Thoughts from an Idle Hour

often, but not always, about books, writers and writing

, ,

Casting an Image: Wendy Harmer’s Lies My Mirror Told Me

After an inauspicious start to life, Wendy Harmer became a formidable comedian on stage, television and radio.

Tessa Wooldridge
7 minutes

Before I started reading Wendy Harmer’s Lies My Mirror Told Me, I propped a photo on the bookshelf beside me. It’s a picture of a primary school class. I’m just left of centre in the middle row, Wendy Harmer (then Wendy Brown) is at the far right of the front row. The boy sitting at centre front, hands resting neatly in his lap, has a writing slate propped against his shins. The slate bears this chalk inscription:

Camp Hill
State School
Grade 3
1963

1963. The year the Brown family moved to Bendigo from Warncoort and one year after my family moved there. For four years, from 1963 to 1966, Wendy Harmer and I shared a classroom (and a playground) at Camp Hill. Like her, my years there were troublesome. Unlike her, I did not go on to have a stellar comedic career in theatre venues large and small, on radio and television, and in the literary world.

Early years

‘I had a fox terrier pup born with a cleft palate and I had to drown it’ – Graham Brown (Prologue)

Image courtesy of Allen & Unwin

Harmer’s memoir, Lies My Mirror Told Me, unfolds in a largely linear fashion, initially chronicling her childhood years as her family traipsed from one posting to the next at the whim of her father’s employer, the Victorian Education Department. It then moves through her adolescent years, which included surgery on her ‘bilateral cleft lip and palate’, and on into adulthood and her various careers in the media and the arts.

Harmer’s birth family comprised parents Margaret Wicks and Graham Brown (our classroom teacher in Grade 6 if memory serves me rightly), and three younger siblings. During the family’s Bendigo years, it became apparent that Harmer’s mother was deeply unsettled. She drifted in and out of the family’s life before leaving altogether and returning to her home state of Tasmania. Meanwhile, Harmer’s father continued to live life ‘as if he were a single man’. (A second marriage for Graham Brown, to a woman Harmer describes as delivering ‘mind-bending’ psychological abuse, would follow.)

Fortunately, the grim realities of those Bendigo years were studded with wild escapades and the chivalric camaraderie of the four Brown children.

Later years

‘Look at you. No, not in the mirror. As your husband, children and friends see you.’ (Epilogue)

Skip forward to Harmer’s seventh decade. From this vantage, Harmer can see both her mother and her father with new clarity. She is glad she and her mother ‘found our way back to each other’ but remains ‘wary’ of her mother’s sometimes changeable recollections and revelations. She recognises her father’s flaws, but values the ‘deep, uncritical acceptance’ he offered her.

By the end of Harmer’s memoir, her father has died, as has one of her brothers, and her sister is estranged. But she now has her own nuclear family with husband Brendan Donohoe and two adult children.

The second time she met Donohoe was at a fundraiser. He walked her to her car at the end of the evening and, writes Harmer, ‘a thought came to me unbidden. I’m home.’ They were engaged within three months.

Newlywed at the age of 39, Harmer was told she was ‘too old’ to have children. Happily, that medical opinion was incorrect.

In-between years

‘What have you got yourself into this time, Harmer? This is ridiculous. There is no way you can pull this one off.’ (Chapter 15. Love Gone Wrong)

Wendy Harmer is a woman in perpetual motion.

In between the stories of her childhood and the eventual formation of a joy-filled family of her own, Harmer’s memoir tracks her eventful comedy career. The book’s pages serve up a veritable ‘who’s who’ of the Australian (and international) comedy scene.

The names will be familiar even to people who’ve never been to live stand-up but who have lived through the era of The Gillies Report and The Big Gig, and who have read enough news to know about the comedy festivals in Edinburgh, Melbourne and Montreal. Names like Richard Stubbs, Max Gillies, Tracy Harvey, Jill Kitson, John Clarke, Mary-Anne Fahey, Peter Cook and Harmer’s comedy idol, Joan Rivers, pepper Harmer’s generous account.

Wendy Harmer and Mary-Anne Fahey, 1986

Along the way, Harmer teamed up with Neil Armfield, taking on an acting role in the debut season of Patrick White’s Shepherd on the Rocks, and with Baz Luhrmann to create Australian Opera’s Lake Lost.

While touring Australia and internationally, and while creating, hosting and staring in shows for television, Harmer also began writing books. (She now has over 40 titles under belt including the highly successful Pearlie series.)

Still not enough? Let’s try radio. Starting at Melbourne’s 3AK before moving to the ABC’s Radio National, Sydney’s 2DayFM, and back to the ABC for a breakfast program, Harmer became, at one point, ‘the highest paid woman in radio’ in Australia. She loved the ‘ephemeral nature of daily radio’. Like comedy, she says, once ‘it’s done, it disappears’.

Got a spare moment? With Jane Waterhouse and Caroline Roessler, Harmer found time to set up The Hoopla, an online news site. ‘We launched The Hoopla as “news through the eyes of women” … not “women’s news”. There’s a big difference.’ Although the cash-strapped site would close after four years, Harmer declares it ‘the enterprise I loved the most’.

Several lifetimes of work achievements somehow fit into Harmer’s one, singular life.

Back to Bendigo

‘My odd face hadn’t been a problem until I attended … Camp Hill Primary School.’ (Chapter 3. Tunnels and Towers)

‘Bendigo. The Grand Camp Hill State School’ (2016) by denisbin. CC BY-ND 2.0.

It was the hook of our shared time at Camp Hill that prompted me to pick up Harmer’s memoir in the first place. Would her recollections align with mine? Would I glean new insights into my primary school years?

It was at Camp Hill that children’s meanness reared its head for Harmer. (An experience we have in common.) ‘I prefer to say I was “teased” or “picked on” rather than “bullied”, even though by modern definition bullying is what it was.’ Not yet ten years old, Harmer decided those children would never have power over her.

With sociological insight beyond her years, she worked out: ‘There was safety in numbers, I figured, so I found a group of girlfriends who were a bit daggy like me. Kind and loyal. Not the glamorous, popular “A” group, but girls who loved school, did well at their studies and were never in trouble. Individually we could all have been targets at Camp Hill – the ones of Chinese descent, the too-tall ones, the too-fat ones, too-skinny ones, the shy awkward ones, the “brainy” ones – but together we were an anonymous collection of all-sorts.’ Indeed we were.

For all the bravado displayed by Harmer in those years, exclusion comes at a cost. Many years later, during a visualisation exercise, she re-visited ‘that little girl back in Bendigo and sobbed my heart out’. Those Camp Hill years were harrowing.

Thank goodness for the Brownies and the swimming pool.

The Brownie Book with Pixie badge

As it happens, both Harmer and I were members of Brownie packs – she in the 2nd Eaglehawk pack, I in the 9th Bendigo one. We were both ‘jolly pixies, helping people when in fixes’. (I know. You had to be there.)

And like Harmer, I spent my summer days at the Bendigo Olympic Pool. I, too, ‘put in a lot of hours swimming up and down’. We both swim laps to this day. Make of that what you will.

Links and sources

Photo credits

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Trending