The Australian Women's Weekly December 2016

There’s nothing quite like an Australian Christmas. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to be one of the roughly one million Aussies who each year spend the silly season somewhere else, such as the UK, Europe and Canada. As I write this, I’m in New York, where snow themes are staring out of Fifth Avenue department store windows and red bows adorn lamp posts. It’s all very lovely, but it reminds me that when it comes to Christmas, there’s no place like home. I love an English Christmas steeped in tradition and no one does cosy hospitality and twinkling decorations like the North Americans, but our Aussie summer Christmases aren’t like anywhere else and, for me, that makes them special. My grandmother loved an English roast dinner followed by…

Letter of the month I sit here with my mum in palliative care, in her final days of her life. The Weekly is on her table. This magazine has always been there through Mum’s circle of life – marriages, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, divorces, birthdays, happy and sad days. Mum loved her Weekly and had it delivered by our newsagency for as long as I can remember. We, too, have shared in stories from the royals, world events, people’s journeys, celebrities, recipes, humour and, Mum’s favourite, the crosswords. We have watched it go from a weekly to a monthly. Mum wrote a few stories in 1967, one on “rearing kids”, and had them published, so we think we had a very famous mum. I always think fondly of Mum when the…

Jessica Hilda Mauboy’s urge to sing is irresistible. Flopped on the back lawn of her parents’ Darwin home, Jessica, 27, is holding her four-year-old niece, Ruby, in her arms and softly crooning in that distinctive and deeply resonant voice that has endeared the Darwin-born songstress to music lovers across the nation. “All I want for Christmas is you …” sings Jessica, gently tapping Ruby’s nose with her index finger. And as she lifts her voice, Jessica’s gathered family – everyone from her 72-year-old aunt, Harriet (who, with Jess’ grandmother, Hilda, introduced Jessica to gospel singing) to her mother, Therese, and >> even The Weekly photographic crew – lift their voices in a stirring rendition of the Christmas classic that wafts on the steamy afternoon heat like an alleviating breeze. In…

Natarsha Belling A very country Christmas The annual Christmas road trip signals the start of the festive season for Network Ten news presenter Natarsha Belling, her husband Glen and their boys, Harrison and Hugo. The minute their car wheels crunch onto her parents’ driveway at Mudgee, NSW, the traditional country celebrations begin. The highlight, Natarsha says, has always been Christmas morning, “and having children, you get to experience it again through the eyes of the child. Often we get home from Christmas Eve Mass and try to convince Dad to let us open just one present, but he has a hard and fast rule that we’re never allowed to open presents until Christmas Day.” The festivities usually involve a hot meal, “which is exhausting in a part of the country…

“ It’s going to be down to the wire … but it’s more than hope. ” After an agonising six-month wait for genetic test results to arrive, Hollie and Daniel Feller were led into a small Melbourne hospital room in February 2014 to learn their little boy’s fate. The geneticist didn’t need to say a word. “Her hands were shaking holding the piece of paper,” recalls Hollie. “Then I knew.” The couple’s third child, Harry, had been born deaf less than three years earlier – which was shocking enough – but the latest news came like a body blow: their only son had Usher syndrome, a rare genetic condition that would eventually make him go blind, too. “You know when you’re about to faint and you go all hot and…

“You can’t underestimate the pain of loss... It sent me into survival mode.” Sarah Ferguson arrives at The Weekly’s exclusive photo shoot like a hurricane waiting to blow. With her sister, Jane, by her side, the royal now known as Sarah, Duchess of York, surges forward to begin a flurry of greetings. Her treacly voice with its plummy aristocratic vowels echoes around the courtyard of the house we have hired to photograph her in, as with a hearty, firm handshake she repeats, “Hello, I’m Sarah, who are you?”, to every member of The Weekly’s team. Then, poised on the threshold, she stops and gathers the myriad thoughts that are swirling around her head, ideas she’s keen to get across in our interview. “We really must all be kinder to each…