The Fence-Painting Fortnight of Destiny: A memoir

by Meshel Laurie

  I had a terrible feeling of foreboding in those first few weeks in Brisbane. I was scared of what I was about to live through, but I was on a mission: to build a career that would make me some money . . . so I could buy Adrian a house . . . and then he’d let me have a baby . . . and then we’d all move back to Melbourne when I got a better job there . . . and we’d buy the house we’d live in forever . . . and the Brisbane years would all be worth it.

  It was a tough plan to keep believing in sometimes. I figured I needed to put the shields up a few days after I arrived, but if I’d known how long I’d have to wait this one out, I don’t think I’d have tried. I wouldn’t have believed I could hold the shields up for that long, and I tell you what, they took a beating!

  I was so isolated and lonely, much more so than the first time around, because I had actually created a happy life for myself in Melbourne in between. It wasn’t just a fantasy anymore and I pined for it. I had a terrible feeling I really had relived Uncle Frank’s journey, complete with the miserable ‘return to die’.

  Thank God for Spicks and Specks.

  Spicks was a real lifeline for me during those years. Not only did it keep my tiny national profile bubbling away—which is very hard to do from Brisbane because no national television or radio is made there—but more importantly it kept me connected to Melbourne and feeling relevant and involved. It was also put together by a beautiful group of people, including my old mate Ged Wood, who’d run that little pub gig in Yarraville (remember him?), and that dude from New Zealand whom I’d thought was quite good at The Espy that Sunday, Alan Brough. I grew very fond of Myf during the Spicks years as well. She and I were born on the same day, you know: 29 May 1973. (I hope she doesn’t mind my giving the year away!) What a gem she is. Unassuming and ever so gentle of spirit. I’m so grateful Spicks gave me the opportunity to know her.

  Every episode I taped felt like a much-needed trip home to check in with my people and my real self. I’m sure you’ve realized how terrified I was of forgetting to leave Brisbane, so my trips down south for Spicks, the Comedy Festival, the odd Rove appearance and anything else I could jag helped me reassure myself that I wasn’t forgetting what I had to do. But all that travel combined with breakfast radio is a recipe for running oneself quite ragged.

  Anyone I work with now will tell you how hard it is to get me on a plane, because during those seven years I spent so much time on planes, in airports, in cabs to airports, and cabs from airports to hotels I’d spend no more than five hours in before embarking on the long journey back again. I made that trip twice a week sometimes. I knew I couldn’t keep it up forever, but I had no way of knowing how long it would take me to get a job in Melbourne, so I just got up at 4.30 every morning and put one foot in front of the other until I could lie down again. It was particularly hectic during 2006, when I scored myself a regular spot on Rove.

  It was by far the best career year of my life, and I kept telling myself that, because it made me so happy and made me feel like I was making progress. I was as proud as punch to be part of Rove’s team. ‘I’m the girl on Rove!’ I remember telling Adrian as I hung up the phone from Jacinta. This was proper prime-time commercial TV, with borrowed clothes and everything! It helped me feel like I wasn’t really ‘of’ Brisbane, I was just ‘in’ Brisbane—a distinction that meant everything to me. It also gave me confidence that my Brisbane years were almost up . . . I mean, it seemed pretty crazy to keep the girl from Rove hidden away up there. Surely there’d be a great job in Melbourne with my name on it just around the next bend.

  Working on Rove was really exciting. They created a great green-room vibe in which the guests were encouraged to hang out together, rather than everyone holing up in their own dressing rooms. I met lots of very famous people, but those who stand out in my memory are P!nk (whom I warned about marriage troubles if she didn’t go home every now and then), Chris Isaak (so sexy), the Scissor Sisters (they told me I was funny and I nearly died), John Mayer (no interest in me on any level whatsoever), and Dame Edna Everage (to whom one must relate as Dame Edna, and never Barry Humphries, who told me she loved a joke of mine, nearly died again). The most significant conversation I had in that green room was with Rove’s beautiful wife, Belinda Emmett.

  She and I were sitting on a couch together in the green room, waiting for the show to start, and she started joking about her lack of bum cheeks. She said that she lost everything from her bum and it drove her crazy. ‘Why don’t they make padded undies?’ she asked. We both thought it was hilarious at the time, only now, post-Kardashian, they actually do!

  So I said I wished I could give her some of mine, because I had more than enough to go around, to which she said something along the lines of, ‘I used to say that too—you gotta be careful what you wish for.’

  We laughed a lot about the pitfalls of a bony bum that night, but her wise words resonated with me in a way that no ‘positive body image’ article ever had, and I’d read them all. Since then, I’ve honestly never complained about the size of my bum, or any other physical imperfection, even to myself. It’s not out of guilt, but out of a deep and fundamental understanding of the irrationality of doing so. ‘When the student is ready, the teacher appears,’ said Lao Tzu a couple of thousand years ago. Well, I was ready I guess, and there she was, my frail little teacher laughing hoarsely on the green room couch.

  Belinda was often in the green room in early 2006, or perched in make-up chatting with everyone, because everyone knows that make-up is where the best gossip is! The Rove make-up room was run by the same girls who ran the one on Spicks and Specks, and they knew everything that was going on around town. They still work virtually everything that comes out of the ABC and Foxtel in Melbourne, which is a most comforting state of affairs. My early television appearances were so nerve-racking that I found the hour or so in make-up tortuous, but somewhere along the line during that time on Rove I lost the nerves, and now love nothing more than sitting back and relaxing with my eyes closed while they do me up and chatter about the latest scandals.

  It was a time of massive growth for me as a performer. Rove’s relaxed approach to live television was truly inspiring, and slowly but surely it rubbed off on me. I think relaxation is the key to any kind of broadcasting, really, because it’s hard to listen and react naturally when you’re freaking out. When people are nervous, they tend to focus on what it is they want to say next, going over and over it in their heads, and often fail to notice that the conversation has moved on, so when they finally say their thing, it sounds crazy. The other mistake you can make is second-guessing yourself so harshly that you never end up saying anything at all. That’s not the way to be invited back.

  Sitting across the desk from Rove, and next to Peter Helliar, I gradually calmed down as the weeks and months went by, and stayed more in the moment we were creating together. It also gave me a lot more confidence on radio.

  I was growing as an adult too, saving money for the first time in my life. In October 2006 I managed to buy a house—and you know what that meant: baby time! I was feeling so confident about the future, and so proud of how hard I’d worked, that I booked an overseas holiday for Adrian and I to spend together over Christmas. I remember sitting in that seat on the plane, so contented with the goals I’d kicked that year. It’d been such a long year, I thought to myself, and so exhausting, but I’d done it and set myself up beautifully to keep building on in 2007 and beyond. The Brisbane years had been worth it after all.

  ‘How many chickens in your overhead compartment, madam?’ you might have asked me.

  ‘Well, none have hatched yet,’ I’d have answered, ‘but jeez, I’m counting heaps!’

  Rove’s beautiful wife Belinda died just before Adrian and I headed off on our trip in November 2006. It was still a shock to me, even though she’d been sick for such a long time. I attended her funeral on a stunning sunny Sydney day. Her newly completed album So I Am played through the church speakers before the service, which
was conducted by a wonderful priest who looked to the coffin at one point and said simply, ‘You go and rest now little mate.’

  It was just the perfect thing to say to Belinda, so tiny, who’d fought so hard for so long.

  Unbelievably, when Adrian and I woke up in Berlin on Christmas morning and flicked on the TV, the Australian film in which Belinda starred with Eric Bana, The Nugget, was on, dubbed into German. ‘Rest now little mate,’ I thought to myself as I sat quietly in bed watching it. What’s that line about life being what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans?

  Rove took six months out to think about what he wanted to do, and decided that he did want to come back and continue with the show, albeit differently. I started seeing ads for his return, but no one was calling to talk to me about flight times and wardrobe preferences. It slowly dawned on me that I was not going to be the girl on Rove in 2007.

  I knew that to make any of it, in any way, about me would’ve been an act of spectacular arse-holery, but I was quietly crushed and humiliated. I was never self-absorbed enough to feel resentment towards Rove—I have way too much love for the guy for that. Mind you, I could think of a few other people who could’ve picked up the phone, although everyone was just so devastated at the time and so focused on the old ‘one foot in front of the other’ routine that I guess I slipped through the cracks.

  The job of ‘The girl on Rove’ for 1997 went to Carrie Bickmore, who is unfortunately a fantastic woman, whom I love, so I couldn’t even vent my sadness by hating her. Although the changeover was never spoken of again, I continued to appear on Rove every now and then, right up to and including the series finale in 2009.

  Belinda’s death and the loss of the treasured job rocked me to the core. The year 2007 did not pick up where 2006 left off. In fact, I reckon Jacinta rang me with offers of work no more than four times in that entire year. I only did one episode of Spicks and Specks that year, one Rove and maybe a Glass House, (I’m being generous in saying there might’ve been another one). By the middle of the year I was absolutely beside myself with worry, assuming I’d screwed it all up again somehow, wondering where I’d draw the strength to keep fighting, and taking a lot of ribbing about it all from frenemies who smelt blood in the water.

  I reached the lowest depths of depression I’ve experienced in my life in 2007. I came back down to earth with a thud from the lofty heights of 2006, and the bit of earth I hit was in Brisbane, where it looked like I’d have to stay for the foreseeable future if I wanted to be employed. Many, many times I toyed with the idea of chucking it in and moving back to Melbourne to start again. I sought advice on breaking my radio contract on the grounds of mental health, and my mind wandered back to the teepee in Sid’s garden. I even found myself looking at the Catholic church at the end of my street and wondering if I’d find any relief inside.

  I became a needy noose around Adrian’s neck because I steadfastly refused to make friends in Brisbane, and he was my only shelter. He talked a lot about accepting that we were going to be in Brisbane for a long time, and seemed to genuinely think that was helpful. It was a dagger to my heart.

  I was in that kind of depression that makes you feel like you’re in the bottom of a very dark hole. It’s so dark down there that you can’t see anything to cling onto, or any foothold to pull yourself out, and everything you grab for crumbles in your hands. Eventually your energy flags from the struggle and you start to consider just sitting down, closing your eyes and waiting to die. I tried everything that had worked for me in the past. I exercised and ate well, I listened to relaxation tapes and got plenty of rest. I tried to find some hobbies, learn a language. I wrote and performed a comedy festival show, and I even started taking drugs again, although this time around they were antidepressants prescribed by my doctor. Nothing I did made a difference. I was really sinking this time, and I didn’t know what else to try to pull myself back up.

  I googled ‘Buddhism Brisbane’.

  BEING HUMAN

  Finally! The bit I’ve been so looking forward to writing about. It’s the bit where I suddenly become an eccentric old religious lady, like Madonna, but with fewer riding crops.

  I’d been reading about Buddhism since my early twenties and had always planned to get serious about it one day. It seemed really demanding from those rudimentary readings. I wondered how I’d remember the Four Noble Truths, the Three Jewels and the Eight-Fold Path, much less the Four Immeasurables, the Seven Points of Mind Training and the 37 Practices of a Bodhisattva! It seemed like being a Buddhist was going to be a full-time job, so I pushed it to the back of my mind, planning to come back for it when I was old and rich and fabulous and could get away with wearing a kaftan.

  Well, there I was in 2007, only a little bit older, but with a troubling amount of time to fill due to lack of work. I was home from the radio station by 11 a.m. every day. I was also desperate for help when I googled ‘Buddhism Brisbane’ and found something called the Langri Tangpa Centre, which is what they call a dharma centre—a place that holds classes about Buddhism. Right there on the timetable I saw the most extraordinary thing: ‘Dealing with Disturbing Emotions, 10 a.m. Tuesday Mornings, Eddie.’

  That sounded like the class I was looking for alright, so down I went, just the minute I could extricate myself from work that morning. I was fifteen minutes early to the church in Camp Hill that had been converted into a dharma centre. The old hall at the back was the dharma shop through which we entered, and the chapel itself had been rebranded and redecorated and was now a ‘Gompa’.

  I was greeted at the door by a colourful character by the name of Miffi Maxmillion, whom I would come to learn was the driving force behind the centre, as her mother had been before her. Miff is one of those ‘force of nature people’. I know I used that phrase to describe Julia Morris earlier, but I think they really are the two most powerful personalities I’ve ever met: both jumping out of their skin with laughter and forward momentum.

  Anyway, Miffi talked me through the procedure, which was along the lines of: put five bucks in the jar, take your shoes off there, grab a book from that shelf, find a seat and wait. Before I knew it, I was sitting in the gompa with about ten other people, awaiting the arrival of Eddie.

  ‘Funny name for a monk, Eddie,’ I thought as I waited. I assumed I was about to experience full immersion, but Eddie turned out to be a tall, thin Maori man in trackie dacks. I guessed he was in his forties, but he later revealed himself to be much older. He’s a master of the stunning personal reveal, is Eddie—but only if and when it’s helpful in explaining an aspect of the dharma. ‘I remember when my wife was dying . . .’, ‘I remember this jail I was in once . . .’, ‘I need to overcome my attachment to cream buns . . .’.

  I watched Eddie that first day as he curled himself, cross-legged, into a red cushioned chair that sat maybe 10 cm off the ground, in front of us all. Beside him was a very grand chair, decorated in red and gold fabric with lots of embellishment. The timber backboard and steps up to the seat had intricate symbols handpainted on them. The seat itself was well over a metre in the air, and above it, a peculiar piece of haberdashery hung from the ceiling, which was clearly part of the overall chair arrangement. I wondered why Eddie didn’t like sitting in that one, but soon forgot it was there.

  During that very first session, Eddie said the following:

  ‘Lama Zopa Rinpoche said once that “The dharma centre is an emergency rescue operation, like when police go in with all that noise—sirens blaring, red and blue lights flashing, helicopters whirling—to rescue people in distress! Like that, the meditation centre plays a very important role in the emergency rescue of people, human beings, using the seatbelt and life jacket of the lamrim. Meditation on refuge and karma immediately saves you from falling into the lower realms again.”’

  I only really understood bits of it on the day, but its relevance to my state of mind was unmistakable. I was well aware that I needed a rescue operation, and I had a really good fee
ling that I’d found what I’d been looking for.

  Disturbing emotions are a really big deal in Buddhism. They’re known as ‘poisons’ and ‘hindrances’ and are believed to be the root causes for forms of suffering such as depression, fear and anxiety.

  Anger stood out for me, straight away. Eddie advised that anger could also encapsulate hatred and bingo, I was home. I’d been feeling some pretty significant hatred towards frenemies and some straight-out enemies who were basking in my despair. The suggested reading explained that hatred is a negative emotion that burns inside of me, long after those people are gone, and makes me think about harming them, or getting them back in some way, which is filling me with disturbance, distracting me from more beneficial thoughts and creating terrible karma for me.

  Hmmm, was it possible that my anger, greed, conceit, craving and attachment had been the cause of my misery, and not all those people I’d been blaming? ’Fraid so. Eddie’s classes helped me to understand that I am not a victim of my world, but of my reactions to it.

  When I was in Cambodia a few years ago, I was climbing aboard a tuk-tuk, which heaved and squeaked under my weight. The driver of the tuk-tuk next to mine burst into fits of laughter. ‘You very big!’ he chortled, ‘How big? Maybe sebenty keelo?’ he asked, tears streaming down his face, without a hint of embarrassment.

  ‘Maybe hundred!’ I said back, my eyes widening, awaiting his reaction. ‘Ooooohhhhh,’ he wailed, slapping his thighs hysterically. I was laughing just as hard at this exchange as we each pressed our palms together and bowed our heads to each other as I was driven away. I was so happy, because I knew that my reaction to that scenario would have been very different without Eddie’s classes on disturbing emotions. I chose to react with generosity and good humour, instead of pride and anger, and as a result, I continued to enjoy the opportunity I had to be in that wonderful place that day, instead of locking myself away in shame, hating that funny man. Obviously it would have been harder if he’d had any malice in him at all, but still, it was a big win for me and I took it.