SYDNEY, 1971
I was twenty-one and full of ambitious enthusiasm when I first met David Hannay. It was 1971 and I had just graduated as a graded journalist following a three-year cadetship at the Australian Women’s Weekly. I had a boyfriend my own age, but he’d recently headed off to London and I was saving up to join him. In order to accumulate the money I needed for this journey, I left my reliable magazine job for a pay rise in the publicity department of the television station Channel 9; this day job also allowed me to have a night gig as a barmaid at my local, the Mosman Hotel.
When I first started at Channel 9, my plan was to quickly escape the publicity role for that of news reporter, even though at that time there were only two women television journalists in Sydney, both at the ABC. I wanted to take my news reporter training a little further into uncharted territory. I was not beautiful but I had an open face and a ready smile. I had long red hair which I wore hanging straight in the fashion of the day, belying the fact that my hair was naturally even curlier than Nicole Kidman’s locks in the film BMX Bandits. It took hours of laborious winding of wet hair around my head to achieve this smooth style. I also wore thick make up to cover my freckles, and black false eyelashes – another must-have fashion of the sixties.
Not long into my new job, an unusual looking chap walked into the small publicity office. He was balding with long blond-streaked hair and a bright red beard that reached halfway down his front. I noticed his intense brown-black eyes as he politely introduced himself, telling me he was a part of an independent production company making a weekly family show called The Godfathers.
‘Where did you spring from?’ he asked. I laughed and told him about my journalism background and because I’d never seen the program he offered to take me onto the set in Studio 2 to watch an episode being taped. I was immediately fascinated by the process of television production – and him.
That evening I reported to my mother that I’d met a man called David at work that day, saying he looked a bit like a garden gnome. He wore a ‘trademark’ outfit of pale blue denim jeans, matching jacket, tall leather boots and a silk scarf around his neck. All he needed was a pointed hat.
For me it was not love at first sight; I was still besotted with my absent high school boyfriend and excitedly told David I was planning to fly to London as soon as possible, so I would probably only work at the station for six months or so.
I also mentioned I was keen to try TV news reporting and to my amazement he immediately organised an audition for me with the station’s popular current affairs program, A Current Affair with Mike Willesee. It didn’t dawn on me at the time that he was trying hard to impress me. Somehow I thought myself to be sophisticated but looking back I realise I was completely unworldly in the ways of men.
David would pop into my office every morning for a chat, interrupting my daily media deadlines by sitting on the edge of my desk drinking coffee. It was fortunate that my boss was an easygoing bloke. David was dismayed when my audition for the program came to nothing, although the ‘soft news’ story I had put together for them was actually played on the program the following week.
‘Women aren’t really welcome in the newsroom,’ the news director explained, not bothering to let me down gently.
‘We had a woman once and she was nothing but trouble. In the end she took off with one of our best reporters.’
Imagine using that language to an aspiring job applicant in this day and age. I was disappointed – but not really surprised.
David asked me out but I was so busy doing my barmaid gig six nights a week I had no time left for socialising – by Sunday, my night off, I was always worn out. A few weeks later he trailed around after me at the Channel 9 Christmas party, where I had what we now know as a show business #MeToo moment. I was invited by one of the corporate secretaries go with her by taxi to a nearby motel for an after-party. Despite my naiveté I soon realised it was a small, exclusive party. In a hotel room filled with bottles of champagne there were two female secretaries, three rather scary senior executives and me, the new girl. It was a set-up. I had a nasty head cold and, snuffling and sneezing, managed to beg off, catching a taxi home at great cost to my junior wage. The following Monday morning David appeared at my desk asking where I’d vanished to – he said he’d been searching for me at the original party for hours until he gave up and went home.
I told him the ‘executive set-up’ saga and he was incensed. Later I discovered that David loved nothing more than to be incensed; to be enraged. He was a bit of a drama queen. He’d been an actor in both film and television in Australia for several years in his early twenties and before that a child radio actor in New Zealand. In his late twenties he switched to the production side of the business.
I do sometimes wonder if I’d stayed at that party and co-operated in the ‘fun’ with the executives, would it have advanced my ‘girl reporter’ television ambitions? I doubt it – the two young secretaries were never promoted beyond their ‘personal assistant’ status.
The development of my relationship with David happened slowly and naturally. He was eleven years older and he took me under his wing. I enjoyed his company and his attention. Sometimes we ate lunch together in the work canteen and eventually, on one of my Sunday nights off, we went out on our first date. We smoked some dope and drank some beer and I stayed the night in his small bedsit. I had never made love to an adult male before and I really liked it. My boyfriend from schooldays was lovely but not driven sexually. He had addiction problems and I’d been supporting him financially before his parents gave him the plane ticket to London for his twenty-first birthday. He was a talented artist and they hoped it would inspire him to get started on his career.
David, I soon discovered, had been married for ten years and had had several other relationships, both before and after the marriage. He was separated from his wife but he failed to mention to me on that first crazy night we spent together that his ex was in an advanced stage of pregnancy. I was given that startling news several days later when he cornered me in the canteen and told me excitedly that his estranged wife had just given birth to a baby boy. I can’t remember exactly how I felt, but I must have been confronted and confused by the revelation.
Looking back at that time of my life, I acknowledge that it was absolute madness. I was making significant decisions and choices at such an early age with little (or no) real-life experience. What was I doing sliding into a serious relationship with a still married but separated man who had just become a father? How did David manage to convince me to meet his wife and baby Tony? Which I did. Tony was adorable and I struck up a sort of friendship with his wife, guilelessly offering to give her a break from mothering for a few hours every Sunday so that David could spend time with his son. My parents were perplexed when we turned up for lunch the following Sunday with a baby in a basket on the platform shelf of David’s hardtop MGB. (Babies didn’t have protective car seats or seatbelts back then.) I would cuddle Tony at the lunch table and feed him bottled breast milk that his mother had expressed for his weekly ‘family outing’.
David had a very powerful and persuasive personality. He was intense and quite obviously determined to hang onto me and our new relationship. It’s just as well I loved babies.
We’d been living together for several months in David’s little bedsit when my old boyfriend flew home from the UK to try to woo me back. It didn’t work. I felt terrible about betraying him as I had dearly loved him, but it had become a hopeless situation. My attempts to save enough money to join him were futile: almost every week he phoned me at work, reverse charges, asking me to urgently send him money. He hadn’t even tried to find a job and as fast as I was saving, it was all going overseas, undoubtedly to pay for his drugs as well as his rent. Very sadly, he died in Paris in his thirties of an accidental drug overdose.
My parents were both journalists and between them earned an excellent income. They had both been staunch members of the Communist Party and at various times my father used this as an ideological excuse not to enter the property market. His political convictions were not the only reason we lived in a small rental flat for most of my childhood. A heavy drinker and gambler, Dad simply had no desire to spend his salary on a mortgage. I could barely believe that by the age of twenty-two I was in a committed relationship with an older (still married) man and that my name was next to his on the title deeds of a house.
This was how it all began. How could I have imagined that the man who had reminded me of a garden gnome would be my life partner for forty-three wild and (mostly) wonderful years? How could I have known that, from being a lowly PR junior, I would spend much of my career writing about gardening, leading people on botanical treks in the Himalayas and being a TV presenter on a national gardening show?