Originally published in Australian Women's Weekly

As a teenage model, Sarah Nursey’s dazzling cover girl smile hid an undiagnosed condition which affects between 3 to 5 percent of the population. 

Images can arrest our senses and enslave us to dreams. In an age before Photoshop, Instagram or scrolling endlessly on smartphones, glossy magazines carved all our aspirations. When 15-year-old cover girl Sarah Nursey graced the cover of DOLLY magazine no less than three times in 1984, she was like an incantation commanding me to perm my hair. 

Sarah’s dazzling smile, round face and inviting eyes are proportioned in the same golden ratio as Leonardo Da Vinci’s portrait Mona Lisa. Sarah’s fit and lean 178cm tall body – honed by athletics and aerobics – was undeniably alluring to my chubby teenage self. 

The Dachet jeans and fluoro Cherry Lane clothes Sarah wore hit the right note. But her sun-streaked curly hair clinched it. Those DOLLY covers seemed to sing: get a perm; curls are for beautiful girls. 

Lisa Wilkinson - who now presents Network 10’s The Project - edited DOLLY in the 1980s and worked closely with fashion photographer Graham Shearer, discovering fresh-faced and friendly Australian girls to put on the cover.  

“From the very first time I put Sarah on the cover, the readers fell in love with her, and demanded we keep using her,” says Lisa, taking time out from writing her autobiography to talk about Sarah.  

“Graham also came to me with some Polaroids of a young up and coming model he’d found called Nicole Kidman. I put her on the cover straight away, and it was my first ever sellout issue.” 

Sarah Nursey sold more copies of DOLLY than Nicole Kidman did. A 1985 cover featuring Sarah was the bestselling cover of Lisa Wilkinson’s editorship.

Sarah appeared to have it all before she’d even finished Year 10 at high school. She was the undeniable star of DOLLY magazine, where she shone on the cover and inside on the fashion pages and feature stories that showed off her best friend Simone and boyfriend Barney. 

Sports Illustrated’s 1985 swimwear issue showcased Sarah’s beachy athleticism in a Baywatch-style red swimsuit, inspiring a raft of fan mail from male prisoners as well as teenage girls like me.

Sarah rose like an apparition, starring in Pseudo Echo’s video for the 1983 hit ‘Listening’ – ironic given she was battling an undiagnosed condition that makes it almost impossible for her to listen or focus. 

Sarah has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), a mental condition as inheritable as the height that blessed her modelling career. She was diagnosed at the age of 45, too late for the treatment and skills training that might have changed her life.

ADHD is a neurodevelopmental problem with a confused reputation. Many think it only affects kids. Cynics say ADHD is ‘made up’ or invented by Americans to allow parents to drug poorly behaved children. Nothing could be further from the truth. 

ADHD is the most common mental disorder in Australia, affecting 281,200 children. It is vastly underdiagnosed in adults and girls, who are more likely to have inattentive ADHD, which makes them seem dreamy or vague. 

Research shows 65 percent of kids diagnosed with the disorder do not grow out of it. Adult ADHD affects women and men at the same rate, and a late age diagnosis of ADHD robs people of early treatment and skills intervention which can help them achieve their potential.

ADHD was first discovered in the late 1700s and its vast body of research makes for startling reading – those who have ADHD are at dramatically increased risk of trauma, addiction, anxiety and episodic depression that can be hard to treat. 

Dr Michele Toner says there’s anecdotal evidence to suggest that menopause reignites the brain fog and concentration problems of ADHD. Psychiatrist Dr Charles Chan says accurate diagnosis and evidence-based treatment is vital for good outcomes. Where there’s a child with ADHD, there is more than an 80 percent chance there is a parent with it, too.  

Sarah’s inability to focus is as genetic as the beauty that blessed and cursed her in equal measure. While her good looks enraptured teenage girls who wanted to be like her – they also attracted dangerous men.  

Sarah had a running coach, who promised to help her win gold medals. He liked to massage her legs “to help her feel better”. His hands kept creeping. He raped her. The shame contorted her.

At 13, Sarah was diagnosed with a painful sideways spinal curve called scoliosis. Doctors strapped her into a Milwaukee Brace for 23 hours a day: her neck was tractioned in a thick metal collar; her hips, chest and shoulders caged ramrod straight. Sarah couldn’t look down to see her feet - only straight ahead, unable to glimpse at the ground upon which she walked. 

Sarah was scouted at her local gym by the teenage daughter of modelling agent Vivien Smith. She was introduced to Graham Shearer, and his stylist wife Patricia Merk, who both nurtured her to pose naturally in front of the camera. She loved working with Graham, but shooting with other photographers was more challenging, especially when they barked instructions that she couldn’t follow. 

Sarah would force her best friend Simone Fernando to come with her to castings because she needed moral support when clients openly said her hair wasn’t right or her shoulders were too broad to fit into the size 8 sample fashions.

“I had no confidence at all,” Sarah says.

Those teenage modelling years went by in a blur of school holiday and weekend photo shoots that Sarah remembers painfully. Her anxiety and panic made her believe people stared for all the wrong reasons. “I thought people were looking at how ugly I was because I’d been wearing that brace. I was self-conscious,” she says.

Simone Fernando - who was photographed in DOLLY with Sarah in 1984 – remembers the time more clearly, saying most of Sarah’s peers were in awe of Sarah and her modelling. “Everywhere we went, people would lose their jaws and I would tell them to take a number,” Simone says. 

Yet Sarah hated being looked at. She felt like a fraud. An imposter. “My black and white thinking meant I believed I was a terrible model. Because Vogue magazine didn’t book me, I figured I must be crap.”

Sarah also believed she was a terrible student. Simone has a clearer memory and says Sarah did well at school. Though she often forgot her homework. Or her sports gear – classic ADHD symptoms.

“Sarsy (her nickname) never seemed to really love modelling. She was so stunningly beautiful but it was hard at our school. The headmistress wouldn’t give her time off and her parents weren’t really into her being a model either,” Simone says.

Boarding school bullies

Sarah was sent to an interstate boarding school in 1985 to focus on school and rekindle her love for athletics. Boys from the boarding house literally hosed her down with cold water, trying to get her school uniform to stick to her Sports Illustrated body and cop a good look.

 “I felt abandoned and alone at boarding school,” Sarah remembers. She struggled through her final years of school, looking forward to returning home in school holidays to see her friends and work with Graham and his wife on campaigns for Sportsgirl, Jean Nate and Grace Bros.

Photographer Graham Shearer says 1980s DOLLY cover girls earned serious money modelling - “way more than photographers did” - with many leaving Australia to earn big dollars in Europe or America as Elle Macpherson, Emma Balfour, Tonya Bird, Sonia Klein, and eventually Nicole Kidman did as an actor.

Sarah did travel after finishing Year 12 but rather than build a lucrative modelling career she took up residence at Israel’s Sdot Yam kibbutz, a commune in Caesarea.  

Sarah rose at 3.30am each day, spending long mornings in gumboots wading knee high through cow manure in the milking shed, known as the refit, to earn her keep at the kibbutz. 

This was the happiest time of her life, far from people’s gaze where she fell in love with a Jewish boy, Roded. She thrived on the demanding physical work that calmed her inner restlessness and made her forget the self-loathing of modelling.

When a phone call came asking Sarah to fly to New York for a lucrative modelling contract, she turned it down. Sarah dreamed of converting to Judaism to be Roded’s wife on the kibbutz.

When Roded left the kibbutz for compulsory military service, Sarah’s anxiety returned. Her packet-a-day smoking habit lurched out of control.  An unplanned pregnancy derailed the relationship. Sarah returned to Australia. Directionless. Distracted. And still undiagnosed.

Her quest to quell the boredom that ate at her insides led her to join the police. “I was always looking for something with adrenaline and excitement. If I don’t have something interesting to focus on, then I’m catatonic on the couch,” she says. 

As a police officer, Sarah conducted random breath tests and pulled over James Packer, the son of Australia’s richest man who owned DOLLY magazine. The following day, Sarah arrived for work to find the police station smothered in hundreds of red roses that James had sent. 

Sarah and James became an item. Sarah took holidays from the police force. 

“I’ve always found weekends and holidays really hard,” Sarah says. “When I have a structure or routine, I’m good. If I don’t, then I go looking for something. Anything.” 

Without day-to-day work, Sarah immediately said ‘yes’ when a friend told her the short-staffed Fairstar cruise ship needed people to be on the ship that afternoon to work onboard. 

James sent faxes to the Fairstar trying to find Sarah – she’d never even told him she was leaving.

“I came down with chickenpox. They sent me to the ship hospital, but that didn’t stop me meeting Jason the plumber,” she says.

James sent his driver to collect Sarah when the Fairstar finally returned to Sydney. She broke up with James covered in chickenpox scabs, thinking she was in love with the plumber. She quickly broke up with the plumber, too.

“I often hurt the men I’ve gone out with,” Sarah says. 

Sarah did settle down with a detective she met on the job. She became Sarah van den Hoek and had two beautiful daughters born 14 months apart, Ruby and Nellie. 

I befriended the real Sarah, not the idealised covergirl version, when we were both new mothers. Our kids would play together on the handkerchief sized patch of lawn we optimistically called ‘the park’ in our crowded inner-city suburb.

Sarah’s ADHD diagnosis came 15 years later as her marriage unravelled. The diagnosis was a relief. “I finally knew what was wrong. I could get treatment,” she says.

Sarah has worked as a model, dairy hand, police officer, flight attendant, apprentice pastry chef, judge’s associate and a parole officer. Dr Toner says it can be common for people with ADHD to throw themselves into new jobs or relationships.

It’s also common that those with a late age diagnosis battle the depression that comes with never being quite where your peers are at.

Stimulant medication for ADHD fixes symptoms in around 80 percent of cases. Many talk about treatment as enabling their superpowers to come to the fore. Some also require skills coaching to learn basics like time management or goal setting.

People diagnosed with ADHD often have special gifts, or what ADHD coach Dr Michele Toner calls “islands of excellence”. Sarah’s includes her capacity for hard work and zest for justice. She loves swimming in the ocean - no matter how cold it is - and playing with her rescue dog, Trip. “Swimming is the one thing that gets me out of my head - and Trip can’t help but make me smile,” she says.

Sarah also loves to laugh. Especially at the ill-fated perm I had in the 1980s. “Why would anyone want curly hair if you didn’t have to? You don’t see Nicole Kidman with curls anymore,” she says.

As COVID lockdowns took their toll from 2020, it became harder for Sarah - and many other people - to find laughter or joy. Her couch sucked her back into what she calls “nothingness”. Episodic depression has been a companion to every decade of her life. For some people with ADHD, depression can be stubbornly hard to treat.  

“When I’m down, I get really down,” she says. “My life hasn’t turned out the way I thought.”  

While on leave from work, doctors prescribed Valium to stop her racing mind. It was the first time she’d felt a blissful state of peace in years. So she took another pill. And then another. And another.

She overdosed. “I wasn’t trying to kill myself, so much as numb my pain,” Sarah says. “I wanted to stop feeling so bad.”

Sarah was admitted to hospital, feeling like the misaligned, broken girl inside the scoliosis brace. Her girls sent her flowers with a card commanding her to “keep fighting”.

“I keep going for my girls. And for every other girl who needs to understand that ADHD isn’t something to be ashamed of or judged for,” Sarah says. 

Originally published in Vive

"Don't forget to blow out the candles"

When Alexandra Smart rushes out of the sleek boudoir-like studio of Ginger & Smart at 6pm, she leaves her creative sister to the peace of after-hours designing.

“She’s always telling me to blow out the candles – I like to have three or four burning at once,” admits Genevieve, the younger sister who designs the luxe resort-style range of products that Ginger & Smart sell in 75 Australian stores and 15 overseas outlets.

“I’m usually here till quite late, so it’s the last thing on my mind when I finally leave.”

The scented candles that Genevieve burns so freely were one of the first products in the Ginger & Smart range, which now includes fashion, belts, bags and other beautiful products that fit under the umbrella of ‘precious treasures’.

Genevieve, a former designer for Lisa Ho, and her older sister Alexandra, a former magazine publisher, set up their brand in 2002 and now employ three staff at their Paddington headquarters in Sydney.

“I am your classic first-born child with an A-type personality,” says Alexandra, who has worked full-time on the business since 2002, shortly before the birth of her first child Ava.

The sisters came up with the idea for the business after Genevieve had a stint in hospital and craved luxe goodies like padded eye masks and scented candles rather than bunches of flowers.

“We realised that luxe was not about the money you spend, but the way things made you feel – so we developed and launched the spa range,” Alexandra says.

The sisters grew up in England and Australia with passionate parents who didn’t own a television and lived in a Tudor Cottage on “a pig farm without any heating or running water”.

“Basically, our parents encouraged us to make our own fun from our imagination – I’m not sure I would have worked in fashion if it hadn’t been for my childhood,” Genevieve says.

“Mum would take us into an Op Shop and have us pick something out that we’d end up chopping and changing or customising it with new buttons.

“They call it vintage now, but back then it was just plain op shop and it was awful.”

Genevieve recalls childhood games of making fairy gardens with sparkly rings nestled in piles of flower petals and a dress-up box “full of amazing vintage clothes and petticoats”.

Alexandra lost herself in books and sport as a child and as she entered her late teens, the sisters fought and bickered as most siblings do.

“It was only as we got into our twenties and later in our thirties that we really came together again as sisters,” Alexandra says.

And now, the business is growing so rapidly that the siblings spend more time talking about “niggly day-to-day business things” than sisterly things.

Of course, Genevieve and Alexandra are close – Genevieve was at the birth of Ava – “Our partners get really annoyed at family events because we are always hoping no-one will notice us talking quietly to each other about what’s going on with the business.”

Published in Good Weekend

Designer and post-graduate student Tricia Hanlon, 67, is the oldest of seven children, including twin Zohl de  Ishtar, 53, a peace activist and post-doctoral research fellow.

TRICIA:

Of course Zohl is not her original name. I am never allowed to tell anyone her initial name. She would eat me alive. She was originally named for our grandfather, for goodness sake. We presented mother with a written petition when she got home from hospital with the twins. We said you cannot possibly call this twin by that name. That set the scene for Zohl to change her name later.

I was 14 when the twins came. The rest are dumber than you for a long time so you get away with a lot being the first-born. I’d have to bathe the twins, Zohl and Fran, when I got home from work, but I found creative ways of doing my share. I would take off my stilettos and stockings and make the twins wash my feet.

We were stuck in this semi-rural area of Adelaide, so going out with a boy was my escape from the house. This poor boy was trying to be nice to all these children lined up against the wall watching him. Zohl came up and went ‘dah’ and handed him a little marble of poo, which he took willingly. I was mortified.

Dad died six weeks before I got married, and I became loco parentis to the rest of the children. Mother was a young widow with five children still at home. I spent half my life at various schools sorting out those children.

There was the great denim jeans incident. Zohl made a pact with 10 students to refuse to wear school uniform. By the end of the week, she was the only one still holding to the vow. The headmaster wasn’t happy. I insisted she had the right to wear what she wanted. I was a fashion designer, wasn’t I?

I remember Zohl trying to work out what she wanted to do when she left school. I think it was hard for her to be the youngest twin. She had this weight of sisterhood on top of her. Four older sisters and two brothers. She was definitely at the bottom of the totem pole.

But she went on to have marvellous adventures. She built a gypsy wagon -style caravan called Ishtar and travelled Australia. Then she just disappeared. She told me she would see me on Thursday – and she didn’t come back to see me until eight years later. On a Thursday.

We stayed in touch with letters. She went to Greenham Common in England, which is where she came out and realised she preferred women. It never shocked me or worried me. It was not like she had not had more men than me in all my life. In the 1970s, you got to sleep with them; in the 1950s, you could not. She did say to me, years later, that I should have presented lesbianism as an option to her during our ‘Girls Talks’, but it just wasn’t something I ever thought about.

She didn’t have a structured career. Shewas off traipsing the world, doing a  bike ride for peace or sitting in the middle of somewhere they were going to drop a bomb. I thought if Zohl didn’t get a qualification, she could just be a burnt out hippy.

When she became Dr Z in 2003, I thought it was just wonderful. She was part of the 1000 Women nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. Now she’s encouraging me to be Dr T, with my fashion thesis. She helps me navigate the world of academia and research.

I find it fascinating that we grew up in different decades, almost different generations, yet we are surprisingly similar. You should always live your life as a social experiment, and I think Zohl agrees. I inhaled the 1950s and got a smoking habit from Gauloise cigarettes. She inhaled the 1970s, marijuana smoke and all. We are like bookends, really.

ZOHL:

I can’t remember when Tricia didn’t have green hair. I’m Irish-Australian and I always tell people I am proud of that – but my sister is more proud. I mean, she has green hair. She’s not normal by any stretch of the imagination, but she’s always been creative. She says her hair-colour is ‘the thinking woman’s blue rinse’.

We have arguments, of course, but she is my mentor. She has never stopped playing the older sister. Even when she’s wrong, she’s right.

She always gives me books as presents. One Christmas I opened up my present to find three books I had lent to her. She had wrapped them especially. She really did think she had bought them for me.  

So much of what I have done in my life has been reflected through deep conversations with Tricia. She knows more about me and what I’m up to than anyone else on the planet.

She even came to visit the remote Aboriginal community where I did my research She gave me a place to live when I wrote my thesis, Holding Yawulyu. White Culture and Black Women’s Law. She even came to visit the remote Aboriginal community where I did my research. There was Tricia dragging a branch behind her, juggling a coffee and a cigarette in her hand. The elders said, ‘Oh your sister, she works so hard’, but my other sister was actually doing all the work building this shed. Tricia gets a lot of credit that might not be hers, but she takes it anyway.

She ran the Ginger Workshop, which was this amazing collective of artists in Adelaide. One of the friends I met there asked if I wanted to go to Nimbin. I was trying to work out what to do with my future, so I turned to Tricia for advice. She sent me a telegram, which I still remember: ‘Don’t pull the lever STOP Let the river flow STOP’. Who knows what that meant? I took it to mean make up your own bloody mind and get on with it. I followed my feet and went to the Aquarius Festival. It was the event of the 1970s and put me on the path to the rest of my adventures.

When I was young, I remember her standing around with a long cigarette holder. She was so beautiful. I mean, she used to be a model. Her room was a treasure trove. I used to sneak into her bedroom when she wasn’t around and play with her stuff. I remember her jewellery, I used to rearrange it all the time.

On Friday nights we’d have Girl Talks. Tricia did talk about sex occasionally and I remember thinking, ‘Nu-uh, I’m not going there’. It was there and then I decided I wasn’t going to have babies.

One of the things that annoys me about being the youngest is that there is a whole life that happened before you were born. All the sisters like to talk B.Z., or Before Zohl, and they do it on purpose to annoy me. See, I don’t know anything about that poo story, and I only found out that a rhinoceros pissed on me a few years ago. I mean, you think you had a bad childhood? I was pissed on by a rhino. Tricia left my pram in front of the rhino cage at the zoo when I was a baby.

I guess the good thing about it is that that's Tricia.

Published in Good Weekend

Romance novelist Valerie Parv, 53, is one of Australia’s best-selling international author with more than 25 million books sold around the world. The State Library of NSW has been archiving her papers since 1994. She has been married to her own romantic hero, a former crocodile hunter, cartoonist and layout artist, 79-year-old Paul Parv, for 34 years.

VALERIE

“I think we are an odd couple: Crocodile Dundee meets Barbara Cartland. I’m a bit of a disappointment as a romance writer unfortunately. We don’t live in a fancy house or have a heart-shaped swimming pool. We haven’t even owned a car for 25 years. I get up every day at four or five in the morning and just write.

I was the child bride and he was the cradle snatcher when we got married. It was March 1971, in the registry office in Sydney. I was the junior copywriter at Nock & Kirby’s and he was the senior layout artist.

Our first date was to celebrate that I passed my advertising exams. Paul wanted to take me to his favourite fishing spot, Ashton Park, at the bottom of Taronga Zoo on the harbour. It sounds terribly civilised to say that now, but back then it was wild and you had to plough through bush to get there. We caught a ferry and then a bus and we walked for miles. The papers had reported that a decomposed body had just been found in the park. I was a teenager and here was this man of the world taking me into the bush. As we battled our way through more scrub, I realised that this was the sort of man – and situation – my mother had warned me about.

He’s always been determined to turn me into an outdoor adventurer. We’ve been camping to all sorts of wild places. He used to sleep with a double barrelled shotgun beside us in the tent. It was a monster of a gun. I’d be terrified if he did it now, but back then it seemed normal. I think it even made me feel safe.

Paul is still the most fascinating person I know, even after 34 years. I suppose he is my muse. I steal bits of him for all my characters, but it’s not always the bits you think. A lot of the time it’s the courage he shows. He’s a survivor. He’s been through war, hunted crocodiles. He is larger than life. The romance of his life definitely infects the characters I create.

I don’t regret not having children. To be honest, I was so in love with Paul that I didn’t want any substitutes. That’s the absolute truth. Having an older husband meant there was a good chance I would be left with a child and that would be no substitute for him.

Growing is a good word. We grow together. I have thrown him out on more than one occasion. Relationships always require work, especially to keep romance alive. Very soon after Paul was retrenched from Nock & Kirby’s in the 1980s, he started drinking heavily. There I was at the start of my Mills and Boon career, I had published my third book and my books were starting to earn serious money. Overnight we went from equality to me being a big breadwinner. It was a very hard adjustment for him to make. And painful. I suggested he leave to give us time apart. Naturally he came back and we sorted it out. He’s the only man I’ve ever truly loved.

If there was one thing I could change about him, it would be to make him 20 years younger. It would give us more time together. I don’t want to think about losing him. Six years ago he had a dreadful accident. It was truly frightening and awful. He’s had to use a walking stick since then. We were on quad bikes on a beach in New Zealand and I just looked back and saw him miles down the beach. He was only a blob under a machine. I raced back to him. Adrenaline just took over. I lifted the machine off him. Horrific. He was bruised all over from the neck down. He’s had troubles since then.

He does get jealous. He doesn’t like my affection for William Shatner. I am a huge Star Trek fan and have a collection of Hallmark figurines. I often walk into the room and find that Paul’s arranged Captain Kirk to be in the line of the phasers.

Living romance is more important than writing about it. It’s not just chocolates and candelit dinners. I think you always have to remember what attracted you to your partner. A lot of people forget that and turn into their husband’s mothers. We never let an occasion like an anniversary or birthday pass unnoticed. Paul gives me a Wish Day every now and then. Whatever I want to do, whatever I want to eat, whatever I fancy is all mine. The last Wish Day we had was a hot air balloon ride. We had to be there before dawn, which was fine for me, but not so easy for him to be up so early. Then we had a champagne breakfast afterwards. It was perfect.”

PAUL

“I used to be conceited but now I’m perfect – I think the accident is the only thing that shows otherwise. That quad bike was my own stupid mistake. Being as I am, I took unnecessary risks. It’s terrible to grow old, but it’s better than the alternative.

Now I have to use this walking stick. The stick is the best birthday present Valerie ever got me. It is solid timber with a great handle that has a telescope in it. It has already come in very handy. We were at a book sale the other day in this great big hangar and I lost her. It was a hell of a big place so I just looked around with my telescope and found her at the other end of the building.

I think the best gift I ever gave Valerie is myself. When I first met her, I thought she was a cute chick. Such life in her. I kept saying to myself ‘don’t be so silly’. She is so young and we are from different cultures, a different race. When I first kissed her, it was like a peck from my mother-in-law. I had to tell her to put some feeling into it. She’s improved since then.

I am from Estonia. I arrived in Australia in 1948. I was put into what you would call migrant camps and they gave me a job as a gardener. I tried everything to sabotage that job. So boring. A notice appeared for workers in the Northern Territory to work for the Department of Defence, so I signed up. The contract was for two years, but I stayed for five. I must have liked it.

To me, the Northern Territory was like a huge Disneyland. It was the first time in my life I had seen live crocodiles and buffaloes and snakes. I had a great teacher, Ginger Palmer. Back then I didn’t consider crocodiles animals – to me they were monsters. To my surprise I learned from older crocodile shooters that there was money involved in their skins. This job just became better every day. The Greeks would pay so many shillings per inch of a 10-foot crocodile skin. We would shoot dozens a week and get 10 pounds a crocodile.

The novice hunters would get into scrapes because they would try to hunt in the day. And they would use long shots because they didn’t want to get close. But it was best to go out in the dark, in the dug-out canoes. You would take the torch and shine it in the crocodiles’ eyes. Then you’d shoot them. And tie them to the back of the boat.

It was a great life. I had a dingo friend. Unfortunately I shot his mother and the puppy was left so I took him home and trained him. I called him Dingie. One day the police came knocking. There was a bounty on dingoes and I think you got two pounds for a dingo scalp. The police were going to shoot Dingie.  I told them I would do it and I put Dingie on my motorbike and drove to the bush. I said ‘Go, Dingie, Go’. I had to throw rocks at my lovely pet to make him run away. That was one of the rare times in my life I cried. I just took myself off to the nearest pub and got terribly drunk.

I don’t think marriage is hard work. You feel a sort of happiness when you see your partner. If Valerie was to go first, I would buy a gun cheap. I would make a short trip to go up and see the boss. It will be no good living without her.

I read all of Valerie’s work. She gives a lot of talks about writing. I go with her to everything. I am sitting at one of these talks and the lady next to me says ‘Isn’t she wonderful’. I tell her, ‘I know, I’ve been married to her for 30 years’. She turned to me and said ‘oh, you must be Mr Valerie’. So I hit her with my stick.”

Published in Good Weekend

Wilson da Silva is the editor and creator of Cosmos, a science magazine backed by Dr Alan Finkel. Finkel, the millionaire founder of Axon Instruments, has spent $US400,000 buying tickets for da Silva and himself in the hope of being the first Australian space tourists to fly on Virgin Galactic in 2008.

WILSON

“I had no more expected to go into space than be Secretary-General of the United Nations. I still have to tell myself ‘I’m going into space’ just to make it real.

Alan is a big fan of the Apollo missions and the short version of a very long story is that he bought himself a ticket to get on board the first commercial space flights. He rang me at some hour of the night on my mobile and said, ‘What do you think of the technology, is it safe. Do you think it’s going to work’. He was looking for someone to talk to … someone as enthusiastic about the idea of space as he was. He also asked if I wanted to go into space. I said, ‘Well that would be nice, but I don’t think I can afford it’. So he bought me a ticket.

I met Alan at a science journalism awards dinner back in 1996. He sat across the table from me and was like a laser, focusing on me and asking a million questions. He’s very intense and operates at 120 per cent capacity all the time. I don’t think he ever sleeps.

A few years later, I was flicking through the BRW Rich List and saw a picture of Alan and his wife Elizabeth.  They were worth like $215 million and I nearly fell off my chair. I just never pictured them as that wealthy. It surprised the bejesus out of me and I filed it in the back of my mind

Alan got in touch with me again when I was editing a science magazine called Newton. He loved the mag and wanted to buy hundreds of subscriptions to give to his clients. Soon after that, Newton closed and his wife sent me a lovely email saying the publishers had been short-sighted.

In 2004 I wrote an email to Elizabeth along the lines of: if you guys are serious about Australia needing a quality science magazine, then my partner Kylie and I have a proposal for you.

We had a three-and-a-half hour lunch and he grilled us about everything – we just kept talking on and on and on until there was no-one left in the restaurant. I knew I really liked him. We drank red wine and ate pasta. I liked the depth of his mind. He was sharp, sharp, sharp.

Things soon changed from niceties to ‘bang, we are in business’. He got his lawyers to talk to our lawyers but that nearly killed the deal. The lawyers bred a lot of distance between us.

Alan rang me and said ‘Let’s fire the lawyers – if you want to steal my money and take off to Brazil, no lawyer will stop you’. We have had a dream run with him as an investor. He has put up seven figures, a not insubstantial amount, to create Cosmos.

It was just a few weeks later that Alan made the offer to send me to space. But he rang Kylie and asked if I had felt pressured into accepting. Kylie told Alan that he was like a genie to me, which is completely true.

‘Oh genie Alan, can I have a science magazine?’ Yes Wilson.

‘Oh Alan, can I go into space?’ Yes Wilson.

Right now, there are only 444 people in the whole world who have been into space. I am expecting it to be an exceedingly emotional experience. Some people come back and discover religion. One of the guys that came back from the moon is now a Christian evangelical and another is a painter who paints obsessively about the moon, desperately trying to recapture that feeling of intensity that being in space gave him

Virgin Galactic has actually asked us whether they should provide meal service and have a hostie on the flight and Alan’s reaction was ‘Are you kidding?’.  Space flights are supposed to be ‘only the brave’ and a hostie asking if you want a Diet Coke would ruin that.”

ALAN

“Wilson and I didn’t come together from friendship. We’d been only the briefest of acquaintances and that has now developed into a business partnership and a friendship.

I wouldn’t say I am any kind of genie because no matter how much Wilson rubs that magic lamp, he doesn’t just get something by putting up his hand.

Space is a gut level desire for me. I am frankly excited about being up in that void and seeing the black sky punctuated by non-sparkling stars. I can’t wait to feel the slow motion of zero gravity.

A private person can go into space today for $25 million. That’s too much to pay. $US200,000, while not an insignificant amount, is an accessible amount. People spend more than that on cars. You see someone in a Porsche and you might envy them but you don’t ask them why they have spent so much money on it?

I prefer not to think of it as $US200,000 for seven minutes in space. I prefer to think of it this way – there are three years of anticipation, six days of training which finish with two days of not eating solid food. The actual flight will be two to three hours of circling up in the mother ship, and then some tense minutes of being launched up into space for seven minutes of weightlessness before descent.

It’s fun to do things with friends. Blokes bond by doing things together. It’s not that I am altruistic, I’m actually entirely selfish. I want Wilson to come along because it’s no fun travelling by yourself. You have no-one to reinforce the memories or reminisce with later.

It’s entirely appropriate for the editor of a science magazine to be on the bleeding edge. He should write about it to bring the magic of space alive for our readers, in the same way it was for me when I was a kid reading National Geographic and Scientific American.

Since I’ve retired, I have had a substantial number of business plans come by me but there are very few that I have invested in. I think Wilson just rubbed the right spots for me on my lamp. I get something out of it too. I love that the Cosmos office has a start-up feel. I love it even more that it’s them and not me.  I’ve been there, done that and I can get vicarious pleasure from watching them do it.

Wilson is a little stubborn. He’s got the Brazilian fire which I don’t want to put out. If I was an editor, there are things I would do differently. We definitely have constructive tussles.

If he was not the editor and co-founder of Cosmos, it would never have come up about him going into space. But the gift is his regardless of what happens to the business. It was not like, here are some milestones you have to achieve and then you get your bonus in the form of a free trip into space. Let’s just do it, see it, write about it and enjoy it.”

Originally published in Sunday Life

SELLING IS ABOUT HUNGER MORE THAN MONEY

Seventy-nine-year-old Bill Bridges rises at 5am, seven days a week, to practise yoga and then sell homes to Sydney’s wealthy. Bridges, a prestige real estate agent, is neither smooth nor schmoozy. “People know I’m a bit rough but I say, ‘Do you want me to sell your house or do you want an elocution lesson?'”

Bridges has held several records for selling the harbour city’s priciest properties, including the waterfront Altona for $28.5 million. “It won’t be a record for long,” says the pint-sized Bridges. “I will be busting to break it again.” Setting sales records – and collecting his 2 per cent plus GST commission – is a hunger that never wanes for Bridges. The thrice-married father of six says selling isn’t just about getting rich.

“Of course money motivates me. But so does winning. I like to win.”

Melbourne advertising bigwig Harold Mitchell, who made a living nailing hard deals with media owners for more than 30 years, says his own selling technique is simple: go for the kill and crush the opposition. “For someone like me who doesn’t drink, doesn’t gamble and doesn’t smoke, it can be exciting,” he says. “I like to play on people’s fear. I want them to be more scared of me than their boss. I want a deal that’s in my favour.”

John Lombard, the managing director of recruitment company Sales Staff Australia, says salespeople fall into two categories: the hunter or the farmer. “Farmers are the relationship managers. They are about solution selling and knowing that if they can give the customer what they want, they will get their sale. Hunters won’t stop until they get their kill. Farmers protect existing business; hunters get new business,” he says.

He says the farmer is typically a better team player than the “egomaniac hunter” but “all salespeople can be challenging to manage. They all say, ‘Yeah, I can sell and I meet my budgets,’ but we are dealing with chameleons. Salespeople put on a persona and their resume is 50 per cent crap.”

THE TUPPERWARE TYPE

While money seems like an obvious motivator, a truly great salesperson wants more than just cash. Companies such as Tupperware rely on rewards – cars, jewellery and overseas holidays – to ensure salespeople, who are paid commission only, remain hungry enough to keep surpassing sales targets.

Jenny Collina, a 53-year-old mother of three from Essendon in Melbourne, began selling Tupperware in 1991 when she owned a kids’ clothing shop and needed income to “pay the bills that the shop was not paying”.

Within three months, she was achieving the required $17,500 of monthly sales to earn herself a Tupperware-paid-for car. Within another three months, Collina was promoted to manager.

Today, she is a “group leader in qualification”, overseeing a team of 25 demonstrators and earning a monthly performance-based bonus. As one of Victoria’s highest-ranked Tupperware sales performers, she attends three or four “parties” a week. “It’s not pyramid selling,” says the woman who customised her kitchen pantry to fit her own 160 Tupperware containers. “It’s recognition.”

Tupperware trains its sales force in positive selling techniques. “Explaining and demonstrating the benefits of Tupperware is what makes it different to a container you get from a supermarket shelf,” says Collina.

For example, she says, “The Modular Mates have a clear window and the benefit is you can stand back and look at what you have in the pantry before you go grocery shopping.”

Demonstrators handle customers with deft word choices. “Tupperware teaches you how to be assertive, not pushy. You overcome objections by using positive words,” says Collina. So if someone questions the cost, the demonstrator talks about quality. “Tupperware don’t tell you what to say,” she says. “It has to come from you.”

THE SALES TECHNIQUE THAT WORKS

As Harold Mitchell often sits on the other side of the boardroom table from salespeople flogging him space on their television network or in their newspaper or magazine, he is qualified to comment on which sales techniques work and which don’t.

“Those deals where a large group of salespeople come into a room with a lot of charts don’t work. They usually forget to ask for an order.” He says swish PowerPoint presentations don’t sell; saying exactly what you want sells. “One single person intent on doing a deal is the only sales team you need.”

Lombard says good salespeople are hard to find. An average full-time salary is about $60,000 a year plus a car, superannuation and commission.

“Good operators demand $120,000 to $140,000 as a base. People selling in large global enterprises can basically write their own cheque,” he says. “We placed a guy selling data storage and he made nearly $900K last year, $780,000 of which would have been commission on $10 million deals.”

Banks typically pay high salaries to salespeople, as do software companies and professional consulting firms.

King-hitter Mitchell says his success “probably comes down to ego”. Says Lombard, “What drives that ego is the action, the recognition or the money. I’m here to tell you a salesperson’s drive is the No. 1 reason they are any good. You can put anyone through the most advanced, state-of-the-art sales training but if they have no drive, they will fail.”

SALES ALSO WORKS IN CHARITY: MEET SKYE LECKIE

Charity worker and socialite Skye Leckie doesn’t exactly fit the slick salesman stereotype: she has no wares to spruik and no need to earn a cent in sales commission. Make no mistake, though, the woman is a selling machine – last year, she raised more than $3 million for charity in one evening.

As the chair of the Sydney Children’s Hospital Gold Dinner Committee, Leckie co-organised the event that sold a private Silverchair concert to one bidder for $5000 and a private movie screening with critics David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz for $7500.

“The guests know they are there to spend up big,” explains the foundation’s chief executive, Elizabeth Crundall. “Companies want their tables to be the most active and lively.” Charities fall over themselves to recruit social high-flyers like Leckie to their cause, knowing these people become the sales agents for charity donations by bringing cachet and a little black book of connections.

Leckie spends months planning, scamming and roping in freebies from more than 700 businesses. “You do have to pitch all the time. [But] I would prefer to put knitting needles in my eyes than try to sell someone something,” says the 48-year-old wife of Seven Network chief David Leckie.

“You’re selling the cause of helping children, which is not like selling a product. I am always focused on what I am asking for,” she says. “I take a deep breath and hope they don’t run away from me but I am very blunt.”

Leckie sweet-talked former prime minister John Howard into donating time to have lunch with 10 guests, to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Originally, his office offered her a signed photo of Howard. “I said, ‘That’s really sweet of you but it has to be a money-can’t-buy opportunity.'” The PM lunch at Machiavelli raised fierce bidding and $60,000.

Leckie even took off her clothes – figuratively – in the name of a sales pitch for charity, flashing a topless painting of herself on the big screen to auction a sitting with its artist, David Bromley. Leckie shrugs away any embarrassment and points out that the tactic worked – the commission was bought for $20,000.

WHO NEEDS BOOKS?

Bill Bridges’s competitive streak may stem from his years working on the racetrack before becoming an estate agent in 1950. “I never wanted to be anything but a jockey. But then I fell in love with the knife and fork and ate myself out of the saddle,” he says.

Bridges has never read a book on sales techniques and poo-poos the real estate agents “who all hug each other and think they’re wonderful. The only skill that matters is S-O-L-D. Sold. Did you sell it? A house is never sold until the contract has exchanged and the 10 per cent deposit is in the bank.”

Marketing, databases and “relationship management” are the buzzwords of modern sales. Instead of slick websites, Bridges’s marketing tool is one sheet of paper with a list of 45 sales ranging from $1.8 million up to $28 million.

“Some of the agents are like greyhounds; they will hunt but not kill. They’re more interested in pictures of themselves,” he says. “I don’t put up any glossy pictures of me anywhere. I have a picture of my dog because he’s better looking.” And sure enough, there is a picture of a Jack Russell terrier on the sands of Bondi with the caption: “Bill Bridges’s spiritual guru – Quigley.”

“Salespeople know their customers are smarter – 20 or 30 years ago there was this arrogance that you could pull the wool over a customer’s eyes. There were shoddy tricks like the car dealers who would throw a customer’s keys on the roof while they kept them in a room trying to sell them a car,” says Lombard. “Now it’s about the win for the customer. The buyer is buying rather than being sold to.”

Melbourne car salesman Jason Smith, 36, works for Bib Stillwell BMW selling high-end vehicles such as the $364,000 6 Series. His dealership keeps customer records on a database, knowing the average BMW owner “holds” a car for two years and eight months before upgrading. During that period, Smith will contact the owner eight times, usually over the phone.

“People don’t like it when you call them up without a reason but I ask them, ‘How is the car?’ or ‘Has anyone admired your car recently?’ That’s a really good way to get referrals. If they say, ‘Oh yeah, John the neighbour liked it,’ then I ask them for John’s number and I’m on the phone to John,” he says.

Smith may invite a customer to a special VIP night where new models of Rolex watches and BMWs are on display. He may cold-call a customer to offer them a test drive of a new-model BMW. “When you have them face-to-face, you have to build a rapport. You have to be able to read people,” he says. “Eight out of 10 people that walk into a dealer will buy a car. There is a showmanship in selling. The people who aren’t successful fail because they only do things their way. They don’t tailor themselves to the customer.”

So who are the hardest customers to crack? “Accountants and real estate agents,” says Smith. “Accountants always try to get the price down. Those bloody land rats won’t stop negotiating and never give you a chance to close the sale. Salespeople – they can’t stop themselves.”

WHAT MAKES US SAY YES?

“What makes a person say yes is the value proposition – WIFM: ‘What’s in it for me?’ For ‘traditionalists’, it’s all about price, a deal, a discount, function, features and urgency. It doesn’t matter if the salesperson is on the phone, at the front door or behind a counter, those things will drive the sale for 8 million Australians. The ‘neo-consumer’ is more concerned with how it feels and whether the item has a sense of investment or will become more expensive or valuable later on. They are two entirely different sales cases.” 

Ross Honeywill, consumer behaviourist and sales trainer, the Centre for Customer Strategy.