Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

January 5, 2013

Rosie Thomas

ROSIE Thomas has been trying to protect people from bullies since she was in grade 1. Perhaps it was her well-developed sense of empathy.

“I think the greatest tool that I have is empathy,” she says. “It’s also the biggest thing that holds me back. My ability to empathise is so powerful. I’ll cry during a Lite n’ Easy commercial because of how proud I am of those people for having lost weight. It’s a bit irrational. It’s also my biggest driving force.”

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

December 22, 2012

Loren O’Keefe

LOREN O’Keefe’s life changed on July 15 last year when her beloved brother Daniel disappeared. At the moment Daniel was reported as a missing person, Loren quit her job and for the 17 months since has devoted eight hours a day, five days a week, to finding Daniel.

“Every day I get a phone call I have to follow, spend a whole day calling local businesses in the area where someone thinks they’ve seen Dan and see (if) they’ve got CCTV footage. I check as many things as I can to gauge the credibility of the possible sighting.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

December 15, 2012

Suzanne McDonnell

SUZANNE McDonnell cannot forget a 16-year-old boy whose story broke her heart. One day, as co-ordinator of St Kilda’s Sacred Heart Mission meals program, she noticed how much this boy reminded her of her son. “I was going outside to the laundry and there was a young man there. He looked like my son. He had a skateboard. My son, who was 17 at the time, loves skateboards. He had his skateboard under his arm and his skate shoes. I know all about skate shoes, they have a uniform as a skater.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

December 8, 2012

Tony Harrington

IN the end it’s not the majesty of glaciers or the awesome power of a 20m wave that provides extreme surf and ski photographer Tony Harrington with his greatest inspiration. It’s a sweet little girl called Holly, the seven-year-old daughter of Harrington’s former partner, with whom he has “a really close connection”.

Holly was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a rare congenital heart defect.

“Holly has had open-heart surgery three times,” Harrington says. “She is now 7½. She has made me think about life and realise how lucky you are if you have your health. Holly’s strength and courage and her determination to live has inspired me so much in my life. I have known fear, which takes courage to overcome, but watching Holly I have seen real courage.”

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

December 1, 2012

Mariam Issa

IT’S the most chilling moment in Mariam Issa’s story. It’s the day her mother took her to undergo female circumcision, also known as female genital mutilation. In Somalia in the 1970s the practice was an entrenched part of the culture and at age four Mariam underwent this brutal procedure lying on an outdoor table.

“It is soon over, my legs are tied together with strips of cloth from the ankles all the way above my knees, and then it is (her three-year-old brother) Soran’s turn and I am carried away,” Issa writes.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

November 24, 2012

Colin and Sandy Suckling

YOU often hear about the thrill of running; the endorphin rush, the freedom and exhilaration of it. But you don’t often hear about running saving a life, or helping build a new one, which is why Sandy and Colin Suckling’s story is so life-affirming.

Running brought them together. They fell in love training for a marathon. They’ve since done three ultramarathons together and this weekend will participate in their fourth, in Antarctica. Running was the catalyst for Sandy, 52, and Colin, 58, both finding the happiness they didn’t think they’d know again.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

November 17, 2012

Ruki Baillieu

SUDDENLY, we’re a long way away from the cocktail parties, the beautiful women, the rich sponsors, the fragrant glamour of the international polo circuit. We’re in a St Kilda café talking about how Australia’s best polo player watched a man die after a horse rolled on him.

“I’ve seen kicks in heads, brain injuries,” Jack “Ruki” Baillieu says. “When horses are going at speed and they trip up and roll over the top of you—a 400 kilo animal rolling over the top of you, if it gets you the wrong way, it can really do some damage.”

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

November 10, 2012

Jason Kimberley

JASON Kimberley can draw a direct line from his interest in trying to educate a generation of schoolchildren about the importance of environmental sustainability to the values encouraged by his parents, Craig and Connie Kimberley. Kimberley’s father founded the Just Jeans group, building it from one store to 280 across Australia and New Zealand. In 2001 the Just Group, in which the family had a 65 per cent stake, was sold to a private equity group for $105 million.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

November 3, 2012

Andrew Bourke

WHEN Andrew Bourke was asked to pitch for a project overseeing a group of graffiti artists working on a wall in Cheltenham, he had a strange feeling about it. The address sounded familiar. Then he realised: he was being asked to project-manage a wall that, as a teenager, he would illegally spray at night.

After presenting his work to a panel including representatives from the City of Kingston and architects, Bourke, 31, was chosen from 50 applicants from across Australia for the Cheltenham project.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

September 29, 2012

Mike Williamson

WHEN I was a kid, many years ago, there was a Saturday night wrestle between those in the family who wanted to watch on our one television set Young Talent Time and those who wanted to watch the footy replay preceded by Football Inquest, the precursor to all the footy chat shows we have today.

I would offer silent prayers that amid my five siblings and parents the vote would go to footy replay and that I would be spared Johnny Young and the team. On the occasions the footy won—Dad would kind of allocate himself the deciding vote whatever the numbers—I would thrill to an evening in the company of commentators Ted Whitten, Alan “Butch” Gale and the cheeky, born-host Michael Williamson.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

September 22, 2012

Stephanie Barrington

IT WAS Christmas last year and for Stephanie Barrington, times were tough. Within a few weeks, her grandfather was diagnosed with cancer and her grandmother suffered a stroke. Both lived on the family’s Moorooduc property.

Stephanie’s mother was bedridden after a foot operation. Stephanie, an only child, was designated “chief carer” and was in charge of Christmas lunch, feeding 20 relatives. At 20, and with the family struggling, it was a heavy burden. “I cooked,” she says. “Luckily, Mum taught me.”

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

September 15, 2012

Jesse Fink

THERE was a moment right at the end of the “complex cycle of feelings” he and many other separated men feel that Jesse Fink came to realise that all the sex in the brothels and the hundreds of random dates he’d had and sex with strangers he’d met online didn’t actually mean much.

After 10 years of marriage, his wife told him out of the blue in 2007 she was leaving. Fink, a sports columnist for TV networks including SBS, was devastated. And he knew that on top of losing the woman he loved it meant seeing much less of his beloved three-year-old daughter. He was also struggling with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder, “bombarded around the clock with disturbing thoughts, every minute of every hour, the worst kind of thoughts imaginable”.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

September 8, 2012

Angry Anderson

TWO moments on his trip to Afghanistan for SBS TV profoundly saddened Angry Anderson. The first was at a refugee camp on the outskirts of Kabul. “It was a refugee camp that had been there for 20 years,” he says. “It was filthy, open sewerage, piles of rubbish burning slowly.

“We met this woman in her teens with three or four children that we could tell, presumably by the same father who was a junkie. She was stuck there and her life was over and that broke my heart. You could tell she’d been a very attractive young lady and she’d had this burden of life heaped upon her.”

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

September 1, 2012

Dylan Lewis

TO Dylan Lewis, life is a juggle. Not between work and marriage and kids; he seems to have got that sorted beautifully. It’s a juggle because he’s a juggler, of clubs and balls. And he rides a unicycle and does magic tricks and dresses as a clown for his adored three-year-old daughter, Rose.

I’m with Lewis at radio station Nova in Richmond where he does the afternoon shift. He has decided to tell a story about loss and profound grief, but he also wants to tell a story about renewal and the ecstasy that comes with a happy marriage and children.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

August 25, 2012

Indigo Bloome

CONTRACTING glandular fever is usually the start of a long period of inactivity. For Indigo Bloome, though, it was the moment that has ignited—if I can use that inflammatory word in this context—a new career as a writer of erotic fiction.

Arriving in Hobart from Sydney for a “tree change” with her husband and two children, Bloome (not her real name) was felled by the virus. “I had no energy and wasn’t able to do too much for about six or eight weeks,” she says. “So I read.”

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

August 18, 2012

Michael O’Loughlin

MICHAEL O’Loughlin, you will never play league football in South Australia. Ever.”

It’s half-time in an under 17s match for Central Districts in Adelaide. O’Loughlin has just turned 17, he’s prodigiously talented but flashy, maybe frustrating for a coach. At home he’s a good boy, responsible, didn’t go the path of some of his wayward mates, he’s the eldest of six and a rock for his mum, Muriel.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

August 11, 2012

Ross Clarke-Jones

THIRTY years ago Ross Clarke-Jones, aged 16 and half way through Year 11, decided to leave the family home in Terrigal on the Central Coast of NSW and move to Queensland to follow his dream to join the pro surfer tour. It was a decision that has shaped his life. “I went and met Rabbit Bartholomew and Gary Elkerton, famous Queensland pro surfers,” he says. “It confirmed that I wanted to do what those guys do.” It’s a gift when your mind, as a teenager, is clear on what you want to do; gets rid of a lot of doubt. But you then need to follow through, which Clarke-Jones has clearly done.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

July 21, 2012

Pierre Khodja

SOMETIMES it really is the power of love that can save us. Lying in hospital in bandages from head to toe, drifting back and forward between life and death from third-degree burns, Pierre Khodja would stare at a photograph of his three daughters that his wife Debbie had placed in front of him. It gave him the incentive to live.

“You wouldn’t have recognised me,” Khodja says. “I was like a mummy. You could only see my eyes. My heart stopped beating three times. I went to the other side three times and they got me back. That morning at 4 o’clock, 4.15 and 4.30 I died. They told my wife, ‘He’s not going to come back’.”

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

July 7, 2012

Jeff Rowley

IT was the moment Jeff Rowley had been dreaming of for years, riding the biggest wave he’d ever seen—50 feet (surfers never stopped using the old measuring system but in modern terms the wave was 15.2m). All the training, all the studying of weather maps, all the times he had survived being “rag-dolled”, tossed around by the force of a monster wave after a wipeout had prepared him for this one magical moment.

Rowley, 33, lives in Torquay, but is in a state of constant readiness to jump on a plane and chase the biggest waves it is possible to catch.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

June 30, 2012

Dennis Cometti

MUSIC is a great passion for Dennis Cometti and remains so despite a less-than-spectacular moment several years ago when he put a toe into the industry as a producer. “I downloaded some songs by a singer-songwriter in the US (James McKenna) who I thought was very good,” Cometti says. “After listening to it for a while I decided I’d better tell him. I didn’t know him from Adam. I was going through the specials bin in one of the sites I wander into from time to time, CD Baby, for independent acts who don’t have recording contracts.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

June 23, 2012

Susanne Gervay

SUSANNE Gervay, with too much precision for comfort, can remember the moment she found out her 12-year-old son James (sometimes known as Jack) had endured a year-long campaign of torment by a group of children at his school.

Even today she remains shocked that she didn’t know. “I’m a specialist in child growth and development, an author, I love my kids to death and I didn’t know,” she says. “He was starting to get sick, he was missing school. I thought, ‘If I can’t see it what hope have other parents got?’.”

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

June 2, 2012

Guy Pearce

IF YOU’RE truly in love, the memory of the moment your eyes first met is indelible, a moment frozen in time. It’s a seductive concept—that first intoxicating thunderbolt never really dissipating even if years are spent apart. And so it is for Guy Pearce.

It was in 1980, and Pearce had already been at Geelong Grammar School seven years (since Grade Prep). Then in Year 7 Kate Mestitz arrived at the school.

“I fell in love with her as soon as I met her,” Pearce says.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

May 5, 2012

Brian Nankervis

WHEN you’re young, open to possibility and adventure, up for the experience and living in the moment, anything can happen. And that’s the mindset Brian Nankervis was in when he spent five glorious days in 1976 in Spain with a group of likeminded travellers, a group that included an 18-year-old Bo Derek.

Derek was about to dazzle the world in the movie 10, in which she played a beautiful newlywed who became the object of infatuation by a middle-aged songwriter.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

April 28, 2012

Lyndey Milan

LISTENING to Lyndey Milan talk about her son Blair in a room heavy with grief, I can hear the deep love a mother has for a child and the struggle she’ll always have to understand why she lost him, aged 29, last year.

“He was such a beautiful boy,” she says. “People used to say ‘You’re so lucky with your children’ and I’d say ‘Luck’s got nothing to do with it—it’s what you put in’. He didn’t put himself at risk, he didn’t take drugs, he didn’t drink and drive. He was no goody two-shoes, by the way. It’s very hard to come to terms with.”

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

April 14, 2012

Erin Brockovich

SHE is known around the world as a strong, determined, uncompromising and courageous woman, a fighter for those without a voice. And now Erin Brockovich will have to summon all these qualities to help her family through its toughest battle. I’m sitting with Brockovich at a Melbourne hotel. It was her crusade against the Pacific Gas and Electric Company and its dumping of toxic waste in Hinkley, California, that inspired the 2000 film Erin Brockovich starring Julia Roberts, who won an Academy Award for best actress for the performance.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

April 7, 2012

Sandra Jose

TWENTY-FIVE years ago, I sat in a room in the Police Academy in Glen Waverley and randomly picked four trainee cadets whose progress I would follow as part of a newspaper series. I interviewed them on day one, watched them training for several days, then caught up with them again for a major interview roughly every five years. I wondered if they ever dreaded the call. I amstill in touch with two of them.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

March 31, 2012

Anthony Field

ANTHONY Field would sometimes not notice that his three children, now aged eight, six and four, were in the same room, full of life and noise and questions. “They’re absolutely beautiful and they’re a joy,” he says. “You know when you’ve got real depression when they don’t get through to you. They might be there in the room and it’s like they’re not even there.

“That’s when you know you’ve got some problems and you should get some help. That happened to me a couple of times.”

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

March 24, 2012

Halina Wagowska

HALINA WAGOWSKA was just a little girl of 10 when she was first forced to witness the complete dismantlement of a value system that had any respect for human life.

Not that she could put these sorts of words to what she was seeing or feeling. All she knew was that in five years that should have been full of innocent joy, she was surrounded by cruelty, sadism, barbarism, death and profound personal loss. One day she waved goodbye to her father and never saw him again. Then, as a young teenager, she held her mother in her arms as she died.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

March 17, 2012

Brian Goldsmith

ON Monday, Brian Goldsmith turns 80. And this Melbourne icon is happy to share the moment with a Sydney icon, namely the Sydney Harbour Bridge, also 80.

The Sydney icon, which was officially opened on March 19, 1932, has to be constantly seen to, its painters working their way ceaselessly from one end to the other—just ask Paul Hogan. But all Goldsmith needs to keep in shape is a bi-weekly visit to the gym.

Read the entire article at www.heraldsun.com.au

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

March 10, 2012

Jeffrey Archer

JEFFREY Archer is a fit 71, and he’d be the first to tell you. Indeed, he just did, in his booming voice down the phone line from London. “I’m in the gym three times a week,” he says. “I walk, I feel pretty fit. When I see a pretty girl, I try to kid myself I’m 45. A very beautiful lady of about 30 came up and said, ‘Can I have your autograph?’ I said, ‘Yes, of course, who shall I make it to?’ And she said, ‘To Violet’. And I said, ‘Well, that’s a lovely name, Violet’. And she said, ‘No, that’s my grandmother’. You get occasionally put firmly back in your place.”

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

March 3, 2012

Mark Webber

THIS is about as quiet as a Formula One racing driver’s life gets. It’s late at night and I’m sitting in a hotel restaurant with Mark Webber. He’s just finishing dinner with a support staffer and his wife. The whine of the engines, the flash and dash of the circuit, the GP fans hoping to catch a glimpse of a driver and Webber’s massive support team all seem a million miles away right now.

It’s a good environment for Webber, between Grand Prix races, to reflect on a mountain bike accident in 2008 that changed his life.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

February 25, 2012

Carrie Tiffany

WHEN she was 19, and serving as one of the first female park rangers in the Northern Territory, Carrie Tiffany was bitten by one of Australia’s most venomous snakes. But her pride meant she couldn’t bring herself to tell anyone.

“Because I was ashamed and humiliated that I’d been bitten by the snake, as one of the most junior and female rangers, I didn’t say on the radio I’d been bitten by a snake, I just said, ‘Assistance required’,” Tiffany says. “It took some time for them to come because they thought I had a flat tyre.

Read the entire article at www.heraldsun.com.au

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

February 18, 2012

Lazaros Thomaidis

IN a monastery in a small Greek village named after the Archangel Michael, Lazaros Thomaidis sat and prayed for Christiana, his four-year-old daughter. It was 2010, and a year earlier his beloved Christiana had died. The trip to the birthplace of his parents was a spiritual journey, and kneeling there alone, Thomaidis made a promise to the Archangel: “If you bless us with a child I will return to the monastery with the child and name him or her in your honour.”

“My wife Vicki went to Greece the year after,” Thomaidis says. “She returned and within a month she was pregnant through IVF.”

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

February 11, 2012

Luke Nguyen

IT was a moment that chilled Luke Nguyen’s blood. A fellow student in his English as a Second Language course shocked him with a graphic description of her experience escaping Vietnam with her family. “She told me a story of everyone being killed on a boat,” Nguyen says. She jumped into the water thinking, ‘I’m going to drown, die ... I don’t care, I just don’t want to be raped and killed’.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

February 4, 2012

Glen Murcutt

AS his fame as an architect grew, Australia and later the world feting him for his houses that “touched the Earth lightly” and blended in with the environment, Glenn Murcutt’s every moment before and after work was spent as a committed and engaged single father to his sons Nick and Dan.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

January 28, 2012

Choosing Laughter To Cope

THE strangest things happen at times of strangeness. And diagnoses of multiple sclerosis and breast cancer make for strange times indeed.

So Chrissy Amphlett's response to these two life-changing pieces of information might sound strange, but they have made perfect sense to her.

Read the entire article at www.heraldsun.com.au

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

January 21, 2012

Ita Still Finding New Things To Do

IN HER 70 years – yes, she has just reached that milestone – Ita Buttrose has done so much that it's interesting she has now done something for the first time: marched in a protest.

It was last October in Canberra, a march to raise awareness of dementia in her role as president of Alzheimer's Australia. And it was a moment that perhaps surprised even her.

Read the entire article at www.heraldsun.com.au

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

January 14, 2012

Striking Back From A Tragic Loss

GOLF is not the first sport you'd imagine a kid on a farm in Cohuna, in northern Victoria, taking up.

It could have been cricket, tennis or football, all of which Stuart Appleby loved.

Read the entire article at www.heraldsun.com.au

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

January 7, 2012

Leanne Edelsten

IT was after a recent visit to a Sydney nightclub that Leanne Edelsten gained an insight into that sometimes aggressive world. Watching a barman down shots with his customers, she told the head of security, and was later followed down the street by “three burly guys”, one of whom grabbed her arm. As she phoned the police, she says, one man said: “You’re pissed, lady.”

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

December 31, 2011

In The Company Of A Brilliant Mind

AFTER 21 years it was a catch-up long overdue. In a Sydney restaurant, Christopher Hitchens arrived in a fawn suit and immediately set the schedule.

“I will have a Scotch and two cigarettes over here,” he said, moving outside the restaurant to the smoking area, “and then we will have wine at the table.”

Read the entire article at www.heraldsun.com.au

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

December 24, 2011

Fighting Against Malice And Revenge

IT’S confronting when the victim of an appalling crime holds no anger towards his attackers; when he questions the merits of jail; when he would like to meet the attackers who caused him brain damage, just so they can see the damage they’ve done and hopefully not re-offend.

It's confronting because of our notion of justice, which usually means a desire for punishment.

Read the entire article at www.heraldsun.com.au

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

December 10, 2011

Nick Bracks

IT WAS a moment Nick Bracks knew would—and must—change his life. Woken up by police last year lying on a footpath in St Kilda Rd in the very early morning after another vodka bender, Bracks recognised the incident for what it was: the scare that he needed.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

December 3, 2011

Simon Beasley & Nola Sherwill

AFTER years of friendship and support, Nola Sherwill one day came to reflect on how much Simon Beasley meant to her. He was, in quite a deep sense, the son she never had. And, as the years went by, there came a moment when she realised how much she relied on Beasley and his family.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

November 26, 2011

Di Morrissey

TWO years ago, after the death of her mother Kay, Di Morrissey was going through her mother’s papers. She found newspaper clippings from 1959 about a tragedy with which she has lived since she was 10. In the yellowed pages the details of what happened were finally revealed. It was a deeply sad moment.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

November 19, 2011

Tony Birch

TONY Birch can today only wonder at how he survived his teens. As a member of a gang that hung around the Richmond Housing Commission flats, he might have died—being dragged along in a blanket behind a car, or somersaulting off a bridge into the Yarra. Maybe someone could have punched him in the head a little too hard in one of the many street fights he started with kids bigger than him.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

November 5, 2011

Michael Gudinski

THERE is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in, said a Graham Greene character. For Michael Gudinski, that moment was deciding, at age 17, to leave Melbourne High School and follow the passion that had consumed him: rock music.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

October 15, 2011

Dave Mason

HE DOESN’T agree, because he says everyone has tragedies, but Dave Mason’s resilience and courage in dealing with what life has dealt him is extraordinary.

It’s a story of one monumentally poor business decision that defined his and his band’s working life; a story of naivety by a kid from the country; of the tragedy of losing a brother aged 22 in a car crash; and of dealing with what he calls major depression, which for years left him numb and without the will to live.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

October 8, 2011

A Moment With Renee Geyer

WE ARE sitting in a park in Elwood, bookended by a sports oval and a lake.

Renee Geyer calls out affectionately to a little dog running around and says she’d get one if she didn’t tour so much.

Read the entire article at www.heraldsun.com.au

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

October 1, 2011

Mick Malthouse

BEING immobilised was a rare moment for a man who seemed to have spent his life in constant movement. Two months after leaving the West Coast Eagles after 10 years (and two premierships), Mick Malthouse sat in his car outside Victoria Park frozen in his seat, unable to bring himself to walk for the first time as coach through the door of the famous Collingwood Football Club. “I sat out in that street for a long time,” he says.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

September 17, 2011

Michael Veitch

AS A comedian and actor in the ’90s. Michael Veitch was dazzling audiences with his turns in the comedy sketch show Fast Forward, part of a brilliant generation of writer/performers that included Jane Turner, Magda Szubanski and Gina Riley.

But amid all the adulation there was one man who was not so impressed: his father John Veitch.

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

September 10, 2011

The Evolution Of John Elliott

IT WAS an intake-of-breath moment, the sound of someone getting something very wrong on national television.

A piece of poor judgment that served only to reinforce the arguments of those who would call John Elliott a museum piece, which, subsequently, in so many words, they soon did. It was a Les Patterson moment, without the hyper-extended fake appendage in the powder-blue pants.

Read the entire article at www.heraldsun.com.au

Herald Sun Weekend Magazine

August 6, 2011

Tim Ferguson

A SECRET is a heavy burden. For years, comedian Tim Ferguson told only a small number of people he’d been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1996. He didn’t tell his mother and brothers for a decade and, for 14 years, he chose not to tell his three children.