Simply being ‘in the building’ was a massive advantage, enabling me to foster relationships with the people who gave people jobs—and unlike the tense, contrived scenario of the audition process, I was able to relax and show them my true colours. I knew my colours were right for Nova.
The Perth near-miss had opened my mind to the idea of moving away from Melbourne (temporarily of course). So when Dean started talking to me about the next station he was launching—in Gosford—I thought, ‘Ah, why not?’.
I also wondered if it was where I’d have a baby of my own.
I was gun-shy when it came to Dean’s big plans for me, and kept my options open when it came to other work opportunities around the place. Around Christmas 2003, I received the same phone call that every working comedian in Sydney and Melbourne received about a stand-up comedy show, similar to The Big Gig, that the ABC was putting together. The thrust of the call was to invite me to screen test at the studios in Ripponlea, in the hope of becoming a featured performer. There was a lot of talk about the show around the traps, and somewhere along the line I realised that the screen test was also about finding a host. What I didn’t know was that the person I was auditioning for was none other than Todd Abbott, the guy who’d seen and loved the Yarraville pub gig, who would be the executive producer of the new show.
In one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments in which you just know what you know, and how to make everyone else know it too, I went into that screen test, looked straight down the barrel of the camera and explained why I should be the host of Stand Up.
The rollercoaster was off again, at a million miles an hour. I’d be doing two jobs, in two different states, juggling the expectations of two networks and a punishing timetable of travel and performance. I was terrified of landing on my arse again, so I asked the best in the business, Kevin Whyte at Token, to help me out.
I was hopeful that he’d be interested in managing me as there was actual money to be made by way of a commission, but he promptly sent me to another agent, whom he described as his friend and mentor. ‘She’s the best in the business,’ he told me of Jacinta Waters, and I knew it must’ve been true—but in my heart of hearts I wanted nothing more than to be a Token act. ‘I must’ve been a real arsehole back in ’96,’ I thought to myself at this latest rejection, and made the call to Jacinta.
She was indeed brilliant. As a fellow Catholic girls’-school survivor, I found much common ground with Jacinta. She has what she likes to refer to as ‘firm views’ about most things, which I find comforting, as I hate walking away from a conversation with the uneasy feeling that I don’t really know how it panned out. I never have that problem with Jacinta.
Back in 2004, I assumed she’d take some kind of fee for negotiating my contracts and send me on my way, because I was obviously a gross, unmanageable loser—but in fact, over a celebratory lunch, she asked if I’d be interested in joining her agency. I nearly died. Of course I jumped at the offer, but there was more. She and Kevin were about to announce an amalgamation of their two agencies, and I was, after all those years, about to take my place, Blu-Tacked on the wall in Fitzroy.
It never happens easily I tell you, but eventually it happens.
So up we went, Adrian, Bobby and I, to the Central Coast of New South Wales, where I would do the breakfast shift on Star 104.5, which we launched on 16 March 2004. Ten years, almost to the day, since my first stand-up gig at Famous Bob’s in Brisbane.
I was blessed when it came to my on-air partner, who was a full-on radio guy, but not a dick, called Todd Widdicombe. Wow, what a beautiful man. Todd had been the King of Cairns before accepting the job in Gosford, and it wasn’t hard to see why. He is hilarious, generous and genuinely interested in getting out into the community to meet people. I am very shy when it comes to that stuff. I hate going out as ‘the lady from the radio’, but Todd is right into it. In Cairns he drove a station car, covered in photos of himself, which makes him sound like a wanker, but he really isn’t. He just loves people, and loves it when they love what he does.
Todd taught me a lot about regional radio—which I was dismayed to discover was not like filling in for Kate. We had no producer at all in the beginning; apparently Todd and I were expected to fill that role, which was all about running the show, as opposed to performing on it. We were also on air from 5 a.m., instead of 6 a.m.,and expected to go out during the day and occasionally at night to meet clients. It made for very long days and was quite a culture shock.
Well, I burst into tears during Dean’s first visit, and accused him of trying to work me to death. He hired a producer immediately and changed the starting time of the show to 5.30 a.m. Todd did all the heavy lifting when it came to the client stuff, even agreeing to serve customers in a local butcher shop for an hour one day, to help the sales rep get the business. I, on the other hand, was a nightmare when it came to that stuff I’m afraid. I don’t drink, and I was tired as hell, so I just flatly refused to go. I’m sure it would’ve prevented my moving ahead with the company had Todd not stepped in and carried the load.
I wish I could say I was as good a teammate to him, but I know I wasn’t. I was absolutely fixated on getting out of Gosford as quickly as possible, and worried endlessly about being trapped there. That terrible fear I had as a teenager in Toowoomba, that I’d somehow forget to leave, came back with a vengeance and made it impossible for me to enjoy a single moment of my time there. I was so worried I’d fall in love with the place I did my best to ignore it and concentrate on keeping up with my life in Melbourne. It wasn’t the same as being there though.
Lynda Gibson’s cancer got her a couple of weeks after I left town. Hundreds of people gathered in a park, just like most of them had for Dave Taranto four years earlier. Lynda’s coffin was unmissable, decorated by Kaz Cooke in shocking pink and decoupage clocks, topped off with a bright orange feather boa. At the end of the service mourners wrote messages of love on that coffin, and as it was carried away, Lynda was given a ten-minute standing ovation. I’m crying as I describe it to you, because I only experienced it through the descriptions. I couldn’t afford to fly myself back for her funeral, although I didn’t know how much missing it would upset me. I have so very few regrets in my life, but not attending Gibbo’s funeral is one of them. I just feel as though I owe her so much as a role model, and wish I could’ve written that on her bright pink coffin that day.
Within days of not flying to Melbourne for Gibbo, I found out I’d be flying back and forth to Melbourne a lot, because I landed a telly job, hosting Stand Up on the ABC. Emotional rollercoaster anyone?
Stand Up featured absolutely everyone eventually, but on a weekly basis I was joined by Charlie Pickering and Sammy J (before he knew the puppet). Flight of the Conchords, who were still a cool, underground festival act at that stage, flew over from New Zealand to record three songs. A few years later, when they were superstars, someone showed me one of their YouTube clips. There I was, introducing them on a clip that’d had three million views. I wished I’d paid them more attention at the time, but I was so tired it was all I could do not to lie down on the floor behind them until they were done.
Did I mention I was tired?
Unfortunately, only one series of Stand Up was made. A little show called Spicks and Specks was chosen to take its place, and I was flown to Melbourne to act as team captain for three of the four pilot episodes that preceded the actual first episode. I thought I was a shoo-in for the job, given that I’d just hosted a show for the ABC and was doing the vast majority of the pilots (and because I clearly have an obnoxious tendency to assume I’m getting jobs). Like Perth all over again, I was pipped at the post by ‘another chick’. Jacinta called me at my house in Avoca on the Central Coast to tell me they’d given the job to a girl from Triple J.
‘I know,’ she said in her very dignified, sympathetic way as I stood silently at my end, ‘Bugger bum!’
A few days later I heard who’d landed my job on Spicks and Specks. It was M
yf Warhurst, and as soon as I found out a lot of the resentment drained out of me. I’d read that very memorable name before, many years previous, in one of those street mags you pick up in doorways around Melbourne. It was the name under the very first review I ever received, and the review had been glowing. How could I wish anything but happiness upon someone who’d written me my first good review? I couldn’t, and although I often wondered what my life would’ve been like had I won that job, I was always genuinely happy for Myf that it brought her the happiness it did.
I scored a job on Foxtel’s MAX Music channel not long after, which I loved. Every Tuesday after my radio show I jumped on the train for the hour-long trip into Sydney where I sat for a few hours reviewing music and movies with Andrew ‘Super’ Mercado, Pete Timbs and Machine Gun Fellatio’s Chit Chat. It was a really cool gig, helped soothe the Spicks and Specks pain in a big way, and made me feel like I was more than a regional radio girl, which was very important to me.
We recorded a special show at the ARIAs that year, from a little set under the auditorium. Channel V and Kyle and Jackie O also had a perch down there, and every winning act would make their way down to record an interview with each of us after accepting their award. It was a fantastic night.
Paul Hester was hosting a show on our channel called The MAX Sessions at the time. He appeared on our little set early on in the proceedings, and ended up staying all night and becoming part of our show. It blew my mind, obviously. He was as wonderful as I’d ever imagined he’d be—and all I could think of was that day I’d seen him and Mark Seymour chatting outside Safeway and had taken it as a sacred omen that I was finally where I was meant to be.
The only conclusion I could come to that night was that I was in the midst of another Hester-shaped omen, and that I was still moving in the right direction, albeit never in a straight line.
That line zigged again, where I’d expected it to zag, not long after the ARIAs, when Dean started talking about moving me out of Gosford.
I’d been there about eight months and was happy to hear I was shipping out.
Was it home to Melbourne? Or maybe it was Sydney? That could be fun.
‘Which one is it?’ I asked Jacinta on the phone from my house in Avoca.
‘It’s Brisbane,’ she said, firmly.
‘Bugger bum,’ I thought dizzily.
I went straight to bed and cried.
BRISBANE 2.0. AS IN, O GOD!
Okay, this is the chapter I’ve been dreading. Not the drug stuff, or even the Dad stuff, but the Brisbane stuff, because I know that if this book is going to bring me any trouble, it’ll be the next few pages that do it.
Just call me Meryl Streep, because it’s complicated.
This second Queensland experience brought many wonderful things into my life, including the ability to focus on people who get me, and to mostly block out those who don’t, no matter how loud, obnoxious and close they are. All that good stuff happened a long way into my stay though. The truth is, I was utterly miserable at the prospect of moving back to Brisbane in 2005.
I know that saying this is like taking a dagger to the heart of every true Queenslander. The state takes so much mockery on the national stage that its citizens bond together behind a maroon banner, sponsored by Four XXXX beer, that proudly reads, ‘Queensland: Love It or Leave It!’ From the ’roid-raging nightclubs of Surfers Paradise, to the conservative Christian cow-cockies of the interior battling the evils of ‘Greenies’ and daylight saving, Queensland is a collection of disparate outposts, who’d have nothing in common at all if it weren’t for their common enemy—people who don’t love Queensland.
Queenslanders who love Queensland will often scream ‘Queenslander!’ in each other’s faces. It’s a ritual that dates back to, what else, a football game in the 1980s. It helps highlight the non-Queenslanders too, because they’re the confused-looking people who aren’t yelling.
In a self-fulfilling prophecy, a certain kind of Queenslander expects that those from ‘down south’ will look down upon them, so they do their best to live down to those expectations. They dress badly, they act like boofheads and they pretend to be thick. Take Bob Katter, for example.
As I said to Bob on The Circle on Channel 10 one morning, as he squirmed like a petulant child refusing to talk about his homophobic campaign ads, or his brother Karl who is a gay activist, ‘Bob, I’m trying to make them see you’re not just another redneck lunatic from Queensland, mate!’
I meant it, because he’s actually not. For one thing, he is often perceived as racist, because people think that people like him—i.e. Queenslanders—are racist, but in fact he has an admirable record on Aboriginal issues, both at state and federal level. As a member of Joh Bjelke-Peterson’s notorious state government, he stood up to some of the greatest racists in the business to fight for the right of Aboriginal people to govern their own communities and the assets therein. That dream remains stymied some 25 years later by red tape, loopholes and lack of interest in Aboriginal people on the part of the mainstream Australian community, but Bob pushes on, campaigning most recently on issues around native title.
Bob’s also passionate about the terrible rates of suicide in rural Australia. He used the spotlight he stumbled into during Australia’s hung Parliament debacle of 2010 to draw attention to this sad epidemic. ‘I had two telephone calls this morning,’ he told the media hanging briefly on his every word. ‘Both of them were suicide calls. Doesn’t anyone understand what’s happening to us in the bush?’
Of course I can’t help but wish that someone of Bob’s stature and loyalty would advocate for gay people in the bush, and consider how many of them figure in those terrible suicide statistics. That person will never be Bob Katter, but there is no denying that he is the only voice for many under-represented Australians.
For me, Bob Katter personifies Queensland in so many ways, which will irk the hell out of the urbane Brisbanites pretending they’re in Sydney as we speak. Bob feels slighted and ignored by flashy southerners who he reckons have forgotten where their meat and China’s coal come from. (From the land, or course.) They run the country from their shiny towers a million miles from the real Australia that he loves, and he’ll be buggered if he’s going to march to the faint beating of their drums.
Bob is determined to carry on like a pork chop until they look up from their lattes and acknowledge him, but it’s in his pork-choppery that the message is lost and he becomes another redneck lunatic from Queensland. A big-hatted caricature.
Bob’s Queensland is what I dedicated my twenties to distancing myself from, as I cloaked myself in Victorian-ness. I loved not being a Queenslander anymore. I felt like I’d shed a squeaky skin when I’d crossed that border and had no desire to ever wiggle back into it.
Even trips home to see my mother were tortuous. They only ever lasted a few days, and were years apart, but they really did my head in. Inevitably I’d reach a point where I felt like my move and my life in Melbourne had all been a dream. I’d have this terrible feeling that I’d never left my mother’s kitchen in Toowoomba, and I’d be climbing the walls in anticipation of my flight back home.
So I had some pretty deep psychological triggers when it came to Queensland. I was chatting with a girlfriend about it not long ago. She had a job in Melbourne that I would have killed for, and yet ironically, she could relate to my feelings about Brisbane.
‘Melbourne is my home town,’ she said, ‘and I ran away from it to prove I could make it in Sydney. I worked so hard, for so long, but in the end the only job I was being offered was back in Melbourne. I felt like I’d failed when I accepted it and moved back. Now I feel like Sydney’s moving on without me and I’ll never get back in again. Being in Melbourne just makes me feel like a loser.’
‘Well, give us your job then and off you go,’ I thought as I nodded along sympathetically.
I already knew that a lot of my Brisbane misery was all about the fear of not being good enough for Melbourne, the fea
r that Uncle Frank had been right, and that I was kidding myself if I thought I could survive, let alone thrive, in a big city. I was afraid that I was heading back to the ‘big country town’ in which I belonged. A big fish in a small pond, destined to become a small-town superstar, seen hobnobbing in the local paper’s ‘Out and About’ page with the lady from the news and the Lord Mayor’s wife. Oh Jesus, please kill me.
I would so much rather be a tiny tadpole in a massive pond. At least then I feel like I’m having a go. As I said to Adrian once, ‘I just can’t feel successful in Brisbane. I felt more successful in that tiny flat in Melbourne with the phone cut off than I do with a number-one radio show here.’
You know how hard it was for me to escape the first time, how many setbacks and false starts I had to overcome before reaching Melbourne. It was as if none of that had ever happened. None of those victories—like being asked to the Cheese Shop Christmas Show, or my great comedy festival comeback—counted for anything in Brisbane. No one there knew about that stuff, or understood if I told them. ‘I got four stars at the Edinburgh Fringe!’ I wanted to scream when they asked why I wouldn’t attend the local cockroach races. I was an outsider again.
Paul Hester died about a month after I arrived. That wonderful man, who’d personified Melbourne happiness to me, took his own life in a park in Elwood. I wanted so badly to drive my little VW over there, to that park, to sit and think and lay some flowers. I wanted to mourn with the community that adored him, but I was in Brisbane, where his tragic passing was marked by a ‘Crowdies triple shot’ on the radio, and little else. Paul had once said that he hoped to spend the rest of his life without leaving pages 58 and 59—the Elwood and St Kilda pages—of the Melways. Oh how I regretted ever leaving those pages myself. I didn’t even have the Volkswagen anymore—I’d given it to a friend before we left for Gosford.
The Fence-Painting Fortnight of Destiny: A memoir Page 17