Each week, Benjamin Law asks public figures to discuss the subjects we’re told to keep private by getting them to roll a die. The numbers they land on are the topics they’re given. This week, he talks to Indira Naidoo. The journalist, broadcaster and author, 54, is the host of ABC Radio’s Weekend Nightlife. Her books include The Edible Balcony and The Edible City. Her memoir, about her sister’s suicide, is The Space Between the Stars.
Indira Naidoo: “Everyone struggles with the vocabulary of grief: finding the words to express the emotion.” During the pandemic, in the middle of Melbourne’s deepest lockdown, broadcaster Indira Naidoo’s sister Manika took her own life. TIM BAUER
POLITICS
Your career in journalism has spanned TV and radio over three decades. Is politics a good topic to discuss, or are you over talking about it? No, it’s a good one. I’m a genuinely political animal. Politics was in our blood from a very young age. Both my parents were very political, especially having come through apartheid South Africa.
So growing up, politics was never taboo?We had to have a position on everything and anything. Even though my parents came from a progressive left position, they still wanted you to tear apart their position – on whatever it might be. If we were talking about apartheid – and the best way to dismantle it – was it isolation? Or was it by making sure that visitors to South Africa could see the way people were being treated? Even though we knew what our parents’ views were, there was still a sense that we could develop our own.
You’re one of the most recognisable faces and voices in media. Have you ever been approached to run for office? [Laughs] Yeah, by nearly every single party at some stage. Liberals, Labor, Greens, Democrats, you name it. Except the National Party! I don’t know why not, I look really good in an Akubra.
Have you taken any of those proposals seriously? No. It doesn’t suit my personality. I find it very hard to compromise, which I think is the art, essentially, of politics. If you want to have things your way all the time, you’re not going to be successful in politics. I’m in awe of people that make that sort of commitment.
Are you concerned about political correctness and cancel culture – or do your anxieties lie elsewhere? We’ve got to get real and look at who really has the power. A minister suing a soccer mum for defamation? You’ve got a parliamentary and media platform; you’re well paid; you’ve got access to good lawyers. It’s not a power-equal basis. If you’re someone who feels offended but are in a position where people can hear your voice, I don’t think [your grievance] should be given the same weight as [that of] someone who doesn’t have a voice. I believe my position in the media is to make sure that voices that don’t usually get heard are listened to more often.
MONEY
You were the ABC’s youngest national news host. You’re now a writer, broadcaster and spokesperson for Choicemagazine. What’s been your favourite job? Probably a TV show called Under the Grandstand. There was an incredible series of events. The 2005 Ashes Test cricket series in England was a foregone conclusion, so Channel 9 decided not to broadcast it and none of the other commercial stations wanted to, either. SBS was the last one standing – Steven Bradbury-like – and got the rights. So [on weekends during the lunch breaks] we did this live evening show with a live audience and an open bar serving real alcohol. The audiences were sometimes a little inebriated and I ran the barbecue, cooking food from different cultures around the world. It was wild, unhinged and largely unscripted – and it happened as the 2005 Ashes series became one of the most famous of all time. We got some of the highest ratings SBS ever had.
What constitutes money well spent?
Food.
What’s money poorly spent?
Food wasted.
DEATH
Okay, we’re talking about death now.Good.
Why do you say that? I’ve spent the past two years investigating death, which I’ve always been terrified of. I thought it wasn’t ever going to happen to me, which is ridiculous. When a big death – like my sister’s – happens in your life, it blows you up. On top of it being a horrific, sudden, seismic, catastrophic event in our family, I also had to deal with the realisation – oh, my god! –that death actually happens. We don’t know when it’s coming or how far into the queue we are, but we’re all in the queue. Now I understand that. I didn’t before my sister died.
You call your youngest sister “Stargirl” in your book. What do you want people to know about her life? She was almost always the most charismatic person in the room. She was feisty and opinionated, fascinating and articulate. She was always so … alive, you know? She wasn’t shy. What she loved most was getting together with one or two people at a party, with a glass of wine, a smoke, then having a really deep-down conversation about politics and policy. She was obsessed with swimming. Nature, bushwalking, camping. As a journalist, she would work on a story for days and not sleep. As a political adviser, she’d sleep on the couch in the office overnight and not come home until things were done. She really thought that her role was to find better ways of living and helping the most people.
Because of COVID, only 20 people were allowed at her funeral. If that was an impediment to grieving, to what extent was writing this book an act of processing it? Oh, almost completely. Everyone struggles with the vocabulary of grief: finding the words to express the emotion. It’s almost impossible. There’s one phrase in the book where I came close: it’s the electrocution of grief. Every part of you is zapped. You completely shut down and enter this autonomous state: basic breathing, heart pumping. The rest of you is just in this electrocuting shock. Writing the book was a step towards finding the emotion. Rather than just being completely consumed by your grief, the writing process allows you to hover over yourself, gives you perspective. The writer in me probably saved me.
The story behind Indira Naidoo’s book Indira’s Tree will feature on ABC-TV’s Compass next Sunday, August 14, at 6.30pm. Naidoo will appear at the Canberra, Byron Bay, Tamar and Melbourne writers’ festivals in coming months.
Lifeline 13 11 14
‘We’re all in the queue’: How writing helped Indira Naidoo understand death
take a deep breath and hit the on-air mic button…. “Hello and welcome to Nightlife. I’m Indira Naidoo”.
I roll in an interview package I pre-recorded earlier in the evening, switch off the microphone and sink back into my chair – thankful for some time to gather my thoughts.
Outside the windows of my ABC radio studio, there’s an oppressive drizzling gloom that mirrors my insides.
After her sister’s death, author Indira Naidoo found solace in nature. Courtesy of Blackfella Films
It’s Good Friday 2020, but there’s nothing ‘good’about today.
In recent weeks the nation – along with the rest of the world – has been plunged into a dark dystopia.
By the end of tonight Lifeline will have received 3200 calls for help in one day – a record for the 57-year-old mental health support group.
So huge is the demand, an overnight national radio program like mine becomes a pseudo-Lifeline service. My studio producer Dave Prior performs emergency mental health triage… keeping anxious listeners on hold until a Lifeline operator is available.
There are dozens of calls for mercy. It’s unlike anything he’s seen in his 40-year-career.
Dave and I feel the loneliest we’ve ever felt. The ABC’s Ultimo headquarters normally buzzing with 2000 employees has been evacuated. The empty corridors, lit by flickering emergency lights, are as cold as a morgue. The only other soul we’ve seen all weekend is a security guard who is now also in hiding in a safe room.
Are we survivors of this plague or soon to be two of its many victims? No-one can tell us.
We are deemed essential workers – along with hospital staff, ambulance workers and infrastructure technicians. This weekend we secretly wish we weren’t so “essential”. It’s like being on the frontline of a war zone when you can’t see the incoming missiles or the enemy.
I’ve only recently re-joined the ABC and Dave and I have only worked with each other for a few weeks. We have no history, and maybe we have no future.
Within weeks the pandemic will cause a tear in my universe in a way I could never have foreseen.
One night after work I receive a phone call.
My youngest sister has taken her life during Melbourne’s first lockdown. (Melbourne will soon wear the COVID-19 crown for being the most incarcerated city in the world.)
Her funeral is reduced to just 20 wretched souls. Large gatherings have become illegal so family and friends are prevented from supporting each other in the way we need.
Returning home to Sydney is a painful blur.
One morning, during my regular iso-walks through Sydney’s Royal Botanic Garden, I find myself drawn to a majestic Moreton Bay fig tree on Mrs Macquarie’s Road overlooking Woolloomooloo Bay.
Over the weeks a connection begins to grow between us. I feel my fractured heart can sit with this wise elder. I don’t have to speak. I don’t have to explain. I can just be.
Isolated from my family and friends, I wonder if the quiet companionship of this centurion could help me heal my broken heart?
I begin recording my fractured thoughts and feelings in a journal which soon takes the form of a few chapters that could be the beginnings of a book.
I have flashbacks to our peripatetic childhood lived across five countries on three continents … when my two sisters and I were all we needed. We were three peas in a pod. Just a year between each. Inseparable. As close as three sisters can be without being triplets.
My youngest sister was brilliant and daring, beautiful and inspiring. She died without an explanation.
As I grappled with my heartbreak, supported by the comfort my tree, an unnoticed universe of infinite beauty around me soon began to reveal itself… clouds, feathers, weeds, puddles… they became shimmering sparks of hope and renewal.
With the help of a posse of nature guides, I began to explore how nature – whatever bits of nature are within our reach – could heal us during life’s darker chapters, whether nursing a broken heart or an anxious mind.
It’s not as improbable as it may sound. My urban backyard soon transformed into a playground filled with awe and wonder. I went kite-flying, hunted for edible weeds and jumped into puddles – each nature activity helping me reconnect with the joy I had lost.
The Space Between the Stars has been a difficult book to write. There were weeks where I would sit at my desk staring at the screen willing the words to come. But they did not. Then there were other times when the words gushed forth in waves of revelation and insight.
How Indira Naidoo found hope in her darkest hours