Carmel Travers

Carmel Travers is one of Australia’s most experienced and awarded media professionals. She has worked across Australia and around the world as a journalist and presenter. She has produced and been the executive producer of numerous award winning documentaries, drama and feature films as well as children’s film and television. The first woman Head of News and Current Affairs for a television network, Carmel is an entrepreneur who has established and run several successful production companies.

In demand as a speaker, Carmel Travers regularly presents to corporate audiences and at community events across Australia on a diverse range of critically important topics, from climate change and the environment, through to women in science, diversity in the workplace and women in corporate and management roles.

Carmel delivered the oration to the International Women’s Day celebrations in South Australia at the invitation of Senator Penny Wong. She has delivered the opening address at the Australian Communications and Media Authority conference in Melbourne and a number of other significant national events.

More about Carmel Travers:

In a career spanning several decades she has been responsible for establishing and running a number of this country’s most successful production companies, including Beyond International, Energee Entertainment, Essential Media, and Purple Pictures. In 2017, she launched her newest production house, Pop Family Entertainment.

Carmel began her career as an ABC Journalist, where she worked for a number of years, before taking up a posting in East Africa where she worked as a Foreign Correspondent for the ABC and BBC.

She returned to Australia to host the ABC’s nighttime current affairs programme, Nationwide, in Perth, and was subsequently transferred to ABC Sydney to initiate a ground-breaking science and technology show, Towards 2000. In l984, Carmel developed and produced a new version of the show, Beyond 2000, which she took out to the world across 120 territories, including Discovery Channel, US.

Carmel was the first woman Head of News and Current Affairs for a television network, having run Network Ten’s stable of shows including News at Five, Sports Tonight, Meet The Press and the Barry Cassidy hosted show, The Last Shout, a forerunner to the long running ABC show, The Insiders.

Carmel’s productions range across genre from news and current affairs to documentary to drama and feature films as well as children’s film and television. She created, produced and presented the globally groundbreaking show, Beyond 2000, which was screened in more than 150 countries over 15 years. She was Producer on the Feature Film, The Magic Pudding, starring John Cleese, Geoffrey Rush, Sam Neill, Hugo Weaving and Toni Collette. And she has produced hundreds of hours of animated children’s tv shows including Crocadoo, Gloria’s House, Wicked, Poetica, Fix and Foxi, Sydney Sailboat, Bubble Bath Bay, and My 24.

Carmel has received a number of international awards for her work including ACE Cable Awards for the documentary Red Flag Over Tibet, the George Peabody Prize for Climate In Crisis, the United Nations Media Peace Prize for Refugee Like Me and nominations for AACTA Awards for various productions.

Throughout the eighties Carmel was a founder and Executive Chair of Beyond International, and she produced a number of award winning documentary films including Red Flag Over Tibet, Climate in Crisis and The Great Wall of Iron.

Carmel was appointed General Manager of News and Current Affairs for the Ten Network in Australia, a position she held for three years. She has also reported for the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent from Bosnia and East Africa.

Through the nineties she established Energee Entertainment, the film and television production company that produced amongst other things the feature film version of the great Australian classic, Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding.

As Managing Director of the film and television production company, Purple Pictures, Carmel produced the highly acclaimed documentary, Refugee Like Me, for the ABC; Truth, Lies and Intelligence on the Iraq War for SBS, and the series looking at the lives of rural women in New South Wales, Not All Tea and Scones.

Currently Carmel is Executive Producer of a new drama series for Netflix worldwide and the Nine Network in Australia.