Since announcing her pregnancy back in June, Adele has been out of the spotlight and it seems she may have a very good reason for laying low – a secret wedding!
The UK singer has stepped out for the first time since announcing her pregnancy and she is not only sporting a baby bump, she is also wearing a gold band on her wedding finger, claims US magazine Life & Style.
But Adele quickly denied the claim tweeting: “I’m not married…Zzzzzzz”.
The rumours started when the 24-year-old, who is around eight months pregnant, was snapped in London enjoying a quiet dinner out at smart Asian restaurant Eight Over Eight, followed by window-shopping for antiques and books with her fiancé Simon Konecki.
“Adele was relaxed and calm, and she and Simon looked really great together,” an unnamed eyewitness told Life & Style
“She seemed very, very happy. She absolutely does have a pregnancy glow.”
Known for her under-the-radar behaviour, the singer kept her pregnancy news under wraps for months.
“Adele and Simon managed to keep the baby news a secret for so long…there are rumours they’ve already gotten married too,” an insider told the magazine.
Ben Ryan was just 24 years old when his father Jeffrey was murdered by a contract killer paid for by his ex-wife and her cold-blooded family.
Jeffrey, 48, a respected grazier and cattle breeder died alone in the darkness at his 485-hectare property, Callemondah, at Duri, near Tamworth in northern NSW, after a 12-gauge shotgun blast blew apart his back around 9pm on Friday, October 23, 2009.
His wounds, though extensive, weren’t enough to kill him instantly and it took him many agonising minutes to die, his blood soaking into the soil that he worked and loved.
“Nobody deserves to die that way,” Ben, Jeffrey’s 27-year-old son from his first marriage, tells the September issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
“When I’m lying awake at night, I think about what it was like for him, out there by himself. How could anyone do that to another human being?”
It was a cowardly assault, carried out next to farm sheds and a shipping container in which Jeffrey had been sleeping following the breakdown of his marriage. His wife, Helen Ryan, then 48, was in their marital home just 400 metres away, but said she heard nothing.
Jeffrey died in a calculated conspiracy, a deadly web of intrigue inspired by greed, jealousy and revenge.
Police eventually identified a tattooed former truckie named Ken Brooks as the man who pulled the trigger. However, Brooks was a bit player in comparison to Jeffrey’s wife.
Despite her denials in court, Helen Ryan had the lead role in this rural tragedy which might smack of a Hollywood plot if it wasn’t based in such grim reality.
Helen Ryan played the grieving widow, but she masked a darker character as a femme fatale, a woman with a spectacular talent for lying and an inexplicable hold over men, who hired a hitman to kill her husband, even as he was in the throes of divorcing her.
Her 42-year-old younger sister, Ganene Coulter, became Helen’s weak, easily manipulated pawn, a former prostitute and drug user with the right criminal connections to “get the job done”.
Their 70-year-old mother, Coralie Coulter, filled the role of the cynical crone, an eager accomplice who not only helped conceal the crime, but also provided $10,000 of the $30,000 payment to the hit man.
They were an alliance united around Helen in a quest to kill Jeffrey, to make Callemondah — in her words — “all mine” and set her up for life, complete with discussions about future “boob job” surgery and tropical holidays.
“My dad was a good man,” says Ben. “Helen told lies and manipulated people to get her own way, to get the property from under Dad’s feet. It was all about money, greed and control.
“I think about the man we’ve lost. The local high school has named a perpetual trophy after him, that’s how much people thought of him.
“But Dad wouldn’t want us to let Helen beat us. He’d be saying, ‘Keep your chin up and keep walking forward’. That’s what we’re doing. We’re okay and we’ll be okay. For him.”
Read more of this story in the September issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
When Simon realised two years ago he didn’t have any close male friends in his life, it hit him like a hammer blow.
“I was in my office at home one Friday night and out of the blue it struck me that I’d really love to have a beer with a mate, just a chat and a beer,” Simon, a 52-year-old freelance designer, tells the September issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
“I’d been having a pretty tough time of it financially, and the work wasn’t coming in like it had been. That’s stressful when you’re a solo operator.
“Then, it dawned on me that I didn’t have a mate I could call. I was stunned, horrified. How did this happen? How did I end up in this sad, lonely little office with no men I could call my friends?”
Yet the truth is that Simon (not his real name) isn’t by nature a loner. In fact, he’d been a popular, gregarious student back in his boisterous university days.
Even into his 20s, he’d enjoyed a strong, vibrant social life, but somewhere in the intervening years, amid the ever-deepening commitments and responsibilities of marriage, children and career, and a course-altering move from Perth to Sydney 13 years ago, he’d lost touch with his former male friends and hadn’t made lasting new ones.
“I love my wife — in fact, she’s my best friend — and my kids,” says Simon. “But I needed to hang out with men. When I thought about it, I hadn’t had that in my life for a long time; but it was something that I desperately missed.”
Simon’s experience may seem strikingly familiar to many Australian men and also the women they love.
While there is little formal research into the subject, men often report that as they approach middle age, their close male friendships diminish in both quantity and quality, while their relationships with wives, partners and families remain strong.
Dr Elizabeth Celi, a Melbourne psychologist specialising in men’s mental health, has seen many clients with friendship problems, and says their wives are often to blame.
“Women are often all for the idea of letting a man catch up with his mates, but the reality is that they set all kinds of limitations,” she says.
“And then there is the barrage of questions: Who will you be with? How long will you be? How much will it cost? Why do you have to go out again? He gets the third degree about it. Or he comes home and she’s upset, but he doesn’t know why.
“Over time, it’s just easier not to go. He loves her; he wants to be with her, but being with her and keeping up with his mates just becomes too hard.”
Fortunately, there is a solution, but many women won’t like it.
“I’ll put this bluntly,” says Dr Celi. “Girls, get off your man’s back. And guys, learn to put some healthy boundaries on her control issues.
“Masculine company is vital for a man’s own masculine development and women need simply to let it happen — it’s not all about her! Men have to fight for their male time while women don’t have to fight for their female time and that’s unfair.”
Read more of this story in the September issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Your say: Does your husband have friends? Do you encourage him to see them often?
Why is the number of children with autism doubling every five years? For Louise Milligan, the quest for an answer is deeply personal.
There is no other way to describe the feeling, except to say I felt I had been shot. We were sitting in a psychologist’s office, being told that our son, our delicious three-year-old boy, had an autism spectrum disorder.
Thing is, I kind of knew for about six months there was a very good chance I would be shot. That’s how long, all things considered, it takes for an autism assessment to take place.
In that time, I had been oscillating between thinking he was absolutely fine and that I was kidding myself to think he was fine.
Yet it didn’t matter last June. For two numb days, I curled in the foetal position on my bed and grieved for the boy I thought I had … and tried to come to terms with the boy he would now be.
“I hate autism,” I wanted to scream from the rooftops. “WHY HAS THIS HAPPENED TO MY BABY?!”
Jump forward a year. We’ve just had the news that the tenth child we know is having a formal autism assessment.
This doesn’t include the kids who we suspect are autistic, or the ones who have one parent that’s certain but the other doesn’t want them “labelled”, or even the many other diagnosed kids we have met through the various professionals we go to.
Something is going terribly awry. Autism rates in Australia are now at one in 110, doubling every five years.
Amaze, the peak body managing the disorder in Victoria, reports that it’s seeing 40 to 50 new families a week.
Autism SA, South Australia’s body, has 4600 clients. In 1995, it had 580. As one of my friends, a mother of a boy with autism says, “They’re dropping like flies.” It’s an epidemic. And it scares me.
Some argue it’s just “diagnostic” — improved testing to detect autism in children from what we had decades ago.
Of course, poor diagnostics in the past and the terrible practice of blaming autism on cold and unresponsive “refrigerator mothers” mean there are many adults running around who are on the spectrum and don’t know it.
Yet any notion that’s the only explanation for the epidemic just doesn’t cut it with me anymore. And it doesn’t cut it with any of the other autism parents or professionals I know.
Amaze’s Chief Executive Officer, Murray Dawson-Smith, agrees. “If it was purely diagnostics, you would expect all of the growth at the mild, difficult-to-diagnose end of the spectrum,” Murray says. “But the increases in diagnosis rates are comparable throughout the spectrum.”
He’s referring to “low-functioning” autistic children — with lower IQs, fewer abilities, often intellectually disabled. Their diagnoses are skyrocketing at the same rate as those who, once upon a time, might have been considered “a bit odd”.
For my Facebook friend Valerie Foley, whose son Billy, eight, has autism, the theory that the increases are down to mere ‘diagnostics’ is outrageous.
“The idea that we are ‘pathologising normal behaviour’ is so insulting on so many levels, I can barely type straight,” she wrote.
Valerie believes the only thing we can do to halt this dizzying acceleration in diagnoses is invest heavily in research.
“I don’t want more children to develop autism and deal with its challenges if there’s a chance it might not be necessary, or that we could reduce the severity of it, if it does happen. Even a small chance is worth fighting for,” she says.
Zara Phillips. Photography by Grant Thomas, styling by Jane De Teliga.
Zara Phillips is one of the most private royals but last month, she granted an exclusive interview to The Weekly’s deputy editor Juliet Rieden. Here, Juliet describes her meeting with the Queen’s oldest granddaughter.
In the days leading up to my interview with Zara Phillips I had lived through every cross country scramble and perilous jump as she and horse High Kingdom battled for a medal position in the Olympics.
When the duo clipped a fence in the final show jumping event I started to panic. Until then a gold medal had been in sight, how would Zara be feeling?
She ended the round well, despite the fence down … and ultimately the team claimed silver spot.
Like Wills, Kate, Harry and the rest of her cheering (royal) family, I was leaping up and down. Anyone would think I’d won a medal.
Climbing the steps of the plane that would take me from Sydney to the UK I felt really chuffed: Zara’s win was my win.
And when I touched down in London I quickly realised that air of joy was all around. The usually dour, drainingly miserable Brits were positively overflowing with optimism.
A few hours later my phone rang. It was Peter Phillips, Zara’s brother and business manager — could I meet Zara the following afternoon at her stables in Gloucestershire, a few hours from London.
Twelve hours later I was on the tube to Paddington station where I waited for the main line train to the tiny village of Kemble in the lush British countryside.
Paddington was bursting with families flooding in for the day’s Olympic action, and at least 50 percent in Team GB T-shirts … no wonder the Brits were racing up the medal table.
Finally, the train arrived and I headed away from the crowds and into the fields.
Zara’s stables are on Gatcombe Estate — where her mother Princess Anne lives.
The approach is through a locked wooden gate controlled by an entry buzzer — a strange sight in the countryside, but I guess this is no ordinary stables.
Preceding Zara’s arrival two dogs bounded up, sentinels for the 14th in line to the throne.
Zara came straight from work — a day spent training and riding her horses. She was makeup-free, tired and desperate to see how the Team GB show jumpers were doing.
With the dogs running in and out and the horses whinnying in the stables we sat down to talk.
Zara is not a natural interviewee, not only does she hate talking about herself, she’s suspicious of the press and keenly aware that her royal position demands that she choose her words with care.
But move on to the subject of her horses and that awkwardness disappears. Her brother Peter sat with us, siblings united.
And while it’s clear this chosen corner of England’s green and pleasant land is a haven for the royal duo, where they have their own loyal team of co-workers, the fortress that necessarily exists around the royal family was never far away.
After an afternoon with Zara and Peter, I left thinking how very strange it must be to live in this rarefied bubble, especially when your life is just evolving, and I started to understand why Zara at least chooses to throw herself so completely into her world of horses, competitions and country life. Here perhaps she feels free.
Read Juliet’s exclusive interview with Zara in the September issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Zara Phillips. Photography by Grant Thomas, styling by Jane De Teliga.
In an exclusive interview at her Gatcombe stables just days after her Olympic silver-medal performance, Zara Phillips spoke to The Weekly about wanting babies, life at home with Mike, and coming to Australia.
The Queen’s eldest granddaughter will visit Australia in January as an ambassador for the Magic Millions racing carnival on the Gold Coast.
Deborah Mailman. Photography by Harold David, styling by Judith Cook.
Since she was a shy six-year-old, teased for her weight at school in Mount Isa, Deborah Mailman has struggled to learn to love herself.
Australia started falling in love with Deborah when she began her acting career 20 years ago, and she has finally fallen in line, accepting herself as well.
Whether Deb entertained your children (or helped you learn the time as a child) during her 1990s stint on Playschool, you followed her character Kelly through young adulthood in The Secret Life of Us, or caught up with her more recently as nurse Cherie in Offspring, there’s no doubt you’ve at some stage been captivated by her larger than life presence and infectious smile.
But to Deb wasn’t always the lovable, beautiful Australian woman we now know.
“I struggled with my weight pretty much since the age of six. Playgrounds can be really cruel places. I overcompensated by being especially nice to people, but deep down I was struggling a lot,” she tells the September issue of The Weekly.
“I discovered drama at school and loved the feeling it gave me,” she says.
“It’s a weird thing being an innately shy person and choosing to stand in front of people for a living. But just the feeling it gave me made me think that this is how I can contribute. This may be my gift.”
It’s a gift she’s shared with generations of Australians, and with the recent success of her latest film The Sapphires, it’s one that may take her even further from home and straight to Hollywood.
Now with a husband, two kids and a burgeoning film career, the once-shy, bullied school girl might finally have it all.
“Have I ever,” she beams. “I can’t believe how much I’ve got it. I used to worry all through my 20s whether I was going to find my one. And then I met him and it just sort of happened.
Read Bryce Corbett’s interview with Deborah Mailman in the September issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Plus download our viewa app to see exclusive footage of Deborah Mailman at The Weekly photoshoot.
There are a lot of cute baby videos that go viral, but if you’re after a real heart-melting moment, you can’t miss this one.
This new viral video, which some say sets a new standard for cute kids videos, shows 11-month-old identical twin girls adorably bopping along to their dad’s guitar playing.
Their dad who uploaded the video to Youtube simply said of the video: “My identical twin girls get so excited when I play my guitar!” They sure do!
Watch the video of these adorable twins in the video player above.
Schoolboy Dylan Raven is on a mission to stop the menace plaguing our kids.
Karen Raven thought her son Dylan was just being a typical teenage boy when he’d retreat to his room after school every day. At dinner time, he’d eat a little bit, then disappear again for the night.
“I just thought, at that age, maybe it was hormones,” says Karen. What the Broken Hill mother-of-two didn’t realise was that her son was the victim of extreme bullying at school.
“They’d say I’m ugly, I’m gay, I’m stupid – anything they could think of,” says Dylan, who explains that the verbal bullying, which began in his first year of high school, quickly escalated to frightening physical violence.
“I had my head smashed into a brick wall, and one science lesson I had a cable tied around my throat and tightened to the point where I could hardly breathe,” recalls the now 17-year-old student. “I was choked while I was standing in the canteen line, too.”
Tragically, for many bullied teens, ending their own life often seems like the only way to stop the torment.
“I did have those feelings,” admits Dylan. “But I didn’t do anything, because I know how it can affect people and families.”
Karen only found out about her son’s troubles when her cousin, who was looking after Dylan while he was sick, took him to the hospital. When asked about school, Dylan had a panic attack and revealed all.
“I was completely devastated,” says Karen. “It got me down that badly I was having sessions with a psychologist.”
It was through a psychologist that Dylan learned to open up about his experiences, although he admits, “It was really hard.”
Now in Year 11, Dylan’s days as a victim are over. Having moved schools in Year Nine, his grades have improved and he is much happier. He’s also helping others who aren’t so lucky, through his online Say No To Bullying campaign, which offers advice and support.
“It’s a good feeling knowing that you’re actually helping people – not only the victims but also the bullies – to realise the severity of what they’re doing,” says Dylan.
His message to other victims is simple. “If you don’t feel comfortable talking to your parents, talk to a close friend – tell them what has been going on and how you’re feeling.”
Dylan’s mum and his twin sister Shelby couldn’t be prouder of the stand he’s taken, and Karen urges other parents to encourage conversation with their children.
“Speak to them when they come home from school. If you notice one little change in the way they usually are, query them about it.”
Nine Days by Toni Jordan, Text Publishing, $29.99.
From her exciting debut novel Addition, through the quirkily funny Fall Girl and now Nine Days, Toni Jordan loves to explore love’s journey from subtle hits of ignited passion, through winding paths of romantic liaisons.
Yet this third book sees the author take a brave leap into a much more complex world of multiple characters with sharply executed interweaving tales in different time zones.
This is Toni really stretching her literary wings, and while she doesn’t always soar, there are plenty of beautifully drawn cameos in here, underpinned by a linking plot that adds an edge of thrilling detective-style guesswork to make this the Melbourne-based author’s most ambitious and engrossing book yet.
It is set in the streets of Richmond, and while locals will delight in all their haunts etched in a palpably realistic light, it is a universal yarn.
“It’d be the same story if it was set in West End or Balmain or Subiaco or Port Adelaide,” says Toni — and she’s right. These characters leap from the page and really speak to us.
As the title says, the book charts nine days, told in first person by a different character, each of whom is part of, or connected to, the Westaway family.
First up is Kip, who is really the lynchpin. It is 1939, with the world on the brink of war and Kip is a stablehand — having quit school to help support his family following the death of his father, falling from a tram while drunk.
Kip has a strained relationship with his twin brother, Francis, but a very special one with his sister, Connie.
As we flit forward and back between this generation of Westaways and those who follow, Kip and Connie’s destinies unfold with a poignancy that creeps up and grabs your heart.
About the author: Toni Jordan
Born and raised in Brisbane where her mum worked in the local TAB, Toni Jordan, now 45, was a molecular biologist who quit to write fiction. She is fuelled by a passion for “sitting down and wrangling sentences,” and her debut novel Addition was long-listed for the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award.
Toni’s characters “lurk in my subconscious until they’re needed,” and while destiny does play a part in their paths, she believes that “life makes sense only in retrospect”.
Nine Days is set in Melbourne, where Toni lives with her “wonderful husband Robert”. Her next project? “No idea!” she says. “I still can’t get the Westaways out of my head.”
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