MasterChef Mat: The day my mum disappeared

Mat Beyer explains how a painful family secret was the real reason for keeping his mobile phone in the MasterChef house, resulting in his early exit.

As contestant Mat Beyer left the MasterChef house in disgrace, he had no regrets about the smartphone scandal that engulfed him and made him “infamous” – because Mat knew the real and deeply private reason he needed a direct line to the outside world. On Friday, July 9, 2004, when he was 16, his mother Julie, 47, went missing from her home in Albury, NSW, and was never seen again.

“She was a normal, everyday mum,” recalls Mat, who was living in Melbourne with his father when his mother vanished. Although Mat’s parents separated when he was nine, the family remained close and in constant contact. “I spoke to her every day. We were so close. I was a mummy’s boy, totally. I loved my mum – I still love her.”

Mat remembers his mother as a loving woman who was content in her life, and who made fabulous burritos and baked goods after shifts working as a dental nurse or, in later years, in the office of a law firm. In 2004, Julie was working in NSW as a legal secretary but had resigned as she was excitedly planning a move to Mackay in Queensland, where she had rented a new home and had begun processing a new lease. She had put some belongings in storage in preparation for the move and the beginning of a brand new start. But before she set out for Queensland, she vanished while running an errand in her car to Lavington, NSW.

“The last conversation we had was about the new house she had found and how excited she was to move,” Mat says. “Out of nowhere, she just disappeared.” Mat and his father were forced to call the police when Julie failed to answer her phone for two days in a row, unusual behaviour for the normally chatty redhead. “She just stopped answering our calls, and eventually her phone switched itself off,” Mat says. “Her bank account was never touched again. Her car [a white Daewoo station wagon] was never found. She never renewed her licence.”