A stand-up comedian, journalist, author, radio and television host — there are few women as successful and inspiring as Wendy Harmer.
Apart from her one-woman shows famous around the globe, Harmer was at the helm of 2DayFM’s top-rating Breakfast Show for 11 years as well as hosting, writing and appearing in countless TV shows including the ABC’s Big Gig and Stuff. She still works on radio ABC.
The former political journalist is also the author of eight books for adults, several teen novels and her best-selling children’s series, Pearlie, which has also been turned into a TV series.
Her news and opinion website, The Hoopla, ceased publication last Monday (March 23) after fours years presenting news “through the eyes of women”.
She is a member of the National People With a Disability Care’s Council and a patron of Interplast.
Harmer lives with her husband Brendan and two teenagers, Marley and Maeve, on Sydney’s Northern Beaches.
By Jo Casamento
She’s funny, brilliant and has overcome more obstacles in her life than most. So when Wendy Harmer, 59, describes, with trademark humour, life as one big mini golf course it immediately conjures imagery full of swinging, missing and keeping your fingers crossed.
“People have an idea of success as being almost like an escalator — and that’s a pile of bullshit,” she says with characteristic frankness. “It’s more like a mini golf course. Sometimes you hit a hole-in-one, and most of the time you don’t.”
It’s advice she has always followed and has no doubt called upon last week as she sadly announced the closure of her website, The Hoopla.
“When the elephants go to war, the ants get trampled,” she lamented to Crikey of the “almighty battle” about to occur in cyberspace.
Harmer will no doubt pick up and move onto the next hole. It’s the reason she’s one of the nation’s most versatile performers and it certainly won’t the first or last time she overcomes an obstacle.
Harmer was an unlikely television star, born with a hare-lip, a bi-lateral cleft lip and palate, which she described in detail in a heartbreakingly emotional Australian Story in 2005. She was teased and stared at by kids at school who called her “flat face” “pancake head” and “Wendy the witch” and she knew she was different. But Harmer was never allowed to wallow in self-pity; her parents adopted a tough love approach, which built incredible resilience. “People look at me and they know I’ve been through some hard times and maybe I’ve got perspective which is tempered in the furnace of hardship,” she told Australian Story.
Her mother had a nervous breakdown when she was 10 years old and left (she didn’t see her for six years after that) and her rural Victorian school teacher father, Graham Brown, who recently passed suffering dementia, raised her. His dedication to fixing up run-down schools meant Harmer’s childhood was spent moving around numerous schools and homes. She became self-appointed mother to her three younger siblings, Phillip, Helen and Noel. Her youngest brother also passed last year at the age of 54.
It would be 14 years before Harmer would start the long process of plastic surgery to correct the surgery she had at birth. The wound wouldn’t truly be healed till her own children saw her story on the ABC and told her she was the most beautiful woman in the world.
Despite the many heartbreaks and setbacks, the hilarious and incredibly lovable Harmer takes it all in her stride. She credits her love of books — which started as a five-year-old when she taught herself to read — as being the constant in her life and the reason she went on to become one of our most loved performers, and at one time the highest paid woman on radio.
“Of all the things I’ve done — radio, journalism and comedy — the common thread has been writing and the love of words,” she reveals, reminiscing of a childhood spent in little schools with a library at her fingertips.
“Over the summer holidays I’d set myself the task and start at A and read every book on the shelf till I got to Z. I guess it’s been the love of words and less so about the performance in a way.”
After encouragement from a high school teacher she became editor of the school newsletter, which she invented, called Cyril. Naturally she was the newsletter’s star reporter, editor, photographer and illustrator.
Even before that, at the age of 10, she started a neighbourhood newspaper called the Greenwood Gazette (they lived on Greenwood Street), which she handwrote. Scoops splashed across the handwritten front pages included the neighbours’ house getting electricity or a local being arrested for running a red light. She even enlisted her brother to be the marble tournament correspondent. “I guess that shows I was pretty single minded!” she laughs.
So it was no surprise when Harmer became a copy girl at the Geelong Advertiser, her writing skills evident when she was hand-plucked by a lecturer while doing her diploma in vocational writing (which later became Deakin University’s Journalism degree).
Clearly good at her job and well on the way to a journalism career as a political correspondent at The Sun, it was while covering a story on the new cabaret and the revolution happening in Melbourne comedy when she had her lightening bolt moment. And there was no return.
“I was bitten by the bug. I was absolutely smitten,” she recalls of that moment. It was the era of performances by Ben Elton, Richard Stubbs, Steve Vizard and Gina Riley. Despite colleagues worrying she was throwing away a perfectly good career in journalism, she began pursuing comedy gigs, writing routines and — struggling to find females to perform them — opting to give stand-up a go herself.
“The first night I stood on stage with my little routine about Barbie dolls and school lunches and the lights came on and I had the microphone in my hand and I just had this incredible epiphany. It was like, ‘hang on a minute: you mean, I get a microphone, the lights come on me, people listen to what I have to say and I get paid! There was no going back’.”
It was a spine-tingling moment she describes as like stepping into a warm bath. “I just loved it. It was a natural fit. I fell in love with thespians and actors and musicians. I’d never been in the company of these extraordinary people and I just wanted to be with them all of the time.”
It’s a buzz that still excites her to this day. Harmer was reunited with some of her early comic colleagues for a gig in Melbourne at the end of last year and again felt that energy. “I hadn’t seen them for about five years and I sat there and thought, ‘Oh, these are my people’. They were mad, they were really rude, they were smoking their heads off and being profane and funny and I thought, ‘This is me!’ They made me laugh and laugh and laugh with their scandalous humour. It’s such a brilliant life — why wouldn’t you want to be with them?”
Nowadays, while her daily news site The Hoopla has closed since this interview was done, there’s little doubt Harmer will always have a zillion projects still on the boil. A new show next year with Jean Kittson has been in the pipeline for a while.
Harmer credits her partnership with her husband, town planner Brendan Donohoe, as her secret weapon. “I’m still the breadwinner in my family. My husband has been a stay-at-home husband for the whole time. That’s been our agreement. That Annabel Crabb Book — The Wife Drought — I’ve had that [a wife] for 25 years!”
Through it all, the written word is still her driving force. “I’m happiest when I put something on the page and I think I can stand back and go, that’s really good, that’s a really good piece of work. Then of course what happens is you look back at it later and you go, ‘Jesus, that’s crap!’ But that’s the process. That’s the learning. I think it’s just the fact that you never reach the end, you’re never as good as you want to be and that’s the challenge which keeps one going. It’s that challenge of being as good as you can be.”
She maintains every woman should have what she describes as “F*** Off money” advising women need to get themselves into a position where no one can do anything to them.
“Where you’re not beholden to anybody for a job. You’ve got a house. You’ve got money in the bank. Every woman should have F*** off money. I’m at the age now where I have that!”
Her tireless energy infectious, Harmer’s best tip for success is not sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. “I watch so many people — actors especially — waiting for offers. Well, go create a show for yourself, go do something. It’s all there. It’s all possible. A lot of things won’t happen and they won’t come to fruition — but if you’ve got ten ideas then you can move onto the next one. Have a go. Have a plan B and C and D and E and F.”
Harmer suggests taking tasks and breaking them down into small pieces. “Never eat anything bigger than your head,” she laughs. “Have a great curiosity about the world. Don’t dwell on other people’s successes or failures. Don’t look to what other people are doing….you’ve got to steer your own path.”
Her CV includes writing a libretto for Baz Luhrmann’s Opera Australia’s production of Lake Lost and appearing in a Patrick White play directed by Neil Armfield starring alongside Geoffrey Rush. Among her highlights are being flown to the West End for three nights from Edinburgh (“I sang on the West End!”) and performing in the Ben Elton Live Show with the Doug Anthony All Stars.
Yet despite the many challenges she has overcome, Harmer says it takes a great deal of mental work to stay on track.
“Of course one has self-doubt. You have to have self-confidence that doesn’t turn into arrogance and humility that doesn’t turn into self-doubt. People think self-confidence drops out of the sky, but it takes a great deal of mental work. I don’t think it matters whether your mother is there or not or being born with a cleft palette as I was — or whatever it is. I don’t think it really matters about your circumstances — it’s a daily meditation to quiet the voices that talk you down and the ones that undermine you. We’ve all got them. It is a very big job of work — and I think it’s something that should be taught in schools. To teach kids how to achieve equilibrium. Even if you feel incredibly confident for a bit it can evaporate overnight.”
Even at the hardest junctures in her life, Harmer has remained optimistic. “There’s not a lot of point in asking how you would do things differently and re-visit tombstones,” she says.
But like that golf course you hit some holes-in-one and some not. “The only thing you realise as you get older is that time is running out and that has its own set of terrors.”
Her hopes for the future are simple: A cleaner earth for her children.
“Success for me now is Marley, 16, and Maeve, 14. I just want them to have an environment that’s worth having. A clean, green world. I’m really frightened for them. That’s what spells success. And being about to work from home every day. I do have that F*** off money — I can pick and choose and say no to things and only do the things I really want to. That is really the achievement.”
FAST FIVE WITH WENDY HARMER
Favourite App: My dream app, which analyses your dreams. You wake up and you pop in your dream and it gives you the meaning and symbolism in there. It gives you a whole lot of options. I love it.
Dancer or Singer: I can dance freestyle! I’ve reduced dance teachers to tears trying to teach me routines. I’m definitely a singer. I sang on the West End. That’s a highlight!
Book Worm or Film Buff: Always books. Film doesn’t wildly interest me that much.
Favourite Indulgence: I like to have a bath. I like to be in the bath. That’s pretty good, especially if you are working on something — if you are writing a book and there’s a plot point and you can’t resolve it. You hop in the bath and you can usually resolve it.
Early Bird or Night Owl: Early bird. My husband stays up to very late and sleeps in to very late. But I do think if you’re an early bird and he’s a night owl and then you have children in the way and you don’t have those hours together then you’re f*cked. Because you don’t keep up with each other and that’s really difficult. But Brendan and I spend 24 hours a day in each other’s company. When I was on brekky radio I went to bed at 8 p.m. every night.
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