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Editor’s letter
New Year’s resolutions are always hard to keep. We start off with the best intentions but by the end of January, if not sooner, our pledges have fallen away. So this year I’ve refused to make any grand statement of intent. Instead, after reading The Self-Care Solution: A Year of Becoming Happier, Healthier, and Fitter – One Month at a Time, I’m going for gentle changes, giving something new a go each month. Jennifer Ashton is the chief medical correspondent for US TV channel ABC and in her new book (you can find our review of it in our summer books special on page 162), she takes on 12 new challenges – one month at a time – to enhance her health and life. The book inspired me to make some small changes myself. So this month I’m starting by putting down my phone. I’m constantly on at our two sons to get off their devices, so I’m going to heed my own words and limit my technology time this month. With the weather so beautiful, it’s the perfect time to step away from endless social media scrolling and instead bury my head in books, spend more time at the
beach and attack our overgrown garden (maybe!). Reducing screen time is also great for sleep, so by the end of this month I’m hoping to feel a little more mindful and a lot more well-rested. Come February I’m planning to move on to meditation. I’m one of those people who have downloaded countless meditation apps over the years and given it a go then let it lapse. But I know the benefits are real: less stress, a general sense of wellbeing. So next month I’m aiming to embrace meditation and find my zen every morning. For March I’m thinking yoga – again for the wellbeing benefits and because if my youngest son, at age nine, already knows a handful of yoga poses then I should too. I don’t feel quite ready to join the masses at a yoga class, so I’ll be mastering some moves with a yoga app and hoping I can find some balance. The rest of the year’s experiments are yet to be determined, but I’ll aim to try something new and interesting each month. Our cover star, Peta Mathias, is making her own changes this year – having just turned 70 she says it’s a time of reflection and reinvention. Her attitude to life is wonderful. Read her story on page 14 – she’ll likely inspire you too!
THREE THINGS I
LOVE IN THIS ISSUE
YO U R S TA R S FOR 2020 What’s in store for you this year Page 75
S WA P P E D AT B I RT H What happens when IVF goes wrong? Page 28
Michele Crawshaw, Editor
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
FA S T D I N N E R S Super summer meals in a flash Page 108
- George Bernard Shaw
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Contents
January 2020
On the cover 14 PETA MATHIAS: the joy of
75 2020 HOROSCOPE SPECIAL
French village life, and why she’s reinventing herself at 70
108 SUMMER FOOD: delicious
22 ZARA & MIKE TINDALL:
162 BOOKS SPECIAL: brilliant
down-to earth royals at home 28 IVF SCANDAL: families
torn apart by embryo mix-ups 34 JUDY BAILEY INTERVIEW:
Amanda Billing’s fresh start
recipes for every occasion reading for summer holidays
Up front 5 EDITOR’S LETTER 11 OPEN LINE
40 WOMEN FIREFIGHTERS:
12 IN THE NEWS: a plan
Heroes risking their lives to battle Aussie infernos
to name Wellington’s wicked wind
56 ISABEL ALLENDE: novelist amazed to find love again
46 SOUL SISTERS:
62 DOOMSDAY CULT: strange
goings-on in a Dutch town 66 24-PAGE BUMPER HOLIDAY PUZZLES: test your skills
wellness for women of all shapes and sizes 50 JENNIFER HUDSON: tackles
an iconic role in Cats
C OV E R
68 FOOD HERO:
PETA MATHIAS
flying the flag for Pacific Island cuisine
Photography by Sally Tagg.
Wellness guide 98 MICHELLE OBAMA:
The former first lady on finding your most meaningful life 100 TRULY HEALTHY EATING:
Cut through food advice confusion with this soundly based round-up 103 SUPER SNACKS: Fast, fresh and nourishing ways to
quell hunger pangs
114 FOOD FOR HEALTH:
Recipes based on the latest nutrition research
40 46
34
THE AUSTRALIAN WOMEN’S WEEKLY NEW ZEALAND’S NUMBER ONE MONTHLY MAGAZINE
130
AL I AN
TESTED
HE
AU
TRIPLE
ST R
E N ’S W EE
E ST K I YT TC KL
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OM
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Fashion & Beauty 82 LIGHT & LOVELY: elegant
sheer linens and cool cottons 89 SUMMER MUST-HAVES:
smart slides and sunglasses 90 BEAUTY: look amazing
in the hottest weather
103
94 SKIN SAVIOURS:
protection from burning rays
82
95 BEAUTY NEWS: a trick for
Home & Regulars
travellers and a hot new trend
72 JO SEAGAR: how to look
your best in holiday snaps
Health
74 PAT McDERMOTT: youthful
1O4 HEALTH NEWS: can a
objections to New Year rituals
smart watch do you good?
138 AT HOME WITH PETA:
106 ASK THE DOCTOR
inside her bright French home 143 GET THE LOOK: chic,
138
Food
French-style homeware
108 MEALS IN MINUTES:
144 CRAFT: make your own citronella candles
super-quick dinners for busy week nights 120 TOP TART: a classic that
makes the most of tomatoes 122 SUMMER DINNERS: fuss-
free dishes for outdoor dining 126 BAKING FAVOURITES:
146
classics from your childhood 130 FRUITY DESSERTS:
146 LYNDA HALLINAN her
ulterior motive for haymaking 149 COUNTRY DIARY: the
power of saying thanks 152 TRAVEL: a cruising
convert on the Mediterranean 158 DESTINATIONS: spotlight
on South Africa
luscious sweet treats starring berries and tropical fruit
160 WHAT’S ON
136 QUICK BITES
176 HOROSCOPES
137 WINE NOTES: have you
178 INSPIRATIONS: Dunedin
been drinking whites too cold?
musician Nadia Reid
167 PUZZLES: test your skills
S U B S C R I B E and S AV E Subscribe to The Australian Women’s Weekly this month and you’ll save up to 36 per cent off the retail cover price. See page 150 for details.
90
152
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NEW ZEALAND EDITOR
Michele Crawshaw mcrawshaw@bauermedia.co.nz
EDITORIAL
Deputy Editor Emma Clifton Art Director Bronwyn MacKenzie Designer and Craft Editor Marsha Smith Sub-Editor Rosemary Barraclough Beauty Editor Megan Bedford Fashion Styling The Fashion Department Editorial Assistant Jessica Ault
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DIGITAL
Lifestyle Editor Karyn Henger Celebrity and Entertainment Editor Emma Land
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EXECUTIVE
Chief Executive Officer Brendon Hill Managing Director Tanya Walshe General Manager Publishing Stuart Dick Editorial Director Sido Kitchin
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JOURNALISTS
News and Features Editor Samantha Trenoweth Senior Writer Sue Smethurst Writer Genevieve Gannon
DESIGN
Creative Director Joshua Beggs Deputy Art Director Sarah Farago Senior Designer Jennifer Mullins Photo and Shoot Editor Samantha Nunney
COPY EDITORS
Senior Copy and Travel Editor Bernard O’Shea Deputy Copy Editors Nicole Hickson, Bronwyn Phillips
LIFESTYLE
Style Director Mattie Cronan Style Editor Rebecca Rac Beauty & Health Director Vicki Bramley Fashion & Beauty Assistant Editor Stefani Zupanoska Medical Practitioner Professor Kerryn Phelps Columnist Pat McDermott
FOOD
Food Director Frances Abdallaoui Food Contributors Maggie Beer, Michele Cranston
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Your letters
Open line Letter of the month Thank you for the great Christmas issue. Packed to the rafters with all sorts of goodies and some of the WRITE best human interest stories, my AND WIN! favourite being the feature about Julie Andrews. I was blessed to have a private audience with her soon after the operation on her vocal chords went terribly wrong. When she lost her beautiful voice it was not only a tragedy for her but for us all. However, she picked herself up and bravely Startt th St the new year th the went public and had a wonderful season right way with a Fitbit in Australia. She gave us a rare insight into her Versa 2 device. This family life, including her two adopted modern smart watch, which builds on the Cambodian children. She spoke about The popular Versa, comes with Sound of Music and how attached she still is advanced new health, to the children who acted as the von Trapps. fitness and convenience My daughter had shouted me a top-of-the features. Enjoy the line seat that included a five-minute innovative sleep scores, personal audience after the show. What Fitbit Pay™ for wallet-free a gracious lady, who had a photographer payments, built-in on hand to capture an image with her. Amazon Alexa and I treasure that photo. Thank you for this countless health and beautiful article in the magazine. It triggered wellbeing features. so many precious memories. Rae Patten Perfect for anyone looking to improve their health and fitness. This month’s Letter of the Month winner will receive a Fitbit Versa 2, valued at RRP $360.
Writers of other published letters will receive a prize pack of NuWoman Balance and NuWoman 30 PLU PLUS.
SUPPORT HARRY AND MEGHAN I totally get where Harry and Meghan are coming from with wanting the British media to back off. Believing they can be bullied into doing what the press want them to do is archaic. They must stay strong and support each other through this stressful time, as they are up against powerful forces. Bullying leads to resentment and great sadness if it is not dealt with at grassroots level. I believe Harry and Meghan know this and are fighting back. I ask all readers not to share or forward negative press about this targeted couple and give them a chance to enjoy their lives, their child and each other. That is the least we can do. Val Neil
SIR PAUL’S KIND ADVICE I loved reading the stories of celebrities writing letters to their “younger selves”. I particularly loved Sir Paul McCartney’s wise words. What a wonderful, kind-hearted man he seems to be, and his advice to young people who are having a hard time to “hang in there and don’t despair – you’re not going to believe what happens next” is spot on. If young people can see that someone like him, from humble beginnings, can make it – and be honest that they’ve had struggles along the way – they can know it’s possible for them too. Kerry Leonard
NEW CAKE’S A WINNER I’ve been making the same Christmas cake for four years, but this year I thought I’d give your Negroni Christmas cake recipe a go – it sounded interesting and looked delicious. Well, I’ve never had so many compliments! Thanks The Australian Women’s Weekly for my new annual favourite. Mary Stotholm
P E A R L of WI S D O M
“Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.” – Maya Angelou
S E N D YO U R L E TT E RS to O P E N L I N E , T H E AU ST R A L I A N WO M E N ’S W E E K LY, P R I VAT E BAG 9 251 2, W E L L E S L E Y ST R E E T, AU C K L A N D 1 14 1, or E M A I L AW WE D I TO R @ BAU E R M E D I A . CO. N Z .
OUR MONTHLY ROUND-UP
In Brief NEWS BITES
A CONTROVERSIAL statue of a US historical figure
may be replaced by none other than beloved musical genius, Dolly Parton. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a confederate soldier and former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, inexplicably has been memorialised in a statue in the Tennessee Capitol building since 1978. But now local legislators are looking to replace him. “If we want to preserve history, then let’s tell it the right way. Right now there are eight [statues]. Seven are filled with white men,” said Republican Jeremy Faison. “How about getting a lady in there? My daughter is 16, and I would love for her to see a lady up there.” Suffragette heroine Anne Dallas Dudley is one suggestion, along with Dolly!
A name for Welly’s wind? THE RAMPANT wind is so associated with our capital that Redmer Yska, a Wellington-based historian, argues it deserves its own name. Western Australia has the Fremantle Doctor and the Bora blasts the Adriatic coast. When it comes to name suggestions for Wellington’s wind, Redmer likes Hōhā, which is te reo for annoying, but The Spoiler, Voldemort and Winston Peters have also been suggested.
12 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUAARY 2020
TOP, FROM LEFT: Miss USA Cheslie Kryst; Miss Teen USA Kaliegh Garris; newly crowned Miss World 2019 Miss Jamaica Toni-Ann Singh. LEFT: Miss America Nia Franklin.
Not just a pretty face You don’t normally turn to the world of beauty pageants for good news about women, but there was one bright spot recently. For the first time, African American women currently hold the titles for Miss World, Miss Teen USA, Miss America, Miss USA and Miss Universe. Beauty pageants have long been criticised for lack of representation and this has been hailed as a positive move away from the typical blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauty standards.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY GETTY IMAGES.
Hello Dolly
CLOCKWISE: Satellite image of Whakaari, post eruption; Jacinda Ardern with a first responder; locals farewell the Ovation of the Seas, the ship many of the victims of the volcano were travelling on.
Nation grieves together ON MONDAY DECEMBER 9, Whakaari/White Island erupted,
killing many who were on the island. Local guides, as well as overseas tourists, were among the dead, with some families losing several loved ones. For the second time in 2019, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was called upon to speak to a shell-shocked nation, as well as to the countries of those killed or injured in the blast. “To those who have lost or are missing family and friends, we share in your grief and sorrow and we are devastated. You are forever linked to our nation and we will hold you close.” A recovery squad worked in gruelling conditions to bring the bodies back and local iwi Ngāti Awa carried out a blessing.
In early 2020, New Zealand’s population will hit five million, with Auckland’s population set to double in the next 30 years.
End of a love story
COLIN FIRTH, famous for playing dashing Mr Darcy, and his wife Livia have separated after 22 years of marriage. The pair have two children, Luca and Matteo. “They maintain a close friendship and remain united in their love for their children,” a joint statement from their publicists said.
Historic heist
Couple split
Thieves made off with priceless 18th century jewels in a brazen robbery at Dresden’s Royal Palace, in Germany. The director of Dresden’s state art collections has pleaded with the criminals not to break up the brooches and diamondencrusted swords, saying the value of the gems did not reflect their historic worth. JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
13
Turning 70 has made Peta Mathias more determined than ever to chase new adventures. She tells Emma Clifton about the joys of village life in France, her cure for loneliness, and vows 2020 will be another year of reinvention.
‘My big year of
Cover story
’ change P H OTO G R A P H Y by SALLY TAGG
At home in Uzès, wearing a top and earrings from Morocco, Marni skirt and Robert Clergerie shoes. See more of Peta’s house on page 138. PREVIOUS PAGES: Peta wears an Emilio Pucci dress and Charles & Keith shoes.
Cover story
I
f you’re Peta Mathias, and you’re turning 70 while travelling through a variety of beautiful parts of the world, you’re not going to limit yourself to just one birthday cake, are you? At the tail-end of last year, Peta enjoyed a month-long birthday celebration that took her from her home in Uzès, France, all the way to her home in Auckland – via a 10-day gourmet tour she led through India. The cake count stands at around 14: there were three macaroon-flavoured cakes presented at a party in Uzès, decorated to perfection and in the shape of a “7”, a “0” and a great big heart. In Rajasthan, the local tour manager insisted on a cake and celebration – complete with singing – every single night. And then back home in Westmere, Auckland, there was a two-layer lemon meringue creation by her good friend and fellow chef Julie Le Clerc. “I’m looking on it as a milestone in my life, I am not looking at it as slowing down or retiring or anything at all like that,” Peta says, sitting in the sunny lounge of her Auckland home. “I’m making a resolution to myself that this is the year I’m going to make changes.” To live a creative life, Peta says, is to live a life of reinvention. She has no idea what her next direction is, but change is not something that intimidates her. “If anything,” she grins, “I’m addicted to it.” The holy trinity of stability – family, home and career – were never the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for Peta. But one aspect that has remained a constant is her dual life between New Zealand and France. Her love affair with France started in her 20s and never wavered. She has lived there on and off ever since. For her Australian
Women’s Weekly cover shoot, our photographer was lucky enough to visit her during a roasting hot summer. She started leading cooking classes in France in 2013, always in rented places, meaning an unfamiliar kitchen every time. And so began the idea of creating a permanent home base in Uzès, the sun-soaked medieval village with a population of just over 8500. Now here she is – happy in her vibrant home. Yes, Peta has always liked to be surrounded by colour. “Colour makes you feel alive, it makes you feel happy. I do understand people that like to wear black… I’m just not one of them.” But she is also meticulous about not allowing
mother saying this – you want to get rid of things. And having an uncrowded house is very good, mentally. Because if you’re surrounded by mess, you’ve probably got a messy brain.” As a result, her three-storey house contains a curated assemblage of beautiful, personal details. “It’s the most fabulous home,” Peta says. “And it’s right in the middle of Uzès.” Life in a small French village sounds as idyllic as you would hope. Every Wednesday and Saturday, Peta teaches a cooking class – picking those days because that’s when the village market is open. On non-cooking class days, Peta’s working day starts in bed dealing with emails that come in overnight – and lots and lots of coffee. “I have coffee
“In Uzès, everyone knows each other and everyone looks after each other.”
FROM TOP: A couple of Peta’s many 70th birthday cakes; guests in Peta T-shirts at a birthday party in Westmere, Auckland.
her collection of bright collectables to turn into clutter – an uphill challenge, you might imagine, for someone who spends about a quarter of each year travelling. “I’m very strict,” she says. “I don’t want my houses to look like junk shops. And because I live two separate lives and have two separate houses, I have to keep things down. As you get older – and I remember my
machines on every floor of the house, so I can never be without the drug,” she winks. After that, there’s often a brief wander to meet friends in town who have a coffee club at a local café every morning at 10am. “Anybody who wants to turn up can turn up, which I think is a really good idea.” The village vibe of Uzès – technically it is actually a town, but it feels like a village, Peta says – is such a big part of the appeal. “Everyone knows each other and everyone looks after each other,” she says. “Uzès would not be a bad place to be an old person, because there is so much contact. Old people like to get together and meet for coffee or meet for drinks at six o’clock, just the way young people do.” There are street parties throughout the year and because Peta’s house is in a passage, there are also passage parties, where the neighbours all → JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
17
Cover story
drag out tables and chairs and hold communal dinners. That feeling of belonging is invaluable, Peta says. “It’s a nice, healthy lifestyle. Rather than being isolated, living on your own in an apartment in the city.” Science backs this up. The Blue Zones Project looks at areas of the world where individuals live well past the average life expectancy and have good quality of life, and one of the factors these places have in common is a feeling of community. In Okinawa,
way to alleviating that kind of thing. When people say they’re lonely… they have to make more of an effort, they have to get out or invite people over. You have to give in order to receive.” Between her close-knit community in France, her circle of friends and family in New Zealand, and the fact that for much of the year Peta is either
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: A cooking class at home in France; market day at Uzès; on tour in Jaipur, India.
Japan, they have a word for it, “Moai”, which means a group of lifelong friends who provide social, financial and/or spiritual support and meet weekly or daily. Constantly checking in, even in a small way, makes people feel like they have a home, wherever they are. Community is one of the keys to a good life, Peta says. “Loneliness is a killer, depression is a killer. Social contact goes a long
teaching cooking classes or leading weeks-long tours around different, delicious parts of the world, you might imagine that living alone provides some necessary downtime when she doesn’t have to speak to anyone. “Totally!” she exclaims. “I’m what is called a sociable loner. I have to spend a lot of time alone, to recover from all the ‘surrounded by people’ stuff... I have to look after that,
18 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
because I can get ‘peopled out’ quite quickly. I’m not a complete extrovert at all – I’m a fake extrovert. And being alone is wonderful – I love it. In fact, I like it too much, possibly,” she says with a smile. This is not to say that Peta is averse to romantic love – it’s just not the priority it once was. “When you’re younger, it’s much more important to have romantic relationships but as you get older, you just really appreciate the freedom and the lack of the complications that can come with romantic relationships,” she says, then shrugs. “I have intense relationships with my friends, so I don’t feel any lack in my life.” Besides, as she says, she leads an extremely emotionally intense existence – her cup is most definitely filled. “It’s quite an unusually rewarding life, where I get a lot of love back. I think I get more love than, say, an accountant,” Peta grins. There’s been a lot of love in her work life as well, with the release of her latest book Eat Your Heart Out, an entertaining and meandering journey through the world of the heart and the food, legends and rituals we associate with it. Peta being Peta, this is not a collection of Hallmark card-esque stories of sweetness and light. There are, at times, literal guts and glory behind many of the tales, which come from cultures around the world. People lose years, lives, multiple body parts, all in the pursuit of love. Peta’s favourite tale from the book, for instance, involves a woman inadvertently being tricked into eating her lover’s heart. It’s certainly not the stuff of fairy tales. “I’m attracted to sad stories because I’m Irish. I kept finding all of these weird stories that ended badly. My publisher Harriet said to me, ‘Um… do you have any stories where they end happily?’ But that’s not as exciting!” she exclaims. “A story about a couple who met and fell in love and had six children and →
“I’m not a complete extrovert at all I’m a fake extrovert. And being alone is wonderful.” .
On the terrace in Uzès. Peta wears an embroidered top by Péro, an Indian designer, and trousers by Souleiado.
Cover story were holding each other’s hands in the old people’s home… no one’s going to read that!” It was her publisher, Harriet Allan, who came up with the idea for the book, thinking “we need a little more love in the world.” Harriet envisaged a book of love recipes from all over the world, recipes Peta had herself cooked for lovers… soaked in feel-good, lovey dovey vibes. It became clear quite fast that Peta had other ideas. “I hate writing recipes,” she says. “But I started thinking about it and I thought it would be interesting to write a book of love stories.” Harriet and Peta started investigating, and fans weighed in on social media with suggestions. It was important to Peta that it wasn’t just about romantic love but also familial love and friendship love. The idea that romantic love is all there is to look forward to is, as Peta puts it, “utter nonsense”. “Romantic love sells, of course. It’s like a communist plot, this business that you can’t be happy if you don’t have a romantic partner,” she says. “Most people don’t have a romantic partner, but we all have love in our lives. Romantic love is not the only kind of love – and it has its complications, of course. It’s quite nice being free. It’s quite nice being able to do what you want.”
was just as urgent as her desire for freedom. There have been a few standout moments where Peta has redesigned her life, notably in 1990 when she returned to New Zealand – “broke, but with a million ideas”. It was smack-bang in the middle of the recession and trying to find work as a chef was difficult – despite the fact that Peta had been running her own restaurants in Paris for the previous decade. “I drew a circle on a piece of paper and I put seven or eight little doors around the circle, and I labelled them as what I wanted to achieve.” One door was culinary tours, another was food television. Other doors also included writing books and sailing on a boat on the Mediterranean. “I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that if even of one of these doors opened, all the rest would flick open automatically, and that’s exactly what happened,” she says. The first door was food writing, with the release of Fête Accomplie in 1995; it became clear that her writing was even better than her recipes. That sparked the interest of television producers, which led to hosting Taste New Zealand. “Suddenly that gave me credibility. When people saw me on television, they agreed to help me do all the other things I wanted to do.” All of those doors did open, with Peta building, piece by piece, a life and career that a lot of people dream of. One book turned into 17, one television series become 12, her culinary tours, which started in 2005, now see her lead groups to six countries each year, including Italy, India, France and Morocco, with Portugal added into the mix this year. In every trip, there is at least one moment where Peta thinks to herself: “God, I’m so lucky.” It might be jumping into the beautiful blue sea outside Puglia, or trekking for two hours to have a lunch, complete with
“Romantic love is not the only kind of love and it has its complications... it’s quite nice being free. ”
Travel calls
Peta’s “gypsy nature”, as she calls it, began at age 10, when she was sent off as a family representative to visit her mother’s sisters in Sydney, and the OE she took at 24 consolidated it. “I became addicted to excitement, adventure and romance,” she shrugs. “And I didn’t follow the normal professional path that my friends I’d grown up with followed; where they started businesses, they had family and children. I was just wandering.” That’s not to say she was aimless. An appetite for a big, audacious life
silver service, next to a river in Darjeeling. A gypsy life with two places to call home, and a creative passion that shows no signs of slowing down… it’s little wonder that Peta is using her milestone birthday as impetus to aim even higher.
Rose-tinted life
Late last year, Peta posted a clip of her singing one of her favourite songs, Edith Piaf’s classic La Vie en Rose, on her Facebook page. It was recorded a few years ago in the south of France, accompanied by just a gypsy manouche guitar. Peta has a sensational voice – she studied opera at school. She doesn’t sing much these days, but is pleased to report that at 70, her voice has lasted well. La Vie en Rose is a love song that, when translated, means seeing life in pink – seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses. It’s a song, and an ideal, that Peta loves so much she has a tattoo of the phrase on the back of her shoulder. As she says, it’s a song about love and hope and always looking to the future. As far as personal theme songs go, it’s a good one to live by. And, of course, it’s French. France was always going to be the significant other in Peta’s life; when she first visited there in her 20s, she wrote in a letter to her parents about how she had been born in the wrong country. “My mother wrote back to me and said, [Peta puts on an exhausted voice] ‘Don’t be so dramatic, Peta.’ But then when she turned up to Paris, she said, ‘You’re right, this is totally you.’ I think sometimes you are born into the wrong country, in the wrong life, and the wonderful thing is that you do eventually find it. Better late than never,” she laughs. “You have to be living the life that you want to live – if possible… You just have to make a decision and do it, bit by bit.” AWW l Eat
Your Heart Out: Love Stories from Around the World by Peta Mathias, $35, Random House. petamathias.com
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Zara& Mike Royal exclusive
A p rfect m tch P H OTO G R A P H Y by HUGO BURNAND
Zara and Mike Tindal rs are already horse riding, and now the royal family’s most down-to-earth couple are bringing them Down Under for surf, barbies and a sizzling polo match, they tell Juliet Rieden.
W
hen Zara Tindall was pregnant with her first daughter, Mia, we talked about how she would fit motherhood around her decidedly unsocial schedule of competitive horse riding, which involved her travelling all over Britain and overseas, sleeping in her horse truck. “We’ll just carry on as normal,” she told me, explaining that eventing kids just have to fit in with their parents. After all, that’s what she did with her mum Princess Anne, Zara added. That was five years ago and now I am back in her Aston Farm home, in the heart of Britain’s green and pleasant Cotswolds, and on the face of it not much has changed. Zara and husband Mike both have a full schedule of work commitments and they’re still laughing, joking and sparking off each other like comfortable romantics. Outside, three of Zara’s horses – Cracker, Showtime and Socks (named for his four white socks) – are exercising in the stable yards and one-year-old boxer Blink is one of many family dogs running in and out. But hanging in the air around this energetic outdoor life, there’s definitely a warm glow of slightly frazzled domestic order. For it was just 18 months ago that Mia’s sister, Lena, arrived as the latest addition to the Tindall clan. So, as I settle down to chat to Zara and Mike about their new world of parenting, I’m wondering how the “business as usual” plan panned out. Zara breaks into a broad smile. “I’m still eventing,” she says, laughing. And do →
Zara admits she’s never worn high-heeled boots on a horse before but was happy to give it a go for our fantasy shoot with husband Mike in the grounds of her home in England’s Cotswolds.
Royal exclusive
the girls come with her? “Mia is at school so she can only come on weekends and it depends how far away it is, but yes, they’ve been to a few this year. It also depends on how many horses we’ve got with us. I think Mia just likes the camping – it’s probably more like glamping – in a truck. I don’t think she bothers about watching me too much.” But while Zara is determined to stay very much in the saddle, she concedes it’s not quite been as easy as chucking the children in with the horses and driving off into the – more often than not, rain-soaked – great outdoors. And whether she brings her girls with her to competitions or leaves them at their home (which is down the road from her mum’s residence in Gatcombe Park) involves a lot of variables. “The logistics are much greater. You can’t just drop everything any more. I do have to plan my season around the kids and what they’re up to. “They’re very much part of our lives and what we do anyway. But I have to work out how to fit everything in. You look back and realise how much time you used to have before you had kids and then wonder, what was I doing with it? We make sure we’re looking after the kids properly and then our jobs come alongside. It’s about putting everything into place,” she explains. Fortunately, so far Mia and Lena are loving their mother’s horsey life. “They both ride,” says Zara, looking rather pleased. “Lena is in a little basket on the saddle, purely a passenger. But we just bought Mia a new pony called Magic.” “Should be called Magic Millions, right?” jokes Mike, name checking the Australian race carnival Zara has been the ambassador of since 2012 (which we’ll come to later). I ask Mike if he thinks Mia is a chip off her mother’s equestrian block. “She can be,” he muses. “She’s going through that period where she thinks she knows what to do so we have someone teaching her. Her cousins, Savannah and Isla, and [their father] Zara’s brother, Peter Phillips, all ride as well and they go riding together.” Zara is thrilled their girls are
Mike had to lift Zara up onto the towering bales for this fun shot in the hay barn.
enjoying hanging out with the horses, but she also wants to make sure they find their own paths. “I love that they have the opportunity of working with animals, being outside, all the traditions that you learn with treating an animal – looking after your stuff, looking after the animals and learning good balance, all those skills you learn – but I think Mia will probably want to do her own thing anyway.”
Proud dad Mike, who no longer plays rugby – he retired from the professional game in July 2014 – but is still heavily involved in the sport, is relishing the new pace of family life. “I think it’s superb. Mia is a fantastic bundle of energy and that challenges you as well and keeps it interesting. Lena is just starting to find her feet, but we’ve enjoyed every minute of it. You hope that’s what kids
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do to you and it’s been great.” The 1.87m burly Yorkshireman has now found himself in a house full of women and he couldn’t be happier. “Three female dogs [and] my three girls. Plus we have lots of girls on the yard working with Zara… at least I’ve got Pete, my brother-in-law. And Andy, who works on the farm as well,” he jokes. Before Mia and Lena came along, Mike confesses he did think he might like a son, but now he wouldn’t have it any other way. “I was so happy with how Mia was as a girl that I wasn’t really bothered either way and when Lena was coming along I wasn’t bothered at all [about] what we got. I was just happy to be having another child,” he says. Zara suffered two miscarriages in between Mia and Lena, and talked candidly in a UK TV interview about the couple’s heartache through both. “I think the hardest thing in our
Family is central to the Tindalls’ life. Zara and Mike’s daughters, Mia and Lena, share a close bond with cousins Isla and Savannah (left). Meanwhile, Zara has remained close to her cousins, including Prince Harry (below, with Mike).
“Mia is a fantastic bundle of energy.”
situation was that everyone knew,” she said. “Normally it’s just your family and friends.” She said Mike had been “incredible… It’s very different for us because we’re carrying the child, but for guys it’s kind of that helpless feeling, which must be incredibly high and horrible for them. At the end of the day they’ve still lost a child too.” Mike has thrown himself into fatherhood and I sense the Tindall parenting is pretty much 50/50. Does he change nappies?
“Oh yes. I definitely do that. I think you’ve got to now. That’s part of the enjoyment anyway, doing the full thing,” he says proudly. As for the mythical “special bond” between a father and his daughters, Mike says, “Yes, it’s true. I do think that girls look to their dads to be able to get away with things.” At 38, Zara knows she needs to literally get back on the horse if she’s to stay on top of her career, and she and Mike, 41, work as a team looking after the girls. For Zara, the most urgent concern was getting herself back into competition shape following Lena’s birth. “I think it was easier the second time around to figure out what you needed to do, how long your body takes to get itself back into semiphysical working shape,” she explains. “The second time your body goes, ‘oh yes, okay, I’ve done that before’. It almost has a motor programme,
whereas when you return [after pregnancy] the first time around I think the body goes into shock and says, ‘I haven’t done this before’. “But no matter how prepared you get physically for giving birth, your body is never quite the same. For me trying to get my body physically strong enough to do the right job on the horse, getting it back to where I was before the pregnancy takes a lot of work. I go to the gym, ride the bike, run a bit and swim if I can. I’ve been competing since this time last year so I’m just getting back into it.” Zara would love to compete in another Olympics – she won a silver medal at the 2012 London Olympic Games – but says it’s not just about her own readiness, it’s about having the right horse. “I’ve got a horse [Class Affair], he’s a nice horse for the future; whether he’s going to be quite ready to go to the next Olympics I’m not sure – physically, mentally, experience-wise, he might not be quite ready for that.” In her sport, Zara notes, women compete into their 50s so she’s not panicking yet. “Luckily in eventing it depends on the horse. If you’ve got a good horse and the combination works, then you can go on a lot longer.” But like all mums, Zara can be prey to bouts of mother guilt, even though they have staff to help take the strain. “If I’m away and Mike’s here I don’t feel as guilty, whereas if we’re both away then I feel much more guilty.” Mia is a real livewire and already at school. “She goes to the local village school in Minchinhampton, which she loves. She’s a very active child. She does gymnastics and a lot of swimming, tennis, skiing, surfing.” Sound familiar? I ask both parents – separately – if now that girls can play rugby they’d be happy if Mia and later Lena wanted to take up their father’s sport. “I have no issues with it,” says Mike immediately. “If I was completely honest, I would really like Mia to go for tag rugby because I think it’s fantastic for body awareness, athletic ability and just a general all-round hand-eye coordination. →
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Royal exclusive
Fun in Australia
One thing the Tindall girls will definitely be experiencing – and soon – is sun, surf and swimming in Australia. Since Katie Page-Harvey, Magic Millions co-owner and chief executive of Harvey Norman, signed Zara to be the inaugural Magic Millions Racing Women Ambassador in 2012, she and Mike have been regular visitors to the Gold Coast and Australia. The Aussie vibe suits this very unroyal, laidback couple perfectly and they tell me that they now see Australia as their second home and can’t wait for their annual January jaunt Down Under. And this year, for the first time, they are bringing both daughters with them. “Lena’s been flying a couple of times but nothing long. I think Greece is probably the furthest she’s been, but Mia loves flying. She always has,” says Mike. “She’ll be very overexcited,” adds Zara. “Lena is a little bit smaller so that will be just trying to keep her in one place for long enough.” “Early January is bleak over here so it’s nice to go and have a bit of sun. I love the lifestyle of Australia and the ability to get up early, go on the beach
“Australians are laidback and they have good banter.” – especially for the kids, taking them in the ocean is brilliant,” says Mike. “I just think the people over in Australia are so laidback and they have good banter. No one’s worried about talking to each other. It’s not a rushed lifestyle. I think it’s a great place and we enjoy it so much.” Zara adds, “Mia loves swimming. Of course, the climate allows you to be able to go swimming all day every day. When we first took her to Australia she was 11 months old; we kick-started her love of water.” Mike explains, “She swims twice a week at home with lessons. If she’s anywhere near a pool she’d be in there all day. And that came from Australia when we went for six weeks when she was three and stayed at a place that had a pool. It was all she wanted to do.” This time Mike says he wants to introduce Mia to surfing. “She hasn’t done that much in the ocean but she had a few surf lessons down in Devon [on England’s south-west coast] this year, so it will be quite good to try and get her out on a board in Australia.” Will Dad be joining her? Mike laughs. “I basically make the board sink when I try to stand up on it. It literally has to be the size of a Cadillac for me. I quite enjoy it though. We tried last year and I’m sure we’ll have a go again. I know
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As the daughter of accomplished equestrian Princess Anne, Zara was destined for competitive riding. That passion has taken her around the world (above left, at the 2019 Magic Millions).
that Mia will want to go out so we’ll definitely have another go.” The family has an established group of mates in Australia who they catch up with and Mia is already well versed in the top tourist attractions. “In Sydney with Mia, I have done the Bridge Run and we visited the zoo. Then on the Gold Coast we went to Sea World and Movie World last year. “We’ve now also made lots of new friends in the Magic Millions family. So I get to renew my golf rivalry with Gerry [Harvey] every year – always good fun,” says Mike.
Gold Coast magic
Zara is rightly chuffed that the Magic Millions has become such a beacon for women in her industry. “I think we’re challenging the
P23: ZARA WEARS JOSEPH DRESS AND VICTORIA BECKHAM BOOTS. MIKE WEARS RALPH LAUREN CHINOS, R.M. WILLIAMS SHIRT, BELT AND BOOTS; P24: ZARA WEARS IRIS & INK JUMPER @ THE OUTNET AND THE WHITE COMPANY SKIRT. MIKE WEARS MARKS & SPENCER JUMPER AND BODEN JEANS; P25: ZARA WEARS RALPH LAUREN DRESS.
“Would I really want her to play contact? Probably not, just because of my experiences of how hard it is. The girls’ side is not quite up to the men’s side in terms of what you can do as a professional but if she wants to play I’m never going to stop her. If she finds a love for it and wants to go on, then so be it.” Zara, however, is not as thrilled with the idea. “No, no,” she says, shaking her head. “I’ve had a husband playing rugby and I’m not sure I would want my daughter playing. They say the game is like being in two car crashes a week. They just run into each other. I don’t think I would be able to watch my daughters do that. I guess you want your children to experience anything but at the end of the day they’re going to do what they want to do anyway.” Mike’s answer? “I keep giving her a golf club. ‘Why don’t you play golf?’ I say. And then I can go and play golf with her,” he grins.
HAIR AND MAKE-UP BY ALISIA RISTEVSKI. STYLING BY KAREN PRESTON. PHOTOGRAPHY BY GETTY IMAGES AND CHAS BRETON/SHUTTERSTOCK.
stigma of racing being a maledominated sport. There were a lot of male-owned horses and to be able to get more females involved was Katie’s original idea. There are way more female jockeys now, there’s more females in the sport, so I think globally we wanted it to happen in every sphere of racing, which I think we’ve managed,” she says. The carnival and race day has developed into a first-class thoroughbred event, now in the world’s top 10 richest race meets. The “Racing Women” initiative, of which Zara is patron, champions the participation of women in the sport with an enticing prize money bonus of $500,000 distributed between the
first four all-female owned or leased horses, on top of the prize money. “Every year’s been more of a success than the year before. The amount of women who are now involved with racehorses and the number of times that the bonus has been won is fantastic,” says Zara. When Mike Tindall was a lad growing up in Otley, in England’s north, he says the closest he got to horse racing was working on the fish and chip vans at York or Chester races. Jump forward a couple of decades and Mike is now a regular in the royal box at Ascot, Cheltenham and more. So how does Magic Millions compare? “Royal Ascot is fantastic but it’s
more dressing up in formal gear. Then you’ve got Cheltenham, which is somewhere in between but it’s not really warm, you’re in your coats; whereas this is just pure summer fun. People are far more relaxed. No one’s worrying about what people are thinking. You’re free to dress however you want to and I like that. And now we’ve got the polo as well,” he says. Bringing polo to the Gold Coast in the heart of summer may sound like madness and it does get very sticky, but since the first match in 2017 it’s become a showstopper with a distinctly Aussie edge. “I love polo, it’s a great game to play… a little bit hard on the Gold Coast because it’s so hot, but it’s good fun and since Nacho Figueras [the Argentinian polo heart-throb] came on board it’s been even better. He really is a great global polo player and makes such an event of it. “This year we have also got [acclaimed British jockey] Frankie Dettori,” says Zara Zara plays and Mike is in the commentary box. “I try not to stand next to Nacho for too long, it makes me feel bad about myself,” he jokes. “Obviously I support my wife’s team and try to put the opposition under pressure.” Does Mike think he’ll ever join Zara on the polo field? “I’ve said for three years I’ve got to learn to play polo and I’ve yet to fulfil that dream. Riding would be my main issue. I think I’d be all right at hitting balls. I’d be good at walking polo. It’s the horsemanship I’d struggle with. “Zara is so busy at the moment – she hasn’t had time to coach me – and I don’t really have a horse to do it with, so it keeps being pushed back. But at some point I will vow to learn and spend the year getting ready for it.” As they both talk it’s clear Australia has become a really happy place for the Tindalls so I have to ask: Would they consider moving Down Under? “Probably not while I’m still competing. It would be a little bit hard commuting. But after that… yes, I think if an opportunity came up we’d definitely think about it.” AWW
JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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THE MOTHER OF ALL MIX-UPS What would you do if a court said your baby wasn’t yours, and took him from your arms? As Genevieve Gannon discovers, this has been the devastating reality for couples caught up in IVF embryo mix-ups.
IVF scandal
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n a cold New York day after the usual nine months of nesting and anticipation, Donna Fasano gave birth to two darling boys. She and her husband, Richard, were both in their late 30s and had enlisted an IVF clinic to help them conceive, so when the twins’ cries filled that hospital room in December 1998, there was not only joy, but relief. They named the babies Vincent and Joseph and took them home to Staten Island where the little ones shared bath time and a baby gym, in the way brothers do. “Both these boys are beautiful – two precious, normal little boys,” the couple’s lawyer, Ivan Tantleff, said in the wake of the catastrophe that unfolded, though it would have been hard for the parents to deny knowing something was amiss. On May 10, 1999, when the babies were five months old, Donna and Richard separated their twins, said a tearful goodbye to Joseph, and handed him over to two strangers. “We’re giving him up because we love him,” Donna explained at the time. It was heartbreaking but they didn’t have a choice because, despite the fact that Donna had given birth to him, Joseph had no biological relationship to Donna, Richard or his “twin brother”, Vincent. In fact, the Fasanos were white and Joseph, or Akeil as he was renamed, was African American. The error that led to this nightmare situation was revealed in an ugly court battle. Akeil’s biological parents, Deborah and Robert Rogers, had attended a Manhattan IVF clinic on the same day as the Fasanos, but unlike the Fasanos, their procedure had not resulted in a pregnancy. What Deborah and Robert didn’t then know was that their embryo had been inadvertently implanted in Donna’s womb. In May 1998, eight months before the babies were born, the clinic contacted both couples and warned
Blood feud Donna and Richard Fasano (right) set a legal precedent when they gave birth to “twin” boys, one who had no biological relationship to the rest of the family. The boy was the biological son of African American couple, the Rogers (above).
them of the suspected error. The Rogers were distressed at the thought that their embryo had been misplaced and their much-wanted baby would be born to another couple. But when Deborah and Robert tried to contact the Fasanos, there was no response. Desperate, the Rogers filed a lawsuit that forced the Fasanos to undergo DNA testing. “This wasn’t my doing,” Donna said in a statement in 1999. “People with infertility problems should be able to go to their doctors and trust them to do the right thing. To them it’s a job but to me it’s my life.” After tests proved Akeil was the genetic son of the Rogers, the Fasanos relinquished custody, but only on the condition they could have a relationship with him. The Rogers initially allowed the Fasano family to visit, but the tense meetings led to the Rogers seeking a court order to stop the contact, and the dispute turned nasty. It was a tragic situation that had no
legal precedent, the New York Court of Appeals said, as it made a ruling preventing the Fasanos from seeing the baby they had birthed and nurtured. “It is only with the recent advent of in-vitro fertilisation technology that it has become possible to divide between two women the functions that traditionally defined a mother,” the court said. “With this technology, a troublesome legal dilemma has arisen: When one woman’s fertilised eggs are implanted in another, which woman is the child’s natural mother?” It’s a question society is still grappling with. Since Donna and Richard gave up baby Joseph, there have been instances of eggs being fertilised with unclean pipettes and doctors who have made mistakes but kept quiet, hoping the faulty transfers wouldn’t take. The errors are shocking and rare, but they do happen. “Humans make mistakes despite the most careful guidelines,” leading Australian IVF expert Professor Gab Kovacs says. Last year, three US couples were embroiled in a harrowing legal battle after a Korean-American woman →
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IVF scandal
living in New York gave birth to two babies who were not related to her, or each other. The CHA Fertility Center transferred embryos from two different couples into a third woman, according to a writ filed on behalf of one of the couples. Anni and Ashot Manukyan, of California, got their first inkling something was wrong when the CHA clinic asked them to come in for a cheek swab. When Anni asked what it was for, she was told it was a routine quality control procedure that the company did once a year. Lawyers for the couple say CHA wanted to obtain their DNA under false pretences to determine if a child born to another couple was Anni and Ashot’s biological child. “The truth was appalling,” a writ filed on behalf of the Manukyans said.
The other two couples involved in the CHA controversy have not wanted to be identified; however, in their lawsuit against the clinic the birth parents say they suffered “permanent emotional injuries from which they will not recover”. Their own female embryos, which they believed had been implanted, have been lost forever. Anni and Ashot’s lawyer, Adam Wolf, says his firm has worked on hundreds of cases of fertility centre misconduct, including the loss and mishandling of embryos, but this latest is by far the most egregious. “This is an industry that is largely unregulated. We need accountability for big fertility so that this does not happen again,” the California-based lawyer said. Australasian experts say there’s little chance of such blunders being
all hospital errors in Australia, seeks to prevent shocks like those that have taken place in America. “The couple is immediately informed,” he says. “If the embryo hasn’t been [implanted], you wouldn’t do a transfer. If a transfer has been done and the embryo’s the wrong embryo, the couple could stop taking hormones so the pregnancy doesn’t take. Or if there’s a pregnancy, they could opt for termination of the pregnancy. That’s been the process that I’ve heard of happening.” Sarah Jefford, a lawyer who specialises in fertility issues, agrees a mix-up of the severity seen in the US is unlikely in Australia, where clinicians are more conservative and wouldn’t go against local protocols, she says. “They just wouldn’t be that dodgy.” With an estimated eight million instances of eggs, sperm or embryos being handled in large labs each year, mistakes are unavoidable, Professor Kovacs says. “Whilst it’s most unlikely, unfortunately there always will be mix-ups where people make a mistake. What normally happens… is the clinic would accept responsibility and provide the couple with free treatment until they get After a stranger gave pregnant – that would birth to a baby that be the normal process.” was their genetic In comparison, America match, Anni and Ashot is virtually “uncontrolled”, repeated here. In Manukyan successfully Australia and New he says. There, even under fought for custody of Zealand clinics, every the best circumstances, the child, and are suing step taken in the lab the emotional strain of a the IVF clinic. Although by sperm, eggs or mistake is immense. they won custody, the embryos is witnessed In February 2009, Ohio couple suffered a sense and recorded by two couple Carolyn and Sean of loss and violation. staff members, says Savage were awaiting the Dr John Peek, results of their last-chance spokesman for New embryo transfer. They Zealand’s Fertility Associates. This already had two sons and a daughter, system is not always followed by and desperately wanted more, but many US clinics. In New Zealand the conceiving had been difficult and the process is also audited annually as fertility treatment was taking a toll, part of a clinic’s certification. physically and emotionally. They had Professor Kovacs says there have been through 20 ovarian stimulation been Australian cases of errors being cycles, three rounds of IVF, two identified at the lab stage but a policy frozen embryo transfers and four of open disclosure, which applies to miscarriages. This would be their last
Trust destroyed
The next day, the couple was called back to the clinic where they were told a baby had been born in New York, and he was their genetic match. “I heard my heart beat outside of my body,” Anni told a press conference, adding that her first thoughts were of the birth mother. “What about her? What is she going through?” The Manukyans fought for custody of the baby and are now suing CHA. They won the custody case, but despite being united with their son, their ordeal has not ended. “They cry every day,” court documents say. “They no longer trust anyone and their guard is always up. This is something that will live with them for the rest of their lives.”
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round of IVF and they were anxious to learn if it had worked. When they finally received the call, the doctor said Carolyn was pregnant but there was a problem. The clinic had transferred the wrong embryo and the baby Carolyn was carrying was another couple’s. “I just thought, no, that can’t happen,” Carolyn told the Christian Broadcast Network in 2010. Despite their shock and distress, there was never any thought the couple would fight for custody of the baby boy. “One of my most immediate thoughts was of that other mother,” Carolyn said. “What would it be like to get that news that your embryo is inside a stranger? There’s no way I’m going to take that away from someone else.” The doctor encouraged them to terminate the pregnancy, but as Catholics, they would never consider an abortion. “It didn’t matter that this child was in the wrong womb,” Carolyn wrote in her memoir, Inconceivable. “That wasn’t his or her fault.” The pregnancy was difficult, and they relied on counselling to get them through it. Carolyn has described catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror and experiencing the brief joyful thought of “pregnant!” before quickly remembering it was not her baby. The idea of giving away the child she was carrying weighed heavily. She wondered, “How in the world am I going to survive that?” One state away, in Michigan, teacher Shannon Morell had just arrived at her Year 8 classroom when she noticed there were two voice messages waiting on her phone. She was puzzled when she played them and discovered both voice messages were from her IVF clinic. She hadn’t visited the clinic in years and the nurse sounded extremely tense. When she heard that a stranger was pregnant with her embryo she fell back in her chair. “It’s almost too much to fathom,” Shannon told NBC
Respecting each other Carolyn and Sean Savage (below) were mistakenly given the embryo of Shannon and Paul Morrell (left). The couples met and after giving birth, Carolyn gave up the child, Logan, to his biological parents.
in 2009. “It’s overwhelming.” Like Carolyn, Shannon’s immediate thoughts were of the other woman. “This had to be the most terrible thing that had ever happened to her and her husband,” she wrote in her book, Misconception. She and her husband, Paul, were overjoyed when they learned the other couple would carry their baby to term and then give him to them, but they endured periods of uncertainty, fear and apprehension. Shannon describes feeling “left out of our baby’s life”. She had suffered two miscarriages and was eager for news of their baby, who they nicknamed ‘our little peanut’. “I always felt a small sense of trepidation when I saw the lawyer’s return address in my inbox. Would this be the email that brought bad news?” she wrote. The two couples met when Carolyn was 14 weeks pregnant. The first thing that Shannon said was thank you. “She was so grateful for what we had done,” Carolyn told NBC. The Savages had only one request of the Morells. “We wanted a moment to say hello and goodbye.” In September, Carolyn gave birth to a boy. “He was extremely feisty,” Carolyn said. She and her husband celebrated the birth just like they celebrated the births of their other
children. Then, after 10 precious minutes together, Sean took the little bundle downstairs and handed the newborn to Shannon and Paul. The Morells named him Logan Savage Morell. “There’s no way we could possibly repay them for what they’ve done for us because you can’t put a price on human life,” said Shannon. Although they never wavered in their decision, the Savages have admitted that the aftermath of the birth was more difficult than they had anticipated. “There’s a child who lives 150 miles north of my home who I pray for every night before I go to bed. I have hopes and dreams for him,” Carolyn said. “I think about him all the time. I hope someday we get to know him.” Each couple reportedly received a settlement from the clinic and the Savages later had twins via a surrogate and then, amazingly, another baby boy naturally. IVF mix-ups are rare, but what makes the case of the Morells and the Savages rarer still is how →
JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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the families resolved the error with so much respect and compassion for each other. The same year as the SavageMorell story was playing out, an IVF clinic in Cardiff, Wales paid a couple £25,000 after one of their embryos was implanted in another woman who chose to terminate the pregnancy. The London Telegraph reported at the time a trainee embryologist had mixed up their embryo after taking it from the wrong shelf of the incubator. A similar mistake occurred in Japan – in 2009 a woman sued the Kagawa Prefectural Government after the wrong embryo was implanted in her in a public hospital. Then there was the case of single mother Susan Buchweitz of San Francisco, who faced losing her 10-month-old son after an IVF whistleblower revealed there had been a mistake when he was conceived. Susan was approaching her late 40s when she underwent fertility treatment in mid-2000. An interior decorator who had always intended to raise a family, she had attempted IVF earlier with her then fiancé, but the relationship had fallen apart under the strain of repeated, failed attempts to conceive. “But the desire for a family and a child was stronger than ever,” Susan told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2004. She underwent an embryo transfer, fell pregnant and gave birth to a cherished son, who she believed had been conceived using a donor egg fertilised with donor sperm. Then, in 2001, Susan received a phone call from the Medical Board of California informing her they had received an anonymous tip there had been a mistake made the day of her fertility treatment. A married couple had attended the same clinic for their own transfer the day of Susan’s procedure. They underwent a transfer using a donor egg fertilised with the husband’s sperm, resulting in the birth of a little girl. The whistleblower said the same set of embryos, fertilised with the same sperm, were mistakenly used to conceive Susan’s little boy. Even though they had been born to
different mothers, the children were full biological siblings. When the married couple found out about the error, the husband sought full custody of Susan’s son and was granted visitation rights after a court ruled he was the boy’s legal father. The wife had no legal claim but Susan was forced to take her son to the couple’s house a couple of days a week until 2005, when the son was three years old, and a court ruled Susan and the husband had to share custody of the child. As the custody battle raged on, Susan described the situation as an “ongoing nightmare”. Because there was no obvious visible difference between Susan and her son, the error had gone undetected until the whistleblower came forward. It’s a problem articulated by Anni on
“I have hopes and dreams for him. I think about him all the time.” the steps of a courthouse after she learned about the mix-up involving her son. “The only reason we found out about this one is because the couple carrying him was Asian and we are Caucasian,” Anni said. Her observation raises the question of whether mix-ups where there is no visible difference between the baby and birth parents are going undetected. Professor Kovacs says “it’s possible”. “I consulted in China, in Shanghai, for 12 years and when we started they didn’t double-check. When we first said to them, ‘You’ve got to doublecheck everything – it’s not enough to have one person check it,’ one of the comments that one of the people in the clinic made was, ‘Why? If you make a mistake, no one will know. They all have black hair and brown eyes’. But the world has changed.” Professor Kovacs, who started working in the industry in 1978,
32 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
says it has matured dramatically. “A generation ago, you worked on the principle that, if they don’t know, it won’t hurt them. That’s no longer acceptable.” China now uses fingerprinting to identify women having transfers and ensure they’re getting the right embryo, he says. The CHA case demonstrates there are no winners in these mix-ups. Anni and Ashot Manukyan may have “won” the custody battle, but they still suffered a great loss and sense of violation. “I didn’t get to bond with my child,” a tearful Anni said in a video statement. “I wasn’t able to carry him. I wasn’t able to hold him. I wasn’t able to feel him inside of me. I wasn’t there when he was born.” The couple who had their twins separated and ripped from their arms are surely suffering too. However, had the mix-up occurred in the UK, the result may have been different. US courts have uniformly ruled a child born after an IVF mix-up belongs with their biological parents, but the UK takes the opposite approach. There, a woman who has a child through IVF is deemed the legal mother, even if the child isn’t genetically hers. Australian courts would be unlikely to take the baby from their birth parents and hand it to the genetic parents. “We probably wouldn’t do that as an automatic thing in Australia. It would be about what’s actually best for this child. Genetics would barely come into it,” says Sarah Jefford. The law considers the person who births the baby is the legal parent unless the court declares otherwise, she adds. But whether that would apply in the case of someone accidentally giving birth to a baby who wasn’t related to them, she can’t be sure. “How do you even start with that sort of case? Where do we begin?” AWW ● Genevieve
Gannon is a feature writer at The Australian Women’s Weekly. She researched IVF mix-up cases for her novel, The Mothers, published this month by Allen & Unwin.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY GETTY IMAGES AND AAP.
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The Judy Bailey interview
Amanda
Less drama,
BILLING
more honesty “I Wit h
What’s next for actress Amanda Billing? As she ponders new directions, she reflects on her grief on leaving Shortland Street, the ups and downs of an unconventional life and the power of being a great teacher.
JUDY BAILEY
wish I could look out into the world and find a place that I fit.” Amanda Billing pauses wistfully for a moment and then smiles her beautiful broad smile and says, “I think it probably exists and I’m in it!” These thoughts are, as she would say, “classic Amanda Billing”. She is one of our most successful actors. A teacher and former star of the long-running TV soap, Shortland Street, she has also held lead roles in heavyweight theatrical productions like Lysistrata and Macbeth. She finds herself now at a crossroads, in between gigs. “I feel like I’m at a place I’ve been before. What happens next? It’s forcing me to be more creative and think what I really want to do in a deep way.” We meet in her tiny central city apartment which happily overlooks an equally tiny but beautiful, leafy park. It feels like an oasis from the bustle outside. It’s a steamy Auckland
day and she’s sporting one of her own clothing designs… a tank with the words “Force Majeure” emblazoned on the front. It is, she tells me, one of her dad’s favourite sayings, perhaps because, in so many ways, it sums up his courageous, independent, freethinking daughter. She is, as one of the dictionary definitions of force majeure goes, a person of irresistible compulsion and superior strength. Her T-shirts, all bearing sharp slogans with multiple meanings, have become sought-after items. New Zealand’s newest acting sensation, Thomasin McKenzie, rocked one on the red carpet at the Sundance Festival for the premiere of the movie Leave No Trace late last year – a simple white T-shirt with black lettering that read, “Strong Female Character”. Her mother, acting legend Miranda Harcourt, thought it was perfect for Thomasin. “To play a strong female character is what actresses aim for. Strong does not exclude being vulnerable or
troubled, it just means that you lead the narrative and that is something women are aiming for in drama as well as politics.” Amanda, the youngest of the three Billing children, credits her parents, Dennis and Lynne, with helping her become her own strong female character. “I’m so blessed to have the parents I have. They are both really good people who give a shit. They taught their children about the good and right things to do. “I grew up in a household where personal responsibility was taught. Why and how you do things and how they impact on others. We’re not a particularly chilled family. We all have big feelings and big ideas… I’m quite proud of that. We’re all quite different.” Her brother Andy, five years older, is a banker in New York; her sister, Kate, seven years older, teaches personal growth and leadership skills to business people in Auckland. After school Amanda had no idea what she wanted to do but set off →
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34 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
The Judy Bailey interview
for Canterbury University, because “Canterbury felt like an adventure.” She would graduate with honours in geography and then go on to train as a teacher. It turns out her former geography teacher at school had told her she’d be a good teacher. There’s a pause. “Oh, and also, my boyfriend at the time was studying engineering at Canterbury. Ha ha… there it is!” she laughs, throwing her arms in the air. As happens for so many of us, there was one particular teacher who made a real impact on Amanda in her senior years at school. The young Anne Spensley arrived at St Matthew’s in Masterton with her funky peroxide blonde hair and a zest for living. “She was very hip. She didn’t have a small town view of life,” says Amanda. Spensley introduced great musical theatre and a blues band to the school but best of all, Amanda remembers, she didn’t make you feel like a child. “We were collaborators. It
appalled. “I couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘it’s not the army mate, a bit of humour goes a long way.’” Amanda took that experience with her into teaching. Firstly, at St Margaret’s in Christchurch and later at Rangitoto College in Auckland. But she quickly became disillusioned with the education system. “I love learning and I love teenagers but I don’t like achievement standards. Education has become so compartmentalised, it frustrates me.” Her students, unsurprisingly, loved her. It was a chance meeting in an Auckland bar that led to her very first acting audition. Heath Jones had just
“If actors are doing it properly, we become incredibly vulnerable on stage.”
was my first experience of making something together. It’s very important for teenagers to have that with an adult.” That thought ran counter to what she was taught at the College of Education in Christchurch. “One of my tutors told us, ‘Don’t smile till Easter’. Amanda was
Although she says she loves both television and theatre, you get the feeling that being among a live audience is what really satisfies her. “I find it quite nerve-racking, the exposure and exhilaration that comes from connecting with an audience. My theatrical experiences have all been wonderful. They’ve all been set where the action takes place almost amongst the audience, either where the audience is seated around or to either side of the stage, really close. I love the sense that we’re all in it together. When you can see the audience, it’s really exciting.” She’s not a fan of the word “creative”. “Creative is a word I like using less and less. It’s so ‘beige’. It’s not about sticking a bit of parsley on something, you really have to put yourself out there. To give the audience their money’s worth it has to cost you as a performer, physically and emotionally. “That’s the funny thing about acting. [As humans] we usually experience grief, anger and shame in private moments. If actors are doing it properly, we become incredibly vulnerable on stage, but in return we get a sense of appreciation from the FROM TOP: audience. Theatre is my Actor Thomasin favourite challenge. The more McKenzie wore one of Amanda’s you’re committed to being T-shirts at the exposed the better it is.” Sundance Festival; viewers grieved when Dr Sarah Potts died, but so did Amanda, who had spent a decade on Shortland Street.
graduated from Unitec and was about to direct a restoration comedy at the Silo Theatre. Amanda mentioned she loved acting at school and he suggested she audition for the show. She did, and in his garage in Mt Eden a new career was launched.
36 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
Farewell Dr Potts
For a decade Amanda was one of Shortland Street’s most beloved characters, Dr Sarah Potts. It took her a long time to get over her character’s death in 2014. “I realise now it was grief. I grieved mostly about leaving that character behind. It was an extraordinary experience playing her.” Sarah Potts’s story was, as Amanda says, “classic Shorty Street”. →
“Getting your heart broken a bunch of times makes you wary and a bit tired.”
know.” And then, Sarah Potts died. “It was horrible. It helps to see it as grief because it was a massive life change. I had to pretend I still worked at Shorty until the episode went to air. But I’d filled the boxes from my dressing room and cleared out. And that was that. “I sought out people who could support me through. I called my brother-in-law, who’d been through a redundancy. My sister, Kate, was wonderful and my friend, [radio and TV producer] Gemma Gracewood, asked me to join a tour to China and Japan with the Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra.” Dr Potts was no more, but Amanda’s life was to take another direction. At the time of our interview she’s
38 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
l Amanda’s
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She was very good at her job, slightly unconventional, can’t cook, burns the baked beans, wonderful with patients but with a hopeless love life. Was she, I ventured, a little bit like Amanda? “Yep, she was tailor-made for me,” she laughs. “I’d originally auditioned for the part of a hot lesbian nurse,” she remembers. She ended up playing the slightly kooky, chaotic heterosexual. The Shortland Street gig would last 10 years, a lifetime in soap terms. “It’s called ‘golden handcuffs’ when you get a gig like that,” she explains. She was completely invested in her character. “I lived my life at work.” And then, the inevitable happened. “There are always storylines floating around. We’re not supposed to read those… but we do. They (the story writers) gave Dr Potts multiple sclerosis. I remember feeling anxious about it, how was this going to end? I got to the stage where I didn’t want to
back teaching, at the Pop-up Globe. Three classes of children, teenagers and adults are doing Shakespeare’s King Lear. Amanda is directing the show. It’s the first time she’s helped kids to put on a show and she’s relishing it. “This is how Anne (her former teacher) must have felt. I get to watch them live their dream, it’s so cool. It’s a formative experience for any human being.” She muses, “This might be a direction my life will go, helping other people express themselves artistically.” She tells her students: “You’re not at acting class to become rich and famous. You’re there to become more self-aware, more flexible, more connected to others and resilient. You’re there to change, and you change through being uncomfortable. “I think about my life and the way to live a lot… every day. My life is full of things I’m curious about. I’m curious about how to approach my own personal challenges… classic 40-something behaviour,” she laughs wryly. “In the past I have wanted the conventional things in life – financial security, a partner, children but it always ends in tears. But maybe I haven’t quite wanted the right things at the right time. I have had the courage to leap into the abyss, then I often think, ‘what the hell did I do that for?’ Sometimes I would love to land in the soft lap of full-time work but then I’d get bored and would chafe against it in the end because I want to be autonomous. “I often find I’m needing change, not knowing what to do but things always work out. Being single is a pain but it’s also awesome. I would love to have a husband and children but I have to be philosophical about it. Getting your heart broken a bunch of times makes you wary and a bit tired. [Now] I’m going for less drama, more honesty and courage.” AWW
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Bushfire crisis
COURAGE UNDER FIRE In the midst of an unprecedented bushfire season, Susan Chenery pays tribute to the women firefighters who risk their lives to save others.
T
he noise. That’s what you don’t get in the footage and photos. The terrible, terrible noise of a big bushfire. The malignant sound of the wind as the fire sucks in the oxygen it needs to grow. The hissing and popping of eucalyptus trees, the explosions as they release their gases. Fires make their own weather, creating their own wind, lightning, black hail. “The noise,” says Liane Henderson, volunteer firefighter of 20 years standing, “is like jet planes.” If we’re lucky we’ll never know what it’s like inside an uncontained fire. Liane does, and so do her firefighting colleagues. It’s dark, like an eclipse. “It can get very scary because you can get disoriented. It’s another world when you are out there, it really is.” An unpredictable fast-moving force of destruction, engulfing everything in its path. “I look at it as this beast I’ve got to stop,” says Liane, Acting Inspector for ➝
Rural Fire Service (RFS), Queensland. “It’s us against that, but every fire is different. These things have minds of their own.” This is a season of fire. Australia is burning up. The fires that have raged across the eastern seaboard in these past months have been unprecedented – the sheer scale of them, coming so early in the driest spring ever recorded, with a ferocity that’s never been seen before. At the time of writing, more than 700 homes, six lives and over two million hectares have been lost in mega-fires that are breaking all records months before the start of the traditional fire season. Fire, reported The Guardian, has never or rarely devoured rainforests, wet eucalypt forests, dried-out swamps, ancient forests in Tasmania that have not burned for 1000 years, but they’ve all burned this spring and summer. And as the fires escalate, Australia is in uncharted territory. “Fire knows no boundaries, it doesn’t discriminate,” says Vivien Thomson, a rural liaison officer who has been fighting fires for three decades. On January 18, 2003, she faced the kind of firestorm she thought she’d never see again. “The hairs on the back of your neck stand up and you think something is going to happen. This roar is coming like a freight train, this massive intensity. In a split second it hit us and threw us off our feet, a car ignited in front of us. Ten minutes later we heard it coming back.” But having been at the fires near Glen Innes, in northern NSW, this November, where a wall of flames burned with such intensity there was only one house left, she says things are happening now that “we can’t explain. It was a wild ride. I saw some fire behaviour going on down there which just didn’t fit the mould of what should happen. The worst case scenario is becoming more normal. We were experiencing high fire intensity in the middle of the night, which is usually the time we back burn. Fires were skimming the tree tops where there was no surface fire. It was almost like the atmosphere was on fire.”
RIGHT: Vivien Thomson has been fighting fires for three decades; checking a map on the job at Glen Innes, where Vivien saw unprecedented fires.
Liane sleeps with her phone – lives with the dread, the tension of being always ready to run towards danger. The call can come at any time. The surge of adrenaline, the urgency. “You might be swimming in your pool and get a fire call,” says Peta Bull, a volunteer of seven years at Tamborine Mountain in Queensland. “You turn up in whatever you’re wearing – it might be your bikini or you’re not wearing shoes. I knew a firefighter who used to have designer clothes from her work under her uniform.” Driving into a fire, they are assessing it – seeing what’s in the line of the fire – homes, farms, crops that need to be saved. “Totally concentrating,” says Liane, “and making sure we understand where people are and how we can get them out.” “You’ll see a smoke plume,” says Peta, “and the colour and thickness of it can tell you how intense it is. You have to look at what’s burning, the wind, the head of the fire. You shouldn’t get in front of the head. They call it ‘the dead man zone’ for a reason.” Firefighters see what we don’t. “You’ll never look the same way at the landscape after talking to me,” warns Peta, who works as a nurse when not fighting fires. What others see as undergrowth, she sees as fuel for a fire. “It has ruined it for me. I can’t go for a drive without thinking, Oh God, look at the fuel load in there. You’re constantly looking around.” Right now, firefighters see perfect conditions for catastrophe.
42 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
“There is no humidity, so there’s no moisture anywhere,” says Peta. “Fires are starting from a spark, from anything. Where you probably had the chance before of containing a fire, we’re losing that chance because it’s so damn dry. We’re not getting the rain we need – we’re getting heat – and the wind is drying everything up.” Firefighters are constantly watching the wind, looking behind, above, looking for exits, assessing. “You do a 360-degree size-up,” says Liane. “It becomes normal to you. I do that everywhere I go now. It’s called situational awareness.” They’re watching out for the falling branches of gum trees and for ember attacks that can travel four to 12km ahead of a fire front. “There are so many dangers,” says Peta. “Snakes, spiders, other animals. We could be catching horses, cows, koalas. You might be down a cliff and the truck might be up on top and you have to pull yourself up with the hoses… I had a spider crawl up my pants once. I had to drop them in front of everyone.”
Bushfire crisis CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: Liane Henderson at the Queensland RFS headquarters; Peta Bull has had fire come straight at her; a wildfire at Colo Heights; cars destroyed by fire.
“It was almost like the atmosphere was on fire.” Peta has been caught when the wind has changed and a fire has turned and come straight at her. “You just hope you’re the one holding the hose because you can at least turn it on and spray, and turn it around and spray yourself. I’ve had to do that.” Being scared, says Vivien, is essential for survival. “You’re not brave unless you’re scared. But it is managed fear, managed risk. If I go to a fire ground and don’t have that sense of being scared, it means I’ve stopped looking, reviewing and questioning, and I am putting myself in danger. That is when I stop doing this.” Last November, as catastrophic fire warnings were declared, Peta was on duty at Moogerah Dam in southern Queensland, defending people’s
homes. “It can be really intense,” she admits. “Some of us had been on the fire ground for 18 and 20 hours.” Those houses were, she says, “easy to defend” because the people had done everything right to prevent bushfire. “That was an easy save. But unfortunately sometimes you can’t defend the house. And then there is guilt – a lot of guilt. What if I had done this differently? What if I hadn’t had that afternoon nap? I would have been up and dressed and ready to go when I got that call.” Mikaela Ryan, an 18-year-old university student, is a second generation firefighter. She has been volunteering for the Hawkesbury Rural Fire Brigade since she was 13 years old. Until she was 16 and old
enough to pass her qualifications, she would go out as a scribe – doing mapping, radio communications, logistics, organising crews – for her father, who is a group officer. In November, Mikaela was at the Gospers Mountain fire north-west of Sydney on a catastrophic fire danger day when she experienced a “burnover” – when a fire quite literally burns over the top of a crew. “We were up at Putty Road, which the fire was aiming to cross, and we wanted to try and stop it there,” she begins. The aviation unit advised that the fire front was “fast approaching and the fire behaviour had intensified”. The crew pulled into an area of open grass paddocks with some dwellings. “We could hear it →
JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
43
Bushfire crisis
become more aware of the world you are living in and have more empathy for people.” And there is sadness too, for what has been lost. “Your heart goes out to people who have lost homes and livestock,” she adds. “And to lose native animals and bushland – it upsets us. We care about our communities. Whilst in operational mode, you can’t lose it, but out of operational mode, we do. You can’t forget about it… you get filthy, it takes days to get the smell out of your hair and your eyes can be swollen for days from the smoke.” Firefighters know what they’re really made of. “You’re made of trust and your mates,” says Peta. “If there wasn’t teamwork, we would have 10,000 dead firefighters. We’re a family.” Vivien’s partner’s farm was burned in the 2003 Canberra fires, so she knows how it feels to lose your home, your income, your animals. “Their trauma is so raw.” As a liaison officer, she reaches out to people whose lives have been devastated by fire. “I provide them with the information they need to start the very long, involved, intense recovery period. People have been looking after their animals closely to get them through
44 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
FROM LEFT: Second generation firefighter Mikaela Ryan; preparing to battle the Gospers Mountain mega-fire; backburning along the Putty Road north of Sydney; Captain Lilly Stepanovich.
the drought, and then to have a fire come through is incredibly hard to come to terms with… You can see the stress and trauma – they are basically crying in your arms.” At the time of writing, these women know the risk of fire is going to get much worse as summer progresses. The fire season used to last for a couple of months in predictable locations. Now their crews are on active duty most of the year. Many of the people fighting these fires are volunteers who have dropped everything to work around the clock, away from families and regular workplaces. “Volunteers down tools and they come from everywhere,” says Liane. In this new red-hot world, firefighters often don’t have time to
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALANA LANDSBERRY, AAP AND GETTY IMAGES.
roaring up the gully,” she says. “It had a north-westerly, which is a hot wind, and that wind was pushing very, very fast. When the fire front approached we had 120-kilometre wind gusts, sheet metal flying off buildings. Then it hit us and we had about 600-metre flame heights.” With eight or nine units pulled in there, “our only fire protection was other vehicles around us. I was with three very experienced group officers who said it was the most erratic fire behaviour they had ever seen.” Mikaela remained calm, she says “because the training kicked in”, something echoed by all the women interviewed by The Australian Women’s Weekly. “We all feel very supported and able to get through it together.” Fighting fires requires organisation and precision. Lilly Stepanovich, who became Captain of St Albans RFS brigade last May, was also at the Gospers Mountain fire, which, as we go to press, is still burning. The brigade’s ability to save lives and property there has been, she says, in part a result of strategic planning. “Prior to the fires,” she says, “we had worked with the community, collating information, making sure people knew what we were doing… It was like a well-oiled machine. Everybody knew what they had to do and we got the job done.” Fighting fires also requires operating at an intensity few people will experience in their lifetime. It is like going to war – danger, adrenaline, noise, exhaustion. While the aviation crews are working from the air, the firefighters are on the ground and up close. No one gets away from a fire unaffected, unchanged. Even the best trained firefighter is exposed to trauma on shifts that can extend through days and nights. After a big deployment, Liane says, “my husband tells me I go very quiet, don’t speak much, get very teary. I generally sleep for a couple of days. It is adrenaline that keeps you going on a 12 or 14-hour shift. Then it is coming off the adrenaline. I’m not a social butterfly any more. I am a lot quieter. It does change you. You
“I go very quiet, don’t speak much. It does change you.” recover from one fire before they’re called to the next one, a situation that is risky for mental health. And they do it for no material reward – just the desire to keep their land and their communities safe. Vivien is calling for more women to volunteer. “Women do things slightly differently,” she says. “When I’m running a fire ground, I have a mental picture in my head of who is where, what’s happening, what they are doing. To be honest, one benefit we women have is that we are really good multitaskers.” Dr Noreen Krusel, Director of Research and Utilisation for the Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council (AFAC), says: “We do encourage more women to apply to join the services and we are looking for broad skills and attributes. There is a traditional view that the person holding the hose needs to be this big brawny stereotypical male. There is a lot more that people need to do – they need to work with communities, make decisions – and lots of people can do that. The agencies are always looking to
recruit the best people.” Vivien is also calling for bipartisan action on climate change. Although no individual fire can be attributed to climate change alone, scientists have made it clear that these fires, along with the extremes of temperature and drought that have contributed to them, are in line with climate change predictions. “For everyone who understands climate change – from our youth to our firefighters to our farmers – the solutions are blindingly obvious,” Vivien wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald. “The catastrophic impacts of climate change are right on our doorstep. We need our policymakers to take urgent action.” Last April, knowing what was to come, 23 retired fire chiefs requested a meeting with the Prime Minister. Bob Conroy, former fire manager of NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, said: “The fires are impacting on areas that haven’t known fires for millennia.” Greg Mullins, the former chief of NSW Fire and Rescue, told The Guardian that the bushfire crisis was underlaid by climate emergency.
“Climate change has supercharged the bushfire problem. And on November 12, for the first time ever, Sydney experienced catastrophic fire danger. Fires are literally off the scale on this warming planet.” The chiefs were asking for desperately needed equipment and resources for firefighters and for action on climate change. In December they finally met with government – not with the Prime Minister but with Energy Minister Angus Taylor and Minister for Drought David Littleproud. Greg Mullins asked them to “reach out across the boundaries of politics” because the current response is “simply not enough”. Vivien echoes those demands and reminds Australians that, whether government heeds the call or not, there is much people can do to support their local firefighters – she encourages locals to maintain their properties, make a fire plan and stick to it. People can donate or volunteer for their local brigade. And Australians can tell their parliamentarians that they expect less political point-scoring and more strong, bipartisan action when their lives and land are at stake. In the meantime, Vivien promises that, in spite of the swollen eyes, singed hair, coming home from shifts smelly, dirty, exhausted and sometimes heartbroken: “We are all going to be back out there the next day because this is something we just inherently do, as Australians.” AWW ● Vivien Thomson’s book, Ashes of the Firefighters, is available at ashesofthefirefighters.com.au.
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sisters
Lessons learned from illness, disability and heartbreak prompted three sisters to launch wellness retreats for real women of all shapes and sizes. They talk to Nicola Russell about happiness and living a life less “perfect”.
P H OTO G R A P H Y by EMILY CHALK • H A I R & M A K E - U P by MELLE VAN SAMBEEK ST Y L I N G by TORI AMBLER fo r THE FASHION DEPARTMENT
Wellbeing From left, marketer Toni Paltridge, yoga teacher Jennie Jackson and naturopath Coryn Smith make up Sista Trio.
Y
oga teacher Jennie Jackson, naturopath Coryn Smith and marketer Toni Paltridge know how difficult it is to take time out of a busy life – but a disability, a separation and a cancer diagnosis have led the sisters to reassess time out as a priority, for all women. Their business, Sista Trio, runs wellness retreats with yoga, meditation, nutrition and lifestyle advice, delivered in an accessible way for a greater range of women. “This wellness industry can get quite serious,” says middle sister Jennie. “One of our taglines is heart, hilarity, honesty.” The 49-year-old is the first to admit she is an unlikely yoga teacher. Born with bilateral talipes equinovarus (severe club feet), she had her right ankle manipulated and broken just hours after she was born. It was the first of many surgeries to correct the disability, which in recent years saw her considering amputation. “It was so debilitating and painful, and it gets you down – mind, body and soul,” she says. “My husband Greg used to have to drop me everywhere, because I only had a certain amount of steps a day before I was toast.” But in 2015, through a club foot support group on Facebook, Jennie heard from an American woman who was walking pain-free, with a device developed in the US. “I pondered it for ages and spoke to people all around the world, because it was going to cost 12 grand plus the cost to get over there. Finally I just took the plunge.” Jennie, husband Greg and son Rocco headed to Washington where, at the Hanger Clinic, Jennie had a mould taken of her leg and a customised device made. Her orthopaedic surgeon had warned her against it, recommending yet another surgery. “He said, ‘I think you are being seduced by American marketing’ – but he was wrong, it worked,” she says, with the steely resolve that has come from years of battling daily pain. “That first walk up their ‘catwalk’ was just amazing…” She pauses as the tears well up. “The guy who had made it was right there and he said, ‘you’ve come a very long way to get here.’ It was like walking on clouds.” The “offloading” device was developed by a US prosthetist for the military. Jennie went from struggling to walk around the supermarket to hiking in Alaska on an active six-month family holiday. “It is like a prosthetic leg that walks for you, without having to amputate.” When she got home Jennie used her new-found confidence to train as a yoga teacher. She now teaches as the “Adaptive Yogi” making yoga accessible for “every body”. “I have a disability and I have also lived in a bigger body and so I know the issues that go around that, in your head. “My slogan is ‘it’s all about how you feel not how you look’ and I adapt the poses to fit the body, not the body to fit the poses. Most yoga shapes are made for a young Indian male, they weren’t made with this body in mind.” “We are so proud of her,” says eldest sister Toni. “She brings such a lovely softness to her classes and people → JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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Wellbeing
feel comfortable immediately. But while she is soft, there is also a strength. Jennie has always been the boss.”
Late life-change Toni, a mother of three, was a latecomer to the Sista Trio story, but an essential part of its development. While the 51-year-old had heard Jennie and Coryn talking about yoga and spirituality since their OE to India 30 years ago, and heard their recent plans to run retreats, her focus was elsewhere. “I’m not a yoga teacher or a naturopath so I never felt like it was my place to be part of it, and I most certainly hadn’t started a spiritual journey in India,” she says, as the sisters dissolve into laughter. “I have been uptight, busy and important – all I’ve ever known in my career was working in the travel industry, and being a mum.” That changed after Toni discovered a golf-ball sized lump in her neck last May. “I was quite active at the gym when I found it and I thought I had
TOP RIGHT: Jennie, Toni and Coryn. ABOVE FROM TOP: The sisters Jennie, Toni and Coryn with their mum Kay; taking time out at a retreat; meditation is just one aspect of Sista Trio’s retreats.
just popped something weightlifting. I went to my doctor who gave me an urgent referral to haematology at Auckland Hospital and I just rocked up by myself and went ‘ohhh right, there are people with cancer here.’ It was a huge come-to-Jesus moment. I had tests and scans, and in June I was told I had indolent follicular lymphoma. “I got diagnosed, went into shock, stopped doing everything, started eating doughnuts and stayed in bed for days. I’d stopped working and I had days with nothing ahead of me, so Jen said to me: ‘You’ve got some time on your hands now, why don’t you have a look at what we are doing?’” Toni’s initial reaction? “Blurgh, don’t want to,” but Jennie pushed her gently, but firmly, towards it. “Coryn and I are all words and noise whereas Jen just gives you a look, and you just know what needs to be done, there’s no fuss, no mucking around.” Toni has just completed a six-month stint of chemotherapy, administered after the lumps started to grow. “They were in my jaw, my neck, my armpits and my uterus, and because I am supposedly young for this, they were like, ‘let’s get in there and start chemotherapy.’” The tumours, while still there, have reduced dramatically and Toni has become a third, equal partner in Sista Trio. “It was going to be us doing our thing and Toni doing some marketing, but ironically enough she put the rocket under it,” says Jen. Toni provided a much needed bridge between the two sisters. “Jen and I work very well together, we are both very organised and structured, but I also get Coryn’s free spirit. I see it, I get it and I feel it. I gave it a balance.” She also represents the target market for the business – someone new to yoga and holistic health and with a renewed
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focus on her own wellbeing, and she’s not afraid to raise the red flag when her sisters’ ideas get too “out there” for newcomers. “I’ll start going on and on and Toni will say ‘that just makes my sphincter shrink,’” says Coryn giggling.
Keeping it real Coryn Smith, the naturopath, is the youngest and by far the cheekiest of the group. Her sisters have nicknamed her Freddie [Mercury] due to her tendency to turn up on the day and shine. “I’m marketing and promotions. Jen’s backing vocals and band manager and Coryn’s lead singer,” says Toni. The sisters meet for their interview with The Australian Women’s Weekly at Coryn’s naturopathic clinic in West Auckland. They’ve come fresh from a working bee at Coryn’s house. As a recently separated, now single mum of three kids, the 46-year-old is candid about how hard it is to find time out to care for herself – on her Instagram there are shots of her trying to practise yoga while her children and dog battle for space on her mat. “One word that comes through from clients is that we are real,” says Toni.
P 58-59: TONI WEARS BLAZER FROM ASSEMBLY LABEL, CAMI AND TROUSERS FROM TRELISE COOPER; JENNIE WEARS TOP FROM THE CARPENTERS DAUGHTER; CORYN WEARS DRESS FROM WITCHERY. P 60-61: JENNIE WEARS JACKET FROM POSTIE, DRESS FROM MAX; TONI WEARS DRESS FROM WITCHERY; CORYN WEARS BLOUSE FROM TRELISE COOPER, JEANS FROM MAX. ADDITIONAL PHOTOS INSTAGRAM.
“They can relate. I sit in the back of the retreats giggling to myself because Coryn’s my baby sister and she is still cracking me up. There is none of that ‘oh I’ve heard this before,’ never. She delivers to the people sitting in that room.” It was important to Coryn to keep things light in the retreats. She says the wellbeing industry can get too serious. “You come across too many ‘spiritual soldiers’. They can be so judgemental… you have to have a giggle.” She’s focused on helping people to work out what’s best for their bodies, rather than telling them what to do. “We give people insights, information, and education, but we are really big on providing a place for women to come up with their own answers.” “You help them understand what is right for their individual bodies as opposed to telling them to go on the latest cabbage diet,” Toni adds. Coryn’s workshops cover everything from finding energy and vitality to food and stress, sleep and hormone problems – depending on what’s needed by the group at the time. Like Jennie, the retreats have given Coryn a place to thrive. “It has pushed
me out of my comfort zone and given me a vehicle to do what I can do really well, which is help inspire and educate people. I am really good at it,” she says, laughing at her own tenacity. “I’ve been thinking about doing something like this with Nourish Me [her naturopathy business] forever, but I hadn’t got it off the ground. I have got a new respect for Jen and Toni’s ability to make things happen.” Coryn admits her charm and ability to communicate so well verbally are coping mechanisms for the challenges of dyslexia. “When we first started, Jen was quite perplexed with me because I’m not a planner. I can stand up in front of lots of people and do my magic, but when you talk to me about writing points down I get nervous.” The sisters initially saw her lack of written planning as laziness, until she stood up at the retreats and they realised how well-prepared she was.
“She has such a phenomenal skill set for pulling all this stuff out of her brain in front of people,” says Toni. “It’s been really important for us to understand how to work with her. “I have known Coryn was dyslexic all my life but it wasn’t until I worked with her and saw how she operates that I really understood. We’ve had to remove the frustration behind telling her ‘it’s in the Google drive under the file!’ for the 30th time, because the dyslexic mind just simply can’t find that file.” Coryn nods: “Every job I’ve had where I’ve had to learn systems, I see them looking at me thinking ‘why can’t she follow these simple operating instructions’ and that makes me totally flustered,” she says. Working together means they need to resolve conflicts quickly, says Jennie. “You should see our Messenger groups. There’s tears, there’s fights, it could be a reality TV show. Coryn and I had one yesterday and then Toni came in this morning and asked if the fight was still going and we were like ‘no we’re done’. “It is so refreshing working together because in a corporate environment you can’t really say what you think,” adds Jennie. “We do, and we think that paves the way for growth.” Growth from messy, gritty, real life struggles, worlds away from an Instagram picture of a “perfect” body in a “perfect” yoga pose. It’s summed up by a snippet on their website: ‘No matter where you are at physically, mentally or emotionally, how much experience you have – you are welcome. If you own a pair of fancy yoga pants rock them out, but if you don’t, then come in your daggy track pants!’ And it’s that’s inclusivity they hope makes their retreats stand out. “I was born with a disability, I struggle with my weight and my confidence, I’m an introvert and I’m up teaching a yoga class,” says Jennie. “I can see them going, ‘well if she can do it, I can do it’ and that’s exactly what we want.” AWW
“There’s tears there’s fights, it could be a reality TV show.”
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“My mother used to tell us – no matter what you put your mind to, you can do it.”
Up close
Dream
girl J
ennifer Hudson is sitting in a hotel library in midtown Manhattan dressed in a black beanie and dark shades, a mildly eccentric disguise she removes to reveal a cheerful demeanour. It is 15 years since the singer’s first appearance on American Idol, and she has grown accustomed, through the merciless drive of publicity, to saying nothing, very pleasantly and at length. In the first half of our interview, she is bright and polished. During the second half of our conversation – I can’t tell exactly when the transition occurs, but it’s somewhere around the time the subject of her pets comes up – she is funny and relaxed and a different presence altogether. The 38-year-old has won an Oscar, a Bafta and a Golden Globe (all for Dreamgirls), and two Grammys – one for
Jennifer Hudson was the only choice to sing Memory in the new film version of Cats. She talks to Emma Brockes about lucky breaks, her 26 siblings, her shock phone call from Aretha Franklin – and the family tragedy that haunts her.
her debut album, Jennifer Hudson, and the other for her work on the soundtrack to the stage production of The Color Purple – and is so famous she has to cover her face when crossing a hotel lobby. But when she lets loose, she is pure joy. In Tom Hooper’s version of Cats, Jennifer is at the heart of the film, bellowing her little heart out as Grizabella, the shabby outcast cat who stops the show with her rendition of Memory. She stars alongside a cast that reminds you of the kind of dream you have when you’ve eaten too much cheese before bed: Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Taylor Swift, Rebel Wilson and Idris Elba, all dancing around with digitised facial prosthetics against a not-to-scale, oldtimey London. So how do you play a cat? “You know, that was a discovery. How do you be a cat? As a human, I sat with → JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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Up close
that for ever. Then, wait a minute, I’ve got to sing Memory? Hoo! As a cat. It was the most bizarre – not in a bad way – and unique experience. I was like, what do I do? Especially with a character like Grizabella. I feel like she’s the heart of the story. “The cool part about it is that each cat has a story, which maybe relates to us as humans.”
Early nerves Jennifer was still a young child when she started to notice a pattern developing. Like many in her family, she liked to sing, even though it made her tremendously nervous. In the choir at church, she would close her eyes so she didn’t have to look at the crowd; at home, if there were more than a few people around to listen, she would often fail to get a note out. When she was 11, she was due to sing at her grandmother’s 91st birthday and, she recalls, “everyone sitting at the table laughed and said, ‘She can’t sing’”. This time, however, she managed to get through the song, and when she opened her eyes it was to a standing ovation. From then on it would be the same – at school, at church and when she entered a talent show; every single time, singing with eyes closed, and the same outcome: “Oh, I won.” Having a singing talent like Jennifer’s can be a liability in movie-making: producers and directors are always trying to get a song out of her, even when it doesn’t belong. During the
filming of Winnie Mandela, the 2011 biopic in which Jennifer played the title role, “I had to say to them: ‘Winnie doesn’t sing.’ They were trying to get me to sing in a choir. And I said, ‘Winnie, she does not sing.’” I think we’d have known if Mandela could sing like you, I say. “Right. And I like to stay as true to the character as possible. But they are always trying to find a way to make me sing, whether it’s film, commercial or theatre.” Jennifer had accent coaching for the
FROM TOP: Jennifer as Grizabella in the movie Cats; filming at New York’s Rockefeller Center for Respect, the Aretha Franklin biopic due out this year.
Mandela movie – she showcases one of the three “click” sounds in the Xhosa language with impressive ease – and when Cats director Tom Hooper requested a British accent from the actors in Cats, she found herself veering madly back into South African. “First off I was like, ‘Me? With a British accent?’” She laughs. Jennifer was born and raised in Chicago, but her parents were from the south – Mississippi – and she picked up
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some of their inflections. “But the African accent was the last thing stuck in my mind, so we had to undo that first.” Her base is still Chicago; she lives there with her 10-year-old son, David, whose father is the wrestler David Otunga (the couple split in 2017). Going home, she says, is a blessed relief from the rigours of her schedule. For a while, she was commuting between LA and London while filming both countries’ versions of The Voice: “I’d go from chair to chair.” Those trips were long enough to bring David along, but ordinarily he stays in Chicago and when she gets home, “I never have anything to do outside of just being a mom. When I’m working, I have about 10 or 20 people talking to me at one time, and a dozen things going on. Then I go home and it’s, like, still. Just still. I appreciate the quiet and simplicity.” What does she do? “I love getting up early in the morning and taking my dogs out. I have three dogs and two cats – Grizabella and Macavity. They go with me when I travel.” Wait, what? The cats go with you? “They’re here, now.” In the hotel? “Yes. They’re upstairs right now.” Why?! “Because it’s the one thing I have that’s consistent, that no one can take from me.” Don’t they freak out? “No. Well, Macavity is so chill, he loves being in his bag – he doesn’t want the ruckus of the people. He’s a sphinx. Then Grizabella, she doesn’t love her bag as much, but if I sit her on my lap, she’s fine. They have their litter tray. I’m becoming a cat lady.” When Jennifer is home, you wouldn’t know she’s the type of person who travels with her cats, she insists. She has a house full of boys – her son and his friends. Her sister, Julia, lives close by. It’s a life full of family and friends, during which she tends to sleep during the day, while her son is at school, then starts work, responding to emails and taking calls after he goes to sleep in the evening. “That’s when my day starts.” The day-sleeping is partly a mechanism to catch up on herself. Jennifer is constantly working. Since the
release of Dreamgirls in 2006, she has appeared in more than 15 feature films and countless TV shows, while producing three studio albums and six soundtracks. She is currently filming Respect, the Aretha Franklin biopic, a huge and stressful project. “I need to rest,” she says, of the short periods in between. “I try to balance it out more. Home is so quiet and I like it that way. Taking the dogs out in the morning, the sun just shining.” She describes the dogs: “Oscar is the dad; Grammy is the mother, and Dreamgirl is the baby. Oscar just had a birthday, his birthday is 16 October. He’s 13 years old.” Wow, I observe, you are invested in the backstory of your pets. “Uh-huh,” she says, and she looks dreamy. “I had a goat, too, but he passed. His name was Prancer.”
A mother’s belief
There is a guilelessness and a sunniness to Jennifer Hudson that she says comes from her mother. Darnell Donerson raised her son and two daughters to be confident, happy people. When Jennifer showed promise in any direction, her mother would pounce on it. “She used to tell us: ‘No matter what you put your mind to, you can do.’ She said: ‘I think you can act.’ Or, ‘Jenny, I think you can draw.’ I’m like, ‘Whatever, Momma.’” As it turned out, her mother’s confidence was well placed, and her attitude fostered Jennifer’s talent without putting too much pressure on her. “One of my other favourite things she’d say is, ‘Whatever makes you happy. As long as you’re happy, Momma’s happy.’ And that’s how it should be. No one knows what makes you happy, and who’s to say what you should and shouldn’t be? You know your value. Just because you value one thing, someone else may value another thing and you should respect that. And my mother – I can just see her saying all that.” This is said with some weight. Just over 10 years ago, Jennifer’s mother, brother and nephew were shot and killed by her sister Julia’s estranged husband, who is currently serving three life sentences for the crimes. Her nephew, Julian King, was seven → JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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ABOVE: Jennifer Hudson, centre, with her sister Julia Hudson, mother Darnell Donerson and nephew Julian King at the 2006 Dreamgirls premiere. Julian and Darnell were murdered in 2008.
years old; her brother, Jason, was 29; her mother was 57. Jennifer sat through the trial and sentencing. Later, she set up the Julian D King Gift Foundation, an educational charity, in her nephew’s honour. During an interview in 2012, she talked to Oprah Winfrey about the emotional onslaught following the murders. “Who do I grieve for first?” she said. “Who do I start with?” This is in the background when Jennifer talks about her family. Julia is four years older, and although she can’t sing – “She and I have the same exact speaking voice, but she can’t sing a note” – the sisters are very similar in some ways. Unlike their mother, who was quiet, they are sociable creatures. “We’re very introverted in that we don’t go out much and party, but we’ll talk to people.” And like Jennifer, her sister, she says, “is a workaholic”. What does she do? “She’s a school bus driver. She’s a character. She doesn’t like to travel much – like, to get her to come with me to something is a
task. She doesn’t like to leave Chicago.” Isn’t there something mind-melting about the distance between your lifestyle and hers? Jennifer smiles. “I know.” How do you integrate those realities? “Most people don’t understand my reality. It’s kind of different. Like: the other day we went to see Patti LaBelle; my sister, and a bunch of her friends, and myself. And Julia said, ‘Are you coming Wednesday?’ And I said, ‘What’s Wednesday?’ And she said, ‘My birthday!’ And I said, ‘Oh, Lord. I know when your birthday is; it’s just my schedule is so crazy that I only like to know what’s today. Don’t tell me about tomorrow.’ So, from my perspective, it felt like her birthday was two weeks away.” This logic – don’t ask me to plan, or to remember your plans – is why celebrities have such trouble holding down relationships, of course. Maybe from her sister’s point of view, her dismissal reads as thoughtless? “Well, I just bought her another house, is that thoughtless?” she explodes. “I’ve bought her two of ’em.” She laughs uproariously. The two women were raised in a largely single-parent household; Jennifer’s father was absent until, in a move that seems an early example of her welladjusted and emotionally businesslike approach to most things, she went to find him and tell him it was absurd he wasn’t more in their lives. “He was a bus driver,” she says. “He drove Greyhound. When I was 14 or 15 – because he has a whole lot of kids; like, 27…” Wait, are you serious? “Oh, yes. Eleven girls, 16 boys. I’m the youngest,
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or at least in the last two or three. And it was always my dream – because I love family – to have a giant table with all my siblings. Just imagine the giant table! So when I turned 15, we went to go look for our dad, me and my sister.” What did your mother say? “She said, ‘If you want to, go ahead.’ Once we found him, he moved in with us and never left us until he died. His name was Sam. He was supposed to drive me to college, but he passed before he could. That was when I was 16.” She smiles. “I’m almost 40 now.” Have you met all your 26 siblings? “Not all. But quite a few. I’m trying to count. One of my brothers – halfbrothers – passed recently, or was it two of them? My sister Dinah’s around, she was just fussing that she didn’t get to see Patti LaBelle. I said, Dinah, I didn’t know you loved Patti. And they got me Macavity [the cat] for my birthday.” There is a good humour and a resilience that has obviously played a large role in Jennifer’s ability to come back from the unimaginable trauma of what happened in her family. She has not, she says, been twisted wholly out of shape by the murders. “Thank God. I think I attribute that first to God, next to [the fact that] when you experience trauma, it comes and goes. It’s always there. But it’s a matter of how you deal with it.” For Jennifer, it has been a question of honouring the lives of the people she loved, by “doing what they would have wanted me to do. It would be worse, to me, not to press forward. I’m hearing my brother’s voice say, ‘Jenny, knock it off!’ He would be angry at me for giving up. Or all the things that my mother instilled in us. She prepared us. She would say, ‘You know, I’m not always going to be here and I want you all to be able to make it.’ She used to say, without family, you have nothing, which is why it’s so important to take care of family. So if I’m doing that, I know I’m pleasing my mother. As for my nephew; that’s where the Julian D King Gift Foundation
“When you experience trauma it comes and goes. It’s always there.”
PHOTOGRAPHY BY GETTY IMAGES AND ALAMY.
Up close
comes from, because he was strong and very smart. So to live in a way that honours them is what presses you forward. Not to mention, thank God, that I have a child to live for.” It has taken presence of mind to enact these lessons and Jennifer is ruthless in their execution. “Of course you still get sad,” she says. “That’s what I go back to: what would my mother say? What would she do?” These are questions she has been asking herself since the earliest days of her career, when she got her first professional singing job on a cruise ship. She nearly bolted on the first day. “I’m a homebody,” she says. “I love family, and that was my first time away from home. Talk about terrifying. And when I got to the ship, we had to do a wet drill, which I thought meant they were going to sprinkle water on us.” Instead, they were made to jump into a body of water, “on to a life raft, flip it over, and swim. And I was like, ‘Excuse me, do what? I’m not jumping off of this.’” So she thought of her mother. “I told myself, this is my test: if I cannot get through a cruise ship contract for six months, then I don’t need to go and audition for American Idol. This is not for me, but if I can get through this, then I will go forward. It’s now or never; you jump in, or we’re going home. And I jumped.” Two days after she left the ship, in 2004, she turned up at the American Idol audition and her life changed. It’s sometimes overlooked that Jennifer didn’t win the singing competition; she was a finalist but came seventh. Her performance was so powerful, however, that a year later, she was cast alongside Beyoncé in the movie Dreamgirls. It was a terrifying experience. She had never done a day’s acting in her life – her cruise ship roles,
as the narrator in the musical Hercules and the soloist in The Lion King, were taken as acting credits to fudge things with Actor’s Equity. And while she could obviously sing, “I didn’t start singing with my eyes open until I was 19. I was afraid to look into the crowd.” She got through it with humour, a shrug, and the reminder that “if I got through the last thing, I can get
without succumbing to nerves was through the drama of the material around it. “A classic like that, you don’t want to take it out of its context. We have to stay true to the context of the song because everyone knows it. But then the challenge of that is, well, what do you all want me to do with it?” She laughs. “I was putting the story in it and then the emotion. I don’t think there’s ever been a Grizabella as emotional as the one in the film.” There have been bigger challenges. One day a few years ago, Jennifer’s phone rang and when she answered, it was Aretha Franklin. “And she said, I’ve made my choice, and I’ve decided that it’s going to be you.” Ever since Jennifer won the Oscar for Dreamgirls, she had been in vague talks with Aretha’s agents about playing her in a biopic, but it had taken the legendary singer 15 years to make the final decision. “And so to know it’s now happening, I think I’m in shock. You all for real? It’s happening now.” Aretha died in 2018 and Jennifer performed a spinetingling version of Amazing CLOCKWISE Grace at her funeral, bringing FROM TOP: Jennifer starred the crowds of mourners to their alongside Beyoncé feet. To be playing the icon now in Dreamgirls; feels even more poignant. during a taping of If the opportunity to play her American Idol; hero had happened when she celebrating her was 25, Jennifer admits, her 2007 Oscar ability to withstand pressure win for Best Performance by might have crumbled. “I’d be an Actress in a like, are you all trying to kill Supporting Role me? It’s all about timing and for Dreamgirls. being prepared and if I was 20-anything, I would be like, I’m sorry, I love you and all, but no.” through this”. So it has been, ever At 38, however, she is ready. She since. Between takes on Cats, Jennifer hears her mother’s voice – “all you can would look around sometimes and do is the best you can” – a phrase that gulp. “It was Ian McKellen’s chair, Judi there isn’t much to, when you stop and Dench’s chair, and my chair! I’m like: think about it. “No, there’s not,” Jennifer says. Why does it have such I’m sitting next to Judi Dench.” traction? There’s no big mystery, she Jennifer admired Elaine Paige’s says: “Because I believe it.” AWW original of Memory, and was in awe of the Streisand version. But it struck her that the only way to approach the song ● Cats is in cinemas now. JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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Exclusive
Isabel
ALLENDE
Falling in love again
Novelist Isabel Allende has experienced a tumultuous life, from exile to deep personal loss and towering success, but she never thought she’d be marrying again at 77, she tells Juliet Rieden.
I
sabel Allende has news, surprising news, and for the feminist, best-selling Chilean novelist it came out of nowhere. “I find myself at this old age, for the first time in my life, adored by someone. And let me tell you it’s a very weird feeling,” she reflects. I can sense Isabel’s utter incredulity as she talks more about the lovestruck New York lawyer Roger Cukras, who she met in October 2016 and married in a quiet family ceremony a few months ago. The story of their romance is like something from – well – a novel, albeit not one of Isabel’s. “He heard me on the radio. He was a widower in New York where he’d lived all his life and was driving to Boston to see his son when he heard me. Immediately he emailed my office. He emailed every morning and every evening for five months.” Roger was determined to meet the woman behind the voice, whose incredible story and passion for human rights had captivated him. He and Isabel started corresponding by email for several months. “Finally when I went to New York I said, okay, I’ll meet the guy,” says Isabel. →
Isabel Allende has found love again with New York lawyer Roger Cukras. JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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In 2015 Isabel’s 27-year marriage to attorney Willie Gordon ended. Isabel had emigrated to the United States in 1989 to marry Willie but ultimately their love was smothered by loss – Isabel’s daughter and Willie’s two sons died – and sadness. Isabel fully expected that romance was behind her, but this date with a stranger proved otherwise. “We met and over dinner I said, ‘Look, what are your intentions, because really I don’t have any time to waste’.” Isabel is laughing now. “The poor guy almost choked on the ravioli but he didn’t run off, he persisted. “When I met him, I realised that he was exactly like the person I thought he was through the emails. He was transparent. A person who was non-threatening, committed totally. He had made up his mind that I was the woman he would love, and I thought that was extraordinary,” says Isabel, still somewhat swept up in it all. “A few months later he sold his house, gave away everything, all its contents, and moved to my house [in California] with two bags and his clothes, which I promptly discarded because they were very dated… When we became involved romantically I started seeing all the kindness and the love that he was giving me. This was what I was asking of Willie and he could not give me.”
Living in exile Born in Peru and raised in Bolivia, Lebanon and Chile, Isabel became a best-selling author right off the bat with her now-famous debut novel, The House of the Spirits, in 1982. It was based on a letter she wrote to her dying 99-year-old grandfather. Isabel was living in Caracas, Venezuela, when she first heard that Agustín was dangerously ill. But she was in exile and unable to go to him so – as a journalist – she started to do what she knew best, to write. She began to compose that epic letter on January 8, 1981, and ever since she has started writing her books on January 8, her touchstone day. Grandpa Agustín had been a key figure in Isabel’s childhood. “My father abandoned my mother in Peru when I was three. I never saw him again,”
recalls Isabel. With three children to raise, Isabel’s mother moved back to Chile with her family to live with Agustín. “My grandfather was a larger-than-life personality and a strong man, a wonderful man in many ways, conservative and narrow-minded in many things, and very generous in other things. He is the main character in The House of the Spirits. The character is a mean guy. My grandfather was not mean, but he was that kind of personality: very strong, authoritarian, like an American macho male. “I think his death was like the end of my childhood and my youth,” Isabel surmises. “It was the end of Chile also, in a way. It cut the umbilical cord to my family and my country in a dramatic way. I’m saying this now because I have thought about this often, but at the time I was just very sad that I couldn’t go back to say goodbye to him, that he was dying, that I was losing him. Now that I look back, I think The House of the Spirits was an exercise in nostalgia, of trying to recover everything I had lost.” Isabel watched her mother become wholly reliant on her grandfather and it deeply affected her. “To this day, my worst nightmare is to depend. I want to take care of myself and people around me but I don’t want to be dependent,” she says. And yet she married civil engineer Miguel Frías at just 20 and had her daughter the following year. “It changed everything because by the time my first baby was born I realised I was never going to be alone again. I had to take care of that child and then the second one was born so I always thought all the decisions I made in my life were conditioned by
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“When my grandfather died it was like the end of my childhood.”
the fact that I was a mother and I had to take care of my kids. I adored them both – but that happens to any woman who has kids. We change forever.” Although she now calls California home, I think Isabel left her heart in Chile and today she says of all the places she has lived, she feels closest to Chile – partly, I suspect, because her homeland was snatched away. Following General Augusto Pinochet’s violent military coup d’état in 1973 and his subsequent repressive regime, a counterpoint to the socialist government it pulled down, Isabel fled to Caracas with Miguel and their two children in 1975. Miguel and Isabel didn’t see eye to eye politically but they were in accord over the coup. “Miguel had not liked Allende [President Salvador Allende, Isabel’s father’s cousin came to power in 1970] but when we had the coup he was horrified. Like my grandfather he hated socialism but he hated the military more and he thought that Allende’s government was elected by popular vote and it was a democracy, so whatever you might think of the socialist agenda, it was a democracy elected by the people.” Isabel says she will never forget the day of the coup. President Allende died on that day, reportedly committing suicide, but many believe he was murdered.
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“People had been talking about a military coup but we didn’t have any idea what that was because Chile was the longest and most solid democracy on the continent. It was like a fantasy, but it all happened in a few hours,” she recalls. “I was in my car driving to my office in Santiago and I saw that the streets were empty and there were military vehicles. In those hours everything changed. The military took over. First of all, they shut down the media, so you couldn’t get any
information, and in the streets there were just military bands.” At the time Isabel was working at women’s magazine Paula, a progressive publication with a feminist stance which she had founded in 1967 with three other women. “Paula was totally new for Chile. Feminism had not reached my country yet so we informed ourselves about what was happening in the rest of the world and we brought that to Chile. It really changed the culture.” In Pinochet’s Chile there was no place for Paula and soon no place for Isabel. Isabel on television “Immediately after the in the 1970s. coup there was curfew and for 72 hours people couldn’t get out of their homes. They controlled the city completely, it was like a battlefield. They fired everybody at Paula and they changed the magazine completely so it became just like any other women’s glossy magazine. In that military repressive government with its extreme
CLOCKWISE FROM RIGHT: Isabel’s grandpa Agustín; with ex-husband Willie Gordon in 2012; with first husband Miguel Frías; Isabel as a baby in 1942.
censorship and male chauvinist culture, feminism was totally banned. “To give you an idea, in the first few days of the coup women couldn’t go out in the street wearing pants, because the military would cut the pants off your body. You were supposed to wear skirts, because women wore skirts.” Under the new regime, concentration camps were established. “It was rumoured that they were centres of torture for people who disappeared, and we could see people being picked up in the streets and pushed into military trucks, as well as bodies floating in the river. So, my country became a nightmare for me.” Isabel tried to help those pursued by the regime. “We were hiding people first and then helping them to find asylum. Of course many were doing this but my name, with its connections to the former President, was so visible and I was not cautious. When I realised that I could be arrested or my children could be tortured in front of me then I knew it was time to leave. “It was horrible for me because, first of all, I never imagined that it would be forever. I thought I was leaving and then I would go back, so I left alone first and then after a month or so, when my husband found out that I really could not return, that I was on the blacklist, then he left also with the kids and we reunited in Venezuela, but always with the idea of going back.”
Literary success It was with a full heart that Isabel started to write to her grandfather who had stayed in Chile, and Isabel’s mother encouraged her to publish the manuscript that came from that letter. The book’s runaway success was a huge shock. “I was paralysed. I couldn’t believe it. Thank God I had already started my second book because I don’t think I would ever have been able to write another book if I had lived the success from the beginning.” To date Isabel has sold more than 74 million books, won in excess of 60 awards and is considered one of the world’s greatest living writers. In her 70s, the feisty, soulful writer still has much to say and her latest novel, → JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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A Long Petal of the Sea, is another love letter to her homeland. “It all started 40 years ago when I was living in exile in Venezuela and I met a guy who was living his second exile because he had been one of the passengers of the Winnipeg, a ship that brought 2000 refugees from the Spanish Civil War to Chile in 1939. His name was Victor Pey. He told me his story and I kept it in my heart and stored it there and we stayed in touch.” That story floated back into her consciousness when she contemplated the refugees currently displaced around the world. “There’s a global crisis of refugees, and because I have a foundation that works with migrants on the border of the United States and Mexico, I have many stories and my three latest novels – The Japanese Lover, In the Midst of Winter and now this one, A Long Petal of the Sea – are all stories about displaced people. I think it touches me because I was a political refugee and I have been an immigrant in the United States for many years. When I go back to Chile I know that I don’t belong there either, so it’s this feeling that I’m always the foreigner wherever I go, which is my reality. “Victor Pey died six days before I could send him the manuscript. He was 103 years old. He was strong, healthy and totally lucid. He was working at 103, and a week before he died we were writing to each other.”
Losing Paula Arguably Isabel’s most powerful novel was Paula, the elegy she wrote to her daughter following her tragic death. “Paula was very smart, always learning something new. She was not attached to anything material. She only wore jeans and a white linen shirt all her adult life, had beautiful dark long hair in a ponytail and a gypsy look. She worked as a volunteer with women and children as a psychologist. She never made any money but didn’t care. She was the least vain person in the world, and I am horribly vain. I used to joke that she and my son must have been changed in the hospital when they were born because I don’t see any of my genes in them.”
Isabel’s children, Nicolás and Paula. Paula tragically passed away in 1992.
Paula fell ill in December of 1991 and was in a porphyria-induced coma for all of 1992. It happened in Spain and Isabel flew her comatose daughter home to California so she could care for her. She died in December 1992. “It was like a long dark night,” says Isabel, who in grief turned again to letter writing to record her thoughts. “Later, after Paula died, my mother gave me back the 180 letters I had written to her. I read the letters and for the first time I was able to sort out the confusion of the year because for me the whole year was just one night. I wrote the memoir based on those letters.” I ask Isabel how writing helped her. “It was very healing because it helped me accept what was unavoidable in a way and understand it, but what was most healing was the response I got from the readers. For years, to this day, so many years later, I get at least once a week a letter from someone who has read the book. So I feel that my daughter is very present. The income that came from that book, and other books also, I put in a foundation to honour Paula which is also a wonderful source of joy for me.” Did losing Paula make Isabel hang on to her son, Nicolás, more? “Yes. We are very close. We work together, we live 20 minutes away from each other.”
New love It was Nicolás who urged his mother to take Roger Cukras’s “intentions” seriously. “On our second date he wanted to marry me. And I said no. Eventually he moved to my house and we had been living together for more than a year when my son said, ‘Mum, have you noticed that every time
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Roger brings up the marriage thing you answer with a Chilean sarcasm? Imagine if it was the other way around – that you wanted desperately to get married and he would answer with some New York sarcasm every time you mentioned it. How would you feel?’ I thought, really, it’s very offensive, he’s right, and so then I proposed and we rapidly got married.” Isabel says in Roger she has discovered “a wonderful companion”. “People ask me how is it to fall in love at this age and I say, it’s the same as falling in love when you’re 18 but with a sense of urgency. You have no time to waste because how long will I be able to enjoy Roger? Five years, 10 years maybe? They go by very, very fast.” Unsurprisingly, Isabel is no fan of the current US President. “I’m terrified that he might be re-elected.” Trump, she feels, is part of a global surge in populism which she says is “fascism in different forms. I think that in every country, in every place, there’s a segment of the population that, given the wrong circumstances, would be the Nazis in Germany or the fascists in Mussolini’s time or the people who supported Pinochet. But in my lifetime I have seen that humanity evolves. It would seem to have backlashes but if you look at the progress of humanity in the last two centuries, we have more democracy, more education, more inclusion, more diversity, so the world is better today than it was when I was born, by far.” Will she leave if Trump wins again? “There is the temptation, yes,” she says. “I have my son, my daughter-in-law, my grandchildren, my husband, my dogs, my foundation, my work, everything is here, so to leave would be, for me, like retiring. But I might do that. And if I retire it would be to the top of Chile probably.” Will Roger come with her? “I would not go without him,” she says. AWW ● A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende, Bloomsbury Publishing, is on sale from January 21.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY GETTY IMAGES AND SUPPLIED AND USED WITH PERMISSION.
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ia criter d e fin e-de r p t e o me h w S th RM i w e pl r peo o f 9 1 er 20 b m Dece
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True crime
Within this secluded farmhouse in Ruinerwold, Holland, the van Dorsten family lived for nine years in a secret basement bunker, waiting for the end of the world.
Waiting for the A Dutch doomsday cultist and his children have surfaced after nine years in a farmhouse basement. William Langley travels to Ruinerwold to find a village in shock and a family that will be recovering from trauma for many years. 62 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
T
he village of Ruinerwold lies in what the rest of Holland calls the “forgotten land”, a thinly populated expanse of dark forests and peat bogs, popular with hardcore hikers who provide most of the passing trade at Chris Westerbeek’s main street bar. The young man who came in for a drink on a quiet evening in October clearly wasn’t a typical customer. “He said he lived locally,” says Chris, “but I know most people here, and I’d never seen
APOCALYPSE him before. There was something strange about him. He had a beer and then another, and then he started telling me things.” What 25-year-old Jan Zon van Dorsten told the barman would make global headlines. For the past nine years, he said, he had been living with his father and five siblings in an underground room in a secluded farmhouse. They had occasionally come out to grow food and gather fuel, but none of them had ever left the property, until Jan decided to run away.
Why had they spent nine years underground? The van Dorstens had been waiting for the end of the world.
Life in the bunker Inside the farmhouse police found a staircase, concealed behind cupboard doors, which led down to a dimly lit chamber, where 67-year-old Gerrit Jan van Dorsten lay bedridden, cared for by his two sons and four daughters. The basement bunker also included a number of small, lockable cells but the children were → JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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True crime
not necessarily imprisoned there. According to investigators, the children appeared to believe they were the last people left on earth. The discovery caused astonishment in a country that prides itself on its progressive attitudes and strong social welfare system. How, asked politicians and media pundits, could the Dutch “Doomsday Family” have disappeared so completely and for so long? And what accounted for the large stash of money found inside the bunker? The chalet-style farmhouse is one of many scattered across this remote part of the northern Netherlands, where the great Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh came in the 1880s to paint bleak landscapes of peasants digging peat. Although barely an hour’s drive from the cosmopolitan capital, Amsterdam, locals speak a distinct dialect and many adhere to the stern Calvinist teachings of the Dutch Reformed Church. Police say the van Dorsten children, aged from 16 to 25, were well nourished but chronically disorientated, with no real sense of who or where they were, or of life above ground. “It’s hard to describe them,” said regional police chief, Janny Knol, outside the sealed-off smallholding. “They seem to be physically healthy but they are not normal, and they don’t communicate easily with anyone except each other. We are trying to build an idea of what has happened to them, but it is very slow and difficult.” Ruinerwold’s mayor, Roger de Groot, describes the family as “living like Hobbits” in near-complete self-sufficiency. “They stayed out of sight as much as they could, and seem to have had almost no contact with mainstream society,” he says. “Everybody is completely shocked. The question’s not just how they stayed under the radar, but why.” Investigators believe that Jan, the oldest son, was driven to leave the farmhouse either by concerns over his father’s worsening health, or a wish to escape the cult-like existence in the bunker. “He seemed completely lost,” Chris recalls, “like he was in a trance and everything was unreal.
Community shock FROM TOP LEFT: Jan Zon van Dorsten’s story about life at the family farmhouse (top, right) stunned patrons in Chris Westerbeek’s main street bar (above) in the sleepy Dutch town (left).
He said he had to get out of the place where he was living, and then he told me about it.” At the heart of the case is the mysterious figure of Gerrit, a former soldier who brought his large brood to Ruinerwold almost a decade ago and moved them into the farmstead, five minutes’ drive from the village centre. None of the children were registered with the local authority, as required by Dutch law, and none had been to school. Moreover, the youngsters were apparently raised without ever receiving medical or dental treatment, as that would have given away their existence. For most of his life, Gerrit appears to have flirted with fringe religious groups, regularly switching allegiances while developing his own ideas of spiritual destiny. Since his arrest, investigators have found a vast tract of his writings and videos posted to
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internet sites under the pseudonym John Eagles. The rambling posts, with headlines such as Divine Conflict and The End of Evil, warn against satanic forces, self-indulgence and promiscuity. In one, Gerrit claims to have received revelations from angels, and declares: “We have gone through a very big war, and though this war has not entirely ended, God has announced the end, and the victory of the battle in the spirit world.” In an intriguing passage he advises: “If you want a fruit tree to grow nicely and give abundant fruit, you have to fertilise it exuberantly and often. Every tree develops in its own way. Raising children is just like that.”
Man of many cults Gerrit was born near the central Dutch town of Wijhe, where his father, Johan van Dorsten, was a
RIGHT: Gerrit Jan van Dorsten at one point followed the Unification Church, known for its mass weddings (below). BOTTOM: Calvinist girls in traditional garb in Holland.
writer of popular religious-themed novels and a devout follower of the Reformed Church. After school he joined the military, but appears to have dropped out before completing his term of service. “There were three brothers,” recalls local journalist Hendrik Jan Korterink, who knew the family. “They were smart guys, very intelligent, well educated. When they were young, Gerrit and his brother Derk went on a trip to America, and they fell in with the Moonies.” The Moonies – officially known as the Unification Church – is a worldwide religious movement founded by the late Korean preacher Rev Sun Myung Moon, and best known for holding mass weddings of its barely acquainted followers. It was through the church that Gerrit married his Japanese first wife, with whom he moved to South Korea and had three children. When the marriage
“This is a friendly place, but he barely spoke to anyone.” broke up he returned to the Netherlands, later marrying again to an Austrian woman with whom he had the six children found in the farmhouse. According to the Unification Church, Gerrit was expelled in 1987. “He was an idiot who went completely crazy,” a spokesman bluntly told a Dutch newspaper. Around the same time, Gerrit severed all relations with his wider family, including the three children from his first marriage. In a statement, the older children said he had told them not to contact him or try to find out where he was living. In the years that followed, he appears to have attached himself to various sects and quasi-religious
groups before deciding to become a messiah in his own right. His first plan was to start a commune near Staphorst, the ground zero of Dutch Calvinism, where women still wear traditional bonnets and long skirts, and daily life revolves around the church. “He bought some land there,” says Hendrik, “but for whatever reason it didn’t work out. I guess Ruinerwold was his Plan B.” The property he chose to await the end of times sits on Buitenhuizerweg, a long, narrow lane running through flat farming country. Little traffic passes along it, and the house is hard to see from the road, its entrance unkempt and blocked by a rusty gate. Alida Rooze, a local woman whose family owns the property, says she rented it out to a single tenant, and had no idea anyone else was living there. “We are stupefied,” she told Dutch TV. “We let the house to a man several years ago, and now we find that another man lived there with his children. We had no idea.” The tenant, it turns out, has his own key role in the mystery. Josef Brunner, an Austrian-born carpenter, was also a member of the Moonies, and briefly lived next door to Gerrit and his second wife in the Dutch city of Hasselt in the mid-2000s. Gerrit moved on after his wife died of bowel cancer in 2004, leaving him with six young children, but he and Josef met up again in Ruinerwold. The exact nature of their relationship is now at the heart of the police investigation. Shortly after the discovery of the Doomsday Family, Josef, 58, was arrested on suspicion of imprisoning them, but investigators now believe the two men were in league. Locals recall Josef as a scowling, standoffish presence who spurned their company. “This is a friendly place,” neighbour Jan Keizer tells The Australian Women’s Weekly, “but he barely spoke to anyone. When he first arrived, my wife and I went round with wine and flowers, which is a traditional welcome, and he just took them off us and went inside. I remember it was raining and we were just left standing there.” → JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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True crime
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Gerrit Jan van Dorsten on a wooden exercise machine; son Jan; Ruinerwold’s mayor, Roger de Groot, speaks to the media.
Jan says there were occasional rumours of strange happenings at the farmhouse, but no one inquired too deeply. “The gate was always locked, and there were CCTV cameras in the yard,” he says. “One night the burglar alarm went off and the police came round, but I heard later that Josef didn’t want to let them in, and they went away. I thought there might be something going on there with drugs. Obviously, I never imagined this.” Josef seems to have spent little time at the house, living mostly in a caravan in the nearby town of Meppel, where he made wooden toys for sale. At least once a week, he would load his Volvo wagon with household supplies and food from a local supermarket, and drive to the farmhouse. Specialist investigators are trying to assess the nature of the family’s confinement. Jan, the son who raised the alarm, says none of them had left the house for at least nine years, but there seems to have been no physical obstacle to them doing so. “It’s not that simple,” says police
spokeswoman Evelien Aangeenbrug. “Deprivation of freedom doesn’t necessarily mean locks and bolts. We are looking at things like coercion and psychological control. We need to know why this family lived the way it did.”
Manifesto of doom
Some of the clues are provided by Gerrit’s rambling internet “manifesto”, offering a blueprint to save the world and portraying his own dwelling place as “a mini-cosmos”, providing everything a spiritually aware human could need. It is believed he took the name John Eagles from a passage in the Bible’s apocalyptic Book of Revelation, attributed to John the Divine. “Then I looked, and I heard an eagle crying with a loud voice as it flew directly overhead, Woe, woe, woe to the inhabitants of the earth…” There are no direct references to his children, although he stresses the importance of close family life and that he works and studies best within “family structures”. Three years ago,
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according to his son, Gerrit suffered a stroke, causing partial paralysis, and has been mostly bed-bound since, although his writing continued. “It’s all fascinating from a religious psychology point of view,” says one officer on the case, “but it doesn’t explain what the hell they were all doing down there for nine years.” Fearing that the young van Dorstens would be traumatised by exposure to the outside world, the authorities took them to a secluded campsite to be assessed. Reports say they “physically resisted” removal from the farmhouse and continue to perform distinctive rituals, including walking together in circles while reciting verses. Their father was taken to a prison hospital in nearby Scheveningen. Another twist came with the disclosure that a large amount of cash – around $160,000 – was found in the underground chamber. Gerrit and Josef are listed as co-directors of a woodworking company, but investigators doubt the business could have generated such a sum. Police have now charged Gerrit with unlawful deprivation of liberty, abuse and money laundering, and Brunner with unlawful detention and harming others’ health. Dutch newspapers have also reported that Gerrit is suspected of abusing three older children who left home before the family retreated underground. Both suspects will appear in court again on January 21. At Chris Westerbeek’s modest bar where young Jan first told his tale, the locals gaze into their evening shots of beerenberg, a fiery local gin, shake their heads and ask how such a thing could have happened in their quiet community. “You’ll hear some people saying they thought something was wrong,” says Chris, “and others blaming the authorities for letting it happen, but the truth is that none of us had a clue.” AWW
PHOTOGRAPHY BY AAP AND GETTY IMAGES.
“Deprivation of freedom doesn’t necessarily mean locks and bolts.”
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Food hero
c i f i c Pa
pride
W
A passion for taking Pacific cuisine back to its roots has been life-changing for Robert Oliver – he tells Emma Clifton about the award-winning cookbook that almost spelled financial ruin, his reality TV show and what tourists can do to help.
hen a young Robert Oliver and his family moved from New Zealand to Fiji in the 1970s, he describes it as going from a life of black and white to a life of pure colour. The sights, the smells, the food – it was the beginning of a love story that would last a lifetime. The food you grow up with, Robert says, is part of your make-up – who you are, where you belong. It’s the food your mother made you. But the world has done Pacific Island food an injustice for decades, and it has become the life’s work of many, including Robert, to reverse the tide. Being told the food you grew up with is worthless is both “culturally and spiritually destructive… it’s basically systemic suppression. Colonialism isn’t just land, or politics, it’s the soil, the
68 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
plants. It’s what people eat and their mind-sets,” says Robert. “And because tourists didn’t know about Pacific Island cuisine, the tourism food didn’t reflect the culture – and tourists didn’t think to ask for local food.” So, if you’ll forgive the saying, what’s that got to do with the price of fish? Well, as it stands, plenty. We wouldn’t think of going to Italy or France and refusing to eat the local food. But there has long been an expectation that when you go to a Pacific Island, you sit by the hotel pool for five days and unwind, never leaving the resort. As a result, somewhere along the way, Pacific Island hotel food became a strange mishmash of European influences, putting local foods – and therefore local farmers – out to pasture. “The cuisine got a bit paralysed – young people in the tourism industry were cooking international →
“I do what I love, and it has a great effect on communities that I care about.”
JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
69
foods, so the tourists were coming in and not experiencing the greatness of the local cuisine, and then getting a negative view of it.” But Robert, who became wellknown to Kiwi audiences through his work on My Kitchen Rules New Zealand, is using the power of reality television in his new show Pacific Island Food Revolution. The premise of the show is simple: 24 cooks compete against each other to represent their local food, across four Pacific Island countries. Unlike other reality TV shows, where competition is rife and meltdowns are commonplace, the vibe on Pacific Island Food Revolution couldn’t be more convivial. “There’s no such thing as losing, when you’re contributing to the narrative of your nation,” Robert says. “In fact, if a team was eliminated – because that’s the reality of reality TV – the other contestants would be upset, because they had formed such a tight bond. That’s the spirit of the people of the Pacific, because no one thinks only of themselves. The implication is always of family or wider community – and that also includes the environment.” The connection between promoting local cuisine and protecting local environments is more direct than you might realise. Growing ingredients that naturally thrive in the Pacific Islands creates a more sustainable food chain and reduces the reliance on importing. It also encourages people to return to the food their ancestors ate, which in turn improves their health.“Sustainability may be a new concept now, but indigenous knowledge is the oldest kind of kaupapa,” Robert says. They already have season two of Pacific Island Food Revolution in the bag, and are in the process of locking down funding for season three. Both the New Zealand and the Australian
government have given crucial sponsorship, because they understand that giving people food-related skills is important.
A chef for change Robert’s parents, Dennis and Jean, were social workers, with his father’s work in particular still deeply revered
FROM TOP: A father and son working in their garden in Samoa; showcasing the plethora of locally grown produce and turning it into delicious, healthy meals is one of the main goals of Pacific Island Food Revolution.
across the Pacific, after he set up the YMCA in Fiji and Samoa. Robert fell into cooking when he was 20 and “did the chef thing” across the ditch, before moving to New York. It was in the early 90s, at the very beginning of the locavore movement – when prominent chefs started to prioritise buying locally grown food. This countered the perceived glamour
70 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
of imported ingredients, and Robert saw first-hand the massive ripple effect it had on every part of the process. “I realised the potential of a chef being like an agent of change, and how we could influence the fashions and the food chain,” he says. “The spirit of the people around that movement really got me. I realised that it was a movement, that we could have influence – we weren’t just invisible in the kitchen. All the choices that chefs could make, and what the implications of those choices were…” While he was in New York, he also worked with charities that supported the homeless community. It was work inspired by not only his father, whose definition of success was how well you contributed to your community, but also the inclusive sense of hospitality he had seen demonstrated over and over again during his formative years in the Pacific Islands – no one in the neighbourhood goes hungry. His work took him to Miami and Las Vegas, where he helped run the largest restaurant in America, producing 4000 meals a night. But it was when Robert was hired by a Barbados company, to put restaurants into a chain of hotels, that he saw the effect changing the food process had on an island nation. When he got to the resort, he realised the kitchen was sourcing all its ingredients from overseas, rather than buying local, and set about changing that. “I remembered my dad doing the same thing when I was a kid – trying to connect hotels to local farmers. I realised that the local food system was actually what made everything join up. If you can make the local cuisine culture the sexy new thing, then that needs local supply. That’s the magic ingredient that makes it all work.” He decided to return to the Pacific Islands and started working on a
Food hero
cookbook that would promote the local cuisine, something he had worked so hard on in the Caribbean. “I realised if I could package up the [Pacific Island] cuisine, I could make big changes.” When he was travelling in the Pacific, he received bad news. While working the crazy hours of a highprofile chef, Robert had invested all his money in waterfront apartments in Miami. The 2007 global financial crisis hit, and their value plummeted. Suddenly his plan to retire in the near future was looking very, very far away. “I had to make the decision to go back to America and figure it all out, or stay on the road in the Pacific Islands and keep working on the book,” he says. “My heart was in it – I couldn’t leave. I thought, ‘I can make money again, but I can’t make these relationships or this passion again.’” So he kept going, burning through what was left of his savings to make the book. “When the book came out, I had $100 left in the bank,” he says. At age 50, he was back living with his parents. But then, his luck turned. The book, Me’a Kai: The Food and Flavours of the South Pacific, was nominated for the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards, held in Paris. It won the top prize – Best Cookbook in the World. Suddenly, his passion project about this humble, homecooking cuisine was a global winner – vindicating both his sudden career change into cookbook writing, and the very food he was trying so hard to promote. The world had finally caught up with what the Pacific Islands had known for a long time: that this was a cuisine worth fighting for. “I thought of everyone who had helped me, when I was walking to the stage – the women, particularly, who had believed in me.” Later, when he was asked to deliver a TED Talk for an event in Tahiti in 2013, it legitimised his journey in his own
eyes. “It wasn’t until then that I converted what I had considered failure into what I then considered leadership,” he says. “That was a big deal for me, because of what happened inside of me.” Another cookbook followed, Mea’ai Samoa: Recipe and Stories from the Heart of Polynesia, and Robert was made a chef ambassador for Le Cordon Bleu, the prestigious French cooking academy. Then TV came calling, and now Pacific Island Food Revolution is the fourth series he’s starred in. And the roll-on effects of the show are growing; there are already 12 new initiatives across the islands to promote growing local foods. The messaging in the show is subtle, Robert says, but effective. One challenge might see the teams visit the markets in Suva, checking out all the native greens on display. They have to create three innovative dishes with those greens. “That’s addressing anaemia,” Robert explains. “Fiji has a 30 per cent anaemia rate. So it’s not that the food isn’t there and it’s not that anyone is hungry, it’s that the rate of nutrition isn’t that high.” With a challenge like this, done in a fastpaced reality show setting, the viewers at home are learning three things: these vegetables exist, they’re delicious, and here are three ways to cook them. “I don’t want to burden the project with health language or agendas. But if we can get everybody celebrating the food, it’s taken care of. It’s a Pacific solution to a Pacific problem.” If you’re heading to the Pacific Islands this year and you want to do
PHOTOGRAPHY BY FAANATI MAMEA.
“Always ask for local food… you’re putting your money towards the farmers.”
something useful as a tourist, your task is simple, says Robert: “Always ask for local food, so you know that the supply is local and you’re putting your money towards the farmers.” Places like Samoa and Fiji have rocking food scenes, it’s just that people don’t know to ask, he says. Keeping that community spirit alive is something we can all do without FROM TOP: Three teams per country compete to be chosen to represent their local cuisine in the series finale; best friends Tina and Amazing take part in the Samoa episodes of the show.
heading overseas. “If you see an opportunity to do good, do it. We’re seeing so much of the business world shift towards social entrepreneurship. Money isn’t the only end-game – we all have the power to affect people around us.” He’s a big fan of the rule his father lived by – success is measured by how much you’re helping your fellow man. “I look at my life now – I do what I love, and it has a great effect on communities that I care about. It’s possibly the best way to live.” AWW ● Pacific Island Food Revolution screens on Saturday mornings on TVNZ 1, and is available on TVNZ OnDemand.
JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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A slice of life
Picture perfect
JO SEAGAR
f a house catches fire (let’s hope this doesn’t happen to any of us in the foreseeable future), what are the things people risk their lives for? Aside from people and pets, the treasured items people say they’d save from the flames are family photos. I’d grab my mum’s and Gran’s handwritten recipe books and maybe my childhood teddy, but yes, definitely the photos. Passports, birth certificates and the flat screen telly can all be replaced, but family photo albums and portraits that hang on the wall are precious, and yet a lot of us take them for granted. This holiday season, you’ll inevitably be in countless photos. If you’re catching up with friends you haven’t seen for ages and gathering with family, everyone (especially me) wants to document the moment. Whether it’s the kids taking shots for Instagram or Aunty Doreen for her never-ending scrapbooking project, the holidays are filled with filters, flashes and probably some high-tech editing too. Unfortunately most of us aren’t naturally all that photogenic, and you’ll often end up with more than a couple of snaps you wish didn’t exist. I’ve had plenty of dodgy photos over the years, but there are a few tricks that will make sure you look your best in pictures. The important thing is to change your attitude to the whole photo scenario. Embrace the idea wholeheartedly – be the person enthusiastically gathering everyone together and saying: “Come on, let’s do this,” bribing them if necessary. My good friend and photographer Jae Frew has taught me a few photo tricks over the years. The first is to be relaxed and have fun. If the kids pull silly faces, let them fool around –
people will laugh and join in the silliness and this relaxed naturalness will be evident in the photos. I’m a big believer in photo bursts where you take up to 20 quick-fire photos. You know at least one of them will be a winner. It’s so easy now, with cameras on everybody’s phones. No waiting for Uncle Don to set up the tripod for his beloved Pentax Spotmatic F! By the time he’d sorted out the depth of field and the film speed, we’d all be in a cheesesmiling coma. Aim to make the whole process super-quick and easy. Now onto specific tips for looking your best in photographs. If you’re photographing a group, get everyone together in a triangle shape with the tallest in the middle and smaller ones in front. Avoid squinting into the bright sun, but facing soft, natural light is good – look towards a window if you’re inside. Try not to take photos in the midday sun – overcast days or morning and late afternoon are best. I love that golden hour when the sun is waning and everyone’s bathed in a bronze glowing light. Study yourself in photos that you like and dislike. Work out your best angles and features. Floaty outfits can add kilos if they billow out, so go for darker, slimmer-fitting trousers which will make you look longer and leaner. I think elongating v-necks styles are flattering for me. Put your shoulders back and do something with your hands – hold a little person’s hand or
72 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
even put a hand on the front of your hips as if your hand is in your pocket. Angle yourself about 45 degrees to the camera and turn your eyes to the camera or even look just above the photographer’s head. This elongates your neck and prevents double (or yikes, even more) chins. Putting one leg in front of the other makes your silhouette look svelte. Smile naturally. Relax your facial muscles and put your tongue behind your teeth. If you have time, bright lippy is always good. Then, keep your photos safe. Back them up and scan precious photographs, but print lots off as well. We often don’t realise the value of family photos until it’s too late. We only go looking for them when we lose a darling close to us. Our holiday photos are important – they remind us of our legacy, of who we are and where we fit into our own family story. They’re a great reminder of what really matters and how quickly time passes.
“Be the person enthusiastically gathering everyone together.”
AWW
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAE FREW AND GETTY IMAGES.
I Wit h
When the camera comes out this summer, no hiding! With Jo’s tried and true photo tricks you’ll have happy snaps that will be treasured in years to come.
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Best footing forward The New Year demands a tall dark man be the first over the threshold – or is that just splitting hairs?
I Wit h
PAT M c DERMOTT
f it had been up to my dad, Peter, he would have spent every New Year’s Eve watching his favourite ice hockey team, the Montreal Canadiens, lose another game. “Played like donkeys, the lot of them,” he’d mutter before heading up the stairs to read the crime novel he got in his Christmas stocking. Unfortunately for him, in those days the quaint custom of first footing, imported from Scotland and Northern England, was still practised in Canada. “What’s first footing?” asked Audrey, our eldest grandchild. “It’s when you hop on only one foot! I’m a good hopper! Watch!” said her little sister, Eleanor, bouncing wildly down the hallway, leaving Vegemite fingerprints here and there en route. “First footing isn’t hopping,” I explained. “It’s an old tradition in
some countries. The first person who steps through your door after midnight on New Year’s Eve should be a tall man with dark hair. If it is you’ll have good luck for the whole year. “Unless you live in Sweden and then the tall man should be blond.” “That doesn’t make sense,” sniffed Audrey who will be in Year Four when school goes back and is wise beyond her years. “If it was true it could only work if everybody had dark hair or everybody had blond hair.” “Well, that’s what they say,” I explained. “It’s just a funny custom. And the dark-haired man or the blond man usually brings a silver coin, some
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yummy food and a bottle of whisky as well.” “Daddy has whisky in the cupboard in the dining room but only in case of an emergency,” volunteered Eleanor helpfully. “That’s good to know,” I said. I explained that my dad was tall and had black hair so neighbours often asked him to be the first person through their doors at midnight on New Year’s Eve. Every year my mum and dad put a bottle of whisky and a homemade Christmas pudding in a special bag my mother had knitted for the purpose and set off through the snow to their friends’ New Year’s Eve parties. “It’s a tough job, going from party to party, but somebody has to do it,” Dad would wink, as he tucked me into bed and wagged his finger at my older sister, already on the phone complaining to friends about having to babysit on New Year’s Eve. “But what if you have yellow hair or red hair or purple hair or green hair?” asked Eleanor. “Don’t you ever get to go through the door first?” “Can a woman with dark hair be good luck too or does it have to be a man?” asked Audrey, warming to the injustice of it all. “What about bald people or people like Pop who have hardly any hair?” “It’s just a funny old tradition,” I said lamely. “But it’s not fair! People who have green hair or blond hair or purple hair or no hair can bring good luck too!” Still muttering, they went outside to sit in the sun. They ate Vegemite sandwiches, drank their juice and appeared to be discussing what could be done to make life fairer for the redhead, the blond, the bald and all the rest of us whose hair gets a little help from time to time. It seems to me the future is in good, if very small, hands. Happy 2020 dear friends. AWW
“Can a woman with dark hair be good luck too? ”
ILLUSTRATION BY MARISA MOREA @ILLUSTRATIONROOM.COM.AU.
Family matters
Astrology special
Your stars for 2020
I L LU ST R AT I O N S by LUCILE PRACHE
The Australian Women’s Weekly’s astrologist, Lilith Rocha, helps p you y navigate g yyour w y through g the year ahead, as she decodes what’s in store for your asttrological sign in 2020. For your monthly horoscoppe, turn to page 176.
Signs of the times Will the dawning of the new decade arrive quietly? With a rare triple conjunction of expansive Jupiter, contractive Saturn and eruptive Pluto ending and recommencing for three giant planetary cycles, the answer is, “probably not” – especially considering an edgy alignment with dwarf planet Eris, named for the Greek goddess of discord. Historically, this transit has accompanied major upheavals of civilisations, and 2020 looks set to give us front row seats at a radical reset of global resources and economies. The good news? Jupiter, our solar system’s largest planet in the sign of responsible governance, gives the human community an increasingly powerful public say in the way we move into the future.
Aries
• MAR 21-APR 21
Big picture Powerhouse planets Saturn, Pluto and Jupiter are winding up a cycle in your professional sector and beginning a fresh one, so it’s worth closing the file on roles you’ve outgrown. Your public profile is in the spotlight, with Mars making the last half of 2020 “all about Aries”. Money matters Rams can be a bit conservative where their security’s concerned, but this year it’s well worth rethinking the way you’ve always handled finances. Uranus, the planet of new technologies, will be in your house of work and earning all year, and innovative changes could get money working for you, rather than the other way round. Connections The support of colleagues, loved ones and family is more important than ever this year. As you move forward, some friends join you, others organically fade away. Firecracker Mars in Aries for a six-month sojourn increases your ability to contribute in the capacity of courageous, charismatic leader in whatever field you choose. The inner you Humour is your essential accessory this year. In no way would you want to trivialise all the serious issues the world has to grapple with, which could turn the cheeriest Pollyanna into a gloom-bag, but Aries’ mission is inspiring others. Young people are hungry for vision and alternatives, and your innovative spirit could shine a positive light through 2020 and beyond. Food for thought “What good is sitting alone in your room? Come hear the music play. Life is a cabaret, old chum, come to the cabaret. Come taste the wine, come hear the band, come blow that horn, start celebrating, right this way, your table’s waiting! What good’s permitting some prophet of doom to wipe every smile away? Life is a cabaret, old chum, so come to the cabaret.” Fred Ebb, Aries songwriter.
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Taurus
• A P R 2 2 - M AY 2 1
Big picture Your cha-cha with change continues this year as unpredictable planet Uranus in Taurus offers you new options, and Jupiter extends your voyage of discovery, stretching mind, body and spirit via different perspectives, directions and experiences. As you become comfortable tasting flux, freedom and flexibility, developments reveal their positive possibilities with increasing ease and speed. Money matters Celestial support is plentiful this year for rebooting your money mojo, particularly from April to July, when your patron planet Venus does a four-month remodelling of your wealth and values sector. With career restructuring a fact of life, 2020 brings astral assistance for turning unanticipated disruptions into fruitful opportunities for doing meaningful work that makes a difference. Connections This year you will explore a world of social alliances, with the reminder that communication is essential to relationships. When you find yourself falling back into your old patterns, doing what you’ve always done, make the commitment to share thoughts and feelings, discuss misunderstandings and negotiate compromises. The inner you Try this ritual for 2020: settle somewhere quiet. Take deep breaths. Imagine stepping onto a path that winds ahead, disappearing into the horizon. Ask, “What holds me back that I’m unaware of? What do I need for this journey?” Stay open to the first flashes that arrive, then when Uranus presents an opening you’ll be ready to carpe diem. Food for thought “Together we notice each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. We are here to bring to consciousness beauty and power around us and to praise the people here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather.” Annie Dillard, Taurean author.
Astrology special
Gemini
• M AY 2 2 – J U N 2 2
Big picture This year sees planetary action in the top half of your chart, giving 2020 social and collective emphasis. When Mars checks in from June to December to jazz up Gemini networks, you’re in your element: disseminating information, cross-pollinating ideas and fine-tuning interactive dynamics. Money matters Generous Jupiter spends this year in cautious Capricorn, your house of joint holdings, shared business funds and what happens to your money when you’re not around – all solid indications for making a will and appointing power of attorney. If an inheritance or windfall comes your way, curb the urge to splurge; you can be conservative with cash and still enjoy life’s smorgasbord. Connections The first six weeks of the decade kick off with Mars in full-forward gallop, setting a cracking pace for this year’s potentially sizzling connections. When a mid-year eclipse highlights recurring relationship patterns, follow its prompts to ditch excess emotional baggage, so you’re in prime shape to sustain new partnerships that set you up for success. A mentor could have valuable guidance. The inner you In such an interactive cycle, it’s important to choose quality over quantity and prioritise doing what you love with people you love. The art of mastering this year comes through taking time apart from incessant demands to review and reflect on lessons learned, so you don’t have to repeat them. Keep things simple, say “No” and read The Joy Of Missing Out, by Gemini social commentator Michael Leunig. Food for thought “Everything in life is art. What you do. How you dress. The way you love and how you talk. Your smile and personality. What you believe and your dreams. The way you drink your tea. How you decorate your home. Or party. Your grocery list. The food you make. How your writing looks. And the way you feel. Life is art.” Helena Bonham Carter, Gemini actor.
Cancer
• J U N 2 3 - J U L 23
Big picture Jupiter in your house of togetherness sprinkles growth powder on relationships, improving communications with nearest, dearest, even those difficult or estranged. And Mars delivering a six-month career push suggests mixing personal and business activities could be one of this year’s most interesting recipes for success. Money matters With results-driven, achievementoriented Mars spending the last half of 2020 in your professional sector, could it get any better for topping up the Crab coffers? It won’t pay to just kick back and rely on luck, though – make the most of this auspicious planetary kick-start by buffing up your money mastery, perhaps studying a few online market gurus for tips and techniques. Connections Jupiter’s wisdom, insight and abundance in your relationship corner is one of the finest cycles in over a decade for meeting new love or taking an existing one to new heights. While Cancerians are nurturing, direct and forthright expressions aren’t your style, but sharing your emotions will lead to richer intimacy in the next decade. The inner you Factoring in balances to this year’s full-on input is crucial. Start thinking disconnects from technology, sabbaticals from socialising, reducing information overload and topping up your favourite soul-nourishing sustenance. Or just doing nothing: sitting still beside water, watching the way it moves, learning further lessons of flow and response. Food for thought “Don’t wait till the weather’s better or you have more time. If you have a busy life, that’s your path. Practising generosity can transform you at a deeper level because you’re changing an internal habit of holding on into an outer pattern of opening up, letting go – taking a brick out of your habitual backpack.” Pema Chodron, Cancerian Buddhist teacher. JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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irgo
• AU G 2 4 - S E P 2 3
Big picture The process of renovating your ideas
Leo
• J U L 2 4- AU G 23
Big picture Uranus shaking up your career and public
image can be unsettling – then again, it’s an upgrade you don’t have to pay for. If you’re feeling the need for more professional autonomy, this year’s cosmic wind directs your wings towards a better fit. And face it, you know you’re going to revel in organising a style refresh, revamped work wardrobe, hot professional profile and personal rebrand. Money matters Leos are gifted at fixing things, and this year it would be fruitful to apply that to your finances. You could begin by looking for ways to reduce overheads and expenditure, broker better deals with service providers and invigorate cash flow by attracting revenue. Note to self: when addressing tricky fiscal issues with others, be gentle. Connections Letting go of old ideas about what love should look like is your route to making this decade one of your happiest. As your preferences and priorities shift, you might find yourself taking the lead to initiate change in private or professional relationships that aren’t performing to Leo standards – and lifting your game along with them. Theinneryou This Cherokee wisdom offers support for the year in store: No matter what happened in the past, what you’re going through now, what diagnosis you’ve been given, how stuck you feel, how much trauma you’ve experienced, remember your natural capacity to heal. Even when you feel alone, trust you are surrounded by ancestors to guide you. Feel them. Ask them to accompany you on your sacred path. Food for thought “Fashion is not something that exists in dresses only. Fashion is in the sky, in the street, fashion has to do with ideas, the way we live, what is happening. Fashion changes, but style endures. Simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance. Elegance is when the inside is as beautiful as the outside.” Coco Chanel, Leo fashion designer.
78 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
and belief systems about life can be discombobulating. But the rewards and seriously fun part will be the once-in-a-lifetime meeting up this year of exuberant Jupiter, can-do Saturn and transformational Pluto luring your inner entrepreneur off the comfort couch to explore the wilder shores of 2020. Money matters The driving influence of Mars for six months in your house of jointly held resources could mean more involvement with family or partnership finances this year. Make best use of the red planet’s energy and your own Mercurian preferences by keeping up to date with the latest information, so you know where smart money goes. Connections There are a thousand reasons to be concerned about the state of the planet and the collective psyche, a thousand more to stay engaged and not isolate, despite escalating pressures. As five planets move through your relationship sector and 2020 brings affectionate connecting, it’s worth reminding others by example that love includes the Earth, its creatures and all its living systems. The inner you Suffering digital dryness and feeling pixelated is this year’s cue to give your perfectionist persona permission to indulge in a well-earned Venusian pursuit. It might be something simple like embellishing the comfort of your home with fresh flowers, but most importantly of all, your earth-sign soul needs replenishment in the arms of the natural world. Foodforthought “When I’m among the trees … they give off hints of gladness. I’d almost say they save me, and daily. Around me trees stir in their leaves and call out, ‘Stay awhile.’ The light flows from their branches. ‘It’s simple,’ they say, ‘and you have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and shine’. Mary Oliver, Virgo poet.
Astrology special
Scorpio
• O CT 24-NOV 22
Big picture Scorpios are the zodiac’s secret agents, and
Libra
• S E P 24- O CT 23
Big picture Directed by celestial stage manager Jupiter, the
planetary emphasis in your base of operations this year rearranges Libra’s domestic picture. Whether that’s changes in family dynamics or living arrangements, visitors coming to stay or the nuts and bolts of extensions, renovations, upgrading, downsizing, moving, buying or selling, home is your hot spot for 2020. Money matters While an experimental approach to financial management might seem counter-intuitive in the current economy, it could work well for you this year. Technology is your friend, from budgeting apps that track spending to information about market fluctuations. Not to mention your personal version of the Midas touch: the Libran charm that makes people want you on their team. Connections The first six months of this year refine your relating style to the ripeness of a vintage vino or fromage, which offsets the dynamic effect of assertive Mars reigniting the sizzle in Libran relationships for the last half of 2020. Yours is a cardinal sign, so others follow your lead as you take a proactive role in this year’s partnerships and group activities. The inner you Your ideas about what’s meaningful, your purpose and the bigger picture are undergoing a metamorphosis as you question whether beliefs remain relevant in the face of current realities. Curiosity is your key to unlocking the answers, so experiment with variations to routines, try different approaches, visit new places and smile at new faces. Foodforthought “From the hurricane and the great whale’s sounding to the fall of a dry leaf and the gnat’s flight, all is done within the balance of the whole. But we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. Learn to keep the balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility.” Ursula Le Guin, Libran author.
this year’s influx of energy to the inner part of your chart brings results from self-exploration which become evident in the last half of 2020, when wildfire Mars and justiceseeking Jupiter urge you towards a role in the social or professional arena. Whether your words are warm, wise or wild, the power of language is paramount in 2020. Money matters This year’s stellar patterns suggest taking a look at what drives your spending, saving and investing habits. Don’t be shy about seeking professional advice: an objective party could provide insights into your financial behaviour which improve your relationship with money. Your leadership qualities may be called into play if you’re presented with the choice between integrity and a pay cheque. Connections The presence of game-changing Uranus in your house of togetherness stresses the necessity for interactions with others on all levels – personal, professional, and problematical. It’s delightfully energising to switch reactions off autopilot and revitalise lacklustre responses, and this year brings no shortage of opportunities to engage in more authentic exchanges. And yes – to some questions, silence can be a perfectly adequate answer. The inner you This is your kind of investigative, interior year, getting to know you. Whether that’s through work or via study, travel, meditation, a physical or spiritual practice, last year’s chrysalis is melting down and transmuting into your new self: wiser, stronger, confident and compassionate. Foodforthought “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, They paved paradise, put up a parking lot… We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon, and we got to get ourselves back to the garden.” Joni Mitchell, Scorpio singer/songwriter.
JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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Capricorn
• D EC 2 2 - JA N 20
Big picture No one has to tell you anything worth
Sagittarius
• N OV 2 3 - D EC 2 1
Big picture Welcome to the new decade, Archers. With
this year’s astral accent on values, including self-worth, get ready for 2020’s celestial makeover to the newer, truer you. When charismatic Mars charges into your house of romance, entertainment and creativity for the last half of the year, will there be challenges? Yes, of the most vibrant kind. Adventure? Plenty. Satisfaction? Guaranteed. Money matters Jupiter tours your money zone only every 13 or so years, so does that make it lucky or unlucky? You be the judge of boosts to your cash flow and improved income streams – though this isn’t likely to happen without your engagement. Make a start by examining your behaviours about money, then implementing the necessary changes. Connections Interactive dance steps for 2020 are varied, especially during the April-to-August visit of affectionate Venus to your partnership department. You’ll arrive at a few crossroads and plenty of pivot points as aspirations in intimate, social, business and creative relationships evolve. It’s worth remembering in the word “heart” is nestled the word “ear”, and the art of reaching someone’s heart is to hear them. Theinneryou If you’re full with habits no longer serving their purpose, ancient attitudes or dated beliefs, where can all the new experiences clamouring to touch down chez Sagittarius land? It’s time to shed, cull, let go, lighten up and make space for your free spirit to learn new tricks, try things you wouldn’t usually and make outrageous breakthroughs. Foodforthought “About all you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won’t like you at all. I think the reward for conformity is everyone likes you except yourself.” Rita Mae Brown, Sagittarian writer/activist.
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doing is worth doing right, especially with evolutionary Jupiter, ethical Saturn and powerful Pluto – planets of progress, responsibility and rebirth – super-charging your sign for 2020. This is one of your all-time good fortune years, Capricorns, bringing fulfilment, recognition and personal growth. Money matters Generous Jupiter spending this year in your sign favours bold ventures. Also in Capricorn, Saturn loves practical strategies, action plans, spreadsheets and timelines. With these two heavenly heavyweights adding clout to your efforts, 2020 taps the green light for exploring new ways to have fun doing what you love and making it pay. Connections Peace, like most things, begins at home, with the way we interact. If a déjà vu issue of trust or loyalty keeps repeating, can it be talked through? The greatest distance between people is the chasm created by misunderstandings, so clear communication is this year’s cosmic channel to successful connection. Which isn’t as simple as it sounds and needs commitment. Theinneryou Take time aside to write down firstly the most important things you have to contribute, secondly what’s worth spending time and energy on. What’s meaningful to you and what could benefit the community. Decide what you’ll do less of, where you can delegate and how to eliminate draining obligations so you can give back. Food for thought “In place of weapons, use your mind, your heart, your sense of humour, every faculty available to you. Action is the antidote to despair. I have hope in people, in individuals. Because you don’t know what’s going to rise from the ruins. Someone had to change the world and I was the one for the job.” Joan Baez, Capricorn singer/activist.
Astrology special
Aquarius
• JA N 2 1 - F E B 1 9
ILLUSTRATIONS BY LUCILE PRACHE/THE ILLUSTRATION ROOM.
Big picture With its planetary accent on regrouping and evolution, this soul-replenishing year winds up a cycle of completion to make way for more of what you want. This suggests you’ll be reviewing, reflecting, reassessing and resetting before life at the end of 2020 looks different from its beginning – and feels more satisfying. Money matters Planetary placements recommend a conservative approach to this year’s fluctuating variations. If you’re caught in currency and workplace restructuring, consider consulting an economics expert, professional cash manager or an online advisory site with free tips on cutting and pruning, savvy ways to save and general fiscal fitness. Connections Mars is busy in your community and networks, so if you aren’t already involved, volunteering could appeal this year. Small groups or one-on-one contact where you can connect (put phones away) will be most effective. Make dates to meet friends you never seem to have time for, sharing simple pleasures that needn’t cost a bomb. The inner you As preferences shift, some things you used to love may lose their lustre. You might find yourself enjoying quiet time, or the company of close friends. Mini-retreats or getaways, spiritual practice, walking in nature, artistic pursuits such as writing, painting or singing are all supportive soul vitamins for navigating this year’s waves of change. Food for thought “In shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened or depressed, they’d ask: When did you stop dancing? Stop singing? Stop being enchanted by stories? Stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence? Art isn’t just ornamental. It’s a path in itself, a way out of the predictable and conventional, a map to self-discovery.” Gabrielle Roth, Aquarian dancer.
Pisces
• FEB 20-MAR 20
Big picture The trio of outer planets gathering in your sector of tech-oriented friendships and online communities make this a primo networking year. The most significant influence is Jupiter, who passes this way only every dozen years, opening doors and opportunities through group associations and organisations. This is not a year to disappear or watch Netflix – best invite the crowd around. Money matters January to June favours a go-with-theflow approach of reviewing economic options and planning strategies. From mid-year onwards under-earning and overpaying fade when take-charge Mars issues a call for the last half of 2020, boosting your confidence and drive for bolder money moves. Crowd-sourcing initiatives, anyone? Connections Ready to say no to energy-drainers? You’re going to need extra time for conferences, events and groups which could fling open doors of opportunity pleasurable and profitable for Pisceans. Does this mean mixing love and money, business and fun? It’s sounding like a plan. The inner you The escalating crescendo of stressful planetary events combined with so much buzz in your personal world needs the counterbalance of silent time alone this year to recharge your energy batteries so you can continue sharing your special gifts. When your intuition says, “Enough!” it’s time to turn off the technology, pull the plug on everything, draw a veil of unavailability and avoid burnout. Food for thought “I’d tell myself to listen to my heart. Listen to that voice that says, ‘Mmm, I don’t think so.’ Because when you override that, you override who you are. Be aware of your inner voice and follow it, even though it will tell you the most uncomfortable path to choose.” Pisces actor Glenn Close, when asked to give advice to a younger self. AWW JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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Easy breezy Follow the sun in style with sheer linen and cool cotton layers in sophisticated neutral hues. P H OTO G R A P H Y by ALANA LANDSBERRY ST Y L I N G by REBECCA RAC
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Fashion
THIS PAGE: The Wolf Gang blouse, Zara pants and Dinosaur Designs earrings. OPPOSITE PAGE: Joslin blouse, Sussan skirt, Arms of Eve necklace and Maria Farro sandals.
Fashion THIS PAGE: Country Road shirt, Rachel Gilbert skirt and Dinosaur Designs earrings. OPPOSITE PAGE: Finders Keepers shirt and pants, Arms of Eve necklace and Maria Farro sandals.
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9 1. Vintage earrings, $89. homageonline.co.nz 2. Urban culotte, $150. witchery.co.nz 3. Praise cami, $299. ingridstarnes.com 4. Organza skirt, $229. countryroad.co.nz 5. Stan Smith shoes, $150. adidas.co.nz 6. Magician sunglasses, $550. garrettleight.com 7. Fringe western shirt, $110. levis.com.au 8. Mr Scurry Mini Croc tote in Natural, $679. deadlyponies.com/nz 9. Philly wedge heels, $100. hannahs.co.nz 10. Eco Collection organic cotton slip dress, $27. postie.co.nz 11. Mali shorts, $245. minaforher.com 12. Frill check blouse, $90. seedheritage.com/nz 13. Belted collar dress, $170. witchery.co.nz JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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In the shade Stand out at summer parties in elegant whites and neutrals.
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1. Miss Ross earrings, $189. zoeandmorgan.com 2. Soul Inside dress, $289. ricochet.co.nz 3. Sills belted skirt, $369. sillsandco.com 4. Clara blazer, $460. charmainereveley.co.nz 5. Romy cotton hat, $65. witchery.co.nz 6. Isadora thong, $149. countryroad.co.nz 7. Linen playsuit, $170. seedheritage.com/nz 8. Luchia dress, $375. salasai.com 9. Northern Lights sunglasses in Blushing Marble, $349. karenwalker.com 10. Sills tie top, $239. sillsandco.com 11. Frilby platform sandals, $100. hannahs.co.nz 12. Mawson dress, $399. shjark.com
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Fashion THIS PAGE: Zara dress and Dinosaur Designs earrings. OPPOSITE PAGE: H&M shirt, Sarah J Curtis hat and Dinosaur Designs necklace.
Fashion
HAIR AND MAKE-UP BY KELLY TAPP. ALL PRICES ARE APPROXIMATE.
Oroton dress, Seed Heritage belt and Dinosaur Designs necklace.
r e m m u Sessentials Step into the balmy weather with light, comfy footwear and glamorous eyewear for sunny days. H&H Heide espadrille, $25. thewarehouse.co.nz
Imply Intentionally Blank heel, $389. blackboxboutique.com
Arizona in Nude, $190. birkenstock.co.nz
Seed dress and hat, Dinosaur Designs necklace and Maria Farro sandals.
On the level
GET SET FOR POOLSIDE ACTION WITH A SLIDE THAT’S GOOD-LOOKING AND PRACTICAL.
Dakota leather slide, $80. hannahs.co.nz
Bonita Multi Spot slides, $140. nudefootwear.com
Ancient Greek Meloivia sandals, $380. farfetch.com
Selene slides, $200. mipiaci.co.nz
St Agni Celina knitted sandal sandal, $375. blackboxboutique.com
Evelyn slide, $140. witchery.co.nz
The eyes have it Velvet Canyon Ruby Tuesday sunglasses, $299. rein.co.nz
Ray-Ban Ray Ban aviator in silver/brown, silver/brown Wyndham tan marble sunglasses, $235. sunglasshut.com/au $349. karenwalker.com
Shikker Sun sunglasses, $560. moscot.com
JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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Beauty
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Summer in the Look and feel amazing in the hottest weather with these tips and tricks from Megan Bedford.
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ummer beauty should be easy, so we demand a lot of our products, expecting them to perform well and require little maintenance once applied. Luckily there are plenty of new solutions on offer to meet these exacting requirements, so there’s more time for enjoying the sun.
I want to top up my SPF over make-up
Daily sun protection is essential for keeping skin healthier for longer, and reapplication is the key. It’s no longer okay to apply it once early in the morning and expect it to protect you all day, nor is it safe to rely solely on SPF in foundation. Hence the development of new easy ways to up your protection without disturbing your make-up. Use a traditional cream formula SPF in the morning and try one of these later in the day, as well as covering up and reaching for a hat. 1. Jane Iredale Powder Me SPF30, $95. 2. Brush on Block SPF30 Mineral Sunscreen, $44. 3. Coola Makeup Setting Spray SPF30, $62.
sun
I want to look sun-kissed (sans the sun)
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Stick with your SPF and recreate the post-Pacific getaway look (even if you’re staying home) with a hint of bronzer. Matte formulas devoid of shimmer are great for imperceptible everyday colour. Apply with a fluffy powder brush to areas that would naturally darken in the sun – think the bridge of the nose, across the top of the forehead and cheeks. To avoid a patchy result that catches in certain areas, try setting your foundation with a light dusting of translucent powder before applying. A touch of more radiant cream or powder bronzer sets off a tan when tapped in with fingers along cheekbones, temples, shoulders and collarbones. 1. L’Oréal Paris Glow Cherie Natural Glow Enhancer in Dark, $27. 2. Clarins Bronzing Compact in Sunset Glow, $66. 3. RMS Beauty Luminizing Powder in Midnight Hour, $65. 4. Benefit Hoola Caramel Bronzer, $56.
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I want to feel confident baring my legs
There’s something lovely about popping on some shorts and heading out the door to make the most of the Kiwi summer. If you don’t feel that confident baring all, there are ways to cover visible veins or give your skin a touch of colour so you can enjoy the outdoors without feeling self-conscious. Applying fake tan the day before is useful and helps camouflage bruises and veins, but if you’re time-poor a touch of body make-up is simple, and many remain waterproof and transfer-free. Simply apply directly to skin and blend quickly with your hands, washing them afterwards. A touch of body luminiser or subtly radiant body lotion, particularly down the front of your shins can also create a flattering, leg-lengthening illusion. 1. Bondi Sands Glo Gloss Finishing Glow, $23. 2. MAC Studio Face and Body Foundation, $80. 3. Sally Hansen Airbrush Legs Spray, $30. 1
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Parched post-beach skin needs the equivalent of a long, cool drink. If you’re looking a bit pink, calm quickly with an aloe gel. The soothing effect is glorious, but aloe gels can have a hefty alcohol content, so follow up with a buttery body cream to lock in hydration. If you just want to soften up, choose a silky body oil that’s feather-light and dry to touch in a flash, and use after your shower. Hair also becomes dry and brittle with too much sun exposure. Apply a leave-in moisturising treatment, focusing on the ends, to nourish and add shine – it’s like a lip balm for your hair. It’s also useful to apply before hitting the beach or pool as it forms a sort of protective coating on strands.
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1. Nivea Soft Mix Exotic (set of 4 tubs) $13. 2. Dermalogica Phyto Replenish Body Oil, $99. 3. Bondi Sands Aloe Vera After Sun Cooling Gel, $14. 4. L’Oréal Professionnel Serie Expert Nutrifier Dryness Defense (DD) Balm, $19. 5. Kiehl’s Buttermask for Lips, $44.
Waterproof make-up doesn’t just mean products that won’t wash away when you dive into the pool or under a wave. They are also indispensable during hot, sticky summer days and nights when you apply your make-up as usual and it seems to bid you adieu by lunch, or worse, smudge panda-like around your eyes. New releases seem to have concentrated not only on staying power, but in the intensity of colour, so you’re no longer getting sub-par performance in exchange for endurance. 1. Bobbi Brown Long-Wear Gel Eyeliner, $55. 2. Laura Mercier Caviar Stick Eye Colour in Sugarfrost, $50. 3. MAC Dual Dare All Day Waterproof Liner, $48. 4. L’Oréal Paris Paradise Waterproof Mascara, $27.
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PHOTOGRAPHY BY GETTY IMAGES. ALL PRICES ARE APPROXIMATE.
I want to master an easy pop of colour Look pretty, rather than painted, by choosing new textures designed to be applied quickly with attached applicators or your fingers. Creams, gels, balms and tints melt seamlessly into skin, enhancing your au naturel look without requiring any expertise or on-going surveillance, so you can get on with clinking drinks or readjusting the sun umbrella. A tinted lip balm with added SPF is the MVP of summer colour. 1. Revlon Kiss Cloud Blotted Lip Colour in Pink Marshmallow, $22. 2. Well People Nudist Multi-Use Cream in Creamy Rose, $38. 3. Shiseido UV Lip Color Splash SPF42 in Miami Pink, $37. 4. Guerlain Météorites Bubble Blush in Rose, $70.
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Beauty spotlight
e h T is on! Edited by
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Prioritise protection and hydration when it comes to summer on the sand.
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1. Trilogy Vitamin C Energising Mist Toner, $31. A zesty, refreshing face mist that boosts the skin’s natural glow with hydration and Vitamin C. 2. The Body Shop Skin Defence Multi-Protection Face Mist SPF45, $65. Extend your SPF with a midafternoon top-up that only takes a second or two to apply. This sheer spray is invisible and virtually weightless. 3. Neutrogena Ultra Sheer Face and Body Sunscreen Stick SPF50, $24. Forget leaky and sandy sunscreen bottles, this mess-free stick is easy to swipe on and blend, and won’t block your pores. 4. Bondi Sands SPF50+ Coconut Lip Balm, $10. A lovely nourishing lip balm that feels so good the added SPF would simply be a bonus, except for the fact that it’s so hard to find in other lip products. In that regard it’s indispensable this season. 5. Skinsmiths Daily Defence Compact SPF50+, $59. Applied with a soft sponge, so you can touch up your SPF protection without disturbing your make-up. 6. Girl Undiscovered Soaked In Sunshine Body Oil, $88. Ideal to revive dry, papery skin after a day outdoors, a little of this silky body oil goes a long way when rubbed into your arms and legs. 7. Invisible Zinc Sheer Defence Tinted Moisturiser SPF50, $26. If you prefer to avoid heavy make-up when it’s hot, the hint of tint in this sunscreen is a welcome addition. Zinc formulas are also useful if you are sensitive to traditional chemical SPF ingredients. 8. YSL Holiday Look Rouge Pur Couture Lipstick, $66. When you’re forgoing everything else, a pop of lip colour looks oh so French and chic. This comes in a range of lively brights perfect for hot days and nights and the sparkly case is hard to go past.
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Beauty news Why moringa is the new big thing, and a slick trick for travellers. Edited by
MEGAN BEDFORD
GOING SOLO Single-dose capsules take up less space than your toothbrush, making them ideal for travel. Each one contains enough for one full-face application and the biodegradable capsules protect the potency of the active ingredients inside. The increase in availability comes just in time to avoid an oil spill in your carry-on. 1. Elizabeth Arden Vitamin C Ceramide Capsules Radiance Renewal Serum, $162 for 60. 2. Eve Lom Cleansing Oil Capsules, $122.
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Trending now- moringa oil
The beauty business loves discovering new ingredients, especially when it comes to skincare. In recent years we’ve seen the rise and rise of Vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, hemp derivatives and more. Welcome to the era of moringa. It’s been used in traditional medicine in parts of South Asia for many years, but oil from the seeds of the moringa tree is now popping up everywhere. It’s nutrient-rich, extremely high in antioxidants and fatty acids, and is adept at retaining hydration in skin. It’s also sustainable, as all parts of the drought-resistant tree are used for food, cooking, supplements and more, making it an ideal ingredient for natural beauty brands.
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1. Lush Magical Moringa Beauty Balm Moisturiser, $58. 2. The Body Shop Moringa Exfoliating Cream Body Scrub, $43. 3. The Body Shop Moringa Shower Gel, $18. 4. Pure Fiji Hydrating Body Lotion, $49. 5. Pure Fiji Nourishing Exotic Oil Moringa Infusion, $46. 6. Emma Hardie Amazing Face Moringa Cleansing Balm with cloth, $97 from emmahardie.com.
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MOST USEFUL UL Max Factor Nude Matte Eye Shadow Palettes, $35, in Sunset and Sands, are filled with tawny tones in varying depths – colours you’ll actually wear!
JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women
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How to
find your voice
by Michelle Obama
and I found dedicating time to writing down my thoughts helped me navigate all the transitions. Then I put it away and didn’t pick it up again until I began writing my memoir. Instantly I was transported back to that earlier version of myself, with all the warmth, heartbreak and frustration flooding in. The experience left me asking myself, “Why didn’t I journal more?” The answer, like for so many of you, I’m sure, was that I simply got busy. I switched careers. I got married. I had children. Somewhere along the line I ended up in ballgowns at the White House, however that happened. Looking back, I wish I’d taken more time to write down what I was thinking and feeling. I didn’t journal much because I talked myself out of it – journalling can feel a little intimidating and layered with
98 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
implication, the idea being that once you put pen to paper, your thoughts have extra weight and meaning. This isn’t an exercise to sugar-coat your experiences, or write down something different to what you actually feel, or try to will yourself toward some perfect outcome. You don’t have to journal every day, and you certainly don’t have to feel like you have anything important to say. One of my favourite entries recounted an otherwise uneventful night at a neighbourhood restaurant where an old man punched the perfect playlist into a jukebox. The beauty of life is that an experience you have today might fe totally different after a few months, or years, or decades. We don’t ha to remember everything. But everything we remember has vallue.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY MILLE
A
fter my memoir Becoming was published, I heard a similar reaction from a lot of people – strangers, friends and family alike. They said, “I just can’t believe you remembered that much.” It’s a comment that usually gave me a bit of a chuckle, because when I think back to the process of reflecting for my memoir, what I remember most is the feeling of grasping at the memories that were just out of my reach. What was her name? Did I make that decision before or after that talk with Barack? Which state was that campaign event in? I’d only kept a journal for a short period of my life, for a couple of years during my late twenties as I was getting more serious with Barack and contemplating a new career. It was a tumultuous time filled with change,
BLEY AND GETTY IMAGES.
The Harvard graduate, mother of two and former US first lady has written a guided journal on how to find, or rediscover, your path in life. In an exclusive extract, she shares the 31 questions we should all ask ourselves.
2020
health & happiness
31 questions to ask yourself
Family
Childhood
• Where did your
• Describe your
ancestors come from and what challenges did they face? What kind of childhood did your parents or grandparents have? How was it different from and similar to your own? Who do you care for in your family? How does that relationship help define you? How do you celebrate the holidays? What ttraditions do your fa amily ly hold ho dear? D Describe e a specific place tthat holds p import nt meaning to yo our family.
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childhood home. What are some of the details that stand out the most? What made your home different to your friends’ homes? What did you do as a child when school let out for the summer? What activities did you previously pursue but don’t have the time for now? How can you get back into them again? Who was the most influential teacher when you were little? How did this person leave such an impression? Write a letter to your teenage self giving advice and revealing what the future holds. Write a letter to your future self outlining your expectations for the years to come.
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Health and happiness
Relationships
• What happened in your life
contribute to your circle of strength. Next to each person’s name, describe why he or she is so dependable. If you had to choose, who is the most precious person in your life? How did you meet this person and what do you think your future holds together? Who looks up to you? How do you nurture that person’s spark? If you could have a conversation with a loved one who has passed away, what would you ask him or her? Write a letter to someone you haven’t seen in a long time updating him or her on what’s happened in your life since you last saw each other.
today? List five things that went well. Describe your perfect day – beginning with breakfast and ending with dinner. Write about the last moment you remember being truly at peace. Where were you? What were you doing? How can you tap into that feeling again? When was your last good cry, and how did you feel afterwards? How do you look after yourself after you’ve had a bad day? What keeps you up at night? How has this year been different from last year? “When they go low, we go high.” How do you put this phrase into practice?
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Me, myself and I M
Hopes and dreams
• Where did your name come from
• Describe the world of your dreams.
and how has it influenced the person you’ve become? How would you describe yourself to someone who does not know you? Have you ever felt subject to a cliché? How did you react? List 10 items of clothing you loved, along with when and where you wore them. What is your most prized possession and how did you come to own it?
• • • •
What changes – whether on a local, national or global level – do you wish to see? How do you want to contribute to the world? What is one small step you can take this year towards that contribution? Change happens from the ground up. What is one small thing you can do this week to bring about new change in your life or in the life of someone else?
• List three people who
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Extracted from Becoming: A Guided Journal for Discovering Your Voice by Michelle Obama, published by Viking. © Michelle Obama, 2019.
JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
99
This is healthy eating
2020
health & happiness For long-term health, don’t start the year with a punishing detox, but with the best food advice you’ll ever find. Prof Kerryn Phelps and nutritionist and dietitian Jaime Rose Chambers share their knowledge. ALIAN
report that changes the guidelines again. So what do GPs want you to eat? Or not eat? We are guided by two crucial factors: the evidence available at the time, and an assessment of the patient’s individual needs. I have been searching the evidence on the links between nutrition and health for decades. The evidence base grows all the time, and the medical colleges and dietitians are always reviewing new evidence and comparing it with the existing evidence base. As new studies are published, the consensus on what is a healthy diet will shift to incorporate that new information. Yes, new studies sometimes conflict with existing knowledge, and that always sparks a reassessment of previous advice. It can also be difficult to condense a lot of complicated information into simple rules for living. “Diet” is not a one-size-fits-all. There are some guiding principles that suit most people, but in my experience, there are many people who need to have individualised nutrition plans. There are people with known or suspected food allergies who have to be extremely cautious to avoid ingredients that might cause an allergic reaction. People with coeliac disease have to avoid all gluten and if you have lactose intolerance, you need to avoid foods containing lactose. People who choose to be vegetarian have to make a special effort to avoid micronutrient deficiencies, and often need to supplement nutrients such as iron, zinc, magnesium and protein. People with hypertension need to be more careful about avoiding salt than those with lower blood pressure. Of course, personal taste comes into it too. For example, I may recommend fish several times a week, but if you hate eating fish that is just not going
S
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t seems with every passing year there is new advice about what is healthy to eat, and what is not. Some of this advice comes from well-intentioned but unqualified people promoting the latest fad diet. These fad diets are usually based on the results of a single research study or a random thought bubble. They might provide some short-term gains but are at best unsustainable, and at worst dangerous to your long-term wellbeing because of restrictions or even elimination of essential food groups. When I think back over the years since I have been writing about health, I can recall literally dozens of these fad diets. Remember these? Atkins, Ketogenic, Israeli Army, Blood Type, Paleo, Raw Food, Cabbage Soup, Alkaline, Zone and South Beach to name a few. The reason these fad diets have come and gone is they promise miracles but deliver disappointment. As a GP, I know the value of nutrition in preventing and managing disease. I know it seems as though the research flip-flops all the time, and just when you think you know exactly what to eat, you read yet another
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to happen. You have to find your protein and omega-3 essential fatty acids from other food sources. Will there ever be a definitive “healthy diet”? The answer is probably not. Your GP is guided by your individual needs and the best available evidence at the time. As new information emerges, our notion of the healthiest diet will be modified and updated so that you can make informed decisions.
To eat, or not to eat? Eggs
The controversy:
Eggs are high in cholesterol. High cholesterol levels in our blood are a risk factor for heart disease and are often associated with type 2 diabetes. The reality: The cholesterol in eggs has almost no impact on our blood cholesterol levels. The more powerful contributor to high cholesterol is saturated and trans fats from fatty meat, coconut and palm oil, and processed foods like cakes, biscuits and chips. The reward: Eggs are nutritious, inexpensive, versatile, low GI and low in energy. Eating eggs in moderation, even with high cholesterol, is safe. A sensible guide is no more than seven whole eggs per week, in combination with a diet high in plant foods.
Meat
The controversy:
Research shows bowel cancer is more common in those who eat the most red meat. The reality: Chemicals found in red meat can damage the ➝
JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
101
Health
Dairy
The controversy:
A dairy allergy is an immune reaction to the protein in dairy foods so all dairy needs to be avoided. A lactose intolerance is where the gut doesn’t produce enough enzymes to break down milk sugar (lactose) and usually causes diarrhoea. The reality: Only people with a dairy allergy or lactose intolerance need to avoid dairy products. But mature cheese contains almost no lactose and there are lactose-free products available. Full fat milk, yoghurt and cheese contain saturated fats; they are fine for healthy people but if you have high cholesterol, choose low fat. Ice-cream and dairybased desserts contain added sugars and should be limited. The reward: Plain or natural dairy foods have no added sugar, the sugar on the nutrition panel is the lactose. They’re rich in calcium, for healthy bones, and protein, which is good for weight management. Choose calcium-fortified plant-based options, if you prefer, to meet your calcium requirements.
Vegan meats
The controversy:
Faux meats are highly processed and made to look like, and be used in place of, meat such as mince and sausages. The reality: These products usually contain high amounts of sodium or
“Never, ever should fruit and vegetables be questioned when it comes to health.” salt and are made from processed soy products. To be sure you’re choosing a healthy option, look at the ingredient list of these products to see what you’re getting and choose wholefood options wherever you can. The reward: There are other vegan meat substitutes such as burger patties made from wholefood ingredients like legumes, brown rice and vegetables, which are a good convenience food option for vegans.
Vegetables/fruit The controversy:
Vegetables are high in carbohydrates and fruit is full of sugar, causing blood sugar spikes and weight gain. The reality: Natural sugars found in starchy vegetables like sweet potato and fruits are a great source of energy, the fruit sugar fructose is in small doses and because of the fibre in fruit and veges, the sugars enter your blood stream slowly and don’t cause havoc with blood glucose levels. The reward: Never, ever should fruit and vegetables be questioned when it comes to health! Every fruit and vegetable has a different profile of nutrients including fibre, vitamins, minerals and antioxidants, which are essential for our health. In fact, you could link them with preventing or reducing the risk of most diseases and conditions.
Fats
The controversy:
We have long preferred polyunsaturated fat for a healthy heart; however some now say saturated fat is actually good for us. The reality: Some fats are not good for our health and should be limited
102 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
in our diet, such as trans and saturated fats found in processed foods (margarines, packaged biscuits and cakes), fatty meats and full-fat dairy (butter and milk) as well as coconut, palm and vegetable oils. These foods drive up “bad” LDL cholesterol, which is a risk factor for heart and other chronic diseases. The reward: We need fat in our diet, some are essential and have many jobs such as transporting fat soluble vitamins into our body. Plant-based fats such as olive oil, avocado, nuts, seeds and fatty fish containing poly and mono-unsaturated fats are protective of our health.
Grains
The controversy:
Slimming, fattening, nutritious, anti-nutritious… Never has a food group been associated with so much conflicting and confusing information. The reality: There are many sides to grains and you need to choose what’s best for you. Grains are a rich source of carbohydrate and everyone processes carbs differently, but they’re only “fattening” when eaten in too great a quantity in combination with a high-energy diet. Grains also contain lectins or “anti-nutrients” which interfere with the absorption of nutrients, but they’re most potent when raw so sprouting, soaking and cooking will deactivate them. Anyone with a gluten, wheat or fructan allergy or intolerance needs to avoid grains containing those substances. The reward: Wholegrains include wheat, barley, rye, rice, spelt and quinoa, which contain all parts of the whole grain and are highly nutritious, help regulate blood glucose levels and, because of the fibre and prebiotics, are excellent for bowel health. AWW
PHOTOGRAPHY BY YIANNI ASPRADAKIS (PROFESSOR PHELPS AND JAIME ROSE CHAMBERS) AND GETTY IMAGES.
cells that line our bowel. Processed meats like frankfurters, salami, bacon and ham are concerning as they are linked to a higher risk of heart disease and other conditions like bowel cancer. However, white meats like chicken have shown no association with other health concerns and fish has been shown to reduce the risk of some diseases. The reward: There’s no need to completely eliminate red meat. It’s an excellent source of protein, iron, vitamin B12 and zinc. Choose lean cuts and no more than 350g in total per week.
2020
100 0 ca aloriie sn nack ks
EDAMAME (½ CUP)
health & happiness
ROASTED CHICKPEAS (¼ CUP)
OLIVES (15)
MIXED BERRIES/ GRAPES (1 CUP)
Snacks can be a sticking point when we’ree startingg afresh with healthy, new eating habits. So how do we snack smart? When it comes to munching between meals beware of physical and emotional traps, such as mistaking thirst for hunger, pecking out of boredom, eating out of habit or turning to treats to soothe ourselves. To snack mindfully, nutritionists recommend taking a moment before you eat to consider what your body really needs.
BANANA (1 MEDIUM)
DARK CHOCOLATE (1-2 SQUARES)
Let’s remind ourselves that snacks should be...
Small. They’re supposed to take the edge off our hunger, not constitute a mini meal.
Fresh. Look for healthy versions of your favourite treats, such as bliss balls, low-calorie cookies and sugar-free yoghurts. Avoid high sugar, highly additive choices in favour of snacks that help achieve your daily “rainbow” of foods (blueberries, anyone?)
TAMARI AND SEAWEED RICE CRACKERS (12)
POPCORN (80G)
3 HIGH PROTEIN PICKS TO QUELL HUNGER PANGS 60g snack pot hummus with red capsicum sticks = 4.5g protein 170g cup fat-free Greek yoghurt with chopped strawberries = 16.5g protein 50g light cream cheese with sliced cucumber = 5g protein
Fast. Vending machines and convenience stores rely on us to succumb to speedy foods we crave. Beat them by having your own snacks on hand. Think: fresh fruit, trail mix and homemade chia pots.
Balanced. The ideal snack, if needed, is rich in protein and fibre. Why? Protein keeps our blood sugar stable and helps build lean tissue. Fibre feeds healthy gut bacteria and fills our tummies for longer. AWW JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
103
Wellbeing
Health update Edited by
VICKI BRAMLEY
The lowdown on smart watches and the danger of loneliness.
Health watch Can a new watch really make you healthier? Our testers checked out the tracking, mapping and reminders. What can they do for you? Samsung Galaxy Watch Active2
ANSWERS Scientists have discovered the first evidence that autism may be an autoimmune disorder. In the Annals of Neurology, researchers described finding killer T cells, a type of immune cell, in more than two-thirds of autistic brains. These cells could either be reacting normally to a virus in the brain, or reacting abnormally to healthy brain tissue. Further research is planned, including looking for biomarkers in urine or blood that could aid diagnosis.
Apple Watch with Hermès band
Time to ... ● Listen to your heart: with sensors that track your heart rate and alert you if it’s too high or low. An ECG feature is available on Apple and may be soon on Samsung. ● Map your progress: with a GPS that plots (and shares) your location on walks, runs and hikes. ● Keep healthy habits: you’ll be prompted to get up and stretch your legs, or take a moment to breathe. ● Hear the difference: you can access motivational music, mindful podcasts and relaxing audio books. ● Track your fitness: the time and calories burned in a range of sports, including swims, are recorded. ● Keep in touch: you can leave your phone at home and call or text from your watch (very Dick Tracy). ● See your sleep: track light, deep and REM sleep on your watch (with a downloadable app for Apple). ● And feel free: no need to carry a wallet when you can use your watch to tap and pay on the go.
104 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
AU T I S M
BOTH WATCHES share most features and you can link up with friends or family to share fitness progress. Apple Watch has a fun walkie-talkie feature. You also get a noise monitor to flag dangerous levels and “hard fall detection” which you’ll hopefully never need. One Sydney mum was rushed to hospital following a seizure last year. Her watch had alerted her husband and called emergency services, which used her watch’s GPS to find her.
NEW HOPE FOR BREAST CANCER A global clinical trial is investigating if the drug Denosumab can prevent breast cancer in women with a BRCA1 gene mutation, who have a high risk of breast cancer at a young age. “We are hoping this strategy can switch off tumours before they even develop,” said study chair Professor Geoff Lindeman.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY GETTY IMAGES.
Fri en d s reboot
To protect your heart, this may be the year to reignite old friendships, reconnect with family or even find a housemate. Two papers in Heart journal show loneliness and living alone can affect heart health. Researchers followed 13,443 patients with heart disease, arrhythmia and heart failure for one year. Those who were lonely were more likely to die. And a nine-year Swedish study showed that living alone was associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease.
AWW + a2 Milk
Ba
e r atu o
Pure, natural ing with goodness, u by Anchor™ isn’t the only a2 Milk™ bro daily staple that is best in its natural form.
Just add collagen Delivering stronger hair and nails, and plump hydrated skin, collagen supplements are tackling the signs of ageing and common skin woes accelerated by our increasingly inflammatory lifestyles. Our ability to produce collagen diminishes exponentially from our mid-20s, so protecting and supplementing our stores from natural sources becomes essential for maintaining our health from the inside out. With heat-stable variations now available, you can enjoy collagen blended through your daily smoothie topped up with the goodness of fruit, vegetables and creamy a2 Milk™ by Anchor™. Or stirred into your morning flat white. A cup of glow, anyone?
Organic skincare Where skincare meets self-care. Choosing organic skincare is beneficial to your health, your complexion and the environment. With more consumers demanding conscious beauty products, it’s never been easier to access quality ingredients that are organic, natural, effective and fit in with modern lifestyles. Look for products that are certified organic or organically grown, bio-dynamic and state where their ingredients were harvested and created, to reveal your best skin yet.
Trust your gut Long before modern farming practices there was A2 milk – a pure and natural dairy milk containing just the (you guessed it) A2 protein. Quite some time ago, a natural change in western cattle herds meant that conventional milk served up a combination of A1 and A2 proteins. Today, some people who have trouble drinking conventional cow’s milk say they can feel the difference when they try a2 Milk™, which comes from cows that naturally produce only A2 protein milk. For some people who have trouble drinking regular milk, a2 Milk™ brought to you by Anchor™ might make a difference. Some people say it just feels better in their bodies.
Beeswax wraps Beeswax wraps are undoubtedly the prettiest way to keep your food fresh without the need for plastic. Needing nothing more than some cotton fabric, wax paper, beeswax, an iron and some scissors – if you dare to DIY, that is – you’ll wonder how you ever lived without these reusable beeswax wraps in your fridge, pantry and lunchboxes. Wrap fresh produce, sandwiches and cheeses in them or cover jars or bowls of ingredients or leftovers. These reusable wraps can last up to 12 months requiring nothing but a rinse under warm water and some air drying time between uses.
Brought to you by
For delicious milk-based recipes visit anchordairy.com/a2
Medical Q&A
Ask the doctor PROFESSOR KERRYN PHELPS
Q
My five-year-old son has had blood tests that point to slightly low iron as well as thalassemia minor, which his dad also has. What do I need to know to help him manage this? T.R. Mild iron deficiency can be a feature of thalassemia minor, an inherited blood disorder affecting the production of haemoglobin which can lead to anaemia. This is common in people with Mediterranean, Middle Eastern or Asian backgrounds. The mild or minor form of the disease does not need active treatment. You have to be careful with iron supplementation as it may cause iron overload, but folic acid supplementation may be recommended. His specialist will advise you.
Q
My 24-year-old daughter has developed a small, pea-sized lump behind her ear. There’s no change to the skin and it doesn’t seem to bother her apart from wondering if it’s okay or not. What could it be and should she see our GP? K.B. It is most likely an enlargement of a post-auricular lymph node. This can be in response, for example, to an infection. If it persists longer than a few weeks, or becomes larger or painful, or if she develops other symptoms such as fever, lethargy or earache, she should see her doctor for investigation.
DID YOU
KNOW?
Being slightly out of breath while exercising is to be expected. However, recent onset of excessive breathlessness when doing everyday things must be investigated urgently. Your doctor will look for medical conditions including iron deficiency anaemia, asthma or lung disease, thyrotoxicosis, pulmonary embolism or heart disease. H AV E A
QUESTION? If you have a question for Professor Kerryn Phelps, write to: Ask The Doctor, PO Box 92512, Wellesley Street, Auckland 1141 or email awweditor@ bauermedia.co.nz; subject Q&A. Letters cannot be answered personally.
106 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
Q
I’ve always had good skin, apart from some eczema. I started a cortisone cream a few months ago and after two tubes I got a sore, red rash around my mouth – it’s now on my forehead. I stopped the cream but it won’t go away. What can I do? N.P. It is likely that the rash is perioral dermatitis. It can be caused (not relieved) by prolonged use of steroid creams. Use a soap substitute to cleanse your face. Your GP will prescribe a topical
antibiotic such as clindamycin lotion.
Q
What are the signs of kidney problems and how do I look after my kidneys? A.K. You can lose 90 per cent of kidney function before you notice symptoms. Have regular check-ups, including kidney function tests. Maintain a healthy weight, eat healthily and stay active. Don’t smoke. Keep salt to a minimum. If you have diabetes, make sure it’s well managed. Visit kidneys.co.nz for more information.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY YIANNI ASPRADAKIS (PROFESSOR PHELPS) AND GETTY IMAGES.
Wit h
Q
I’d like to turn over a new leaf in January and take better care of myself. Where should I start with supplements? Does it matter if they’re a pill or powder? Is a multivitamin okay or should I have some specific testing done first? S.H. S.H. Great to hear you are focusing on your wellbeing for the New Year! I would suggest you start with a medical checkup and check your nutritional status. Next step is an exercise plan and a new eating plan. Any supplements would be prescribed based on your diet, medical condition and test results.
Finance
Even if you’re not earning, don’t miss out on the Government’s KiwiSaver contribution.
I
Wit h
MARY HOLM
t’s a great idea to get all the incentives in KiwiSaver. Employees usually receive their full employer and government contributions, unless they are on a savings suspension. But what about everyone else?
There are still too many self-employed people and others not in the workforce getting nothing, or less than they can, from KiwiSaver.
She’s 61, has been in KiwiSaver since it started, and worked until two years ago. Now, though, she’s a full-time foster parent to three young children. “I don’t receive taxable income, just an allowance, so am not currently putting any money into my KiwiSaver,” she says. Jill recently finished paying off a loan for a lounge suite at $200 per month. “I want to continue to do something with that money,” she says. “Should I save it and pay it towards my mortgage, or should I add it to my KiwiSaver? I know I am missing out on the government payment,” she says. But she’s not sure if that’s worth more than the interest she will save by paying extra off her $86,000 mortgage. Firstly, well done Jill! Too many people, when they’ve paid off a loan, just spend the extra money. And with three children to take care of, and not a huge income, Jill could surely use the cash. But if she’s used to managing without it, it’s a terrific idea to use the money to get ahead.
here too. The KiwiSaver year runs from 1 July to 30 June. To get the full $521 from the Government this year, Jill needs to contribute her $1042 by 30 June 2020. So I recommend she contributes $200 a month into KiwiSaver from now on. But after next June 30, things change. Jill has a whole year to get her $1042 into KiwiSaver. And while she expects to pay off her mortgage by 2027, it would be great to pay it off sooner. In light of that, I suggest that from next July she contributes $87 a month to KiwiSaver – which will get $1044 into her account each year. The other $113 a month could go into speeding up her mortgage pay-off.
Readers might remember that last month I told Anne to weigh up the interest rate on her mortgage and the return she might get from putting extra into KiwiSaver. Even though the average KiwiSaver return might be higher, it’s volatile, so many people prefer to concentrate on paying down their mortgage. But for Jill it’s different. While Anne is already contributing enough to KiwiSaver to ASK MARY receive the maximum government contribution, Jill isn’t putting in anything. That means that for Have a question or concern every dollar Jill about saving or investing for Mary? Email awweditor@ contributes she’ll get bauermedia.co.nz, subject 50 cents from the Money. Letters cannot be Government – up to answered personally. If your $1042 a year from Jill topic is chosen you will and $521 from the receive a copy of Mary’s good folk in book, Rich Enough? A Wellington. Laid-Back Guide for Every Kiwi. Because of that turbo-charging – Jill’s Mary Holm is a journalist, money is multiplied by presenter, and best-selling 1.5 for contributions author on personal finance. up to $1042 – it’s She writes a column in pretty much impossible the Weekend Herald and presents a fortnightly money to beat investing in segment on RNZ. Mary’s KiwiSaver when you advice is of a general nature, compare it with other and she is not responsible investments with for any loss that any reader similar risk. may suffer from following it. There’s a timing issue
“It’s a terrific idea to use the money to get ahead.”
ENTER A READER WE’LL CALL JILL.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ELLENCHELSEY.COM
SO WHAT’S IT TO BE: KIWISAVER OR THE MORTGAGE?
FOOTNOTE: JILL WILL NEED A NEW TACTIC WHEN SUPER KICKS IN When Jill turns 65, things change again. She will start to get NZ Super, stop getting the Government’s KiwiSaver contribution, and can withdraw her KiwiSaver money – which currently totals $56,000. At that point, I suggest she blitzes the mortgage with most of her KiwiSaver money and NZ Super payments. Once the mortgage is paid off, Jill will have the spare $200 a month, her Super, and what used to go into the mortgage to save – and also to spend a little. She deserves a few treats!
THIS COLUMN IS SUPPORTED BY THE FINANCIAL MARKETS AUTHORITY TO ENCOURAGE WOMEN TO TAKE AN INTEREST IN KIWISAVER AND INVESTING. VISIT FMA.GOVT.NZ FOR MORE INFORMATION. MARY’S VIEWS DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THOSE OF THE FMA.
Moroccan lamb pilaf R E C I P E PAG E
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25 P H OTO G RA P H Y by JOHN PAUL URIZAR • ST Y L I N G by KATE BROWN a nd OLIVIA BLACKMORE
Weeknight dinners
T E S T K I TC H E N
TIP The punchy flavours of Tabasco and smoked paprika would also be delicious with chicken, pork fillets or firm white fish.
Prawn and capsicum fajita wraps R E C I P E PAG E
112
Moroccan lamb pilaf SERVES 4 PREP AND COOK TIME 30 MINUTES
Loaded avocados with burghul
T E S T K I TC H E N
TIP You could also use ½ cup (100g) couscous instead of burghul. Place it in a small heatproof bowl; cover with ½ cup boiling water. Cover bowl tightly with plastic wrap and stand for 5 minutes; fluff grains with a fork.
Loaded avocados with burghul SERVES 4 PREP AND COOK TIME 15 MINUTES (+ STANDING TIME)
½ cup (80g) coarse burghul 2 large (640g) avocados, halved 3 spring onions, chopped coarsely ½ cup small basil leaves 220g bocconcini, torn 125g heirloom cherry tomatoes, halved LEMONY DRESSING ¼ cup (60ml) extra virgin olive oil 2 tablespoons lemon juice 1 clove garlic, crushed
1 Place burghul in a medium bowl; cover with boiling water and stand for 10 minutes or until grains are swollen and tender. Drain well. 2 LEMONY DRESSING Place ingredients in a screw-top jar; shake well to combine. Season to taste. 3 Remove the stones from the avocado. Using a dessertspoon, scoop large chunks from the flesh of the avocado skin, reserving the avocado shells. 4 Combine burghul, scooped avocado, spring onion, basil, bocconcini, tomatoes and Lemony Dressing in a large bowl; season to taste. Spoon burghul mixture back into the avocado shells. Serve immediately. Not suitable to freeze or microwave.
110 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 1 large (200g) onion, sliced thinly 250g lean minced lamb 2 tablespoons harissa seasoning ½ bunch coriander, leaves reserved, stems chopped finely 1½ cups (240g) coarse burghul, rinsed well 400g can chickpeas, drained, rinsed 2 medium (240g) carrots, cut into julienne ¼ cup (20g) natural flaked almonds, toasted ⅓ cup (95g) Greek yoghurt
1 Heat oil in a large, heavybased saucepan over medium-high heat; cook onion for 8 minutes or until golden brown and slightly crispy. Increase heat to high; cook lamb, breaking up any lumps with a wooden spoon, for 5 minutes or until well browned. 2 Add harissa seasoning and coriander stems; cook, stirring, for 1 minute or until fragrant. Add burghul; cook, stirring, for 1 minute or until toasted. Add chickpeas and 1½ cups (375ml) water; bring to the boil. Reduce heat to low; cook, covered, for 15 minutes or until liquid is absorbed. Remove from heat; stand, covered, for 5 minutes. 3 Fluff up grains with a fork. Top pilaf with carrot, coriander leaves and almonds. Serve with yoghurt dusted with extra harissa seasoning, if you like. Not suitable to freeze or microwave.
Weeknight dinners
Jalapeño steak and watermelon salad SERVES 4 PREP AND COOK TIME 25 MINUTES
500g beef flank (flat iron) steaks 2 (80ml) tablespoons pickled sliced jalapeños, plus ⅓ cup pickling liquid 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 1 large (320g) avocado 1 medium (500g) iceberg lettuce, cut into 10 wedges 1½ cups mint leaves 1 tablespoon lime juice 1kg seedless watermelon, rind removed, sliced thinly 1 tablespoon black and white sesame seeds, toasted lime wedges, to serve
1 Combine steaks with half the jalapeño pickling liquid and 1 tablespoon of the oil in a bowl; season well. Stand for 10 minutes. 2 Meanwhile, process half the avocado, 1 lettuce wedge, ½ cup mint leaves, the lime juice and remaining pickling liquid until smooth; season to taste. 3 Heat a chargrill pan or barbecue on high. Cook steaks for 3 minutes on one side or until char marks appear; turn and cook for a further 3 minutes for medium rare, or until cooked to your liking. Rest for 5 minutes, loosely covered with foil. 4 Spread three-quarters of the avocado dressing over the base of a large platter; top with remaining lettuce, mint and the watermelon. Thinly slice steak and arrange on salad; scatter with jalapeños and sprinkle over seeds. Top with remaining avocado, cut into wedges. Serve with lime wedges. Not suitable to freeze or microwave.
Weeknight dinners
Chicken, broccoli pesto and pulse pasta T E S T K I TC H E N
TIP
SERVES 4 PREP AND COOK TIME 20 MINUTES
600g medium uncooked prawns peeled, deveined, tails intact 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil 1 tablespoon chipotle Tabasco 1 teaspoon smoked paprika 1 medium (170g) red onion, sliced into thin wedges 1 each red and yellow medium capsicum, sliced 400g can pinto beans, drained, rinsed 400g mixed cherry tomatoes, halved 4 (160g) medium wholegrain tortillas ½ cup (120g) light sour cream ½ teaspoon chipotle Tabasco, extra ½ cup coriander leaves
1 Preheat a chargrill plate or barbecue on high heat. 2 Thread prawns onto 8 metal or soaked bamboo skewers; place on a tray. Combine oil, Tabasco and paprika in a small bowl, mix well; season. Brush 1½ tablespoons of marinade over prawn skewers. 3 Heat remaining marinade in a large frying pan over high heat. Add onion and capsicum; cook, stirring occasionally, for 4 minutes or until starting to turn golden and soften. 4 Add pinto beans, tomatoes and ¼ cup (60ml) water to the pan, stir well; cook for 4 minutes or until hot and saucy. 5 Meanwhile, barbecue prawn skewers for 1 minute each side or until charred and cooked through. Barbecue tortillas for 30 seconds each side or until char marks appear. 6 Divide capsicum mixture among tortillas; top each with barbecued prawns, sour cream and a drizzle of extra Tabasco. Serve scattered with coriander. Not suitable to freeze or microwave.
Pulse pasta is an alternative to traditional wheat pasta. It’s gluten-free and has more protein and fibre.
Chicken, broccoli pesto and pulse pasta SERVES 4 PREP AND COOK TIME 30 MINUTES
2 (400g) chicken breast fillets 375g pulse penne pasta 300g broccoli 1 cup firmly packed basil leaves, plus extra to serve ½ cup (70g) pistachios, roasted 1 clove garlic, crushed ½ cup (40g) finely grated parmesan ⅓ cup (80ml) extra virgin olive oil ⅓ cup (80ml) lemon juice 1 teaspoon finely grated lemon rind 2 cups (70g) shredded curly kale 1 medium (140g) lemon, cut into wedges
1 Place chicken in a deep frying pan; cover with cold water. Bring to the boil, reduce heat to a gentle simmer; cook for 10 minutes or until cooked through. Cool; shred coarsely.
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2 Meanwhile, cook pasta in a large saucepan of salted boiling water for 6 minutes or until almost tender; drain. Return pasta to pan. 3 Meanwhile, process broccoli, basil, pistachios, garlic, parmesan, oil, juice and rind until smooth. Season to taste. (Makes 3 cups.) 4 Combine chicken, kale and pesto with pasta in pan, season to taste; toss well. Scatter pasta with extra basil leaves; serve with lemon wedges. Suitable to freeze. Not suitable to microwave.
Recipes extracted from The Australian Women’s Weekly Healthy Food Everyday, $39.99, available from awwcookbooks. com.au.
FOOD PREPARATION BY REBECCA LYALL AND ELIZABETH FIDUCIA.
Prawn and capsicum fajita wraps
Bang bang salmon SERVES 4 PREP AND COOK TIME 30 MINUTES
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil 2 x 250g skinless salmon fillets 2 medium (240g) carrots, cut into julienne 2 (260g) Lebanese cucumbers, seeded, cut into julienne 50g snow pea sprouts 4 spring onions, sliced thinly lengthways 1 cup coriander leaves extra virgin olive oil cooking spray 4 (40g) large rice paper rounds 2 tablespoons sesame seeds, toasted BANG BANG DRESSING 1 teaspoon Sichuan peppercorns ½ teaspoon dried chilli flakes ¼ cup (45g) sesame seeds 2 tablespoons Chinese black vinegar 1 tablespoon light soy sauce 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil 2 teaspoons tahini 1 teaspoon brown sugar
T E S T K I TC H E N
TIP You can shred the carrot with a julienne peeler, mandoline or V-slicer. If you don’t have one, you can coarsely grate the carrot instead. If you don’t have a microwave, serve the salmon with steamed brown rice or quinoa instead of the rice paper crisps.
1 Heat oil in a large frying pan over high heat. Cook salmon for 4 minutes; turn, cook for a further 2 minutes or until just cooked but still pink in the centre. 2 Combine carrot, cucumber, snow pea sprouts, spring onion and coriander leaves in a large bowl. 3 BANG BANG DRESSING Stir peppercorns, chilli and sesame seeds in a small frying pan over medium heat for 2 minutes or until seeds are golden. Cool. Grind with a spice grinder or mortar and pestle to a fine powder. Place in a screw-top jar with remaining ingredients; shake well to combine. 4 Spray 1 rice paper round with oil; microwave on HIGH (100%) for 50 seconds or until puffed up and white. Repeat with remaining rice papers. 5 Flake salmon into large pieces and place in a bowl with the Dressing; toss gently to combine. Place the carrot mixture on a platter; top with salmon. 6 Scatter bang bang salmon with sesame seeds; serve with rice paper crisps and lime wedges, if you like. Not suitable to freeze or microwave.
Diet special
T E S T K I TC H E N
TIP Konjac noodles, also called shirataki, are made from the konjac yam. They are low in calories and carbohydrates, and gluten free. Sold in some supermarkets and online.
T
tra f
Scallop pad Thai R E C I P E PAG E
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y
on
P H OTO G RA P H Y by ALICIA TAYLOR • ST Y L I N G by OLIVIA BLACKMORE
You may tri iet offers a different approach. Try these recipes from the plan, which combines the latest research in weight loss and gut health, taking a total body attitude to weight loss.
2020
health & happiness Rainbow slaw with salmon SERVES 2 PREP AND COOK TIME 30 MINUTES THIS RECIPE IS GLUTEN FREE. THIS RECIPE IS PORTABLE
120g skinless, boneless salmon fillet 140g drained, rinsed canned cannellini beans 2 teaspoons grated lemon rind 1 baby (130g) fennel bulb, fronds reserved, sliced thinly 250g vacuum-packed cooked beetroot, drained 2 tablespoons lemon juice 95g gluten-free, low-fat, high-protein natural yoghurt 2 radishes, sliced thinly 1 medium (120g) carrot, sliced thinly lengthways 1 small (90g) zucchini, shaved lengthways 1 cup (80g) finely shredded red cabbage ¼ cup mint leaves
1 Place salmon fillet, beans, rind and 2 tablespoons chopped fennel fronds in a large bowl; toss to coat. Season to taste with pepper. 2 Heat a medium non-stick frying pan over medium heat. Cook salmon for 2 minutes, turn and cook a further 1 minute or until just cooked but still pink in the centre. Transfer to a plate; keep pan on the heat. 3 Add bean mixture to pan; cook, stirring frequently, for 2 minutes or until warmed through. Remove from heat. 4 To make beetroot dressing, process 100g of the beetroot with the lemon juice and yoghurt until smooth. Season to taste with pepper. 5 Cut remaining beetroot into thin wedges. Divide beetroot, sliced fennel, radish, carrot, zucchini and cabbage between two plates. Top with salmon (broken into pieces), bean mixture and mint. Serve with dressing. Not suitable to freeze or microwave. NUTRITIONAL COUNT PER SERVING: 10.6g TOTAL FAT (3.1g SATURATED FAT); 1214kJ (290 CAL); 21.8g CARBOHYDRATE; 24.3g PROTEIN; 9.4g FIBRE.
Diet special
Revitalising tonics
A 1-cup serve of these drinks counts as one of your daily snack options. Pomegranate lemonade
Turmeric glow tonic
MAKES 4 CUPS PREP TIME 5 MINS (+ CHILLING)
MAKES 4 CUPS PREP TIME 10 MINS (+ CHILLING)
Place 2 rose lemonade cold water-infused tea bags and 2 cups water in a large jug; stand 10 minutes. Discard tea bags. Add 2 cups sparkling water and 2 tablespoons pomegranate juice. Refrigerate 1 hour or until chilled. Add 2 thinly sliced small lemons. Serve over pomegranate seed ice cubes, or with ice cubes and pomegranate seeds, if you like.
Place 4 chamomile tea bags and 1 litre (4 cups) boiling water in a heatproof jug; stand 5 minutes. Discard tea bags. Add 1 halved vanilla bean, 3 teaspoons honey and ¼ teaspoon ground turmeric; cool to room temperature. Refrigerate 1 hour or until chilled; stir through 1 tablespoon lemon juice. Serve with lemon slices and ice cubes.
NUTRITIONAL COUNT PER 1 CUP (250ML): 0g TOTAL FAT (0g SATURATED FAT); 28kJ (6 CAL); 1.6g CARBOHYDRATE; 0g PROTEIN; 0g FIBRE.
NUTRITIONAL COUNT PER 1 CUP (250ML): 0g TOTAL FAT (0g SATURATED FAT); 79kJ (19 CAL); 4.6g CARBOHYDRATE; 0g PROTEIN; 0g FIBRE.
Scallop pad Thai
SERVES 2 PREP AND COOK TIME 20 MINUTES THIS RECIPE IS GLUTEN FREE
2 x 400g packets konjac noodles, drained, rinsed (see tip, page 114) 300g bok choy, halved 200g scallops without roe, patted dry 200g yellow scallopini, sliced thinly (or use zucchini if not available) 2 tablespoons gluten-free fish sauce 1 tablespoon pure maple syrup 1 long red chilli, sliced thinly 1 teaspoon finely grated lime rind 2 tablespoons lime juice
Sangria tonic
MAKES 4 CUPS PREP TIME 10 MINS (+ CHILLING)
Using a vegetable peeler, peel rind from 1 small orange into 4 wide strips; cut orange flesh into 1cm pieces. Place orange rind and pieces in a large jug with 3 cups sparkling water, 1 thinly sliced red-skinned apple and 50g halved grapes; stand 10 minutes. Refrigerate 1 hour or until chilled. Serve with ice cubes. NUTRITIONAL COUNT PER 1 CUP (250ML): 0g TOTAL FAT (0g SATURATED FAT); 176kJ (42 CAL); 8.9g CARBOHYDRATE; 0.6g PROTEIN; 1.9g FIBRE.
½ teaspoon sesame oil 100g bean sprouts 1 cup Thai basil leaves ½ cup coriander leaves 1 tablespoon chopped peanuts
1 Place noodles in a bowl of hot water for 1 minute; drain. Place bok choy in a heatproof bowl with enough boiling water to cover; stand for 4 minutes or until tender, drain. 2 Heat a large non-stick frying pan over medium heat. Add scallops to pan in a single layer; cook for 20 seconds on each side. Remove from pan; keep warm.
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Watermelon soother
MAKES 4 CUPS PREP TIME 5 MINS (+ CHILLING)
Place 4 watermelon, strawberry and mint cold water-infused tea bags and 1 litre (4 cups) water in a large jug; stand 10 minutes. Discard tea bags. Add 250g thin watermelon wedges, 125g halved strawberries and 1 tsp lemon juice. Refrigerate 1 hour or until chilled. Serve with mint leaves and ice cubes. NUTRITIONAL COUNT PER 1 CUP (250ML): 0.1g TOTAL FAT (0G SATURATED FAT); 74kJ (17 CAL); 3.2g CARBOHYDRATE; 0.4g PROTEIN; 0.9g FIBRE.
3 Increase pan to high heat. Quickly add noodles and bok choy to pan, then add scallopini, fish sauce, maple syrup, chilli, lime rind and juice, and sesame oil; stir well. Cook, stirring, for 1 minute or until heated through. 4 Stir through bean sprouts, herbs and scallops. Top with peanuts; serve immediately . Not suitable to freeze or microwave. NUTRITIONAL COUNT PER SERVING: 8.5g TOTAL FAT (3.5g SATURATED FAT); 1141kJ (272 CAL); 19g CARBOHYDRATE; 30.5g PROTEIN; 9.2g FIBRE.
NUTRITIONAL COUNT PER SERVING: 7g TOTAL FAT (1.3g SATURATED FAT); 1274kJ (304 CAL); 25.1g CARBOHYDRATE; 28.2g PROTEIN; 13.8g FIBRE.
Cheat’s roast chicken dinner
SERVES 2 PREP AND COOK TIME 45 MINUTES THIS RECIPE IS GLUTEN FREE
1 large (350g) parsnip, quartered lengthways 300g baby rainbow carrots, halved lengthways if large 100g brussels sprouts, halved 2 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil ½ teaspoon sea salt flakes ½ teaspoon cracked black pepper 1 small (90g) tomato, sliced thickly crossways 1 (200g) chicken breast fillet 1 teaspoon mixed dried herbs 50g green kale leaves
1 Preheat oven to 200°C (180°C fan-forced). Line a large oven tray with baking paper. 2 Place parsnip, carrots and brussels sprouts on lined tray. Drizzle with 1½ teaspoons of the oil, sprinkle with salt and half the pepper; toss well to coat. Bake for 30 minutes or until tender. 3 Meanwhile, cut a 40cm square piece of baking paper and top with a 40cm square piece of foil. Place tomato slices in centre; top with chicken. Sprinkle with mixed herbs, remaining oil and pepper. Fold paper and foil into a parcel to enclose chicken and tuck ends underneath. Place on a small oven tray; bake for 30 minutes or until chicken is cooked through (the time may vary depending on thickness of chicken). 4 Meanwhile, steam kale until just tender. 5 Slice chicken; reserve juices. Place on plates with roast vegetables and steamed kale; drizzle chicken with reserved juices. Season with pepper. Not suitable to freeze or microwave.
Diet special Cauliflower and chicken san choi bau SERVES 2 PREP AND COOK TIME 25 MINUTES
½ small (150g) iceberg lettuce lime wedges, to serve
THIS RECIPE IS GLUTEN FREE. THIS RECIPE IS PORTABLE
200g minced chicken 4 cups (400g) cauliflower “rice” (from selected supermarkets) 1 teaspoon finely grated fresh ginger 2 small cloves garlic, crushed 1 teaspoon dried chilli flakes 1 tablespoon finely chopped coriander stems 1 small (250g) orange sweet potato, grated coarsely 1 large (180g) carrot, grated coarsely 3 spring onions, sliced thinly 2 tablespoons gluten-free, salt-reduced tamari ½ cup Thai basil leaves, torn coarsely 1 cup coriander leaves 1 teaspoon finely grated lime rind 1 tablespoon lime juice
1 Heat a large non-stick frying pan over high heat. Cook chicken, breaking up well with a wooden spoon, for 4 minutes or until it changes colour. Add cauliflower, ginger, garlic, chilli flakes and coriander stems; cook, stirring often, for 3 minutes or until mixture is soft and dry. 2 Stir in sweet potato, carrot and spring onion; cook for a further 3 minutes or until cauliflower mixture is starting to catch on the base of the pan and chicken is cooked through. 3 Stir in tamari; remove pan from heat. Stir through basil, coriander leaves, lime rind and juice. Season with freshly ground white pepper. 4 Line two bowls with three trimmed, washed and dried outer lettuce leaves; divide cauliflower mixture between lettuce “bowls”. Serve with lime wedges. Not suitable to freeze or microwave. NUTRITIONAL COUNT PER SERVING: 7.5g TOTAL FAT (1.9g SATURATED FAT); 1423kJ (340CAL); 29.2g CARBOHYDRATE; 29.3g PROTEIN; 17.4g FIBRE.
Shopping
& decoding labels Servings When comparing products, use the 100g column, as the “per serve” column will send you astray. Even if it’s a similar product, the manufacturer decides how big or small the serve is to seem more appealing.
Fibre Fibre will make you feel fuller for longer, help control your blood sugar, manage your cholesterol, reduce your risk of chronic diseases and, of course, keep you regular. Considering most of us aren’t even meeting the recommended 25-30g a day, go ahead, fibre up!
Super chicken salad SERVES 2 PREP AND COOK TIME 30 MINUTES
Fat When it comes to fats, we’re looking for healthy ones instead of being concerned about the amount. If a product has a high fat content, check the ingredients to make sure the fats are coming from wholesome sources such as olive oil, nuts and seeds. Avoid refined vegetable oils, hydrogenated and trans fats.
PHOTO CHEFS: ELIZABETH FIDUCIA, REBECCA LYALL.
Sodium A good pinch of salt is roughly the equivalent of 400mg of sodium. Aim for less than 400mg/100g to help look after your heart.
Sugar Let’s take a moment to figure out sugar. Four grams of sugar is the equivalent of 1 teaspoon. We’re aiming for less than 6 teaspoons per day, so divide the total sugars by four to gauge if that food will fit into your healthy eating plan or should be kept to an occasional treat.
THIS RECIPE IS GLUTEN FREE. THIS RECIPE IS PORTABLE
¼ cup (40g) dried apricots, chopped finely 2 tablespoons tarragon leaves, chopped coarsely ¼ cup (60ml) white wine vinegar 1 teaspoon tahini 1 small (200g) orange sweet potato olive oil cooking spray 200g chicken tenderloins 1 bunch (175g) broccolini, trimmed, halved lengthways 2 small (180g) zucchini, sliced into thin ribbons 1½ cups (120g) finely shredded red cabbage 2 radishes (70g), cut into julienne or grated 2 teaspoons sunflower seeds, toasted
1 Preheat a large grill plate on high heat. 2 Place apricots, tarragon, vinegar and tahini in a small jug with 2 tablespoons water; stir dressing until combined. 3 Using a mandolin or V-slicer, cut sweet potato crossways into 2mm-thick rounds. Spray rounds with oil, then
arrange in a single layer on heated grill plate. Cook for 2 minutes on each side or until softened and grill marks appear. Transfer to a large plate. 4 Cook chicken on grill plate for 4 minutes each side or until cooked through; transfer to plate with sweet potato. Cook broccolini on grill plate, turning, for 3 minutes or until just softened; transfer to same plate. Cook zucchini on grill plate for 1 minute on each side; transfer to same plate. 5 Divide grilled vegetables and sliced chicken between two serving plates. Top with cabbage, radishes and sunflower seeds. Serve with dressing. Not suitable to freeze or microwave. NUTRITIONAL COUNT PER SERVING: 6.5g TOTAL FAT (1g SATURATED FAT); 1422kJ (339 CAL); 29.8g CARBOHYDRATE; 32.7g PROTEIN; 10.6g FIBRE.
Recipes from The Australian Women’s Weekly 28 Day Transformation Diet, $36.99. Available from awwcookbooks. com.au.
JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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In season
TO P
TOMATO TIPS ● Store tomatoes at
room temperature out of direct sunlight for the best texture and flavour. ● If you need to store
them in the fridge to delay ripening, stand at room temperature for at least 30 minutes before serving. ● Use a very sharp
To ato tart
A fast and fla
Tomato, prosciutto mozzarella tart SERVES 4 PREP AND COOK TIME 35 MINUTES
375g puff pastry, thawed following pack directions (or use two sheets of readyrolled puff pastry) 100g thinly sliced prosciutto 250g mixed tomatoes, halved or quartered 125g buffalo mozzarella, torn into pieces GREEN SAUCE 1 tablespoon finely chopped green olives 1 teaspoon finely grated lemon rind
makes the most of flavoursome summer tomatoes.
15 basil leaves, shredded finely 2 teaspoons finely chopped fresh oregano 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 Preheat oven to 200°C (180°C fan-forced). Line a large oven tray with baking paper. 2 Place the puff pastry on the tray; prick all over with a fork. Lay prosciutto over the pastry to cover the surface then top with a second piece of baking paper and another tray. Bake on lower shelf for
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20 minutes or until golden brown. Remove top tray and baking paper; bake for a further 5 minutes or until prosciutto is crisp. 3 GREEN SAUCE Meanwhile, combine all the sauce ingredients in a small bowl; season to taste. 4 Transfer the tart to a serving plate. Top with the tomatoes; season with sea salt flakes and freshly ground black pepper. Scatter with the mozzarella and drizzle with Green Sauce. Not suitable to freeze or microwave.
RECIPE AND STYLING BY MICHELE CRANSTON. FOOD PREPARATION BY ELIZABETH FIDUCIA. PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN PAUL URIZAR.
knife or a serrated knife to cut tomatoes.
N E H S E R F O ? T R T E N M M WA U S R U O Y UP
Sweet Chilli Chicken, Tomato and Corn Salad
Serves
4
Prep Time 45
Cook Time 20
Dairy Free DF
Gluten Free GF
Ingredients • 3 chicken breasts
• 1 spring onion, finely chopped
• ₁/2 cup olive oil
• 2 cos lettuce, leaves separated
• ₁/3 cup sweet chilli sauce
• 2 avocados, cut into wedges
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 400g cherry tomatoes, halved
• 4 corn cobs, husk and silk removed
• ₁/3 cup coriander leaves
• 2 Tbsp lemon or lime juice
Method
Want a delicious and healthy way to make the most of this season’s juicy tomatoes? This beautiful Sweet Chilli Chicken, Tomato and Corn salad will do just that.
1 Place chicken breasts in a large bowl. In a small bowl, whisk together 2 tablespoons of the oil, half of the chilli sauce and half of the garlic. Pour the mix over the chicken and coat well. Cover bowl and refrigerate for 30 minutes to marinate. 2 Heat a BBQ plate or char-grill pan on medium-high. Brush corn with 1 tablespoon of oil and grill, turning several times, for 8-10 minutes, until browned and tender. Transfer to a chopping board and cut into 2cm thick slices. 3 Grill chicken for 5 minutes on each side, until browned and cooked through. Transfer to a plate. Cover with foil and rest for 5 minutes, then cut into slices.
For this recipe and more fresh ideas, visit countdown.co.nz/foodhub
4 In a small bowl, whisk remaining oil, sweet chilli sauce, garlic and lemon or lime juice. Stir in spring onion and 1 tablespoon of water. 5 On a platter, arrange lettuce leaves, avocado, corn, chicken and tomatoes. Drizzle with dressing and sprinkle with coriander to serve. PER SERVE • Energy 3519Kj • Protein 39g • Total Fat 57g • Saturated Fat 10g • Carbohydrates 37g • Sugars 27g • Sodium 446mg Dietary and nutritional info supplied by NZ Nutrition Foundation
Super summer dinners
Peri peri prawns & tortillas R E C I P E PAG E
124
Enjoy an easy, breezy dinner on the deck with our tasty barbecue recipes, perfect for fuss-free midweek cooking.
Test Kitchen
Orange, fennel and haloumi salad
½ cup loosely packed fresh mint leaves
SERVES 4 PREP AND COOK TIME 20 MINUTES
¼ cup (60ml) extra virgin olive oil 4 (520g) baby fennel bulbs, trimmed, quartered ½ cup (125ml) fresh orange juice 1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves 500g haloumi, sliced thickly 100g rocket leaves, trimmed 3 medium (450g) tomatoes, sliced thickly 1 small (100g) red onion, sliced thinly
1 Heat 1 tablespoon of the oil in a medium frying pan on the barbecue over medium heat. Cook fennel, cut-side down for 5 minutes or until lightly browned 2 Meanwhile, whisk 1 tablespoon of the remaining oil with the juice and thyme in a small jug until combined. 3 Pour dressing over fennel in the pan. Cook, covered with foil or a lid, over low heat, for
5 minutes or until fennel is tender. 4 Heat remaining oil on barbecue flat plate over medium-high heat; cook haloumi for 1 minute each side or until browned. Remove from heat. 5 Arrange rocket on a serving platter; top with tomato, fennel mixture, onion and haloumi; drizzle with pan juices, sprinkle with mint leaves. Not suitable to freeze or microwave.
T E S T K I TC H E N
TIP Haloumi is best fried just before serving. On cooling, it can taste slightly rubbery, but in a good way!
JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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Lemon pepper pork and broad bean salad
T E S T K I TC H E N
TIP If you’re not keen on store-bought lemon pepper, use sea salt flakes, freshly ground black pepper and finely grated lemon rind.
Peri peri prawns and tortillas SERVES 4 PREP AND COOK TIME 20 MINUTES
Fast tip Frozen green peas are a quick and delicious alternative to broad beans.
Lemon pepper pork and broad bean salad SERVES 4 PREP AND COOK TIME 25 MINUTES
4 (940g) pork cutlets 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil 2 tablespoons lemon pepper seasoning 2 cups (300g) frozen broad beans 1 medium (140g) lemon 100g feta, crumbled ¾ cup fresh mint leaves, torn
1 Heated an oiled grill plate (or grill or barbecue) over medium-high heat. Coat cutlets in oil, sprinkle with seasoning. 2 Meanwhile, boil, steam or microwave broad beans until just tender. Rinse under cold water; peel beans. 3 Finely grate 2 teaspoons rind from lemon. Squeeze juice from lemon; you need 2 tablespoons juice. 4 Combine beans, rind, juice, feta and mint in a large bowl. Season to taste. 5 Serve pork cutlets with salad. Not suitable to freeze or microwave.
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1 Combine prawns and sauce in a large bowl; season. 2 Heat oil in a large grill pan over high heat. Thread prawns onto 24 bamboo skewers. Cook prawns, turning, for 3 minutes or until changed in colour and just cooked. 3 Meanwhile, combine juice, the water and mayonnaise in a large bowl. Add coleslaw mix; toss to combine. Season to taste. 4 Microwave tortillas according to directions on packet. Serve prawns with tortillas, coriander and coleslaw. Accompany with lime cheeks. Not suitable to freeze or microwave.
Recipes extracted from The Australian Women’s Weekly Fast Dinners cookbook, $36.99 from awwcookbooks. com.au
PHOTOGRAPHY BY DEAN WILMOT, IAN WALLACE AND JOHN PAUL URIZAR.
24 (750g) uncooked shelled prawns, with tails intact ½ cup (125ml) peri peri sauce 2 tablespoons vegetable oil 1 tablespoon lemon juice 1 tablespoon water 1 cup (300g) mayonnaise 400g packet coleslaw mix 8 x 20cm flour tortillas ½ cup loosely packed fresh coriander leaves lime cheeks, to serve
Test Kitchen Chicken with mango lime salad
SERVES 4 PREP AND COOK TIME 15 MINUTES
4 (800g) chicken breast fillets, halved lengthways 2 tablespoons olive oil ½ cup (125ml) sweet chilli sauce 1 teaspoon bottled crushed garlic 2 tablespoons lime juice 100g rocket leaves lime halves, to serve MANGO LIME SALAD 2 medium (860g) mangoes, sliced thinly 1 small (100g) red onion, sliced thinly 2 tablespoons lime juice 1 long red chilli, chopped finely
1 Combine chicken, oil, sauce, garlic and juice in a medium bowl; season. 2 Heat an oiled grill pan (or grill plate or barbecue) over medium-high heat. Cook chicken, in batches, for 2 minutes each side or until browned and cooked. 3 MANGO LIME SALAD Place mango, onion, juice and chilli in a medium bowl; toss gently to combine. 4 Serve chicken with Mango Salad, rocket leaves and lime halves. Not suitable to freeze or microwave.
Test Kitchen
g n i k a B favourites Revisit these sweet classics everyone remembers from childhood. A pavlova smothered with whipped cream and berries, or fresh chocolate lamingtons will delight family and friends.
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T E S T K I TC H E N
TIP Pavlova can be baked a day or two ahead; store in an airtight container in a cool, dry place. Assemble with cream and fruit close to serving.
Classic pavlova R E C I P E PAG E
129
Wagonettes
MAKES 16 PREP AND COOK TIME 30 MINUTES (+ COOLING TIME)
⅔ cup (150g) caster sugar 3 teaspoons gelatine ¼ cup (60ml) boiling water ⅓ cup (110g) strawberry jam, warmed, strained 32 (400g) milk chocolate wheaten biscuits
1 Whisk sugar and ¼ cup (60ml) water in a medium bowl with an electric mixer for 4 minutes or until sugar dissolves. 2 Place gelatine and the boiling water in a small jug; stir until gelatine has dissolved. Pour hot gelatine mixture into sugar syrup. Whisk on high speed for 10 minutes or until mixture is thick and fluffy, and bowl is cool to touch.
3 Spoon marshmallow filling into a piping bag fitted with a 2cm plain tube. 4 Spread jam onto plain side of half the biscuits. Pipe marshmallow over jam; top with remaining biscuits. Not suitable to freeze or microwave.
T E S T K I TC H E N
TIP If the marshmallow sets too quickly before you use it, return to the mixing bowl with 1 tablespoon of boiling water; beat for 1 minute.
Test Kitchen
Lamingtons MAKES 12 PREP AND COOK TIME 50 MINUTES (+ COOLING AND STANDING TIME)
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMES MOFFATT. STYLING BY OLIVIA BLACKMORE. FOOD PREPARATION BY ELIZABETH FIDUCIA.
6 eggs ⅔ cup (150g) caster sugar ½ cup (75g) plain flour ⅓ cup (50g) self-raising flour ⅓ cup (50g) cornflour 2 cups (160g) desiccated coconut CHOCOLATE ICING 4 cups (640g) icing sugar ½ cup (50g) cocoa powder 15g butter, melted 1 cup (250ml) milk
1 Preheat oven to 180°C (160°C fanforced). Grease a 20cm x 30cm rectangular slice pan; line base and long sides with baking paper, extending the paper 5cm over the sides. 2 Beat eggs in a large bowl with an electric mixer for 10 minutes or until thick and creamy. Gradually add sugar, beating until dissolved between additions. Sift flours twice onto a piece of baking paper. Sift a third time evenly onto egg mixture; fold flour mixture through egg mixture. Spread mixture into pan. 3 Bake cake for 35 minutes or until cake springs back when pressed lightly with your finger in the centre. Turn cake immediately onto a baking papercovered wire rack to cool. 4 CHOCOLATE ICING Sift icing sugar and cocoa into a medium heatproof bowl; stir in butter and milk until combined. Place bowl over a medium saucepan of simmering water; stir until icing is spreadable. 5 Cut cake into 12 squares. Place coconut in a medium bowl. Dip each square in icing; drain off excess. Toss in coconut. Place lamingtons on a wire rack to set. Suitable to freeze. Not suitable to microwave.
Classic pavlova SERVES 8 PREP AND COOK TIME 1 HOUR 50 MINUTES (+ COOLING TIME)
4 egg whites 1 cup (220g) caster sugar ½ teaspoon vanilla extract ¾ teaspoon white vinegar
300ml cream 250g strawberries, halved 125g blueberries ¼ cup (60ml) passionfruit pulp
1 Preheat oven to 130°C (110°C fanforced). Mark an 18cm circle on a sheet of baking paper; place paper, markedside down, on a large oven tray. 2 Beat egg whites in a small bowl with an electric mixer until soft peaks form. Gradually add sugar, beating well after each addition, until sugar dissolves or until mixture is thick and glossy. Add vanilla and vinegar; beat until just combined. 3 Spread meringue mixture inside marked circle on the tray; level the top with a spatula.
4 Bake meringue for 1 hour 30 minutes or until dry to the touch. Turn oven off; cool pavlova in oven with door ajar. 5 Just before serving, beat cream in a small bowl with an electric mixer until soft peaks form. Spoon cream on pavlova, top with berries and drizzle with passionfruit. Not suitable to freeze or microwave.
Recipes from The Australian Women’s Weekly Australia Bakes, $52.99, available from awwcookbooks. com.au.
JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
129
R E C I P E PAG E
y uit
s h u fr L
Mango and kaffir lime baked cheesecake
132
Summer fruits Lime yoghurt gelato with tropical fruit salad SERVES 6 PREP AND COOK TIME
45 MINUTES (+ COOLING AND FREEZING TIME)
10 (650g) limes 3 cups (660g) caster sugar 2 sprigs mint 6 fresh kaffir lime leaves 3 cups (840g) Greek-style yoghurt 3 (2kg) small pawpaw, halved ½ (650g) small rockmelon, seeds removed, cut into thin wedges ¼ (375g) honeydew melon, cut into thin wedges 24 (600g) fresh lychees, peeled (or use canned) 2 teaspoons rosewater
1 Remove rind from 1 of the limes with a zesting tool. Juice all the limes; you will need 2/3 cup (160ml) juice. 2 Place sugar, 2 cups (500ml) water, mint, 4 of the lime leaves and lime rind in a medium heavy-based saucepan over medium heat. Bring to the boil, stirring to dissolve sugar; simmer for 4 minutes. Strain half of mixture each into 2 large heatproof jugs; discard solids. Cool syrup. 3 Whisk yoghurt and ¼ cup of the lime juice into one jug of syrup. Add remaining lime juice to second jug of syrup; cover, refrigerate until needed. Pour yoghurt mixture into a lightly oiled 25cm x 30cm metal tray. Freeze for 4 hours or until frozen. 4 Working quickly, remove frozen yoghurt mixture from tray; break or chop into large pieces. Process, in two batches, until smooth but not melted. Return mixture to metal tray. Cover; freeze for 4 hours or until frozen. 5 Divide pawpaw, rockmelon, honeydew and lychees among bowls. Thinly slice remaining lime leaves. 6 Combine reserved chilled lime syrup and rosewater in a small jug. 7 Serve fruit salad and lime syrup with scoops of yoghurt gelato, sprinkled with sliced lime leaves. Suitable to freeze. Syrup suitable to microwave.
Do-ahead Lime yoghurt gelato can be made up to 3 days ahead.
Store it Blend any leftover fruit salad and syrup until smooth; freeze in paddle pop moulds for up to 1 month.
Summer fruits Pineapple granita and co-yo ice-cream
SERVES 4 PREP AND COOK TIME 40 MINUTES (+ COOLING AND FREEZING TIME)
1 stick lemongrass (white part only), bruised ½ cup (135g) coarsely grated palm sugar ½ (600g) small pineapple, peeled, chopped coarsely 2 teaspoons finely grated lime rind, plus extra to serve 2 tablespoons lime juice ¾ cup (200g) Greek-style yoghurt micro or baby mint leaves, to serve CO-YO ICE-CREAM 500g unsweetened coconut yoghurt 395g can sweetened condensed milk pinch of fine sea salt
1 CO-YO ICE-CREAM Whisk ingredients in a bowl. Transfer to an airtight container; freeze for 2 hours or until almost firm. Transfer mixture to a food
processor; process until smooth. Return to container; freeze until firm. 2 Place lemongrass, sugar and 2/3 cup (160ml) water in a medium saucepan; cook, stirring, over low heat until sugar dissolves. Bring to the boil; remove from heat. Pour syrup into a large heatproof jug or bowl; cool. 3 Meanwhile, blend or process pineapple until smooth; you will need 1½ cups (375ml) pulp. Whisk pineapple, rind, juice and yoghurt into cooled syrup. Pour pineapple mixture into a 20cm x 30cm (base measurement) metal slice pan. Freeze for 3 hours or until just beginning to freeze. Using a fork, scrape the mixture to break up ice crystals. Cover; freeze for 4 hours, scraping the mixture every hour, or until completely frozen. 4 Serve scoops of granita and ice-cream, topped with extra lime rind and mint. Suitable to freeze. Syrup suitable to microwave.
Swap it Use unsweetened coconut yoghurt instead of Greek-style yoghurt in the granita, if you prefer.
132 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
Mango and kaffir lime baked cheesecake
SERVES 10 PREP AND COOK TIME 2 HOURS 15 MINUTES (+ COOLING AND REFRIGERATION TIME)
¾ cup (205g) finely grated palm sugar 12 kaffir lime leaves, sliced thinly 300g digestive biscuits ⅓ cup (25g) shredded coconut 140g butter, melted 1 (600g) large mango, chopped coarsely 500g cream cheese, at room temperature 1 tablespoon lime juice 3 eggs, beaten lightly 300g sour cream 1 tablespoon finely grated lime rind 2 medium (860g) mangoes, extra, diced
1 Preheat oven to 140°C (120°C fanforced). Grease a 22cm springform pan; line base and side with baking paper. 2 Place palm sugar, 10 kaffir lime leaves and ½ cup (125ml) water in a small saucepan. Bring to the boil over medium heat; simmer, without stirring, for 5 minutes. Stand to infuse until required; strain before using, discarding solids. 3 Meanwhile, process biscuits, coconut and butter until medium fine crumbs form and mixture holds together when pressed between your hands. Press biscuit mixture on base and about halfway up side of cake pan. Refrigerate until required. 4 Process mango until a smooth purée forms; transfer to a bowl. Beat cream cheese, strained sugar syrup and lime juice with an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment until smooth and well combined; stop the motor and scrape side of bowl a couple of times to ensure there are no cream cheese lumps. Beat in mango purée, then eggs and sour cream, continuing to mix until well combined. 5 Pour cream cheese mixture into pan; place on an oven tray. Bake for 1 hour 20 minutes or until cheesecake has a slight wobble in the centre when pan is shaken gently. Cool at room temperature for 1 hour. Refrigerate for 3 hours or until cheesecake is set. 6 Meanwhile, thinly slice remaining kaffir lime leaves. Combine lime rind, lime leaves and extra mango in a bowl. 7 Serve topped with mango mixture. Undecorated cheesecake suitable to freeze. Not suitable to microwave.
Do-ahead
The ice-cream cake can be made up to 3 days ahead, then covered and frozen until required.
Swap it When
fresh blackberries are not in season, use frozen berries, such as raspberries or strawberries, instead.
Ice-cream cake SERVES 8 PREP AND COOK TIME 35 MINUTES (+ STANDING AND FREEZING TIME)
1 litre (4 cups) vanilla bean ice-cream ⅔ cup (120g) pistachios, plus extra to serve ½ cup (75g) fresh blackberries, plus extra to serve Icing sugar, for dusting BLACKBERRY COULIS 1½ cups (225g) fresh blackberries ½ cup (110g) caster sugar
1 BLACKBERRY COULIS Place blackberries, sugar and ½ cup (125ml) water in a small heavy-based saucepan over medium
heat. Bring to a simmer; simmer for 15 minutes. Stand for 10 minutes; press blackberry mixture through a fine-mesh sieve over a jug or bowl; discard solids. 2 Meanwhile, scoop half the ice-cream into a medium bowl (return remaining half to freezer until required); stand for 15 minutes or until softened. 3 Grease a 19cm round springform cake pan; line base and side with baking paper, extending the paper 2cm over side. 4 Add pistachios and 2 tablespoons of the Blackberry Coulis to bowl of softened ice-cream; stir through until smooth. Spread pistachio ice-cream
mixture over base of pan; spread three-quarters of remaining Coulis over mixture. Freeze for 1 hour or until firm. 5 After 45 minutes, remove remaining vanilla ice-cream from the freezer; scoop into a medium bowl to soften. Stir through blackberries. Spread blackberry ice-cream mixture over pistachio ice-cream in pan. Freeze for 4 hours or overnight, until frozen. 6 Remove ice-cream cake from freezer 10 minutes before serving to soften slightly. Serve with extra blackberries and pistachios, drizzled with remaining Coulis and dusted with icing sugar. Suitable to freeze. Coulis suitable to microwave.
Summer fruits
Passionfruit and ginger curd tart SERVES 8 PREP AND COOK TIME 45 MINUTES (+ FREEZING AND REFRIGERATION TIME)
1 Preheat oven to 160°C (140°C fan-forced). 2 TART BASE Process ingredients until combined and mixture forms a medium-coarse crumble texture. Press base evenly and firmly into a 24cm loose-based fluted tart tin. Flatten and press tart base, using back of a dessertspoon, to press it evenly up side of tin. Freeze for 20 minutes. 3 Place tart tin on an oven tray; bake base for 20 minutes or until light golden and dry. Carefully remove tray from oven; use back of dessertspoon to gently press the softened mixture back into place up the edge of the tin and press down onto base to pack base down. Refrigerate for 1 hour or until firm. 4 Meanwhile, remove pulp from 5 passionfruit; you need ⅔ cup pulp. Place pulp in a large heatproof bowl with 4 whole eggs and 2 yolks (keep whites for another use); whisk until combined and smooth. Add sugar, lemon juice and ginger. Place bowl over a large saucepan of simmering water, ensuring base of bowl doesn’t touch the water.
Cook, whisking occasionally, over medium heat for 20 minutes or until mixture becomes very thick. Remove from heat. Add butter gradually, whisking until melted. Strain curd through a fine sieve into a large heatproof jug, pressing firmly to yield as much curd as possible; discard seeds. 5 Pour curd into cooled tart shell. Refrigerate for 4 hours or until set. 6 Just before serving, beat cream, icing sugar and vanilla seeds in a clean bowl with an electric mixer until firm peaks form.
134 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
7 Transfer tart to a plate. Spoon the vanilla cream onto the tart; top with pulp from remaining passionfruit and the mint sprigs. Serve immediately. Not suitable to freeze or microwave
Recipes from The Australian Women’s Weekly The Grocer, $49.99 from awwcookbooks. com.au.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JAMES MOFFATT. STYLING BY OLIVIA BLACKMORE AND SOPHIA YOUNG. FOOD PREPARATION BY ELIZABETH FIDUCIA AND REBECCA LYALL.
8 (145g) passionfruit 6 (360g) large eggs 1 cup (220g) caster sugar ¼ cup (60ml) lemon juice 2 teaspoons finely grated fresh ginger 120g butter, diced 300ml cream 2 tablespoons icing sugar 1 vanilla bean, split lengthways, seeds scraped small mint sprigs, to serve (optional) TART BASE 250g Golden Crunch biscuits 120g soft butter ½ cup (40g) shredded coconut 2 tablespoons plain flour
Promotion
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C
ertified as low GI** with less than 3.8g of sugar per 50g serve^, nutritious Sanitarium™ Low GI Granola™ is ripe for experimentation. Try these creative breakfast ideas, which use both moreish flavours – Golden Almond Crunch, and Strawberry & Coconut.
Golden almond smoothie bowl SERVES 2 1 cup almond milk ½ avocado 1 ripe banana, frozen 1 tablespoon almond or other nut butter ½ teaspoon ginger powder ½ teaspoon turmeric powder 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 2 ice cubes 1 cup (100g) Sanitarium™ Low GI Granola™ Golden Almond Crunch ½ green apple, sliced 6 grapes, halved
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1 Place first eight ingredients in blender and blend until smooth and creamy. 2 Top with granola, sliced apple and grapes and serve immediately.
Chia pudding SERVES 2 1½ cups So Good™ Cashew Milk Unsweetened 6 tablespoons chia seedss 1 teaspoon vanilla essence 6 tablespoons plain unsweetened dairy or soy yoghurt 1 cup (100g) Sanitarium™ Low GI Granola™ Strawberry & Coconut ½ cup raspberries, fresh or thawed
1 Mix the cashew milk, chia seeds, vanilla and 4 tablespoons of the yoghurt in a bowl. Cover and leave to thicken in the fridge overnight. 2 When ready to serve, half fill two jars with the chia mix. Top with a layer of granola and raspberries. Fill the jars then top with remaining granola, raspberries and 2 tablespoons yoghurt. 3 Serve immediately. TIP Try adding ½ teaspoon ground cardamom or ½ teaspoon orange blossom or rose water in step one.
Available in leading supermarkets. For more information and recipes, visit sanitarium.co.nz *Compared to high GI foods when consumed prior to exercise, as part of a balanced diet. **Glycaemic Index (GI) value = 53 (Strawberry & Coconut); 49 (Golden Almond Crunch). ^Per 50g serve of Low GI Granola without milk.
Food news
Quick bites
Edited by
JESS AULT
Tips for waste-free picnics and succulent steaks. HOW TO PACK AN ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY PICNIC
“WHEN FREEZING BREAD, TAKE IT OUT OF ITS ORIGINAL PACKET, AND ADD A PIECE OF KITCHEN ROLL TO THE ZIP LOCK BAG. IT WILL BE FRESHER AND TASTIER WHEN DEFROSTED.” – ANDREA YOUNGS
● SERVE FINGER FOODS This avoids the need for plates or cutlery. Just remember to pack a few cloth napkins for clean-up. ● REUSE YOUR REUSABLES Reusable cups, plates and cutlery are only eco-friendly if you actually use them. They take a lot more energy to make than disposables, so if they’re just going to collect dust they’re actually less environmentally friendly than a disposable one. ● DON’T OVER-CATER It’s tempting to try to feed the masses, but at picnics a lot of food can end up going to waste if friends or family members are joining you and also bringing their own fare. Work out beforehand who is bringing what so you cut down on waste. ● GO BIODEGRADABLE If using your own reusables isn’t an option, opt for biodegradable materials like paper plates and cups (preferably recycled).
Sizzling ideas: Summer is in full swing and that means it’s barbecue season. Cooking
good for your skin, good for the future + safer for you and our world
outside not only makes the most of long warm evenings, it cuts down on cleaning up too. Four top barbecue tips: 1. Always bring meat to room temperature before barbecuing. 2. Poach sausages in stock, then finish on the grill until golden for beautiful moist snags. 3. If you aren’t confident about cooking steak to perfection, invest in a meat thermometer. A medium-rare steak should be taken off the heat when it’s around 60-65°C in the centre. 4. A watermelon, feta and mint salad with lemon juice, olive oil and seasoning is a fresh accompaniment for barbecued meat.
GIVEAWAY
The health properties of superfoods are harnessed in a delicious range of condiments, dressings and drizzles offered by premium Hawke’s Bay olivery Telegraph Hill. The company has added a unique range of superfood-charged products to its line-up. The range includes: Beet & Apple Drizzle, Olive Leaf & Chia Seed Vinaigrette, Turmeric & Black Pepper Drizzle, Hemp Seed, Sesame & Ginger Dressing, Pumpkin Seed Pesto and Hemp Seed Dukkah. Available from New World supermarkets and specialty food stores nationwide, RRP from $8.95. We have a perfect entertaining or gifting hamper full of Telegraph Hill goodies valued at $250 to give away. To enter send your top culinary tip and your name and address to awweditor@bauermedia.co.nz with “Quick Bites” in the subject line by January 27, 2020.
From the vineyard
Wine notes
WINE GLASS
WISDOM
You could well have been drinking your white wine too cold. Surprising truths about the right temperature for different wines. EMMA JENKINS
Wit h
I
f I told you that you probably need to warm up your white wines and cool down your reds, would you think that perhaps I’ve enjoyed a few too many of my samples? Fear not, all is well, it’s simply that I know paying attention to the temperature of your wine makes a surprisingly big difference to how good it tastes. Aroma is very important in wine. We can taste five elements but smell over 10,000 different aromas. Up to 80 per cent of what we “taste” is actually related to smell (if you don’t believe me, try tasting wine when you have a blocked nose). Aromas are volatile compounds and temperature has an enormous impact on their release. There’s plenty of interesting science behind this but here’s what a wine drinker needs to know. Wines that are too cold lose much of their aroma and flavour, and taste acidic and hard. Fridge temperatures suit beer better than wine, which is why
your chilled white wine improves in the glass over time. It’s not just you “wine-ding” down, your wine’s getting into its happy place too. When wines are too warm – especially reds – alcohol and astringent tannins dominate. When we say serve reds at room temperature, that’s meant to be 15 to 18°C, but most modern houses, and certainly summer’s temperatures, are a lot warmer. Above 20°C, reds lose freshness and vitality, becoming soupy and dull. If it’s really hot, pop reds into your fridge for 15 minutes; if pressed for time even a five-minute plunge into a bucket of iced water will do the trick. For whites, an hour or so in the fridge before serving is about right, and for sparkling, a couple of hours is perfect. If you enjoy a post-work white wine, pop it into a bucket of iced water when you get home for about 20 to 30 minutes – it’ll be a much better temperature than if stored in your fridge all day.
Do you know why wine glasses have stems? Apart from keeping grubby fingermarks at bay, it’s all about temperature. Holding the stem rather than the bowl prevents your hands from over-warming the contents. Living, as I do, in a house full of children and dogs, I am quite tempted by practical stemless glasses, but knowing the importance of wine temperature, especially once the mercury begins to climb, means I keeps my trusty old stemware on hand. That said, stemless glasses are handy if you’re dining outdoors in Aotearoa’s often blustery conditions, plus they are easy to pack if you’re travelling to the beach, bach or a picnic. Look for relatively thin-walled glass and a nice tapering tulip shape for maximum wine enjoyment. w
This month’s pick of the bunch
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2013 NO. 1 FAMILY ESTATE MARLBOROUGH MÉTHODE TRADITIONELLE CUVÉE ADELE, $240 My current favourite lipstick is called Bling Thing and I’ve now found the perfect wine to accompany it. The price tag makes this a proper splurge, but who doesn’t love a bottle with a bit of Swarovski sparkle? The wine is just as dazzling – crisp, plenty of finesse and length.
2
2019 HUNTING LODGE EXPRESSIONS DELICATE HAWKE’S BAY ROSÉ, $22 A New World Wine Awards gold medal winner, with an array of delicate red berry fruit, a vibrant palate packed with bright fruit, a touch of spice, juicy acidity and a moreish dry finish.
3
2018 NOBODY’S HERO MARLBOROUGH PINOT NOIR, $25 Made by Framingham
Wines, this is a charming, easy-to-drink, yet sophisticated and well-made pinot, with sappy red cherry, plum and strawberry notes; it could absolutely be given a slight chill on a hot day.
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2018 TE PĀ MARLBOROUGH CHARDONNAY, $30 One of my favourite gold medal winners from the New World Wine Awards, this is a rich, fruit-driven style with layers of creamy stone fruit, citrus and a touch of roasted cashew toastiness. Delish.
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2018 CHALK HILL MCLAREN VALE GRENACHE TEMPRANILLO, $24 When the weather is hot, you want a fresh, flavoursome red. McLaren Vale grenache (from 130-year-old vines) with a dash of tempranillo’s earthy strawberries will certainly spice up your next barbecue. JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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Home
My home in Perfect blue-sky weather, cobblestone streets, exquisite produce… there’s a lot of joie de vivre in Peta Mathias’ adopted hometown Uzès. She takes us inside her one-of-a-kind home. P H OTO G R A P H Y by SALLY TAGG
138 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
e c n a Fr
Peta’s dining room, with colourful chairs and majolica plates found in flea markets. OPPOSITE: A hand-painted mural, by artist Sarah Wood, was inspired by a dress of Peta’s which features a traditional Rajasthan design.
Home
FROM TOP: The gold panel behind the living room couch was painted by a Swiss artist who creates similar features in Arab palaces. Peta thinks the spiral staircase would be illegal in New Zealand; Peta snaps up fresh produce on market days; the kitchen, used for cooking classes, has a Smeg fridge and Provençal floor tiles.
What’s cooking?
The ground floor of Peta’s three-level home is where she hosts her cooking classes (and the long lunches that follow the lesson). “It’s lovely for a cooking class because people get to go into someone’s house – it’s domestic, rather than just being in a cooking school.”
Endless sunny days
There’s no shortage of reasons to live in the South of France, but the weather does have a big part to play, with perfect blue skies much of the time. Large windows ensure that Peta’s home is as sunny inside as it is outside, and the top level, where the bedroom is, has an outside area for relaxing in the shade. On the day we visited, the temperature was well into the mid-40s. Peta has added her own quirky, colourful touches. Inspired by Polynesian friends, she embellished the entrance with a cascade of artificial flowers. The stairs leading from the ground to the first floor are painted in a piano key pattern, then dotted with more faux flowers. It’s not just the house that’s been given DIY touches – Peta is pictured below in Charles & Keith shoes she repainted turquoise, adding colourful Provençal-style bows. →
FROM TOP: Faux flowers create a welcoming garland; Peta wears a dress by designer Sara Roka, who lives in Italy; mismatched china, picked up from local flea markets. JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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Home
ABOVE: Peta heads into the passage that leads to her house. She and her neighbours often have “passage parties”, when they all drag their furniture out and everybody brings a plate.
Home of many colours
A palette of mostly white walls and floors means that the many pops of colours don’t make the small but perfectly formed house feel cluttered. Valerie Barkowski linen sheets are topped by a pompom blanket from Morocco (above) in Peta’s bedroom, which takes up the second floor. The living room (left) features a couch that looks nothing like its original incarnation. It was given to Peta by Gina Codoni, who designed the house. Gina had spray-painted the couch black but Peta asked her to paint the wood fuchsia. Behind the couch is a 16th century fireplace, which Gina restored so it could be used once again. AWW
142 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
Home
Resene BFF resene.co.nz
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Resene Roadster resene.co.nz
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G E T T H E LO O K
Peta’s style
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Mix and match brights for eclectic French chic.
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1. Florian pendant, $590. lightingdirect.co.nz 2. Muuto Fiber side chair, tube base, in Dusty Red, $560. bauhaus.co.nz 3. Orange Pompom Weave tote, $70. bluebungalow.co.nz 4. Moroccan Marron tile, $POA. tiletrends.co.nz 5. White Seed Stitch throw with Oak Buff pompoms, $159. luxurylinen.co.nz 6. Bonnie and Neil table runner with hand-painted stripe, $95. smallacorns.co.nz 7. New Hampshire loose cover three-seater sofa, $1999. freedomfurniture.co.nz 8. Limon Painted Garden Harriette cushion, $60. luxurylinen.co.nz 9. Oriente Loro Savon dish, $69. republichome.com 10. Green Garden round tray, $27. redcurrent.co.nz JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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S
er scent
y ou how to make citronella candles.
Craft WHAT YOU NEED
Makes 1 candle
l Glass tumbler 80mm high x 77mm
diameter or similar (must be heatresistant and not too large) l 250g soy wax, melted (approximately 2 cups wax shavings) l 10ml citronella fragrance or essential oil l Wick (longer than the depth of the tumbler) l Double-sided tape or hot glue to hold wick in place l Wooden wick holder l Pyrex jug l Wood popsicle stick for stirring l Pot to use as double boiler l Candy thermometer All above available from purenature.co.nz l Label, twine and heat-safe glue like super glue for porcelain (optional)
Citronella is a natural, non-toxic insect repellent, ideal for warding off mosquitoes. Combine with a natural, non-toxic soy wax and you’ll be able to breathe easy, having avoided the use of nasty chemicals. Plus, soy wax is easier to clean up after making.
1 Start with a clean work surface. Measure and lay out all the ingredients before starting (A). 2 Use a piece of double-sided tape or hot glue to secure the wick to the
PHOTOGRAPHY BY BAUER STUDIO (NZ).
A
D
E
bottom of the jar. Make sure it is centred with the help of a wooden wick holder. Alternatively make a hole in a popsicle stick, or use a wooden peg to hold the wick in place. 3 Using the double-boiler method, melt the wax. Fill a saucepan a third of the way with water and heat so it continues to simmer gently. For a tumbler of this size we used approximately 2 cups of wax shavings. Place wax in a Pyrex jug (B). It will look as if you have more wax than you need, but when melted it shrinks significantly. Make sure the handle of the jug sits over the outside of the pot. Heat the wax until it reaches 80-85°C, gently stirring the wax occasionally so it melts evenly. The melted wax should look like olive oil (C). 4 Remove jug from the double boiler and set aside on a heat-resistant surface like a wooden tray. Add approximately 10ml of citronella fragrance (D), stir for a minute or two, making sure the fragrance has been mixed through thoroughly. 5 Wait until the temperature drops to 65°C (E), give it another gentle stir and slowly pour it into the glass tumbler (F). Be careful not to spill the wax down the sides or on yourself. Fill the tumbler until it reaches 10mm from the top. You may need to adjust the wick and wick holder
B
so it sits nicely in the middle. Note: We used glass tumblers that are purpose-made for candles. If you are using other types of containers, make sure the glass isn’t too cold. Aim for room temperature or slightly warmer to ensure the glass doesn’t crack and the wax cools evenly. 6 Set the candles aside somewhere dust-free, where they can’t be knocked while setting. Let the candle cure for at least 48 hours before using (1 week is best). Once cured, trim the wick 10mm above the top of the wax. 7 Wind twine half a dozen times around the tumbler, using a few drops of glue to hold in place. Photocopy, cut out and glue the label on.
TIPS AND SAFETY:
l When lighting your homemade
citronella candle for the first time, let it burn for long enough to create a full pool of melted wax to the edges. This helps it burn evenly later. l It will be easier to clean the Pyrex jug if you do it while it’s still warm. l Other types of wax, various wick sizes and essential oils have different properties and may burn differently, so use these instructions as a guide only, if using products other than those suggested. l Never burn your candle for longer than 3-4 hours at a time. l Never leave candles unattended and always keep out of reach of children and pets. l Use on a heat-resistant surface and stop burning once wax is 20mm from the bottom of the glass tumbler.
C
F
Photocopy label JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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d a h I , d l o t e b th u r T “ g n i k a m r o f s e v i t o m r o i ulter � . r e mm u s hay this
Lynda’s project
ay
Let’s The haymaking ritual is as Kiwi as the berry jam and pikelets Lynda Hallinan dishes up to weary workers.
S
he quintessential Kiwi summer is redolent with ripening peaches, plums and heritage raspberries, blackened sausages on the barbie, fishing trips on the briny and hokey pokey ice-cream melting all over the back seat of the car. And in the country, summer also smells of wild honeysuckle, houhere, heliotrope, hot compost heaps, homemade jam and freshly cut hay. In summer, the grass isn’t greener on the other side of rural fences. It’s as brown as free-range egg shells, especially in paddocks locked up for hay. For when the fresh chlorophyll of spring fades to 50 shades of beige and the nation’s haymaking contractors clear their social calendars and start chugging out thousands of bales, you know summer has officially arrived. As a kid growing up on a dairy farm in the northern Waikato, I loved the annual ritual of haymaking. When the long-range forecast promised at least three sunny days in a row, the grass was cut, raked and turned, then windrowed as high as an ’80s blowwave before Leonard, the local baling contractor, got the call. While Mum milked the cows, and Dad and his mates hauled the bales to the shed, my sister and I ferried out trays of cheese
wiches, hot pikelets and crates of ice-cold DB. Dad aimed to fill our hay barn before Christmas but the weather wasn’t always obliging. Some years, the dry rye was good to go in early December but more than once our city cousins were drafted in to help pick up all the bales before the turkey could be carved for Christmas dinner. Our wee farm in the foothills of the Hunua Ranges is too up-hill-anddown-dale for tractors and hay rakes, but this summer I thought it would be fun to make hay from the flat fields around the old cottage we’re renovating. “Who cuts hay around here?” I enquired on the local Facebook grapevine and, a fortnight later, Bryce, the partner of our former school bus driver Annette, turned up on his tractor. As an active follower of Instagram and Pinterest party trends, I figured a couple of dozen bales would suffice for casual seating around bonfires and alfresco dining in the paddock, but I hadn’t factored in the lush spring growth nor the unseasonably warm start to summer. Our hay was the first to be cut in the district, on the same day I flew south for the Timaru Festival of Roses, leaving my longsuffering husband to pick up the bales while I gallivanted around South
Canterbury’s gorgeous gardens. My man cursed me from afar as he shared a video of golden hay bales lined up neatly across the field like fallen dominoes. “The next time you decide to make 190 bales of hay,” he texted, “you can load them and stack them yourself.” “Goodness!” I replied. “That’s a lot! At least it saves you going to the gym.” “Actually I think I burned an extra 100 calories swearing at you every time I picked up a bale,” he fired back. “Perhaps you could use our old set of wagon wheels to build a traditional dray to make the job easier next season,” I hinted. Truth be told, I had ulterior motives for making hay this summer. →
P H OTO G R A P H Y by SA L LY TAG G • STYLING by LY N DA H A L L I N A N JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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Lynda’s project
B E R RY JA M
TIPS & TRICKS
FROM LEFT: Raspberry jam dressed up with vintage labels found in an antiques store; Lynda risks a sneezy posy.
Before I moved back to the land almost a decade ago, I had no allergies aside from a blistering aversion to sticking plasters (a sensitivity that arose after a rather nasty childhood clash with a barbed wire fence and self-adhesive bandaging). But 10 years on, I can’t even look at my garden without sneezing, weeping and coughing. That’s right: I am a gardener who has developed an allergy to pollen, and grass pollen is the worst of the lot for getting up my nose despite my newfound appetite for antihistamines. At home, the kids’ pet lambs Maisy and Lucy, now retired to the pig paddock to hang out with our kunekune Plum Chutney and orphaned ram lamb Tiki, are excellent allergy-fighting allies. When they aren’t climbing the back fence to nibble at my roses or nip the tips off the tallest chrysanthemums, they do a pretty good job of topping
the oxeye daisies and pollen-laden English plantain. Unfortunately, they haven’t a hope of keeping up with the thigh-high swathes of flowering fescue, cocksfoot, rye and Yorkshire fog grasses in summer. When I call them for a cuddle and a bucket of grain, I can see the long white cloud of disturbed pollen heading in my direction long before I can see their bobbing heads beneath it. So despite my husband’s lack of enthusiasm for the project, I couldn’t be happier to see at least the cottage’s paddocks scalped to stubble. For where he sees a stack of hay bales as high as our barn roof, I see two tidy tonnes of hayfever neatly packed away out of harm’s way. AWW
148 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
buttery pikelets were the first thing I learned to cook as a child, slathered with homemade jam. Summer is bramble berry season and fresh raspberry, boysenberry and blackberry jams have a flavour that’s second to none. If you don’t grow your own, source bulk berries from pick-your-own farms and freeze in 1kg batches. l Berries (and apricots) are notoriously low in pectin, the natural gelling agent that makes preserves set firm. I always use Chelsea Jam Setting Sugar when making berry jams as it costs a little more but is worth the extra expense for its reduced cooking time. l In a large pot, combine 1kg berries (fresh or frozen) with ¼ cup water or orange juice. Heat gently until the berries are juicy, then quickly bring to the boil. Add 1kg jam-setting sugar, stirring until dissolved, and turn up the heat. Boil hard for exactly five minutes, then take off the heat, pour into warm, clean jars and seal. l This year I bottled my raspberry jam in half-litre jars decorated with vintage labels from an antiques store. They look so posh lined up on our pantry shelf.
HAYMAKING PHOTOGRAPH DEANNA ROBINSON.
l Hot
Country diary
Two little words
Gratitude for a new knee and the enormous wave of kindness that came with it, prompts a New Year’s resolution that’s all about saying thank you.
T
ILLUSTRATION BY GETTY IMAGES.
With
WENDYL NISSEN
he beginning of the year can be such a selfish time. We look ahead to the next 12 months and make plans to be a better, fitter, healthier me. It’s all about what this year means for us. But this year I’ve decided to make it all about everyone else. Saying thank you is one of the first rules of childhood. It’s drummed into us from the earliest years to remember to say thank you to people. “It’s two little words which make all the difference,” my mother used to say, ever-conscious of the need to have polite children. Another saying of hers was: “If you raise your children to be pleasant, people are more likely to offer to look after them.” Mum loved a bit of child-free time. I’ve been saying thank you a lot recently to those people who work hard to make us better. We are so lucky in this country to have funded healthcare and there’s nothing like getting into your 50s to help you realise just what a privilege that is. I recently had a knee replacement operation, which, if I had paid for it privately, would have cost upwards of $30,000. I got it for free. The topnotch surgeon, the clever anaesthetist and the skilled and caring nurses and physio staff. For nothing. By the time my operation and hospital stay was over I figured I had been through the hands of about 20 health workers who held my hand, monitored my pain, administered drugs (thank God!), fed me, bathed me, checked my vitals and took me through the all-important post-hospital rigours of physio exercise. Not to mention the ones who booked my operation, saw me for preoperation sessions
and took my phone calls when I needed some reassurance about all of that. Most of these people work long hours, on very average wages and must turn up every day with a can-do attitude (that quite frankly must be hard to summon), along with a caring touch, which most of us only have to use with our loved ones. Not every patient is easy, as I saw during my time in the public system. Some are downright obnoxious, entitled and rude. Others are so sick they’re completely dependent and then there are the perky, glad-to-bethere people like me. It seemed to me that when you have received so much care, the least you can do is thank them. Free healthcare is our right, but the people who deliver it should be acknowledged and if sending a card or some flowers makes a difference, then I’ll do that. I had read British doctor Adam Kay’s two bestselling books This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor and Twas the Nightshift before Christmas, which are not only the funniest books I’ve read in a long time, but also a cry for help for the UK’s National Health Service, which is on its knees. At the
end of the books he asks his readers to acknowledge the staff who have taken care of them under extremely challenging circumstances simply by saying thank you. Inspired by Adam, when I was in hospital I tried to note on my phone the name of every person who cared for me. And then I bought thank you cards and wrote in them, feeling a bit silly. Is someone really going to care that one of the thousands of people they deal with sent them a card with a picture of kowhai flowers and the words “Ka Pai” on the front? Will the nurses from my ward really want a vase of flowers and cupcakes on their busy shifts? Will they even have time to eat them? Will it seem a bit trite? But I did it anyway. At the very least I was honouring my mother’s manners training and it also felt like something rather lovely and old-fashioned to do. I had recently watched The Crown and the idea of sitting at a desk with a fountain pen, thoughtfully looking out the window of my palace while I wrote heartfelt words seemed a deliciously whimsical thing to do while convalescing. (In reality they were scrawled while in bed, high on painkillers.) Then my phone started pinging. Messages from the people who had received the cards and flowers saying thank you back. Well, I never expected that! But it’s made me determined that this year is not all about making it the best year for me. Instead I’m concentrating on thanking people. No act of kindness will go unnoticed by this mid-50s woman with a brand new knee. AWW
“Will the nurses from my ward really want a vase of flowers?”
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f o a Se
Travel
In a head-spinning few days, cruising convert Michele Crawshaw checks out the fabulous food, dazzling shows and clever technology on a brand new ship – and falls in love with Montenegro.
T
he Love Boat theme song was the soundtrack to my childhood. Every week I watched Captain Stubing, Gopher, Isaac, Doc and Julie navigate a never-ending cast of celebrities through comedic misadventures and romantic escapades, all while visiting exotic ports. They made life on the high seas so appealing that before I’d decided on a career in journalism I had dreams of becoming Julie, the cruise director. The 1970s show, which ran for nine seasons, introduced the idea of a glamorous cruise vacation – luxury, excitement and round-the-clock entertainment – to the world. But TV bosses surely never could have imagined the true impact the sitcom would have: The Love Boat is credited with officially launching what is these days a $100 billion-plus global cruising industry. Yes, we’ve all gone cruise-crazy – so much so that there are, astonishingly, now at least nine new cruise ships launched every year to meet demand. On board one of the newest cruise liners, the Sky Princess, it’s nice to see they haven’t forgotten their roots. There are reruns of The Love Boat playing on the TV in your cabin (so you can watch a show about a cruise ship, while on a cruise ship!), and as we set sail from Trieste in n Italy on a inaugural e on the iterranean, ship’s ghorn oudly sounds he famous opening bars of the show’s heme song. Love, citing and . Come rd, we’re ing you…” stantly
recognisable tune blaring out across the ship sets the tone for what is to be a short but fantastic adventure on the Sky Princess’s maiden voyage bound for Athens.
So much to do…
At 19 storeys high and 330m long (think the Sky Tower lying sideways), the Sky Princess is truly like a floating city. It’s hard to know what to see and do first, and despite trying to tick off as much as I can during my four days aboard I manage only a tiny portion of what’s on offer. On any given morning you can find poolside zumba, trivia challenges, table tennis competitions, culinary demonstrations, movies, crafts, guided meditation, travel lectures, golf putting tournaments, live music, martini demonstrations, line dancing lessons, bingo and yoga on the go. There are countless more events and activities after lunch and into the night – whatever your interest, it’s highly likely you’ll find it happening somewhere on the ship at some time. Or, of course, there is the main attraction – sitting poolside on the top deck lazing in the sun and ordering cocktails. There’s a constant buzz of activity around the top deck with bars and restaurants open late into the night. By day the loungers are full of sun worshippers, but come evening they’re turned into recliners for Movies Under the Stars – where the crew hand out blankets and bags of popcorn while a movie plays on the giant 30m screen above. The heart of Sky Princess, though, is the Piazza – a glittering gold, threestorey atrium with grand winding staircases and water features. Lined with various cafés, bars, shops and restaurants (and the nearby heavenly Lotus Spa), it’s a busy hub where you can watch the ship’s entertainers perform, or catch ballroom dancing or cocktail making lessons. And it’s here I discover one of Sky Princess’s biggest – and possibly best – new features. Suffering from →
JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
153
Travel
“ The ultimate is pulling open the curtains in the morning to find you’re in a new port. ” FROM LEFT: Michele Crawshaw on board; Sky Princess arrives in Montenegro, Michele's new favourite place.
jetlag on the first night on board, I go in search of coffee at the Piazza’s International Café. The barista looks down at his device then greets me by name and asks if I’d like a flat white – the same order I’d made earlier in the day. One of the longstanding criticisms of cruising has been that the larger the ship, the less personal the service – so when you’re one of around 3500 passengers on board, little touches like this go a very long way. The new, deeper personalisation of service is part of Princess Cruises’ new high-tech MedallionClass, and Sky Princess is the first ship to be built from the ground up with the innovative technology. It works by downloading an app to your smartphone or device that operates through a coin-sized wearable disc you carry with you on
board. Whenever you go near one of the more than 7000 sensors located around the ship your photo flashes up on the crew’s devices so they can see who you are and your preferences. It might sound a little Big Brotherish, but you choose how much or how little information you share, so the level of personalisation is up to you. It comes with other benefits too, perhaps the coolest being that your cabin door will magically unlock as you approach it thanks to your medallion – so no more rooting around for lost keys or swipe cards. The new app also allows you to locate and message friends or family you’re travelling with, and if you’re like me and don’t know your port from your starboard MedallionClass comes in particularly handy – a location tracker can give you step by step directions to anywhere on the ship. But perhaps the most popular function is the app-based ordering service, which I put to the test while sitting by the pool on my second day on board. With book in hand and a
154 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
sought-after spot on a chair by the pool, I don’t want to join the queue at one of the restaurants so instead I use the app to order lunch to be delivered. Shortly afterwards a waiter arrives with pizza and a glass of wine on a tray. With the medallion in my pocket the staff member is easily able to locate me; and I can track the progress of my order on my phone. It’s like Uber Eats – at sea! Food and entertainment are, of course, what cruise ships are known for. And here they do both extremely well. There are endless options for lunchtime dining, from the buffet-style World Fresh Marketplace – where the extraordinary variety on offer makes it the ultimate exercise in discipline not to just take one of everything – to The Salty Dog Grill (burgers, hot dogs etc) up on the top deck, and the likes of Alfredo’s Pizzeria which serves authentic gourmet pizza. Night-time dining is where Sky Princess really excels. There are three main separate dining rooms where you can dine alone or with other
HIGH
TECH Sky Princess is the first ship to be built from the ground up with MedallionClass. It has revolutionised cruising, with several key benefits:
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: The Piazza is the heart of the ship; the Sky Suite's huge balcony; movies play under the stars at night.
guests. But the five specialty restaurants, where an extra charge of around US$25-40 per person applies, are definitely the places to head – the Crown Grill steakhouse does exceptional beef and seafood, Bistro Sur La Mer serves up beautiful French fare, and at the Chef’s Table Lumiere you can tour the galley before dinner. Sabatini’s Italian Trattoria, is my top pick. It’s Italian gourmet fare at its best. As terrific as the meals were, though, I was always in a bit of a hurry for them to be over. For me, better things awaited – the after-dinner shows. Sky Princess has a huge cast of entertainers who perform each night. The latest show is Rock Opera, a dazzling act headed by America’s Got Talent star Brian Justin Crum. The show combines
●
Message and locate friends or family anywhere on the ship.
avant-garde fashion with a soundtrack of classic rock, opera and musical theatre. In short, it’s magnificent. There are comedy shows, a new Jim Henson-inspired puppet production and a host of others. My advice – see every one. If shows aren’t your thing, head to the new jazz lounge, Take Five, where there are nightly performances. The club is a cosy, beautifully fitted out, relaxed spot where you can enjoy a drink and listen to some great live music.
● Keyless entry to your cabin – no more fishing keys out of your bag. ● Great WiFi – with the ability to stream movies or FaceTime friends and family – for US$10 per day. ●
Staff can identify passengers and access information they provide before cruising, from food allergies and emergency contacts to favourite hobbies. ●
Magic mornings
Get directions to any spot on the ship.
Endless food and entertainment, set against 360 degree views of the ocean all day… there is a lot to love about cruising. But to me, the ultimate is going to sleep at night then pulling open the curtains the next morning to find → JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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Travel
you’re no longer looking out to sea, and instead have arrived in a new port. It’s kind of magical. Another highlight of cruising? Visiting different cities and only having to unpack once. There is a lot to be said for not lugging your overloaded suitcase through airports and from hotel to hotel. During our trip we stopped in two ports – the first was Kotor in Montenegro. Pulling back the curtains and taking in this ancient city was breathtaking. Winding streets and alleys, centuries-old churches and buildings, and fortifications are all set below magnificent limestone hills. A shore excursion took us on a tour of the old township before we boarded a boat and headed out on the Bay of Kotor to visit Our Lady of the Rocks – a tiny island, home to the most beautiful little church. Built in the 1600s, the church is adorned with dozens of paintings by famous baroque artists, including a 10m long artwork, The Death of the Virgin, by 17th century Montenegro artist Tripo Kokolja. Before this trip I couldn’t have said with absolute certainty where Montenegro was (geography was never my strong point), but it’s now one of my most-loved places, and one I want to
156 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
Sad farewells
Arriving in Athens the following morning was bittersweet. I was dying to get to the Acropolis but after only four days I struggled to say goodbye to my new floating home. Over the years I’ve read stories about people who have retired, sold their home and spent months, even years at sea on cruise ships like this – their food and accommodation covered, plenty to entertain them each day and the bonus of seeing the world. I had wondered how they didn’t go slightly mad with all that time at sea. Now I understand that their plan is genius. And when it comes my time to retire one day, I think I might just be joining them. AWW l The
writer travelled courtesy of Princess Cruises. See princesscruises.com.
DINING
OUT You’ll never go hungry on a cruise ship – there is food, and all of it good, available 24 hours a day. Room service is available for those who want to stay in their robe and dine in private on their balcony (I did this for breakfast each morning) and you can use Sky Princess’s new high-tech MedallionClass to order anything, from anywhere on the ship – pretty impressive when you remember you’re hundreds of miles out to sea.
l
Don’t forget to stop by Gelato after dinner at one of the main dining rooms or specialty restaurants. All of Gelato’s Italian ice-cream is made from scratch each day. Even better it’s completely authentic – Sky Princess is awaiting accreditation from Ospitalità Italiana, an Italian government body that approves standards of Italian food and hospitality. l
And don’t worry about all those extra courses – there’s a well fitted-out gym if you want to work off the extra calories, or you can take the less arduous and more scenic option, like I did, and walk around the fitness track on the top deck each morning. It’s stunning, especially early in the morning before many of the other passengers are up and about. And of course, walking the stairs in between decks rather than waiting for the lift will ease the guilt a little come dinner time. l
PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF PRINCESS CRUISES.
FROM LEFT: Beautiful Kotor, in Montenegro, is backed by limestone cliffs; inside one of the new 160sqm Sky Suites.
return to again. It’s one of the wonderful bonuses of cruising – discovering a different spot you may not have thought of visiting, and realising it is your new favourite place in the world. Back on board the ship after farewelling Montenegro we set sail again, this time headed for our final destination, Athens. It’s been one of my bucket list spots for years, mainly to see the Acropolis. We had another day at sea before we arrived in Greece – which was taken up with more poolside relaxing, multiple trips to the gelato café, a tour of the two new Sky Suites (at more than 160sqm and with two bedrooms, living room and enormous balcony overlooking the top of the ship they’re the biggest suites to ever feature on a Princess liner), and sitting on my balcony just watching the world go by. It’s sort of meditative, watching the ocean from 10 storeys up.
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Destinations
The Kalahari
WINE
The Kalahari’s sweeping desert savannah is the perfect place to unwind and discover the timeless beauty of Africa. On a visit here, you’ll find one of the best destinations to spot meerkats and cheetahs. If you’re lucky, you might also find the elusive pangolin and aardvark. For the ultimate desert safari experience, stay at The Motse in Tswalu private game reserve – luxury at the foot of the Korannaberg Mountains.
AND
CapeWinelands
-free travel to South Africa has landed! Exploring untry’s wildlife and culture has never been ut where should you go and what should you do? Ed ited by
Famed for its worldrenowned wines and beautiful Dutch architecture, the Cape Winelands is an easy add-on when visiting Cape Town. The cluster of picturesque towns is just a 45-minute drive from the city, and the pinotage is to die for. Go wine tasting to the many vineyards, or try a tram tour, sampling delicious cuisine and fine wines while rolling through lush green valleys.
OLIVIA GRAVES from Wor l d J ou rn eys
LUXURY RAIL
Pack your fancy clothes and discover South Africa as a “world in one country” aboard the luxurious Rovos Rail. The wood-panelled coaches and Victorianera dining car channel the romance of a bygone era. Meals are served in grand style with fine china, silver and crisp linen, paired with the finest South African wines. Journeys on offer include everything from Pretoria to Cape Town, to multicountry jaunts.
The Mother City
Cape Town (nicknamed the Mother City) is one of the world’s most beautiful cities, with breathtaking Table Mountain as a backdrop. Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, is a reminder of the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. The city bustles with world-class dining and thriving nightlife. For a touch of luxury, try the Cape Grace Hotel on the Victoria & Alfred Waterfront.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY GETTY IMAGES. FOR EXPERT TRAVEL ASSISTANCE, VISIT WORLDJOURNEYS.CO.NZ.
WILDLIFE
Promotion
FROM LEFT: Guy Blundell and his daughter, artist Katie Blundell, are the creative team behind Riverhaven Artland; Between Two Trees by Cheryl Wright is inspired by the daisy chains of her childhood.
Home is where
is
A new Clevedon sculpture park holds special memories for the father and daughter who created it.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JANE BLUNDELL. INSTAGRAM @RIVERHAVENARTLAND.
F
or the past three generations, the Blundells have lived in Clevedon, a rural area that overlooks the Hauraki Gulf in Auckland. A dairy farm became an orchard which has now become Riverhaven Artland, a sprawling, 16-hectare sculpture park in a particularly scenic spot. It’s a project of love for Guy Blundell and his daughter, artist Katie Blundell. Guy’s wife, and Katie’s mother, Sue, died over 20 years ago and Guy started planting trees as a way of coping. The picturesque spot has become a perfect place to highlight the work of New Zealand artists, with a particular focus on female sculptors. The permanent collection includes work by Peter Lange, James Wright, Cheryl Wright, Samantha Lissette, Melanie Arnold and more. With many beautiful paths to explore and plenty of friendly sheep to keep you company, Riverhaven Artland aims to create a place where nature greets art. It will be included in the Clevedon Art Trail Open Studio Event on January 25-27 (clevedonarttrail.co.nz). Visit riverhavenartland.com for more information about opportunities to visit, and follow them on Facebook and Instagram for updates. RIGHT FROM TOP: What’s the Time Mr Wolf? by Katie Blundell; Who am I? by Fred Graham; Run River Two by Louise Purvis.
Entertainment
Take a trip to the Auckland Botanic Gardens and you’ll find more than just flowers this month. In A Curious Garden is a theatrical adventure inspired by Alice in Wonderland, performed by a cast of 30. The free performances weave in stories about endangered plants and the future of our planet.
O F F TO A F LY I N G S TA R T
If your New Year’s resolution is to move more, give tai chi a go. Free classes are starting at Auckland’s Cornwall Park from January 5. Every Tuesday from 6-7pm and Sundays from 9-10am in Pohutukawa Drive, Cornwall Park, kiaorataichi.nz.
The skies above Tauranga will be filled with the sound of jets, aerobatic planes and military aircraft on January 18 for Classics of the Sky: Tauranga City Airshow. Crowd favourites include the Royal NZ Air Force Black Falcons and the New Zealand Warbirds Roaring Forties display teams. Tickets from eventfinda.co.nz.
January 18 and 19 at the Auckland Botanic Gardens, Manurewa, aucklandnz.com.
This month
A vintage party, dramatic aerobatics, tai chi in the park… there’s something for everyone in January. Three powerhouse female performers are headlining one of summer’s biggest shows. Singer Gin Wigmore is making her return to the Kiwi stage, joined by Tami Neilson and Hollie Smith, for a one-night show at Soper Reserve in Mt Maunganui on January 7. Take a picnic and dance the night away. Tickets at livenation.co.nz.
Whanganui
is officially our prettiest city and it’s putting on its biggest party of the year. Whanganui Vintage Weekend will be held over three days from January 17-20 and celebrates all things vintage – music, art, ballroom dancing, high teas, heritage walks, steam engine trailer rides and a vintage car parade. Pop on an outfit from your favourite era and join the party. See whanganuivintageweekend.nz.
160 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
On screen
Film review
An oldie, but definitely a goodie – this star-studded reinvention is hugely entertaining. Wit h
KATE RODGER
Little Women
Starring Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Meryl Streep, Timothée Chalamet and Laura Dern. Directed by Greta Gerwig.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY ALAMY AND GETTY IMAGES.
P
lease, I beg of you, do not drag me out into the town square and throw me in the stocks for this shocking public confession, but I’ve never been much of an aficionado of the Austen/Alcott/Brontës books and adaptations. They’ve just never particularly connected with me. Until now. Film-maker Greta Gerwig is no stranger to awards-worthy outings. Her fabulous Lady Bird, with her muse Saoirse Ronan again in the lead role, was deservedly nominated for five Oscars and won two Golden Globes. Now they are back with the beloved Louisa May Alcott novel Little Women. I was a little “yeah/nah” when I first heard about it but now, after seeing it, I am very much YEAH. It’s no mean feat to take original source material like this, a story first published in the 1860s, and deliver to the here and now. Gerwig and her fabulous cast do this with the script, their robust, authentic performances and their commitment to a bracingly chaotic realism, showing us how women really communicate: with vigour, passion and much hilarity. Ronan takes on the key role of aspiring writer and all-round firecracker Jo, alongside her sisters, of course: rising star Florence Pugh (as Amy), Emma Watson (Meg) and Eliza Scanlen (the ailing Beth). Laura Dern is their saintly mother, with
Meryl Streep offsetting that demeanour to perfection on her mission to rival the Dowager Countess of Grantham as the acid-tongued Aunt March. The veritable cat among the pigeons is young Timothée Chalamet as their neighbour Theodore “Laurie” Lawrence. The themes are in keeping with the era, but cleverly refreshed. The overarching need for women to marry into money to keep their family afloat, to choose financial security over love, is still the backbone of this narrative. But there is nary a hint of that age-old adage that wives and children should only ever speak when spoken to, and I’m not sure I witnessed a single curtsy – correct me if I’m wrong! The story stays true to the novel, with the girls’ father away at war, leaving his family to manage for themselves. They scrape together a fairly simple but happy life, befriending the Lawrences next door as they do. The trials and tribulations of the four very different girls growing into four just as different little women fill out this story so authentically and with such surprising relevance. The end result is two hours of first-rate entertainment. Watch out for Little Women this awards season and, of course, at a cinema near you. This one is not to be missed.
BINGE WATCH T H E M A N DA L O R I A N (STREAMING ON DISNEY+)
Starring Pablo Pascal, Created by Jon Favreau Shock horror, I hear you cry. Kate Rodger is bingewatching a Star Wars TV show! Well, yes she is, and so should anyone who calls themselves a Star Wars fan and even those who don’t. The Mandalorian is the flagship original on which Disney’s new streaming service is hanging its launch hat, and it’s good… very, very good. A space western steeped in Lucas lore complete with a baby Yoda so cute it melted the internet, this is the TV show you’ve been looking for. Binge The Mandalorian on Disney+ right now.
HHHHH JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
161
Books special
r e mm u S g n i d a e r Best books for lazy holidays – from thrillers to historical novels and family dramas.
Literary reads
DAMASCUS by Christos
Tsiolkas, Allen & Unwin A new Christos Tsiolkas novel is always an event and Damascus doesn’t disappoint. It’s a powerful, exciting and ambitious historical work based on
Crossings by Alex
Landragin, Pan Macmillan
A wealthy bibliophile brings a treasured manuscript to her Paris binder. The pages are creased, yellowed and pungent with the nutty aroma “that old paper exhales as it decays”, and underneath the title is a jumble of figures. The book is broken up into three stories, and the reader can choose to read them in any order. In the first story, laudanum-addicted poet Charles Baudelaire meets a woman who says she was once his lover. She offers to find him the youthful body of a literary talent to “cross” into. If you start on page 150, the last story, you meet a Jewish escapee writing a novel as Nazis burn books. Story two is a dark romance set when the Germans invade Paris.
the gospels and letters of St Paul, unpicking our idea of Christianity and its teachings. Here we are knee-deep in the world immediately following Christ’s execution and as debate about Jesus rumbles, there are also questions of faith, good and evil to be nutted out.
GIRL by Edna O’Brien,
Allen & Unwin
THE MUSEUM OF BROKEN PROMISES
by Elizabeth Buchan, Allen & Unwin Laure is the curator of a unique Parisian museum, housing everyday items that represent moments of grief, betrayal and loss. Her own contribution – a train ticket from Czechoslovakia to Austria – suggests a connection with dissident politics behind the Iron Curtain. As the action flits back to the summer of 1985, a story of Cold War intrigue and secret love is revealed.
Concise and confounding, this superb novel narrated by a Nigerian girl abducted by Boko Haram throws up powerful questions about the darkest corners of humanity and how we deal with them. But amid the horror is tenderness.
Fiction & fantasy
The Shelly Bay Ladies Swimming Circle by Sophie Green, Hachette
Four women dive into the ocean together every morning, each in search of something different. It’s 1982 with Paul Hogan on TV and The Man from Snowy River making faint hearts quiver, but for these women their swimming circle provides unique companionship. Theresa is after fitness and some me-time, widowed Marie wants a new routine to help process her loss, Elaine, newly arrived from England, wants to stave off her loneliness, while nurse Leanne is running from a desperate situation. The traumas and triumphs of these four women are supremely recognisable and we feel we are in the ocean with them as their stories unfold.
Family drama Allegra in Three Parts by Suzanne Daniel, Pan Macmillan
Allegra is 11, living in 1970s Bondi and bounces between her two grandmothers and her surfie dad. What happened to her mother is the mystery at the heart of this story and we can only reach it through our tapestry of characters. Matilde, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor, is intense and wants Allegra to study hard to be a doctor. Joy is a free-spirited feminist, has a tortoise called Simone de Beauvoir and collects her tears in glass bottles. And Rick is a gambling addict and desperately misses Allegra’s mum. The plot swirls, a mighty wave which crashes as tensions erupt.
THE MODEL WIFE
by Tricia Stringer, HQ Fiction Mum, wife, teacher, caregiver to all, Natalie King is 58 when she is struck by a health crisis which makes her rethink her life. She lives on a farm, has three daughters who are fully grown, but for various reasons are still hanging around, a non-committal husband and an overbearing mother-in-law. Now it is time for Natalie to find herself, and the unlikely catalyst is a book her mother-in-law gave her years ago – The Model Wife, written in 1928, offering stern and old-fashioned advice for young wives.
THE HARP OF KINGS
by Juliet Marillier, Pan Macmillan This is the first in a promising new series from fantasy queen Juliet Marillier, and fans of her Sevenwaters trilogy won’t be disappointed. Eighteen-year-old Liobhan is a girl-power heroine, a beautiful singer, expert whistler and superb fighter. She aches to be one of Swan Island’s elite warriors and, with her brother, is training hard. But then they are called on a special mission, which involves posing as wandering minstrels as they seek out a precious harp, which has mysteriously disappeared. What follows involves troublesome druids, an evil prince, magical myths and a slow-burn romance.
GHOST FIRE by Wilbur Smith
with Tom Harper, Allen & Unwin The 28th in Wilbur Smith’s Courtney series is an epic. It opens in 1754 in Madras, India, where English siblings Constance and Theo are enjoying a privileged life until their parents are killed in an attack on the fort in the Seven Years’ War with the French. This tears them apart as Theo joins the Brits and Connie becomes the victim of cruel guardians. What follows is a sometimes violent adventure story with endless twists and turns.
THE MITFORD SCANDAL
by Jessica Fellowes, Little, Brown Number three in the delicious Mitford Murders series sees Diana, 18, the most beautiful of the Mitford sisters, wed heir to a fortune, Bryan Guinness, and head to Paris. But their gay life is punctured when one of their party is found dead – is a murderer among them?
THE CLERGYMAN’S WIFE
by Molly Greeley, Allen & Unwin Pride and Prejudice fans will remember Charlotte Collins, who sensibly married ridiculous vicar Mr Collins. This tale imagines what happens when true passion enters Charlotte’s universe.
Real life
Other People’s Houses by Hilary McPhee, MUP
This is the second volume of writer and publisher Hilary McPhee’s memoirs, but it works in isolation and is engrossing. Hilary’s story starts with a former school hockey team-mate calling her out of the blue with a curious message. Hilary may hear from someone in Amman, Jordan about a writing project. At the time Hilary was bruised in the wake of her marriage break-up and was uncharacteristically enticed by the prospect of flying to the Middle East. She has been asked to write the memoir of Prince Hussan. However, when she gets to Amman, she discovers that despite liking the prince, persuading him to open up his life for a book is nearly impossible. Honest and fascinating.
Suspense
Those People by Louise
UNDER CURRENTS
Candlish, Simon & Schuster
by Norah Roberts, Hachette
When riff-raff Darren Booth drives his filthy, decrepit Toyota into London suburban Lowland Way, the close-knit, tennis-playing community baulked. Most of the Victorian villas were destroyed during the war, but Booth’s arrival was a bomb too far and battles ensue. First with manners – a meet and greet! But paradise is lost and loud music, parking violations and anger escalate into a horrific crime. Everyone has something to hide, but the residents close ranks: Booth did it. The police don’t agree. “I see who you think you are, but I know you’re no better than me,” warns Booth.
With its sweet rose garden, two faux turrets and three storeys of brown brick, Dr Graham Bigelow’s European-style property exudes wealth and style – right down to the Mercedes SUV, mountain bikes and ski equipment stacked in the tidy garage. But nervy wife Eliza and children, sulky Zane and obedient Britt, hide secrets behind the family’s imposing front door. Respected Dr Bigelow is not what he seems. The family’s life falls apart as brutality builds.
TOWARDS THE MOUNTAIN: A STORY OF GRIEF AND HOPE FORTY YEARS ON FROM EREBUS by Sarah Myles,
Allen & Unwin Moving and personal, Kiwi writer Sarah Myles tells her family tale after her grandfather, Frank Christmas, was killed alongside 256 others at Mt Erebus in Antarctica. Through a series of interviews, she unpacks not only what happened after the disaster, but what happened in the final moments on the plane, in an attempt to bring closure to those who lost loved ones. An in-depth and intimate exploration into one of New Zealand’s biggest tragedies.
THE SELF-CARE SOLUTION
by Jennifer Ashton MD, William Morrow One of the US’s leading doctors describes her journey to emotional and physical self-improvement, by focusing on one challenge a month for an entire year. The result is a book that takes the waffling out of wellbeing and provides an easy blueprint for readers to follow, one month at a time.
164 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
THE EX by Nicola Moriarty, Moriarty HarperCollins Nurse Georgia finishes her Friday shift to meet Tinder-date Brett. But after two very expensive cocktails, it’s clear she’s been stood up. When two drunken men crowd her, a third guy – Luke – steps in. They share a drink and she goes home feeling “pretty Disney”, until his ex emerges. A pacy pager-turner.
A MADNESS OF SUNSHINE
by Nalini Singh, Hachette Nalini Singh, a New York Times bestselling author of contemporary romance novels, takes a new turn with this excellent crime novel set in New Zealand. A West Coast town is rocked by tragedy and tries to move on, but eight years later, when one of their own disappear, the cracks start to appear.
Historical fiction
The Guardian of Lies es
by Kate Furnivall, Simon & Sch huster
MEET ME AT LENNON’S
It’s 1953 and the Cold War iss hitting France. Eloise was raised on a bull farm in the south but has folllowed her elder brother André to Paris. She idolises her brother so when he joins the CIA as a spook, Eloise triies to follow suit. Her application is turned down, so she joins an investig gation agency. A mission involving both b siblings leaves Andrew injureed and Eloise determined to discoverr who betrayed him, but she no long ger knows who she can trust.
by Melanie Myers, UQP When uni student Olivia comes across the “river girl murder”, a young woman killed on the banks of the river in wartime Brisbane, she feels compelled to dig deeper. And so begins a split timeline tale, flitting between the present day and the 1940s when Lennon’s social club was the place to meet US soldiers in the city and tensions simmered dangerously.
THE DAUGHTER’S TALE by Arm mando
THE UNFORGIVING CITY by Maggie Joel,
REVIEWS BY KATIE EKBERG, JULIET RIEDEN AND EMMA CLIFTON. ILLUSTRATIONS BY GETTY IMAGES.
Lucas Correa, Simon & Schusterr
Allen & Unwin
In 1939 Nazi sympathisers rule the streets of Berlin. Bookshop owner, Amanda, who is Jewish h, is procrastinating about handing g over “unpatriotic” volumes to be burned. Cardiologist husband Julius ple eads with her to hurry, so they can e escape with their two daughters. But one o day Julius does not come home fro om his office – he’s been sent to a forrced labour camp to work as a doc ctor. uth of Amanda flees towards the sou France and is offered the chan nce to escape to Cuba. Will she go? Based B on the harrowing true story of one of the Nazis’ worst atrocities.
Inspiration
CREATE YOUR OWN MIDLIFE CRISIS
by Marie Phillips, Profile Books Styled after the old-school “choose your own adventure” titles of our childhood, this hilarious, tongue-in-cheek book gets you to design your midlife crisis instead. The options for excitement/ disaster are truly endless; will you shave your head or run off with a Brazilian shaman to try ayahuasca in the Amazon? Maybe get a matching tattoo with your dad, or ring up your ex-husband and discuss having another baby?
The true story of Australia’s journey to federation, when six colonies tried to unite as one, is the gripping backdrop for a novel about three people sharing a house in colonial Sydney. The city is a melting pot of trouble as class struggles, women’s rights and the rise of unions bubble in the background.
SHE SPEAKS by Yvette Cooper,
Atlantic A collection of speeches by well-known women, from historical figures like Emmeline Pankhurst and Elizabeth 1 to modern-day heroines like Michelle Obama. Her 2016 speech that made famous her motto: “When they go low, we go high,” is included, as is Jacinda Ardern’s speech following the March 15 mosque attacks. An important bit of history in a world where it’s mainly speeches by male leaders that get quoted the most.
A MAORI PHRASE A DAY
by Hēmi Kelly, Raupo We are blessed to have a beautiful indigenous language in our country, and if you want to incorporate more te reo Māori in your daily life, this phrasebook full of usable little snippets makes it feel like fun, not homework. Clever and accessible.
BROUGHT TO YOU BY
Puzzles
Find A Word T I U S M I W S N H S A L P S
S H O R E M A E R C C N I Z P
F L O A T I E S U R F I N G E
S D N P S R N B E R I P P L E
T S A O C S A N I N I K I B D
E R Y S I D Y S U D U F E R O
Easy Crossword
W L N A I T N A S S E D A S S
E U B V B O A R D S H O R T S
S D I A R E E C A I B A S N R
H N A K T P D V A E L E T E E
G C E H P A E I I V V O S R M
A L A I S R L G S H D E H R M
I N L E T N O F S A V O I U I
N F C A B O U A N A E L R C W
S A N D B A R S W I T S T S S
Holiday time means the beach and we’ve hidden a host of beach-related words in the grid here. These words can be spelt horizontally, vertically, diagonally, backwards and forwards, but always in a straight line. When you have found all the words listed below you should have 11 letters left over, and these will spell the mystery answer. Solution in next month’s issue.
BAY BEACH BIKINI BOARD SHORTS BOOGIEBOARD COAST CURRENTS DIP DUNES FLIPPERS FLOATIES HAT HOLIDAYS
INFLATABLE INLET LIFESAVER RASHVEST RIPPLE ROD SANDBAR SCUBA DIVING SEASIDE SHORE SNORKEL SPEEDOS SPLASH
SUNNIES SUNSCREEN SUNSHADE SURFING SWIMMERS SWIMSUIT T-SHIRT VACATION WAVES WRAP ZINC CREAM
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When you complete the crossword, the letters on the shaded squares, reading left to right, top to bottom, will spell the mystery word. Solution in next month’s issue.
ACROSS
DOWN
1. Sketching implement 5. Greeny-blue 9. Subject, … of conversation 10. Bring life to 11. Synthetic, … fibres (3-4) 12. Identified, … the suspect 13. Necklace baubles 15. Pie’s pastry 20. Large wading bird 22. Enters by force, … the country 24. From London, eg 25. Reigned, governed 26. Remain, … in place 27. Firmly balanced
2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 14. 16.
Outlay, cost Chocolate-based drink Filled with cargo Slimmer, skinnier Wake-up device, … clock Articles, … of clothing Flexible Degree of compactness Fitted with a riding seat, … the horse 17. Stilettos, loafers, etc 18. Tourist attractions, see the … 19. Keep in reserve, put … 21. Starboard side of boat 23. Section of a poem
JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
167
The Colossus ACROSS
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5. 9. 13. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 32. 34. 37. 39. 41. 42. 44. 47. 49. 50. 52. 54. 57. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 66. 67. 69. 70.
Assumed name, under an … Monastery head Sudden terror Short cloaks Oyster jewel Escape or avoid capture Last letter of the Greek alphabet View narrowing towards the horizon Caterpillar or grub, eg Type of Indian curry, … josh Workers’ guild, trade … Rome’s famous fountain Electrical therapy, … treatment Travel prices, train … Specific slot, … market Accurate, precise Ships’ chimneys Wander restlessly, … about Fastens on Sheep mother Small rug Umpire (abbrev) Bank cash dispenser (1,1,1) Literary composition Nasty, spiteful Arrange in loose folds Gives permission to Furniture item, coffee … Owns, possesses Cowboy’s lariat Subtly signify Victor Hugo novel, … Misérables Coming from the East Large vase Oil lamp, … lantern Soft-drink gassiness Meaningless repetition, repeat by … Food cupboards, larders Makes beloved, … himself Area, neighbourhood Spiritual guide Cupid
71. Australian bird, spangled … 75. Waded ankle-deep in water 80. Enclosed shopping street 83. Fail to recollect 85. Composer of The Minute Waltz 86. Original, unique (3-3) 87. Unfaithful spouse, cheater 88. Drink alcohol, eg 89. Reverberated 91. Sings alpine-style 93. Rule over 96. Fragrant thorny flower (3,4) 100. Medical fitness 103. Rise up 104. Scary film, … movie 105. Country formerly called Nyasaland 108. Crisp round lettuce 112. Metal bar that attracts other metal 115. Brand-name fastening strip 117. Forehead hair 118. Famous cavalry attack, … of the Light Brigade 119. Mark made by sea on ship, below the … 120. Prone to 121. Minor complaint 123. Erase, remove 125. Marmalade fruit 127. Nattered, gossiped 131. Birds’ hooked claws 134. Move by small degrees, … forward 135. Dropped from schedule, the program was … 136. Walks wearily 139. Gain a legacy 140. Charade, sham 143. Cygnet’s parent 144. Restless desire 145. Strews around 147. Old record label (1,1,1) 148. Ignite again, … the romance 150. Devour 151. Pay a call on 154. Margins, at the … 157. Musical twosome 158. Drive back, … an attack 160. Spotted, was … 162. Aida opera composer
168 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
164. Actor and comedian, … Rogen 166. Swift, a … response 167. Paid sportsperson 168. Discard, get … of 170. Prohibit 171. At the moment 173. Pumping mechanisms in engines 174. Rock song, Born in the … (1,1,1) 175. Impersonation 176. Harnesses for oxen 180. Field entrances 181. Ready and willing 182. Research deeply, … into 183. Footloose actor, … Bacon 184. Old US sitcom, … Lucy (1,4) 185. Large fishing net 186. Tilts, slants 187. Artery of the heart 188. Mournful tune 189. Sign up for a course 190. Makes money, … a living 191. Cheeky, lively and bold 192. Considers, … it possible 193. Sugary 194. Hurriedly, in …
DOWN
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Australian national anthem, … Australia Fair Following on from (2,10,2) Sudden outbreak, a … of robberies Escort as a date (4,3) Partnership Spain’s secondlargest city Poke fun at Mechanical moving figures Chipper, jaunty Close of the day War, battle Novice driver Bring about Chief female dancer (5,9) Holy place in a temple, inner … King Kong heroine, … Wray Collection
33. Rock song, You … It Well 34. Method, style 35. Identity cards (1,1,1) 36. Cut and polished stone 38. Spread in many directions (3,3) 40. Adolescent (abbrev) 43. Aircraft’s height 45. Circular, curved 46. Hit for The Who, … Wizard 48. Upper-jaw canine (3-5) 50. Jumped on one foot 51. Fable, The Tortoise and the … 53. Appraise, gauge (4,2) 55. Contracted into wrinkles, … her mouth 56. Ghost actress, … Moore 58. Put down roots 65. Lack of objectionable qualities 68. Tapas-bar tortilla (7,8) 72. Beatles’ drummer, … Starr 73. Not a soul, tell … (2-3) 74. Study of history through excavation 76. Blue of the sky 77. Daunt, put off 78. Noblemen 79. Initial impressions, on first … 81. Hooded snake 82. First public performance, movie … 84. Smidgen, just a … 85. Shed tears 90. Senior in years 92. Different, alternative 94. Batman Forever actor, … Kilmer 95. Uncooked, … food 96. Chinese exercise form, … chi 97. Hymn, … Maria 98. Type of poem 99. Chocolate treat, Easter … 101. Milestone period 102. Classic horror movie actor, … Chaney 106. Find repugnant, loathe 107. Pinafore
109. Best fresh fish, … of the day 110. Soft flat hat 111. German river 113. Movie, Monty Python and the Holy … 114. US talk-show host, … DeGeneres 116. Have debts, … money 117. Provided with a meal 122. Radio broadcast medium (4,4) 124. Uses, … her rights 125. Deliberately vague 126. Extremely quickly (2,1,4,2,5) 127. Vulnerabilities, … in his armour 128. Track or field competitor 129. Lingered, stayed 130. Going steady 132. Slightly acquainted (2,7,5) 133. Hi-fi unit 137. Hogwarts hero, Harry … 138. Listen attentively, be all … 141. Laments, … the day 142. Taipei is there 146. English comedian, Jimmy … 149. Simple board game 152. Whatever happens (2,3,4) 153. Climbing evergreen 155. Tried hard, … her best 156. Spying activity 159. Golf hole’s rim 161. Obtained by threats, … money 163. US cattle duffers 165. Stocky in build 166. Beam of sunlight 167. Science subject 169. Australian and NZ soldiers 170. Valour, courage 172. Unwanted surplus 177. Shabby, disreputable 178. Ticks over, … the engine 179. Cuts down, … the trees 180. Grind the teeth
Solution in next month’s issue.
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JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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Insider Powder holder Our star: – de Rossi
The clues for this puzzle are all within the grid itself. Write your answers in the direction shown by each arrow. All answers run left to right or top to bottom. When you have finished, the letters on the shaded squares will spell the mystery word. Solution in next month’s issue.
Roof rooms At back: in the –
Movie: The Pink –
Fulfilled: – your obligations Labyrinth Took a seat: – down
Vampire mammal
Parent’s father
Operate: – machinery
Lightly cooked meat: – steak
Sway: move – and fro Speak
Listened: – music 50 per cent They: he and – Was consumed
Sunblock: pink – Distant
Summer, autumn, eg Removed centre Challenge Bees’ home
Curved doorway Entire: – of it Country: – Lanka
Nickname for Dorothy
Singles: they scored in –
Termites: white – Fire residue
Chocolate Oils, biscuit: pastels etc – Tam
Type of poem
Cuppa: billy – Repair, renew
Region, zone Song: We – Family
Cashew, pecan, eg
Part of a circle Smelly: on the –
Humble, meek
Display space: – gallery
Word of agreement Morning moisture
Pub counter
Possess, have
Prohibit Try hard: – your best Keep
Use a loom
Scarlet
Our star: – Denton
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170 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
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In this puzzle, each letter of the alphabet is represented by a number from one to 26. We’ve put in three numbers and their corresponding letters in the top panel. Fill this in as you go, then use your letters to fill in the squares below the panel to get your mystery word. Solution in next month’s issue.
Cryptic Crossword 1
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ACROSS
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Extravagant to lash around six (6) Looking to do some Googling (6) Depend on Darrel, yes, a little (4) Keep fellow – a warehouse worker (8) Bloomer might be part of hippy culture (6,5) Poor punners again produce naming words (6,5) Connective tissue and lint seen on game (8) A method of being not at home (4) Lament poorly relating to the mind (6) Iron I see (and hear) to be satirical (6)
DOWN
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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 12. 13. 15. 16. 17. 19.
Solution in next month’s issue.
Word Maker
K A R H C E D I C
How many words of four letters or more can you make using the letters given here? Each one must include the central letter and you should have at least one nine-letter word in your total. Avoid plurals, proper nouns, hyphenated words, those with apostrophes and verb forms ending with “s”, eg, “bakes”.
25 SMART 28 TERRIFIC 32+ BRILLIANT! Solution overleaf.
Sudoku
Each number from 1 to 9 must appear in each of the nine rows, nine columns and 3 x 3 blocks. Tip: No number can occur more than once in any row, column or 3 x 3 block. Solution overleaf.
8 5
4
Early holding half gear keenly (7) Urban settlement is alternatively chintzy (4) One pursuing Anne Hegerty, for example (6) Ornate architecture style or backing Ms Chanel (6) Go relate again to second personality (5,3) Need, we hear, pressing work! (5) Rant, yes, after battle for assurance (8) Sick person has no legal authority (7) Pa and singer Fitzgerald get Spanish dish (6) Keep rain on alien (6) Tribe turns up in Italian river (5) Bit of a tomato a very small thing (4)
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Spot The Difference
Test your powers of observation. The two pictures at right may look the same, but we’ve made six changes to the one on the right. Can you spot them all? Solution overleaf.
JANUARY 2020 | The Australian Women’s Weekly
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Recipes
you can trust
1
Every recipe in The Australian Women’s Weekly is tripletested by our world-famous Test Kitchen, established in 1950. Each dish is created by our food team, then tested three times to ensure it works as well for you in your ki as it does in ours.
2
You can trust The Australian Women’s Weekly’s food team to be first with the new trends – after all, we introduced Chinese cooking into homes in the 1970s and are now giving mainstream appeal to the new world of superfoods and clean eating.
3
Ingredients we use will be readily available in your local supermarket and if we do suggest an exotic item, we always give an alternative that’s easy to find.
from centre of arch. 3. Extra pattern added to green skirt. 4. Stripes removed from yellow T-shirt. 5. Second lady’s lip colour changed to blue. 6. Lense removed from second lady’s camera. WORD MAKER: Aced, Ache, Ached, Acid, Acre, Acrid, Arced, Arch, Arched, Cache, Cached, Cadre, Cake, Caked, Card, Care, Cared, Cedar, Chair, Chaired, Char, Chard, Check, Chic, Chick, Chide, Cider, Crack, Creak, Cracked, Crick, Cricked, Cried, Deck, Dicer, Dicker, Each, Hack, Hacked, Hacker, Heck, Hick, Iced, Race, Raced, Rack, Racked, Reach, Rice, Rich, Rick, Deckchair.
7 8 5 2 6 9 1 4 3
4 1 9 7 5 3 6 2 8
3 6 2 8 1 4 5 7 9
1 3 7 4 9 2 8 6 5
5 2 4 6 8 1 3 9 7
6 9 8 5 3 7 4 1 2
2 7 3 1 4 8 9 5 6
9 4 6 3 7 5 2 8 1
8 5 1 9 2 6 7 3 4
December INSIDER:
Mystery answer: Carols.
D B A G T I V A N D A S W E F E A
T U R N S O U R
H E N U T R T A I G L S T WA R X P I E U V B R I E C R E T T YOG D E DG N L E S I P S A U T R S ON M B E A N P V I RO C C K N A A L X I I E S S C E
M C A R S H R E I S C H E A S T
N O N E H E R D S
E C P D L E E W L A W A K E S A R S H A R D O T S T P E A K R A R W L A S S I D L O O S T I N S E
O L OGY S U P E R I E A U A O KOH L M E S S Y E A L S O T A L L L U B A L L I Y T O S C A A Y A H S E X Y E E K B I D E I L L A DO S T Y E P AGOU T I L E X AM N MU D D D P R I N C E E L E E O O A D A N Y N U N S A D R E S H Y E R E A D S I E NGA A R A S S A Y A I MO T H R E C I P D N E I S T E P OK E OB J E C R I I N A N E R S E N E D C D E S C V C F EW E C E OA R OW L R U N I R SW I G O I L I E R I L OOM L OU T S U I N S I S T H T I C E T AM E E T O T S A R RO N N H A P E S T D R A I N L V E U K D E F E C N C RO P Y N A N T I L U R K S N G L O I U P T R E S T H E S E
C R A C K E R E E L
N O L E R I D E S T E V E N I N D A S S
B A K E D B A S S I S T S O H E MU I E T D R AW S R I O T A I R E K K E R N U B A S T I C N X P R OO F O HOOK S S R I S OY A K T A NON L S K I P ON C E G I T E M A P T C H D A SWE L L E M I T I E R L E X E S D N L A YOU T S L E D G E I P H I P I E L I D E GO A U N T S S E N D R I E I G E D A WA R R A N T S R E AG L E Y N T I E N T I D L E A RMS S O F F E G A T I ON T H AW R E D O L P E R S E I A V E N T U M I N I M I S E U F E E M R M R T A R MO P I MAMS S S E I A S S G E P L E DG E R COV E I D E R T O T O I G A P I E C E L I N E OA K S A D S L E T AVON L OA F V S A I L F Y RO S E G MY T H S M L R T OR S E T I N L A Y I O A N T E N O G A L B UM E P I C WO O R E E A R E E O A D DON M I R ROR E D
EASY CROSSWORD:
Mystery answer: Santa. L O S E R A P A K NOWN E O G S E N S E R M H A WA I S L H E L L O Y L A S K I E D T N E E A G E R
V B O Y R A G P E I E R E A T A X I N
T O V E MO S P O R A O I N S R E U S I N I N S T S I
WN R O S N GA P U R O I N N D I E X E
S T E R N E G L A S S
CRYPTIC CROSSWORD: G A R I S A U P N A P E N E C E J E C T T A S T I C A L I S R A E N R S P I R I E E R T I D I E
H N
K L T R
S P U M N C O T I N L I O U A S B
H A P E U L E R A T S A S T A U I S E C T T R OA D A L L L E I O A N T A
S T E A L O S M I U M
FIND A WORD:
Mystery answer: Celebration.
CLUELESS: 1=W, 2=L, 3=I, 4=O, 5=Q, 6=U, 7=M, 8=P, 9=Z, 10=V, 11=E, 12=S, 13=D, 14=K, 15=A, 16=G, 17=J, 18=F, 19=Y, 20=N, 21=T, 22=H, 23=C, 24=B, 25=X, 26=R. Mystery answer: Wreath.
JANUARY 2020, VOL 88, NO 1, PUBLISHED BY BAUER MEDIA GROUP (NZ) LP. New Zealand office: The City Works Depot, 90 Wellesley Street West, Auckland 1010. Letters: The Australian Women’s Weekly, Private Bag 92512, Wellesley Street, Auckland 1141. Tel: (09) 308 2945. Printed by: Webstar, PO Box 95 144, Swanson, Auckland. Distributors: Gordon & Gotch. Australian office: 54 Park Street, Sydney, NSW 2000. Tel: (+61) 2 9282 8000. Recommended and maximum price: New Zealand, $8.80 incl GST. To subscribe, phone 0800 624 746 (8am-5.30pm Monday-Friday) or visit magshop.co.nz. Recipes, instructions and patterns in this magazine are for personal use only, not for commercial purposes. Material in The Australian Women’s Weekly is protected under the Commonwealth Copyright Act 1968. No material may be reproduced in part or whole without written consent. BAUER MEDIA PRIVACY NOTICE This issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly magazine, published by Bauer Media Limited (Bauer Media), may contain offers, competitions or surveys which require you to provide information about yourself if you choose to enter or take part in them (Reader Offer). If you provide information about yourself to Bauer Media, Bauer Media will use this information to provide you with the products or services you have requested, and may supply your information to contractors that help Bauer Media to do this. Bauer Media will also use your information to inform you of other Bauer Media publications, products, services and events. Bauer Media may also give your information to organisations that are providing special prizes or offers and that are clearly associated with the Reader Offer. Unless you tell us not to, we may give your information to other organisations that may use it to inform you about other products, services or events, or to give to other organisations that may use it for this purpose. If you would like to gain access to the information Bauer Media holds about you, please contact The Privacy Officer Bauer Media (NZ) LP, City Works Depot, Shed 12 / 90 Wellesley Street West, Auckland 1010. Alternatively, you can send an email to our Privacy Officer at: privacyofficernz@bauermedia.co.nz.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY GETTY IMAGES. ILLUSTRATION: AUSPAC MEDIA/GEORGE WEBSTER.
AU
TESTED
SPOT THE DIFFERENCE: 1. Roof tiles removed. 2. Removed trees
SUDOKU:
TRIPLE
January
COLOSSUS:
E N ’S W EE
HE
ST R
OM W
E ST K I YT TC KL
AL I AN
Answers
Directory
Pakiri Beach Horse Rides
Imagine the wind in your face, the sun on your skin and only the sound of the waves and hoof beats on the sand. Riding exercises your body, refreshes your soul and lightens your mind. Pristine, unpopulated Pakiri Beach is yours to enjoy on a trained, cared for, well loved horse to suit your riding ability or your mood, in comfort and safety by yourself or in a group. 1 and 2-hour, half and full-day treks daily and multi-day rides of 2, 3 and 5 days. Departures: 10am and 2pm daily. Café, bar and accommodation.
p. (09) 422 6275 e. pakirihorse@xtra.co.nz w. www.horseride-nz.co.nz
317 Rahuikiri Rd, Pakiri Beach, Matakana
Sweaty palms
and you’re only on your way to the airport 485,000 Readership
52,436 Circulation
New Zealand’s most-sold and most-read monthly magazine To advertise in The Australian Women’s Weekly contact Kim Chapman: (07) 578 3646/021 673 133 e: classifieds@xtra.co.nz *Nielsen CMI Jan-Dec 18. ABC Oct 17-Sep 18
Having problems with flying is normal, doing nothing about it is not! Courses starting soon!
To find out more about the Flying Without Fear programme in your area. Visit www.flyok.co.nz or phone Sue Amos on 0800 737 225
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Sourcing the sweetest, juiciest, most flavoursome tomatoes is not just about what you know, but who – people like grower Jason Culbert, of Pukekohe’s NZ Hothouse, who Countdown’s buyers have been going back to for 35 years. Taste the Grower Fresh difference for yourself this summer at your nearest Countdown store, or shop online at countdown.co.nz.
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Huawei Y5 2019 reveals a design inspired by nature in the 5.71” Dewdrop display. The beautiful, vibrant screen with a wide 84.6 per cent screen-to-body ratio, shows off a bigger world for your entertainment or playing needs. Be recognised faster – the Huawei Y5 2019 will automatically begin to recognise your face once you lift up the phone. Using 1024 facial feature points to intelligently map your face, you can conveniently unlock your device in seconds, even in low-light. See Vodafone.co.nz/prepay.
Evolu’s beautiful Active Age-Defence Protective Day Cream SPF30 balances proven plantpowered hydration with the reassurance of reef-friendly, clear zinc sunscreen that’s safe, effective… and invisible. The expert blend of plant-actives works to protect, hydrate and nourish, supporting connective tissue to vitalise the skin’s appearance. All-natural fragrances and lightweight textures are a hallmark of the range. Evolu Active Age Defence Protective Day Cream SPF30, RRP $59.99 (60ml). evolu.com
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Horoscopes w ith
LILITH ROCHA
Capricorn DEC 22-JAN 20
With Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto and the sun in your sign setting this month’s table for a feast of Capricorn splendour, the new decade couldn’t offer you a warmer welcome. Yes, mid-January’s Saturn/Pluto conjunction could have widespread consequences, but auspicious, optimistic Jupiter is spending the whole year activating those higheroctave Capricorn qualities the world is presently so much in need of: integrity, responsible leadership and long-term vision. On a personal, everyday level this could look like understanding the larger drama in which we all play our parts, and trusting the strength of invisible but substantial energies like friendship, empathy and justice.
JA N 21 - F E B 19
New Year resolutions are part of our genetic inheritance – who doesn’t love a fresh start? January’s planetary configuration for Aquarians is in power-save mode, recharging after the hectic pace of recent weeks. Appreciating that less is more allows what you already have to shine brighter this month, especially when glamour puss Venus illuminates your sign for the first fortnight, followed by eloquent, entertaining Mercury. When the January 25 sun and new moon in Aquarius announce your annual wish-planting date, the astral force supports you to bring back the magic by inviting more of your heart’s desires into this year’s life and work.
Pisces
F E B 2 0- M A R 2 0
As January’s five-planet focus in Pisces’ friend zone enhances your love affair with the collective, people with wildly differing skill sets are likely to reveal intriguing facets and unexpected benefits of the hive mind. If you need to shield your romantic, idealistic field from doomy news when mid-month Venus shimmies her fluid allure into your super-sensitive sign, mind/body guru Deepak Chopra suggests gratitude is one feel-good way of doing it. His research shows grateful people have
lower stress levels because gratitude is more than an attitude: it’s a powerful tool for helping us through trying times.
Aries
M A R 2 1- A P R 2 1
Jupiter’s influence extends our horizons to open up new ways of seeing and perceiving. Flanked by celestial heavy-weights Saturn and Pluto, its presence in your career sector this year is excellent professional news because the lucky planet of expanded possibilities has been known to shatter glass ceilings. As January upgrades your skills at playing with others, the challenge is finding a graceful combination of loving and tough – especially if pruning Team Aries becomes necessary. Wise Chiron in your sign helps avoid making the same old mistakes, something this month’s Mars in Sagittarius (the foot in mouth transit) could put to the test.
Taurus
A P R 2 2 - M AY 2 1
“Our revels now are ended,” wrote famous Taurean William Shakespeare. But January’s new cycle of adventurous, enterprising energy proffers a passport to explore the mind-expanding possibilities of other cultures, inner realms and infinite creativity. Powerful planetary forces are at play for all signs this month and
176 The Australian Women’s Weekly | JANUARY 2020
while Uranus emerging from its fivemonth hibernation to rearrange relationships can be tricky, the results are ultimately liberating. Especially when Venus, your planetary guide gliding from fixed Aquarius into fluid Pisces, morphs Taurean friendships and love lives from mind-trapped to mermaidy, intellectual to sensual, more curvaceous and less hard-edged.
Gemini
M AY 2 2 - J U N 2 2
January’s gang of planets doing a major makeover of your joint ventures and shared resources might not be entirely comfortable, but Gemini’s mentor, Mercury, shifting mid-month to the sign of bright ideas will bring renewed confidence and the ability to see longterm pay-offs. If an unexpected offer gives you goose bumps, don’t wait. Negotiate and seize the opportunity to execute a few shrewd master moves. While this month sets up 2020’s template for communicating with groups and wider online networks, on a personal level try not to make assumptions about what someone else may be thinking or feeling. If you want to know, ask.
Cancer
JUN 23-JUL 23
Your introduction to the new decade arrives via this month’s defining moment: the super-charged full moon lunar eclipse
ILLUSTRATION BY LUCILE PRACHE/THE ILLUSTRATION ROOM.
Aquarius
in Cancer on January 11. So tune your receptors to what’s arguably your premier astral event for 2020, which could manifest as an epiphany, eureka experience, profound release or transformational breakthrough. If a group project stalled recently, that holding pattern allowed certain key elements to shift; now events can power forward with more mature communication, negotiation and mediation, less aggravation, frustration and alienation. When the January 25 new moon schmoozes Venus in romantic Pisces, expect charismatic connections, soul synching and sensual flares.
Leo
J U L 24 - AU G 2 3
Your glamorous majesties are naturally familiar with the concept of noblesse oblige – that privilege entails responsibility – because mid-January’s momentous Saturn/Pluto conjunction is likely to require all of your Leo superpowers. As a potent concentration of planetary energy in your sector of service helps refine your must-do and must-have lists to only what serves the highest purpose, this could mean significant shifts in the company you keep. Which in no way sees you alone on the throne: friends, family, social networks and community groups offer loyal support and add no small amount of fun to this month’s organisational efforts.
Virgo
AU G 2 4 - S E P 2 3
While Virgos are always acutely aware of the room for improvement, don’t be tempted to do extensions on it this month. January’s potentially dramatic dynamics won’t benefit from a glasshalf-empty perspective, so be a silverlining finder instead. Here’s a kickstarter to begin with: a five-planet bonanza in your house of creative brilliance this month highlights the benefits of challenging situations and gets changes working in your favour. While Virgos operate most efficiently with structured plans, mid-month Venus swimming into hydrating Pisces to water your inner lawn makes it easier to balance feelings and facts.
Libra
S E P 2 4- O C T 23
January’s congregation of heavenly bodies in grounded, practical Capricorn and your foundational base of emotional security and ancestry – your roots – has the capacity to expand your clan or add to your extended family. If that feels like a mixed blessing, do your best to ignore dissatisfaction with circumstances and trust natural momentum. Libra’s guiding planet, Venus, is the diplomat of the zodiac. So, during this month’s exciting take-off into the new decade, if you need to disagree, offer a workable alternative. The evening star’s mid-month slide into Pisces sends deliciously rogue waves across your ocean of emotions to refill Libran love tanks.
Scorpio
O CT 2 4- N OV 22
Our inner narratives and beliefs affect the results we achieve, and as this month’s tremendous planetary emphasis on Scorpio communications progresses it becomes increasingly clear that what you say becomes what you get. Since energy flows where we direct our attention, keep shifting focus and conversations, both internal and external, away from what you don’t like or want onto your desired outcome. While January has its challenges on the world stage, how you respond is your choice, but you’ll be chuffed to know that energetic Mars in Scorpio’s zodiac house of values, cash flow and income has your back.
Sagittarius N OV 23 - D EC 21
Last year had legs, this year has staying power, kicking off with your ruling planet Jupiter heating up Sagittarian cash flow. When Mercury’s in Capricorn money talks, and this month’s a good time to remember Sagittarian Winston Churchill’s famous observation: “We make a living by what we get; we make a life by what we give”. Whether you donate time, money, expertise, effort or influence, look for useful contributions you can make towards shaping the future through what you do. If international trips aren’t on the present agenda, you’ll find local paths less travelled are positively percolating with potential. AWW
End notes
My most memorable overseas adventure is... All my international touring – from performing in Switzerland to London. I’ve always learned so much while travelling the world playing music.
Inspired by...
Dunedin-based musician and songwriter Nadia Reid will debut her new album at the NZ Festival of the Arts in March. and water painting at the Steiner School in North East Valley, Dunedin. The film or book that changed my life is…
Just Kids by Patti Smith. Every time I want to feel understood, I reread it. The five people I would have at my ideal dinner party are… Olivia Colman, Phoebe
Waller-Bridge, Jacinda Ardern, Rufus Wainwright, John Campbell. And the celebrity chef that would cook us dinner is… Bevan Smith from Riverstone
Kitchen in Oamaru. My most memorable outfit ever was… For the Vodafone Music
Awards in 2017, I wore a very loud and amazing two-piece suit from Miss Crabb. It was green and mustard. They loaned it to me and I wish I had bought it. The family member I talk to when I need advice is...
My aunty Jane Reid. The three books I’m lining up to read next are… A Book of
Common Prayer by Joan Didion, Year of the Monkey
My #1 pick for a karaoke song is… Dreams by Fleetwood Mac.
by Patti Smith and A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. My favourite pet growing up… Poppy. My white and black speckled border collie. The most loving and faithful friend to date. The song lyrics that motivate me or sum me up are… Off the top of my head it’s You
Gotta Be by Des’ree. I remember it from when I was growing up in the 90s. “Listen as your day unfolds Challenge what the future holds Try to keep your head up to the sky.”
The item I would save from a fire is… My guitars and a box of photographs and letters.
The fictional character that most reminds me of myself is… Meg March
from Little Women. The things I need for a perfect night in are… Freshly washed
hair, the new Angel Olsen album and homemade dinner. The living person I most admire is… Olivia Colman. Her speech at the Oscars was very inspiring. She appears so down-to-earth and is such a dynamic actress who has worked hard for her craft. And she’s hilarious.
When I need to get some spark back into my soul….. I go walking around where I live in Port Chalmers. I go up to the town belt or around the harbour to look at the water. I leave my phone at home and just walk.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY GETTY IMAGES AND COURTESY OF ALEX LOVELL-SMITH.
My fondest childhood memory is… Singing
QUICK-FIRE FAV O U R I T E S