Renowned comedian, author, radio and television presenter Wendy Harmer talks to Peninsula Living Pittwater about her life and her frank and funny memoir, Lies My Mirror Told Me.
Wendy Harmer, 68, is a woman of firsts. She was the first woman journalist in a newspaper newsroom, the first woman to host a comedy show, the first woman to co-host a breakfast radio show and the first woman to host an all-female breakfast show.
In Lies My Mirror Told Me, Wendy regales tales of resilience and determination as she trailblazed through a career in the public eye, most recently co-hosting the ABC Radio Sydney breakfast show from 2016 to 2021.
She didn’t have an easy childhood. She was born with a cleft palate and a cleft lip, for which she had surgery as a teen. Her mother left home when Wendy was just
10 years old, leaving Wendy and three siblings with their father.
Her parents didn’t mollycoddle Wendy, which she says was more about the era in which she grew up.
“We had more of an ethos of ‘don’t come running to me. Fight your own battles”, Wendy tells Peninsula Living Pittwater. “I suppose I could have been a shy child, but I had that upbringing from my father to push me out front.”
She named her memoir Lies My Mirror Told Me after something her mother said when Wendy was eight years old.
“The boys were picking on me at school because of my cleft palate and lip,” Wendy recalls. “And my mother said to me, ‘You go and look at that mirror,
and when you can find something to complain about, you come out and tell me’. But I didn’t have the courage to do that. There was plenty to complain about, but I just came out and said, no, I’ve got nothing to be sorry for.”
The ‘mirror’ theme is present throughout the book.
“I’ve divided the book into chapters with different mirrors, says Wendy. “I think women particularly can chart their lives through a particular mirror. Sometimes you’ll be looking into a mirror, and you’re struck by the event happening, and that image of yourself in that moment stays with you.”
Wendy always loved writing. She worked as a journalist for the Geelong Advertiser after school. It was on an assignment that she first discovered comedy.
“It’s like kids who go to the circus and sit up all night learning to juggle. It was just a real light bulb moment,” Wendy says.
She quit her job and decided she wanted to be a comedian. Nerves did not strike her.
“I looked around and thought, ‘Oh, wow, this is a microphone, and people pay to see me, and I can say anything I like’. I just enjoyed being in command of that stage, and I liked showing off,” Wendy says.
How women found their voices in comedy and radio is one of the things Wendy wants people to know.
“I wanted to remind people of how seismic that shift has been,” Wendy says. “Women may have been in comedy shows, but they weren’t writing their own material. So there wasn’t this breadth of character work that we see now.”
A bad relationship breakup and an offer to co-host the 2Day FM breakfast show brought Wendy to Sydney in 1992.
“I laughed every day. I had a great time,” Wendy says of her 11 years with 2Day FM. “And the great thing was if you came up with an idea, you could bang it on the radio straight away.”
Wendy has lived in the same house in Collaroy with her husband, Brendan, since they first got together and have raised two children there.
“Brendan’s always been the stay-at- home dad. I obviously would not have been able to do the job without him taking care of business. We’ve made a good partnership.”
Now semi-retired, Wendy loves cooking and gardening. Wendy didn’t think she would like retirement and figured she’d miss the ‘daily grind,’ but she has settled into a ‘happy rhythm’. And she’ll always have her love for words. “I’ll keep writing as long as I’m able, and that’ll do me,” she says.