Ali Moore will leave ABC radio’s Drive shift after her last show on May 29, closing a run that began when she took over the chair at the end of 2023. Charlie Pickering will step into the slot in June, moving from a guest role on the program to a full-time place in one of the station’s most visible afternoons.
Moore told listeners on Friday that she was leaving, saying she planned to split her time between Italy and Australia while she and her husband buy a farmhouse in Umbria. She said she wanted to learn Italian, learn to cook and build “a really different life” from the one she has led for the last 40 years. “It has been amazing, and I have loved it, I really do genuinely mean that,” she said.
Her departure ends a broadcast career that began in 1987 as a graduate cadet with the ABC and went on to include work across radio and television. Moore started on 3LO, then the name for ABC Melbourne 774, and later hosted Lateline and Lateline Business. She also served as the ABC’s Beijing-based China correspondent and spent long stints with Nine and the in Singapore, adding up to a career that, by her own count, covered a dozen broadcast roles and three employers.
Moore told management in December that she was unlikely to see out the entire year, but she said she stayed on because she wanted to keep serving the program for as long as she could. The move also gives the station a familiar successor. Pickering hosts ABC TV’s The Weekly and has presented the nationally syndicated radio comedy panel show Thank God It’s Friday since late 2024. He had already been a regular guest on Drive before adding a 5pm radio show to his schedule.
There is a practical reason for the handover. ABC Drive’s most recent survey showed a 2.5 per cent listener share, a modest audience in a fiercely contested slot, and the station is betting that Pickering’s broader profile and comic timing will lift the program without losing its existing listeners. Moore, who described herself as a serious news journalist, said the change would be noticeable: “My husband and I once spent a couple of hours walking around a market in Pakistan trying to buy me a sense of humour, because I largely don’t have one,” she said. “And now management has gone from someone with no sense of humour to a comedian, who is also one of the brightest people I know. It will be really different, and it will be really good.”
She said she was leaving with no bitterness. “I genuinely think he’s great, and I think he’ll be great for the program, he’ll be great for the station,” Moore said of Pickering. Pickering, for his part, summed up the job in a single line: “It’s the best shift on the best radio station in the best city in the world.”
For Moore, the next chapter is less about a broadcast schedule than a different pace of life. After 40 years in newsrooms and studios, she is heading for a split existence between two countries, with the radio microphone set aside and Italian lessons, cooking and a farmhouse in Umbria ahead of her. For ABC Drive, June brings a new voice, but the bigger story is that one of the network’s long-serving journalists is choosing to leave on her own terms.
