The Australian Women's Weekly January 2017

There’s a certain dread that comes with fire season if you live in a bushfire zone. It’s watching the undergrowth become so dry it crackles. It’s days when the heat rising under your feet makes you feel like the land is breathing and how the hairs on the back of your neck stand up when the wind swings north. Growing up on the rural fringe, I remember Mum teaching me to drive the car, aged 10. If the bushfire threat was too great, I knew my job was to pack the photo albums, load up the dogs and get my little brother out. There were the years we evacuated and the time we had to drain the neighbours’ swimming pool to fill the tanks on the Country Fire Authority’s truck.…

Letter of the month I am an 86-year-old transgender woman. My eldest son is bisexual, while my second son, whom we tragically lost from AIDS in 1989, was gay. My daughter is happily married. Both my son and daughter are having difficulty coping with their father, who is now a woman. My wife of 45 years is now my best friend after long feeling a terrible loss. We go out for coffee and shopping as two ladies, which I greatly appreciate. So a letter (Three Of The Best, AWW, December) on your transgender story was of great interest. Michelle F., via email. Royal role models The royals are like family to my generation and I love your article on the Duchess of York (There Is A Little Voice In Me…

There is a little noise that Nicole Kidman emits when deep in conversation: something between a sigh and an “ah” that comes out as a soft “wah” and signifies intensity of emotion, accompanied by a tilt back of the head or a swipe of a palm on her brow, her russet curls scraped back today in a topknot. Her complexion, which can be bloodless on screen, is flushed a wild rose by the late Nashville summer; perhaps glowing a little pinker through the force of maternal passion. For she is trying to persuade me to get pregnant. “Come on, please, have that baby!” she begs, leaning in close, her eyes flashing with mischief. “Babies bring so much joy. Wah!” Nicole is so far from her image as the regal redhead,…

“ I didn’t come out of my room for three days. ” In a Melbourne homeless shelter, Tziporah Malkah sits on a single mattress in a bleak room no bigger than a prison cell, remembering the day she moved in. With a fridge by the bed and cigarette burns on the sofas, it hardly felt like home, but it was better than sleeping on the street, and she had nowhere else to go. “I didn’t come out of my room for three days,” she recalls. “I just sat there and cried.” Tziporah remembers the terror and hopelessness, but most of all the shame. How had she fallen so far? In the 1990s, as Kate Fischer, she had been a darling of the Sydney social pages – the fun, feisty model…

Pat Bigham is not afraid of fire. She’s not afraid of heat so searing it snatches the breath from your lungs. She’s not afraid of darkness in the middle of the day from smoke so thick you can’t see your hand in front of you. And she’s not afraid of running into the teeth of a firestorm when everyone else is running away. “Having been through Ash Wednesday and Black Saturday, I know there’s no point worrying. Mother Nature will do what she chooses and we’ll just deal with whatever comes our way,” says the 68-year-old chicken farmer from Victoria’s Yarra Valley. “What will be will be.” It’s a mantra Pat and many other volunteer firefighters repeat every summer evening when they rest their heads on the pillow, knowing the…

On a wintry day in 1986, a teenage girl with wide eyes, high cheekbones and long legs left the small town she had grown up in and took the snowy road to the big city. Only to discover that Ljubljana, the picturesque but sleepy capital of Slovenia, was nowhere near big enough. Soon, Melanija Knavs, now an aspiring model, was heading for Milan, then Paris and on to New York where, adorned in a $200,000 Dior wedding gown and her name changed to Melania Knauss, she would become the third wife of controversial billionaire and President-elect of the United States, Donald Trump. A sense of wonderment hangs over the town Melania left behind. Snuggled into the bend of a river, Sevnica is the kind of place even its own mayor…