Tracy Grimshaw

The past, for many, is a place viewed with misty-eyed romanticism, a place where memories are happily tinted by warmth, love and respect. For Today show co-host Tracy Grimshaw, 44, the past is all of that, but it is also a place that resonates with pain, sadness and the lingering torment of opportunities lost.

Like most of us, Tracy fondly recalls the simplicity and affection of her childhood. She smiles when she remembers the horses that occupied the paddocks – and her imagination – at the end of the road where she lived in Greensborough, outside Melbourne. She laughs loudly when recounting her first jobs, selling jeans and pumping petrol, and of her early forays into journalism, covering such tantalising stories as bicycle theft at the local supermarket.

Yet there is a part of her past that holds little joy for Tracy. For almost half her life, she spoke not a single word to her father, Owen Grimshaw. It’s a subject she has never addressed before in public and something that she only now feels comfortable speaking about, following their dramatic and unanticipated reconciliation last year, in the months before his death from a debilitating lung and heart condition.

This issue, Tracy opens up about her estrangement from her father and the emotional aftermath of their reconciliation, her attitudes to love, marriage and children, her demanding lifestyle, as well as her reaction to some of the nasty “ageist” and “sexist” comments that have come her way in recent weeks, since she started co-hosting the Today show with the young, handsome Karl Stefanovic.

Only in the April 2005 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.