Jane Hansen, former A Current Affair reporter and co-author of Boned, dies
Former A Current Affair reporter Jane Hansen, who co-authored the controversial tell-all book Boned, has died following a long battle with brain cancer.
Hansen passed away on the Gold Coast on Tuesday night, surrounded by loved ones. The family thanked Hansen’s support network for their “extraordinary level of support, love and compassion” over the course of her 18-month cancer battle.
Jane Hansen shook Australian commercial TV through the anonymous tell-all book Boned.Credit: 20070920
“To all that knew and loved my sister. Jane passed away peacefully at approximately 11.40pm, 6 August,” said the statement.
“Jane put up an amazing fight right until the end and never once complained, and never lost her sense of humour this whole time.”
Originally published anonymously, Hansen confessed to co-authoring Boned, saying somebody had to take a stand against television’s problematic boys’ club.
Hansen started at the Nine Network in 1995, working in various roles before becoming a regular reporter with A Current Affair. She left Nine in 2008, the same year Boned, a highly controversial novel set in the world of commercial TV, was published.
The book’s title refers to Today show host Jessica Rowe’s sacking by Nine. A senior producer at the network once alleged in an affidavit that then-CEO Eddie McGuire had used that colloquialism to describe her axing.
Ostensibly a work of fiction, Boned tells the story of a top-rating TV journalist whose employment is terminated because she is approaching 40, an unofficial use-by date in the world of TV.
The book was originally published under an anonymous byline, causing widespread speculation about who might be responsible for the explosive tell-all. In a 2017 piece published by The Sunday Telegraph, Hansen revealed she and former reporter Fiona McKenzie were behind it.
In her revelations in The Sunday Telegraph, Hansen – who was a journalist at Nine between 1995 and 2008 before joining News Corp in 2009 – claimed the book was a result of television’s problematic boys’ club.
“As veterans of the television world, we were horrified by the despicable behaviour of the men in charge. So we decided to make our small protest against it,” Hansen said.
“When we wrote Boned, we had both left our jobs. We had young babies and we were freelancing. We’d also been beaten down by the boys’ club. We’d been bullied. But we were never victims,” she wrote.
A former war correspondent who reported from some of the most dangerous places on the planet, Jane Hansen passed away on the Gold Coast on Tuesday night.
Hansen joined News Corp in 2009, where she wrote extensively as a columnist and reporter about the anti-vaccination and anti-fluoride movements in New South Wales, as well as driving the high-profile No Jab No Play campaign. Most recently, Hansen was the writer and host of Mother’s Guilt, a podcast exploring the criminal case against Kathleen Folbigg.
Find more of the author’s work here. Email him at thomas.mitchell@smh.com.au or follow him on Instagram at @thomasalexandermitchell and on Twitter @_thmitchell.
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