‘… one of the photos was a nude shot, taken from the back. This photograph was particularly important to me. It demonstrated to me that it didn’t matter that I had only one breast’.
I meet Liddy Clark in Melbourne on a cold windy day and the former Queensland State Minister, actor, producer, voice coach, casting consultant, artist and former Queensland State politician brings a bubbling warmth to the afternoon. As we sit to talk, she tells me she feels a ‘bit of a fraud’ being interviewed as a woman who had fought breast cancer.
‘I never think of myself as a breast cancer survivor. I just see it as a part of my life. I don’t see myself like a Bonny Barry, a colleague in the Queensland Parliament who is going through treatments at the moment.
‘I’m not one of those brave women who have gone through the hideous and painful treatments and struggled with surgery and medications. I’ve just lived with it as part of who I am since I was just a toddler,’ she says. ‘I was very young, and naivety has to be cherished. At that age you don’t think of it as something life-threatening and terrible,’ she admits. ‘It was just part of me and my life.
‘It is really my mother who was the brave one—the person who battled fear and despair for her daughter. She was the one who had to endure the treatments of her tiny little girl.
‘During my life I have worked for charities supporting cancer, like Relay for Life, and in all that time I never told anyone, or admitted that I was a “survivor”.
‘It’s only when we become thinkers that cancer has this frightening grip over us. But, for me, there was no emotional anguish. That’s why I haven’t previously said anything or put my hand up as a survivor, because it’s a totally different feeling. Yes, my life is a story about getting through breast cancer, but not one of survival.’
However, Liddy’s personal account shows that there is a unique story for every woman diagnosed with breast cancer. Her survival is her courage in living with the ravages that her childhood breast cancer imposed on her body.
It all began for Liddy about 51 years ago, when she was just nine months old and living in South Australia. Her two-year-old brother was just getting over polio, so when her mother noticed a growth on Liddy’s chest she became very worried about it. It was found to be a breast tumour.
‘Those were the very early days of radiation treatment, and doctors were just starting to discover what could be done and beginning to understand how radiotherapy could be used in these types of situations. So I guess I was lucky that those new treatments were available—however basic they were back then.
‘People talk about having flashbacks to when they were a child, and how they don’t really understand them. I’ve had many and I also have always had problems breathing. My mother tells me that because the radiotherapy equipment was in its formative years and I was a wriggling baby, the doctors would place huge heavy weights on my chest to keep me still and to protect the rest of my body, and my mother had to keep me still. They would then put the radiation machine over that.’ As Liddy recalls this, I notice one of her hands involuntarily covering her chest.
‘I had that treatment for days and days and days—all these heavy weights. Then the tumour started to grow again, and the specialist said they would need to burn from underneath. My mother said the treatments were only about a minute or so at a time because I was such a tiny baby, but to her it seemed like an hour. So I think it explains my history of chest problems. As well, all my life, whenever I am nervous, I have this constricting dead-weight feeling in my chest.’
When I ask if Liddy’s illness and her elder brother’s polio could have been related, her face breaks into a grin. ‘One of my ooglyboogly statements would be that my brother was ill and having lots of attention so, to get noticed, I got ill too. However, given the nature of the growth, that isn’t realistic, is it?’ she asks.
‘Looking back, I realise that getting a breast tumour at that young age was unusual and I sometimes wonder if the diagnosis was totally accurate and,’ she quips cheekily ‘maybe they just wanted to use all of this newfangled equipment—and here I was!’
The many weeks of radiation treatment, however, did leave Liddy with a catastrophic legacy. ‘I didn’t know until I reached puberty that all the growth tissues had been burnt by the heavy radiation. The treatment did ensure the tumour was gone, but when I started to develop as a teenager I only grew a breast on one side. I also had an enduring radiation rash, a deep burn, on the damaged side.
‘I guess it was lucky for them that it happened in the 1950s because in our now very litigious society I could have a field day with the medicos,’ she adds wryly.
By this time the Clark family had moved to Melbourne. She was taken to doctors for a series of opinions. All of the doctors agreed that there were no traces of cancer, but that radiation had meant that all tissue had been destroyed.
‘So I guess my story is how does a child go through the growth and development stage with the legacy of a breast tumour as a baby?’
Her mother had always said that she was pleased that it was Liddy rather than her elder sister, who was diagnosed, because she felt ‘my sister would not have been able to deal with it. But because of my personality I could cope. I don’t know about that—and it really did upset me every time Mum said it—but I guess the whole saga has made me who I am today.’
Her memories of those early teenage years are very different from those of most adolescent girls. She will never forget the embarrassment of being fitted for her first bra.
‘It was a 30AAA, and with only one breast, you can only imagine how I felt. I always had inserts in my left side. My mother made them from bird seed and curtain weights. She also made my bathing suits, always halter-neck and also with the bird-seed inners. People now ask whether they were uncomfortable, but they were just what I knew.’ It was Liddy’s pragmatic approach to her situation—and her sense of humour—that saw her through this period of her life.
‘Many of my school memories were also clouded with my bra mishaps, like playing chasey in the school yard and losing my false breast in various areas around the playground. But I admit that having the personality I was given meant that I was also a bit naughty with it. I remember being in sewing classes and using my left breast as a pin cushion or dramatically putting needles into my left false breast. It was long before any oil prosthesis had been invented, although I had moved to stocking inserts by the end of school.’
Whilst Liddy says that she ‘just buried her physical problem’, she also recognises, when reflecting on her school years, that it was probably a lot easier to handle having the operation as a toddler, rather than as a teenager or in her 20s or 30s. But she did have difficulties.
‘Even the fact that my mother had to specially make all of my clothes and my bathers did make me different and did make me have to think about how I looked and presented myself.’
An example that illustrates this concern with her body image occurred after Liddy had left school and became a budding young actor. ‘I had to have “composite” photos done to take around to agents. I got mine done and one of the photos was a nude shot, taken from the back. This photograph was particularly important to me. It demonstrated to me that it didn’t matter that I had only one breast. Unfortunately, though, that backfired on me badly.
‘Cash-Harmon Productions were auditioning for actresses for Number 96, one of the television soapie-style shows they were producing in the early 1970s. They saw my photo and called me in, telling me I would have to take my clothes off. I told them at the casting that it would depend on camera angles because I had only one breast. The producer was absolutely furious and screamed at me for what he called “false advertising”. I told him not to worry because I was no longer interested—but it was a defining moment for me.’
However, this tough lady was not put off and in 1973 she auditioned for the one-line role of a prostitute in her first stage show, No Sex Please, We Are British. She got the role, and the costume designers wanted lots of cleavage for her costume. ‘Well, I had to explain they could only have one-sided cleavage, and the producers again got terribly angry with me. I tried to explain that the role was about my skills not my breasts. However, to their credit, they did redesign the costume with wonderful exposure on my well-developed side and then draped a scarf over the flat side.’
Liddy then toured Australia and New Zealand in Doctor in the House. The larrikin in Liddy continued to put on the clown act—perhaps, she concedes, to camouflage her deeper feelings about her physical attributes.
‘When we were touring in New Zealand, my party trick was that whenever we were swimming, I’d do a few laps then bounce out of the pool and, in front of everybody, I’d wring out my left breast, then go into the pool again. Appalling stuff,’ she laughs, ‘but probably I’d do it to prove I was okay—and possibly even to get in before anyone else,’ she admits.
However, after an embarrassing leak when her oil insert dripped green dye during a performance, she decided at 22 that she would have a breast reconstruction and an inserted prosthesis.
As had been the case when she had radiotherapy, breast reconstruction was still in its early days. Unfortunately, the implant went hard the very day after her operation. ‘So since then I have had a very lopsided appearance because my left breast was hard and small whilst my right side grew almost huge in comparison: so much so that I had to wear an oil prosthesis on top of the implant. And, of course, being me, I kept it there until two years ago. I would say I just couldn’t be bothered. It also occurred to me that if I did have “cosmetic surgery” then I would be shallow and vain. But really, I was just too stubborn,’ she says with a shrug.
‘During the years when there were a lot of people suing and litigating doctors over incorrectly doing reconstructions, my brother urged me to be a part of the class action. But after 30 years I’d just got used to it.’
With humour, Liddy reflects on those 30 years, during which, whenever she had a mammogram, staff would sit her on the table and yell for everyone to come and have a look. ‘I can’t believe it took me 30 years to realise I was a freak,’ she says, shaking her head.
‘Then, in December 2004, I decided, “It’s time,” and I had a full reconstruction—at probably the most hideous time in my life.’
At that stage, Liddy was the Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Policy in the Queensland Parliament. She’d won the seat of Clayfield in the 2001 election and was re-elected and appointed to the Ministry in 2004. She had an extremely stormy 12 months as a Minister, with controversy over a staff member taking a bottle of wine into a ‘dry’ Indigenous community, and the issue of taking an Aboriginal activist to Palm Island just after the riots.
‘I hadn’t yet resigned, and just before the parliamentary Christmas break, someone saw me in the Wesley Hospital and leaked it to the press. The newspaper headlines next day screamed, ‘Is there a medical problem and is she still fit to be a Minister?’
Despite her physical challenges in a world where image, beauty and perfection are fundamental to success, Liddy’s acting career burgeoned. She was a part of the ABC in the halcyon days of ABC drama and education, acted in many of Hector Crawford Productions, made several movies and was a well-known theatre actor.
‘I didn’t think much of it because, as I’ve said, I just buried it. I did enjoy, though, making fun of it. It was a bit naughty of me, but I did enjoy making it hard for the boys. I remember telling and retelling the story of being in an amorous position with a boyfriend. When he took off my bra and threw it across the room it landed with an awful thud. Well, that certainly was enough to scare them off,’ she laughs.
But then she becomes serious and owns up to becoming very bored with having to explain her body. ‘Especially when I was dating and starting to be sexually active, so sometimes I never did bother saying anything. And you could watch them almost shudder when their hands moved across my chest and felt the missing breast. That was difficult.
‘Interestingly, with all of my relationships, everyone avoided my left breast. And that is something that I have kept with me and something that I really haven’t liked,’ she adds sadly.
‘I didn’t mention it, so neither did anyone else. And probably one of my disappointments is that men didn’t embrace the difference; they couldn’t even talk about it. Whereas if I’d had a female partner, she would have brought my uniqueness out into the open. Women tend to be much more open and inquisitive and would want to look and touch and feel, but I think men have a fear that it is a worry for me and therefore don’t broach it,’ she adds insightfully.
‘But even now, with all the nips and tucks in my beautiful new reconstruction, I still don’t have a nipple on one breast or feeling in the other. But, whatever—who really cares now? These days, it’s from the neck up—that’s the best bit of excitement now.’
Liddy’s gaze meets mine, and I am struck anew by her vitality.
And with that she wraps her bright emerald sweater around the two now pert breasts and rushes off to her ballroom dancing class. She looks far removed from the self-proclaimed freak and more like a fabulous breast cancer survivor who has really twirled and danced her way through life.