The Australian Women's Weekly July 2016

SITTING HERE IN the Editor-in-Chief’s chair overlooking Sydney’s Hyde Park and the graceful spires of St Mary’s Cathedral, with the sound of ferry foghorns echoing from the harbour, I am penning my first editor’s letter for Australia’s biggest and most loved magazine. Suddenly, I’m acutely aware of the incredible honour of this role and the responsibility of being the custodian of one of the great voices for Australian women. But there’s something else, too. Amid the flurry of kind well-wishers, the excitement of joining the team, the eagerness to get on with the many plans ahead (and a generous dose of first-week nerves), I realise what that unexpected sense is: stepping into The Australian Women’s Weekly feels like coming home. It’s not simply the decades of covers on the office…

PEARL OF WISDOM A happy frame of mind makes a perfect picture. M. BUCKLEY, NOBLE PARK, VIC. The winner of our Pearl of Wisdom this month wins a 12-month subscrption to The Australian Women’s Weekly, valued at $83.80. NEXT MONTH The August issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly goes on sale on July 7. Don’t miss out! WRITE TO US Letter of the Month wins $100. Your postal address must be included in all correspondence. Please state clearly if your letter is not for publication. See Contents for the location of Bauer Media Limited’s Privacy Notice. Courageous Marlene Beverley Hadgraft’s Rebuilding Marlene (WW, June) was a confronting and distressing read, sparking a flood of emotions ranging from shock, anger and sadness to shame; shame from knowing that most non-indigenous Australians…

As chance would have it, I picked up my wife’s copy of The Weekly just after we had returned from a pep talk on positive ageing. If we needed any more encouragement it was there in spades in articles on the 90-year-old Queen (WW, June), the octogenarian Joan Collins (On-screen Kissing Is Horrible) and that other ageless 90-year-old, David Attenborough (“I Could Never Put My Feet Up”). All bear testimony to the part keeping active plays in staying young at heart. The Queen has been on the throne more than 60 years; Joan Collins acting almost as long and Sir David has been thrilling us with the natural world since the 1950s. It was heartening to read how Attenborough resisted the temptation to “hide under the bed” on his 90th…

JADE HAMEISTER WAS 13 when she sat down to her usual family dinner and made an announcement: she wanted to become the youngest person ever to ski to the North Pole. It was something she’d been dreaming about for the past year, she said, and since the dream wouldn’t go away, she wanted to see if she could make it a reality. Most parents would probably have laughed and told Jade to finish her vegetables. Luckily for Jade, she doesn’t have most parents. Her dad, Paul, immediately began investigating how to make it happen. “If your kids have a dream, it’s important to take action and find out if they can do it,” he says. “It’s better to have a crack and fail than to run away in case things…

THE TENSION IN the room was palpable, emanating not just from the demeanour of the doctors and nurses surrounding 75-year-old John Kennerley’s prostrate form, but from John himself. His wife of 32 years, Kerri-Anne Kennerley, gently stroked his hand – touch being one of the few sensations left to John after his devastating spinal injury – as the team prepared to remove the resuscitation tube from a tracheotomy incision just centimetres below his Adam’s apple. “We’d tried this twice during the past few weeks, but both times John was unable to breathe,” recalls Kerri-Anne, 62. “Survival is the first thing you hope for in a situation such as this and I was grateful John was alive, but if that life was to have any quality at all, he needed at…

WHEN THE NEWS broke that John Kennerley had been paralysed in a freak accident, comparisons were immediately drawn to the late actor Christopher Reeve. At first, it seemed John’s injuries were similar to those of the Superman star, who was left quadriplegic after an equestrian accident 21 years ago. However, we now know John’s condition is less severe than originally feared. Unlike Christopher, whose skull became disconnected from his spine and had to be surgically reattached, John has “incomplete quadriplegia”, with some feeling and movement below his injury. John broke his C3 and C4 vertebrae, which are near the top of his spine, but lower than Christopher’s C1 and C2 injury, which left him on a ventilator. Just a centimetre or two can mean the difference between hope and despair.…