A Guide to Australian Etiquette by Ita Buttrose, Viking, $29.95
“There are those who claim manners no longer matter, but I don’t agree,” writes Ita Buttrose. “Times may have changed but good manners never go out of fashion.” Neither does Ita Buttrose.
Many may remember Ita’s original The Guide to Modern Etiquette published in 1985, and the doyenne of magazines and one time editor of The Weekly is back on form with this new comprehensive manual which covers everything from Muslim weddings, to same-sex unions, workplace dress codes, “netiquette” (internet etiquette) and even perfect canine behaviour.
The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver, Faber & Faber, $23.99
My current literary love affair is with Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna. The story of Diego Rivera and Frida Khalo’s cook, it begins in 1930’s Mexico and ends in post-War America, taking in the hero’s ever-hopeful femme fatale mother, the exiled Trotsky and the ghoulish functionaries of the Un-American Activities persecutions.
The scholarship is lightly worn. Its vivid characters, its humour, its language, its geography, its breathtaking range, all make it un-put-downable. If I’d written this book, I’d die happy.
Sex And Stravinsky by Barbara Trapido , Bloomsbury, $32.99, is in stores now.
Left Neglected by Lisa Genova, Simon & Schuster, $32.99
Sarah, the main character in Left Neglected (Lisa Genova’s follow up to Still Alice) has a husband she loves, three happy children and is a high powered executive at the top of the corporate food chain.
Some would say she has it all, but not the time to enjoy it. A careless moment while driving changes her life in an instant and she is left dealing with a little known or understood traumatic brain injury.
Her journey to rehabilitation is simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting as Sarah is forced to address the things she has neglected in life.
You will read Genova’s book constantly on the verge of tears but at the same time unable to tear yourself away and ultimately enriched.
Prince Harry on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen yesterday
Prince Harry might be a royal, but he showed he is just like any other young man yesterday when he joked about his private parts during a swim in the Arctic Ocean.
The 26-year-old prince was on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen training for his upcoming trek to the North Pole.
As part of his preparations, Harry and his companions took a dip in the frigid ocean. Donning a bright orange immersion suit, the third in line to the throne jumped in. “It’s quite tight on the balls!” he said.
Harry floated around in the 1°C water, laughing while splashing his swimming companions. When asked how the water was, he joked: “That’s a silly question … it’s warm. It went up my nose.”
Harry will join wounded British servicemen for the first five days of their 320km trek to the North Pole on Friday. The expedition has been organised by the Walking with the Wounded charity, of which Harry is the patron.
He was joined in the arctic waters by the charity’s co-founders Ed Parker and Simon Dalglish.
Harry and the other trekkers will face temperatures as low as minus 45°C on their journey. They will need to wear their orange suits to cross cracks in the ice, so they are protected if they fell into the freezing water.
Walking with the Wounded hopes to raise £2 million ($3.1 million) from the trek to support injured servicemen and women.
Your say: Do you think it’s inappropriate for Prince Harry to joke about his private parts in public?
Video: Prince Harry honoured for his humanitarian work
It’s L day for me today… Launch Day. My book, Love Wisdom Motherhood. is heading out into the wider world. And I keep pinching myself when I think about who is launching it for me — our Governor-General Quentin Bryce.
She is one of the fabulous women that I interviewed for my book. What a treat it was to sit down with this most articulate and elegant woman and talk about babies! The GG passionately believes that if a mother isn’t well — then the family isn’t well. She clearly remembers a time when it all felt too much:
“The Governor-General is ‘evangelical’ about the care of new mothers. As a young mum in her mid twenties, she found herself unable to get out of bed. At the time she wondered how she was going to cope with it all, how she would manage her little baby, two toddlers, a house, her husband and a job. These are the questions most mothers grapple with. When Quentin Bryce thinks back to those moments, lying in bed, wearing her pink chenille dressing gown, she realises, ‘how easily I could have had what was then [referred to as] a breakdown’.”
So if you feel like it’s all getting too much — you’re not the only one! Even the most powerful woman in the land has had her moments and that is why I wanted to write this book. I want to lift that mask of motherhood so many of us feel we have to wear and have an honest conversation about the joys, challenges and heartache that being a mother entails.
The other woman who have generously shared their motherhood experiences are Lisa McCune, Heidi Middleton, Elizabeth Broderick, Wendy Harmer, Collette Dinnigan, Maggie Tabberer, Tina Arena, Quentin Bryce, Nova Peris, Gail Kelly and Darcey Bussell.
I’ve had my share of heartache but I was totally unprepared for the seismic shift that having a baby does to your life. The seeds of this book began in the weeks after the birth of my heavenly eldest daughter, Allegra.
I remember going to a Mothers’ Group — and it wasn’t one of the good ones! I had never felt so alone and isolated — as I looked around the room all these mums seemed to have it together — breastfeeding with ease and looking like they knew what they were doing. Boy, did I feel like the odd one out. I just nodded and didn’t dare open my mouth, knowing that if I did I would burst into tears. For me, things weren’t getting better. They were getting worse. And no, this wasn’t the happiest time of my life. I had post-natal depression. I wasn’t ready to admit it yet.
However the nights got longer and sleep continued to evade me despite my exhaustion. I felt more and more like I was losing my mind. It was as if a pane of glass was between myself and the rest of the world. I knew I had to talk to someone.
Talking to my husband was the hardest thing I ever had to do. I felt like such a failure. But the darling man that he is, he took me in his arms and told me everything was going to be alright. And for the first time in a long time, I believed him. The next day I got an appointment with my obstetrician, and she organised for me to see a psychiatrist. Although I had a way to go, I knew things would work out. With the help and care of my family, doctors and medication I started to feel like ‘me’ again. And I could focus on my darling daughter. I realised that I was not a failure. I just had an illness. It didn’t mean I was a bad mother, or that I didn’t love my daughter.
Please, if you have an inkling you’re struggling, or if you’re worried about someone close to you. Speak up. Talk to your GP, midwife, friend, or visit Beyond Blue. One in four of us mums will have post-natal depression. That’s a big club and you don’t need to feel like you’re the only one going through it.
So as I frock up today for the launch, don’t be deceived by the fancy dress, high heels and extra eyelashes. The main thought running through my mind — I’m worried about how my daughters will behave in front of the Governor-General and I have my fingers crossed they won’t be clinging onto my legs crying, or busting to go to the bathroom when I make my grown up speech!
Your say: Did you struggle with post-natal depression?
The paparazzi knew they had a good get — a female celebrity in a swimsuit always is — but this was the jackpot. The public face of weight loss in Australia and as such the body everyone wants to critique. And so, as Magda Szubanski and some friends enjoyed an impromptu swim at Bondi Beach in January, a long lens was hard at work, capturing full-length frames.
What the public saw published the following week were photos of a happy woman enjoying the surf. What they didn’t see, however, was a candidate for Victoria’s Secret’s next angel and, for some, this came as a shock.
Even after losing a remarkable 36kg and maintaining her goal weight for two years — the true achievement in weight loss — Magda is still popularly considered a big girl. She is aware of this and, what’s more, knew this would be the case when she set out. Magda always had a goal of 85kg (down from 121kg at her heaviest) and at a 157cm was aware these statistics would never crunch down to a Miranda Kerr.
Yet Magda was and still is okay with that. Her goal in losing weight was to regain her health and, as such, save her life. She doesn’t need to look like a supermodel. Doesn’t want to. Never has.
So, when the beach photos were published, Magda once again heard the comments. Most, she concedes, were the usual “good on you” votes of encouragement that she credits with making her public weight battle the most “rewarding and life-affirming experience” of her life thus far. Yet she was aware of other comments, too, those jarring reminders that her idea of body confidence and society’s have a long way to go before they meet. And it saddens her still.
“I actually love the beach photos,” Magda says, straight-faced. “Honestly, I really do. I think it’s great to be photographed the way I am. My body shape is very normal for an awful lot of people. I am what I am and I’m not ashamed to be so.
“I know that there are people out there thinking I should lose more and I might. Ideally, I’d be a vegan. Maybe I’d have to be to please some people, but as long as my basic health parameters are sound, I am happy.
“I don’t know if I will lose more weight and I am not about to make any promises. It just doesn’t matter. If this is as good as it gets and I am healthy, then I’m fine about that. If I lose more, then that’s fine, too. I’m about to turn 50! My hormones are changing. I’m doing my best and that’s all I can do.”
When Magda hits the big 5-0 on April 12, family will be large in her thoughts. She will be raising a glass to those who have gone before her, along with her loved ones still here. Happily, her 85-year-old mother is and, listening to Magda, she had better have her party shoes ready as she’s going to be busy.
“I am going to party all right — many times and in many different ways — a hootin’ and a hollerin’, massive series of parties,” Magda says, that cherubic smile returning.
“I want to go overseas, I want to party, I want to fully embrace it. I want all my friends together, a big gathering of the clan.
“There’s a certain kind of peace of mind when you get to this age — it’s a great time of life. You still have the energy to enjoy. I’m a party animal and I get out there and have a lot of fun.
“And I can now say that I genuinely like myself. I do. And now I like myself, not despite my faults, but because of them. And I’m glad for them in a way, I embrace them.
“I have a real sense of what I want to do, how I want to live this next art of my life, what sort of a person I am and what things matter to me. I really feel fantastic. I really do. I feel… I don’t know, I’m just lovin’ it. I really am.”
Read more of this story in the April issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Your say: Do you think Magda is brave for continuing to go to the beach and be photographed in her swimsuit?
Grace Wang is the victim of one of Australia’s most shocking medical mistakes. During birth, her epidural was filled with antiseptic instead of anaesthetic. Today she is severely handicapped and unable to lift her baby.
Sometimes it’s a touch on her face. Sometimes it’s a look exchanged across a meal. Sometimes it’s a shared tear. Grace Wang, once an active, vibrant young woman with the full promise of motherhood stretched out before her, takes solace in life’s simplest expressions.
“The things that lift me up are small; things other people take for granted,” says Grace, 32. “To see my husband’s eyes, to know he cares for me, to see my baby son and know that he is safe and well. These things help me keep my hope when hope seems so far away.”
Grace needs hope in a way few of us can understand. Nine months ago, she suffered a catastrophic medical accident. An anaesthetist at St George Public Hospital in Sydney injected antiseptic into Grace’s spine instead of anaesthetic during an epidural, a procedure intended to relieve the pain of childbirth.
That blunder, almost inconceivable in a modern Australian hospital, sent a toxic chemical coursing through Grace’s body, ravaging her nervous system and robbing her of her ability to walk, to use her arms, to care for herself. Moreover, that ghastly mistake cost Grace everything she held dear: the future she planned for herself and her family.
In an emotional and, at times, gruelling interview, Grace and her husband Jason, 42, tell for the first time of their feelings about the mistake that changed their lives irrevocably. Grace speaks candidly about two brain operations, her depression and thoughts of suicide, of not being able to hold her baby son Alex, of the impact her injuries have had on her marriage and her fears for the future.
“We don’t know what will happen to us, tomorrow or in 10 years,” says Grace. “We don’t know how I may be affected in the future, whether it will change or whether it will get better. It is like being in a kind of limbo, with no going forward and no going back.”
Grace and her family endure unhappiness of a vastly different magnitude. “I don’t know how this happened to me or why,” says Grace quietly, speaking out for the first time since the accident. “But I know this should not have happened and I hope that it does not happen again. No one should have this happen again.”
Today, Grace is severely handicapped and unable to move from her bed without a mechanical sling to place her in a wheelchair. She is in constant pain from muscle cramping, as many as 100 a day. She cannot raise her arms above her shoulders and is losing the feeling in her hands. Most distressingly, she cannot hold her son and fears her bond with him will slip away.
“There have been times when I thought that it would be better if I was not here, so that Jason and Alex can go back to normal life,” says Grace. Her smile is gone, replaced by tears and grief.
“One day, I went to the hospital library with Alex and his nanny. Every mother there was holding her baby. They were singing and laughing, and enjoying themselves. But my Alex was being held by a nanny. He was in her arms and then he looked around and I knew that he was looking for his father, not for me. I was hurt. I am scared he will forget me.”
Her hopes are simple. “I want to be like other mothers,” she says. “I want to hold my baby, my beautiful baby Alex. I so want to feed my baby, but now he is living with the nanny and is so close to the nanny and not to me. Alex even touches the nanny’s face with his hands. I am very jealous.”
Read more of this story in the April issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Your say: Do you have any words of encouragement for Grace and her family?
Grace Wang is the victim of one of Australia’s most shocking medical mistakes. During birth, her epidural was filled with antiseptic instead of anaesthetic. Today she is severely handicapped and unable to lift her baby. Here, The Weekly‘s Michael Sheather discusses his emotional interview with Grace.
One of the great privileges of working for The Weekly is that I sometimes meet and interview people who truly inspire me.
Grace Wang, the woman injected with antiseptic instead of instead of anaesthetic during an epidural at Sydney’s St George Hospital in June last year, is one of those people.
Small framed and quietly spoken, Grace is a woman of immense character and an immeasurable inner strength. She bears her physical disabilities with a courage and quiet determination that few of us could muster in such difficult circumstances.
The chemical injected into Grace, chlorhexidine, wreaked havoc with her body. As a result of this catastrophic medical blunder, Grace, 32, can no longer control her legs, which are gripped by sudden and painful cramps at all times of the day and night.
She has only limited use of her arms and her grip is now so weak that she has difficulty holding hands with her husband Jason, 42. She needs a mechanical sling to get in and out of bed. Most distressingly, Grace cannot hold her baby son, Alexander.
We conducted our interview in the small unit that she now occupies not far from the main buildings of St George Hospital in Kogarah, south of Sydney. It boasted a small combined kitchen, dining, and lounge room, a bed room and a bathroom. Her son sleeps two rooms away in the care of a nanny.
Grace and Jason came to Australia from China in the hope of building a new life for themselves and starting a family. However, those dreams are now in ruins and their future at best uncertain.
Most difficult for Grace was not her many physical disabilities but rather the loss of normal physical contact with those she loves.
“During the first few weeks after the accident, I could hold and feed my baby,” says Grace. “But later I lost the strength in my arms and hands. Yet no one supported us.
“They left us to cope on our own. One night Alex was crying and he was hungry and I pressed the button but no one came for half an hour. I cried and cried because it was so difficult to know that your baby needed you but you couldn’t do anything.”
For all that, Grace shows little, if any, self-pity. She is, instead, mostly stoic and ready to get on with her life as it now stands. Nevertheless, as we discovered during our interview, emotions are sometimes overpowering — we stopped twice for extended periods after Grace found it too difficult to continue.
During one of these breaks, Jason fed his wife lunch patiently raising the food to her mouth, dabbing away excess with a napkin and gently ensuring Grace maintained her dignity. Intensely intimate, it was a moment that spoke volumes about the tenderness they share.
“She can’t hold anything,” her husband Jason told me. “Grace complains about loss of sensation. Both arms have more numbness than before. That is why we worry. That is why we are scared for the future. We both think a lot about what the future will be like for us but we don’t know. No one can tell us if it will be worse in the future.”
Grace also pines for her family, who live in China. “I miss them,” she says. “I would like to see my mum but she is not well and can not travel.”
Jason, too, is a quietly spoken but perhaps understandably he is angry. He has, he says, lost confidence in the system in whose care he, Grace and Alexander now find themselves.
Yet, somehow, Grace and Jason cling to hope. It is possible, they say, that time may heal the damage to Grace’s nerves, that one day the toxic chemical effects may dissipate.
“We hope that the chlorhexidine will disappear and the nerves will heal by themselves, that Grace will one day stand up and everything will be normal,” says Jason. “But we don’t know what will happen.”
It’s worth noting that what happened to Grace and Jason might have happened to any of us. Their lives changed irrevocably because of a tragic accident. Nevertheless, it was an accident that should never have happened.
Read more of this story in the April issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Your say: Do you have any words of encouragement for Grace and her family?
Actress Sarah Wynter (right) and her mother Helen Cummings (left) with new book Blood Vows inset
In an exclusive extract from her moving book, Helen Cummings talks about the terror of her abusive marriage and the realisation that she too could have ended up dead had she not left her ex-husband.
It started out as an ordinary Newcastle day, one weekend early in March 1984. Something was creating a strange sense of sadness and unease in me. I was crying and couldn’t explain why. My children [Sarah and Brendan] were settled and happy. My parents were living just around the corner. My brother and two sisters were happily married and raising their families. But still the tears flowed. I’d never experienced anything like this.
Meanwhile, in a doctor’s surgery in the Victorian town of Heathcote, the patients were getting restless. It was the Tuesday morning after a long weekend. Many had waited for surgery hours to consult their local GP, Dr Stuart Wynter, but there was no sign of him. Something must be wrong. His lateness was out of character. Dr Wynter’s partner, Dr Jim Casey, was worried.
The two doctors had known each other for about five years, having met in March 1979 on the Micronesian island of Banaba. They’d worked together in the Heathcote practice since February 1982, and their daily routines were well established.
Stuart was due to work at the local hospital at 8.30 on Tuesday morning, but he didn’t turn up. By now, the receptionist had phoned the flat several times, and so had Dr Casey. The receptionist had also established that Binatia [Dr Wynter’s daughter with second wife Raken] wasn’t at her pre-school.
Dr Casey’s concern grew by the hour. He drove to the police station, where he reported his concerns to Senior Constable George Entwistle. He drove back to the flat with Entwistle, who entered the flat through the unlocked back door while Dr Casey waited outside. A few moments later, Constable Entwistle came back and beckoned Dr Casey into the flat. In the bedroom were the bodies of Raken, Stuart and Binatia.
At about four o’clock that afternoon in Newcastle, I received a phone call from a sergeant at Mayfield police station. He had some bad news. “Stuart Wynter is deceased,” he told me. I immediately asked if Raken and Binatia were okay. I held my breath as I waited for his reply, silently saying, “Please, please God — no, please.” After a few seconds, he said quietly, “No — they are all deceased.”
At that instant, my mind began spinning like the wheels of an overturned truck after a crash. I was facing my own past. Later that afternoon, my sister, Margaret, drove me to visit Eve, Stuart’s mum, who lived alone in the family home. Two police officers spoke with my sister while I comforted Eve. The officers were puzzled about how I knew the deaths weren’t accidental. No one had given me any details. Margaret smiled grimly and said, “She knows.”
This is an edited extract from Blood Vows by Helen Cummings, published by The Five Mile Press, $32.95.
Read more of this story in the April issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
Hilary Swank is not one to do anything by halves. She has built her career playing underdogs — women who struggle to overcome adversity through dedication and hard work — and in the process has earned two Oscars (Boys Don’t Cry in 1999 and Million Dollar Baby in 2004).
Her own tough beginnings growing up an outsider in a low-rent trailer park have forged an actress as driven as the women she portrays.
“I’m just a girl from a trailer park who had a dream,” she said in her first Oscar acceptance speech. And now she explains why she understands the women she plays. “I grew up in a lower-income family,” she says, matter-of-factly. “And at age seven, I learned what class-ism was, because a lot of my friends’ parents didn’t want me playing with their kids.
“They would tell them, ‘It’s time to come in’, if they were with me. Or, if I was at their place, they’d say, ‘Hilary you need to leave’. I just can’t understand how they could do that to a child. But I guess we’ve all felt like an outsider at some point, and so my friends became characters in movies.”
Hilary’s story is almost as dramatic as her on-screen roles. At 15, she left school for Hollywood with her mother. They had so little money they slept in their old car and called agents from pay phones. And yet she doesn’t view this existence as negative. “It gave me a lot to pull from. I was just trying to live my dream.”
Parts in TV shows, including a season on Beverly Hills 90210, from which she was fired, led less than a decade after she arrived, to Boys Don’t Cry and the Oscar.
Meeting her, you understand that this did not happen by chance. Rehearsing her role as a transgender teen in Boys Don’t Cry, she passed herself off as a man for weeks before filming began, fooling neighbours and friends in the process (at 24, she also lied about her age, saying she was 21, to get the part).
For Amelia, the story of Amelia Earhart, the first female aviator to attempt to fly solo around the world, Hilary learned to fly.
And she gained 8.5kg of muscle and trained for six months to play a broke waitress driven to be a boxer in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby.
For Hilary’s latest movie, Conviction — the true story of Betty Anne Waters, an unemployed single mother who, in real life, spent 18 years becoming a lawyer to free her brother who had been wrongfully imprisoned for murder, she gained 7kg and learned off by heart a two-and-a-half hour recorded interview with her character, before she even tackled the script, just to get the accent right.
“These roles that I’m blessed enough to get the opportunity to play — they make my heart beat fast. Am I going to be able to pull it off? Can I do justice to the story? My homework just settles my nerves.”
Even so, she says she drives to work going, “Please don’t let me mess up.” You believe her when she says it takes her a month after shooting a film to get back to her old self.
This vulnerability shows a refreshingly human side to her, because here’s the strange thing about Hilary. Despite her brace of Oscars, she is surprisingly below the stellar radar. We don’t feel we know her, or look out for a Hilary Swank movie the way we do with a Sandra Bullock comedy or an Angelina Jolie thriller romp.
Could it be that we remember the characters, not the actress? “It’s true,” she tells me. “I’ve been playing real-life people who are ordinary people with extraordinary experiences. Like Betty Anne [in Conviction], I really relate to that. I choose stories that move and inspire me. Getting to walk in these women’s shoes, even briefly, has been a wonderful challenge.”
Read more of this story in the April issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
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