The Australian Women's Weekly August 2015

SITTING AT LUNCH last month, a friend confessed that someone close to him had a tumour that was so big it may have spread well beyond her ovaries. He is an exceptionally busy man, but naturally, everything was automatically less significant. Almost every reader will recognise that sentiment. Last year, at precisely the same time, another friend called Annie told the world that she too had become one of the statistics. She was one of the women diagnosed every 10 hours with ovarian cancer. Annie had even worked with us on previous awareness campaigns and, as she wryly observed, should have known the signs better than most. Yet that is the thing about ovarian cancer – there is no equivalent to the Pap smear as an early detection test and…

Letter of the month My heart goes out to Gillian Triggs and I feel overwhelmed with sadness for us both. My son was diagnosed with Edwards syndrome while still in the womb, 19 years ago. I had two children, aged two and five, and the specialist gave me the same information, that he wouldn’t survive pregnancy or, at best, would spend his short life in a humidicrib. Based on this, we electively terminated the pregnancy at 22 weeks. I still mourn him and can see his tiny hands and feet, but I am thankful that I made the decision I did. I have been a single parent for 17 years now, so my and my children’s life would have been overwhelmingly difficult if he had lived as long as Victoria.…

KAREN MIDDLETON Karen Middleton is a freelance journalist who has covered national and international affairs in Australia and overseas for more than 25 years, spending the past decade as Chief Political Correspondent for SBS TV. This month, she examines why some Australians say they can’t support legalising same-sex marriage. “I think to properly debate important issues, we need to hear all the arguments calmly and clearly,” she says. Read her report on page 55. SUSAN HORSBURGH This month, The Weekly’s Melbourne-based Senior Writer Susan Horsburgh took on the task of interviewing Tara Brown – TV’s toughest interrogator. While reflecting on her remarkable year in the interviewer’s hot seat, Tara told Susan about her father, whom she hasn’t spoken to for 40 years. “She’s one of our most accomplished TV journalists,…

IT WAS WHILE out on the ocean they both love, with a ring he had bought four years ago and as a manta ray swam lazily beneath them. If Turia Pitt’s marriage proposal could have been more romantic, it’s hard to know how. The inspiring burns survivor and her long-term beau, Michael Hoskin, have become engaged while holidaying on a boat in the Maldives. And so the country’s greatest love story continues. Certainly, if there’s been one thing more persistently inspiring than Turia Pitt’s remarkable tale of triumph over adversity, it’s been the love story that has underpinned it. Michael – the former copper from Ulladulla, the boy she knew at school and admired from afar, the man Turia credits with giving her the strength to rebuild her life after…

SCOTT MORRISON IS blinking back tears and his staffer has gone to look for tissues. He has been jolted by the memory of his late grandmother, who passed away shortly before Scott entered Parliament. Yet the evidence of emotion is so brief that only the awkward placement of the tissues confirms it. The 47-year-old is in his ministerial office on the ground floor of Parliament House in Canberra. He has recently been moved from the Immigration portfolio into another controversial area – Social Services. And even though he would have preferred to have been rewarded with the prestigious Defence portfolio, he has taken the welfare system by storm, announcing difficult reforms and forging alliances. As one influential MP said, “If we lose the next election, Scott Morrison will be leader.”…

KATE WATERHOUSE FASHION AND LIFESTYLE BLOGGER Hailing as she does from Australian horse-racing royalty, Kate Waterhouse was always in danger of living in the shadow of her mother, super-trainer Gai Waterhouse. Yet since the 31-year-old stepped confidently into the public sphere as a newspaper style editor 10 years ago, she’s not put a fashionably clad foot wrong. Her lifestyle blog, her newspaper column, her regular appearance in the country’s most stylish leader boards (including this magazine’s Most Stylish Women list) are all testament to Kate’s savvy understanding of the new media world in which she lives. “These days, we are all the custodians of our own personal brand,” she says. “Before you used to specialise in one area, [but] these days, you have to be much more fluid, be prepared…