The slim blonde is delivering a piece to camera when from behind her lurches a snarling clutch of lost souls, blood streaming down their faces, arms outstretched.
You won’t find it on Vanessa O’Hanlon’s official bio, but this is her secret zombie flick.
Blink and you will miss her appearance in Dead Country – a movie far more horrible than horrifying which sank pretty much without trace upon release in 2008.
Confronted with evidence from her undead past, the national weather presenter for ABC News Breakfast is remarkably gracious.
“I don’t think I ever even saw it,” she laughs. “It’s just a tiny reporter part that someone asked me to do and I agreed to before I realised there would be zombies surrounding me.”
While it’s highly unlikely that she’ll ever so easily fall into their clutches again, the zombie encounter underscores O’Hanlon’s willingness to step out of her comfort zone.
Whether it’s climbing Mt Kilimanjaro, trekking the Kokoda Track, encountering gorillas in Uganda, travelling solo to Sarajevo, at the gym, or the hands-on renovation of a four-bedroom home in North Melbourne, O’Hanlon likes to push herself.
She describes her steady ascent from Melton schoolgirl community radio volunteer to one of the national broadcaster’s more popular faces as one of “sheer determination”.
This, after all, is a woman who for years spent much of her working day as a traffic reporter doing live crosses from a helicopter, feeling ever-so-slightly nauseated.
“I don’t know if you have ever looked down in a chopper, but I used to get a little bit sick,” O’Hanlon admits now.
For seven years, on and off, she reported on and filmed real-time road conditions, traffic congestion and accidents for all major radio and television stations including regular spots on
Sunrise and the Channel 10 news. During that time she also worked as a host of Melbourne After Dark on Mix 101.1 and managed to complete a bachelor of arts majoring in psychology and public relations.
The legacy of that period is an excellent aerial understanding of Melbourne and the remarkable ability to hear herself think with a dozen people talking in her ear and chopper blades whirring overhead.
“In the air, I’m like a Melway, but if I’m in a car I’m geographically challenged. I have to look for landmarks,” she confides.
It was no surprise to colleagues when the composed girl in the chopper was head-hunted by the ABC.
For more than five years now she has been getting up at 3.45am to join Virginia Trioli, Michael Rowland (who succeeded original co-host Barry Cassidy in 2010) and sports presenter Paul Kennedy at the ABC’s Southbank Centre, and the program’s ratings are building nicely.
“Your body clock gets used to it, though it can be hard on a Monday morning because you change your routine on the weekend,” O’Hanlon says.
Her knowledge of her subject is exhaustive.
“When the ABC first put the concept to me I went out and learned every single thing I could about the weather. I spent a lot of time looking at synoptic charts.
“I prep everything myself, I research myself, I write, I often don’t read the autocue because the information is already in my head and I read off the maps as well. When people talk about that old-school weather girl stereotype, it’s disheartening.”
No climate change sceptic, she also finds it “disappointing” that people like Prime Minister Tony Abbott – who as opposition leader dismissed climate change as absolute crap – make comments that are “so blatant”.
“Everybody is going to live on the edge of having an opinion, but I also think you should take the available information and at least examine it. Just in the time I have been doing the weather, I’ve noticed how extreme things have become.” Seeing weather patterns develop genuinely interests her, and O’Hanlon points to a low in the Coral Sea that she seems to have been talking about for weeks.
“It can be a long time from the time we get the information to the time it actually happens and we can get ahead of ourselves out of excitement, but if that goes in as a cyclone into inland areas, it could be good news for farmers. Sometimes people do seem to think you can make it happen. They want you to say it will rain and then they blame you when it floods.
“Most of it’s in jest, but it is funny.
“Make it rain: sure, I can do that!
“Then you get the people who want to make sure it won’t, and contact you on social media six months out and say, can you tell me what it is going to be like on such and such a weekend because I’m getting married.”
It’s not just her weather forecasting that provokes interest.
“I will meet people sometimes who say they just tune in to see what I am wearing. Everybody has to say whether they like the cut, the colour.”
But as the eldest of five children, O’Hanlon is accustomed to robust opinions.
Among the first students to graduate from the newly built Kurunjang Secondary College in the then semi-rural satellite town of Melton, she recalls it as a very different place from the sprawling outer suburb it is today. It was here working in a local record shop and the community radio station upstairs that led her to enrol in the Swinburne radio course and her first commercial presenting gig on Sun FM in Alice Springs.
“I always thought I would work more in music. It’s weird finding yourself in a news environment when it all started as a music-driven thing.”
O’Hanlon’s personal fave is still Bon Jovi – perhaps not suited to all tastes – but her weather?
That’s music to the ears.
