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Exploring the younger years and turning point moments of authentic, outstanding and inspiring people. See the world through the eyes of someone who may have grown up in an entirely different way to you.
Merita Tabain: When I Was Young, Podcast Episode 5
Nina: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to When I Was Young, the podcast that explores the younger years of interesting people. This podcast is a chance to slow down and hear about the world through the eyes of someone else who may have grown up in an entirely different way to you. In each episode, we explore the younger years and turning point moments that help people discover who they really are.
Nina: Each guest is someone quite remarkable with an interesting story to tell. So relax and enjoy your time with us today. I'm your host, Nina Fromhold. All stories are true and affirmed by my guests. With me to is Merita Tabain. Merita is a remarkable [00:01:00] communications specialist who has dedicated the later part of her career to supporting people affected by emergencies and disasters.
Nina: Merita is someone who steps up and offers her expertise, her calm, her measured leadership, and her kindness. In times when people are devastated by tragedy, Merita has regularly been at the forefront of emergency response on floods and bushfires here in Victoria, Australia. I met Merita when we were both working on the COVID response in 2020 in Victoria's Department of Health and Human Services, Merita was leading the overwhelming portfolio of communications and media.
Nina: I'm not sure many people could have led that work with such grace at a time when everything was urgent in crisis and in flux. Remarkably, when the dust started to settle on COVID and the rest of us were [00:02:00] exhausted. Merita took up another leading role in emergency management. She has had a diverse career with time in journalism and a multitude of challenging leadership roles in government communications.
Nina: I have enormous respect for Merita as a professional and as a beautiful human. It takes a special kind of person to work in emergency response roles. Today I know we will learn more about the foundations of Merita's resilience, perseverance, and tenacity. Welcome Merita to when I was young, and thanks for being my guest today.
Merita: Hi Nina.
Nina: So let's start at the very beginning. What do you know about where your parents came from and how they ended up meeting and getting married here in Melbourne?
Merita: Well, my parents were both from Croatia, it's now known as Croatia, but was in the former Yugoslavia. My mum came out here on a working [00:03:00] holiday, which was quite unusual then. She had family here in Broken Hill. There were miners. One part of the family had come out during the Gold Rush, in fact. So she came out to visit them and she'd been in Broken Hill, in Adelaide and came over to Melbourne. Was staying with a cousin here in Melbourne and was working, and while here met my dad. My dad's family had come out in the early fifties to Australia as refugees post the war.
Merita: They're actually from a part of the country that's quite close to each other. My father is from an island and my mum's from the mainland in Dalmatia, but really not very far from each other at all. Only a couple of hours on a bus and a ferry. A lovely part of the world. They met here through the community that was here, the Yugoslav community as it was started going out and got married.
Merita: It was an unusual thing to travel halfway around the world to meet [00:04:00] somebody who came from an area very close to where you're from. So when and where were you born? I was born here in Melbourne. Melbourne, born and bred. And I was born actually at Cabrini Hospital in 1964, which is so long ago now.
Nina: And is there a story behind your name?
Merita: My mother read it in a novel. There are not many Merita’s. We are nearly every single one of us of Catholic background. 'cause it's a variation of Mary.
Nina: Can you describe your childhood home to me and where you used to like to spend your time as a youngster?
Merita: We grew up in a very working class suburb, and the home was a very plain home, particularly at the start, it was weather boards.
Merita: We had different coloured carpets in every room. The furniture was all second-hand 'cause my parents had worked very hard to buy the place, buy our home, so they couldn't afford new furniture. [00:05:00] It was a really big yard that we had, and they worked really hard both front and back. Our backyard was like the backyard of so many, as we were called, “New Australians” at the time.
Merita: The majority of it was a vegetable garden, and we had heaps and heaps of fruit trees. We had fig olives, apples, nectarines, apricots, plums, everything you could possibly fit in, and a lovely yard at the front, which we weren't allowed to play in. We had a lawn: it was like a carpet. Anyway, we weren't allowed to play there just in case we ruined it.
Merita: It was a very humble home to start with. And I was always a child, I guess, that liked to play. I was on my own initially. I was the eldest. And one of my things was to (again, this drove my mother mad), I used to get all the blankets, put them over the kitchen table. I'd get underneath there and I would travel to lands far, far away in my own mind and pretend I was [00:06:00] a princess or whatever.
Merita: And the other thing I liked to do, which used to get me into real trouble, was draw on the walls. I used to get pens and pencils and just draw all over the walls. It was an absolute nightmare for my mum who was obsessively clean and tidy. So she was forever chasing me 'cause I was always making a mess.
Nina: But you had your little cubby sanctuary.
Merita: I did, and I loved it. I would put it up every day that I could. Sometimes she would indulge me and let me play. And other times it would be go outside, then I would go make a mud cake and then she'd get angry again.
Nina: When did you become a big sister and how did things change at home after this?
Merita: I was four when my brother was born, and I loved being a big sister. I felt important and I was very protective of my little brother. This is before he grew taller than me. It also was a big change for me because up until then, both my parents had worked, which [00:07:00] was unusual in those days. Both my mom and my dad worked at the local factory, which is the Nicholas factory.
Merita: It was quite a big deal at the time. They used to make Nicholas Aspro and Akta-Vite which we always had as children. And I used to desperately wish we could get Milo 'cause that seemed like lots more fun and sweeter. Akta-Vite was always good for you. My grandparents had actually cared for me when I was a little girl and it was great, but it was quite a big thing 'cause then I came home 'cause my brother was a baby.
Merita: My grandparents had been good. It was hard for them. They were quite elderly. 'cause my father was the ninth of 10 children.
Nina: Oh, wow.
Merita: So they were older when he was born already. And so then by the time then I came along, they were quite elderly, and they were very different people. It's quite funny reflecting back, my grandmother was very religious and she would go to church as often as her legs would take [00:08:00] her.
Merita: If she could do it every day, she would. That was just part of who she was, she was deeply religious. And for me, that used to mean that I used to have to learn a prayer every day on my knees. And so, when my granddad would come in and say, do you wanna go out and help me garden? I'd go, yep. And he had a little shovel and trail he'd bought for me and we'd go out there and we would be digging away helping him with the garden.
Merita: I really, really enjoyed that. They were different and my grandmother was more strict and proper. Whereas my granddad would walk me down the street sometimes and he would buy me an ice cream, which was such a big deal 'cause we didn't get that kind of thing much at home. Being cared for by two quite elderly people was one thing.
Merita: But then being at home when my mom was at home, when my brother was born, it was quite different. She then also started doing piece work at home 'cause they're migrants. So paying off the house was really, [00:09:00] really important. And my parents were unskilled workers, both of them. So my father's wage wasn't anything great.
Merita: So my mum to sort of keep up with things. She started assembling the backs of PowerPoints at home. So as well as playing in the backyard, I also had to look after my brother a little bit. And thankfully he was a very calm baby, so it wasn't that hard. I did take it very seriously. There's actually a picture of me holding him so tight.
Merita: The poor little thing is screaming 'cause I was terrified that I was going to drop him.
Nina: Gorgeous. Talk to me about starting school. What do you remember about this time?
Merita: I really looked forward to going to school, so I was desperate to go to school. I hadn't gone to kindergarten and a lot of the children in the area were older.
Merita: I mean all four or five. I would run around and get the cricket ball when they were playing cricket in the street. But there [00:10:00] was no one sort of really much my age that it seemed like at the time to me. So I was just desperate to go to school and it was gonna be great fun. I thought it didn't turn out to be so great.
Merita: In fact, I was one of very few children who were non-Anglo Saxon and also my English was not very good because my parents hadn't taught me English. So whilst I was born here, I spoke Croatian. I knew, to say hello, goodbye please. Thank you. And can I go to the toilet, please? Which were considered essential phrases, but the view was, oh, she'll learn English when she goes to school.
Merita: Which there's a logic but not a great understanding of what children are like at school. So I get to school, my English was not very good. I guess I must have looked different, you know, with all the other children there. It wasn't great and I'd not had any experience of unreasonable behaviour. [00:11:00] I'd been with adults mostly, so I didn't understand what children were like, so I didn't understand what was going on.
Merita: I was also quite unwell, so I'd had really bad childhood asthma, and so I was at home a lot, which made it harder 'cause I would be sick and I was completely useless on the monkey bars. There was just nothing to recommend me to anyone. So I, you know, not sporty, not adept. My English got better, obviously I became a writer eventually.
Merita: But at the time, you know, that first year prep was really, really tough.
Nina: Absolutely. So when you're talking about some of the struggles there, can we call it out as the kinds of prejudices that were quite prevalent in society at that time? Is that a true reflection?
Merita: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that carried through most of my primary years, even though I changed schools.
Merita: 'cause there were two schools next to each other. One was the state school and one was a Catholic [00:12:00] school across the road. The Catholic school didn't have prep. So then I started the state school, but even at the Catholic school, there was only three kids that were non-Anglo Saxon. I mean, it was a little bit better controlled there.
Merita: But even then, I mean, I used to get chased home. This happened like most of my primary years. I used to get chased home from school by kids that were from the high school, not people that knew me. They didn't know me. So one of the things you learned growing up like that is that you learn to either talk a lot or run really fast.
Merita: I wasn't the world's best runner, so I learned to talk and I learned how to talk my way in and out of things. I can't say it was a dream time in primary school.
Nina: Sounds like some tough lessons there. And long before the cultural conversations around diversity.
Merita: No! Was none of those. None of those at all.
Merita: No. No. We were called New Australians and Wogs.
Nina: Yeah, [00:13:00] I was gonna say there was a whole lot of other terms that were used as well that weren't charming.
Merita: No. And got to say, I like a lot of the way the humour over the years has reclaimed those terms because it's good. It was really tough for those of my era.
Merita: Like now it's like almost, it's a term of endearment. It wasn't then at all. It was an insult. It was meant to be an insult. You were a disease.
Nina: Wow. So when you are thinking about the ways that other kids would've marked you out. Talk to me about school lunches?
Merita: I was the kid with the smelly lunches. My mother would make me sandwiches with salami, with schnitzel, with lettuce, anything that seemed not normal.
Merita: I used to dream of being one of those little girls with the rainbow wrapping paper and a jam sandwich. But I was never one of those children. 'cause, well, my parents were thrifty out of necessity. I wasn't able to buy my lunch [00:14:00] either. So all these other kids who came from housing commission, these children in housing commission homes, they were all buying their lunches.
Merita: So they were all having sausage pies and meat pies, and I actually didn't know what they were. I'd never had one. I was in grade four before my Mum finally let me have a lunch at school, have a tuck shop lunch, and I had a meat pie and I didn't like it. Oh no. I'd never had it. I just wasn't used to it.
Merita: Didn't know about anything like that in those days. We used to have to sit in the class and eat our lunch, so it wasn't like I could hide it or throw it away. I had to eat it.
Nina: I recall we used to have to sit outside in a class group to eat our lunch and we'd be supervised. Yep. And I had the homemade whole meal roll full of salad.
Nina: Everything healthy and all I wanted was the white bread Vegemite sandwich.
Merita: Yep. Yep, I hear you.
Nina: So tell me about the [00:15:00] time in later primary school when you first understood your values were critical to who you are as a person.
Merita: I had over the years at primary school, managed to get myself into the core group.
Merita: I don't quite know how I did, but I did. And it wasn't the nicest group of girls, but it meant I wasn't getting picked on. So that's who I hung out with. But one day we were teasing another little girl and doing something highly intelligent, like getting a ruler and lifting her dress or something stupid like that.
Merita: And she turned to me and she looked at me and she said, “I thought you were my friend.” She was really upset. She couldn't have hurt me more if she had taken a knife and put it in my heart because she was right. I had been her friend. You know, we sat next to each other in class. I was mortified and I'd said to everyone, stop, stop, stop.
Merita: And I kind of did a little bit, but not really. And I had a [00:16:00] real think. I was quite upset and I thought, I actually can't do this. This is a nice person, the person I liked. I can't be that, you know, with all the intelligence of a 10-year-old. So with another friend in that group, the tallest child in the year actually, she was the most sporty girl.
Merita: This, this is ironic 'cause I was of course still the least sporty child. I had a talk to her and both of us decided we weren't going to do that anymore and we weren't going to hang out with a cool group anymore. And we didn't. But that came at a price. 'cause we were ostracised, not just by the cool group, but by everybody else because these girls sort of ran the year.
Merita: We stopped being invited to birthday parties, all of that. Everyone was told don't invite them. But that was okay. It was just a moment and I really vowed not to do that again. And I didn't understand the philosophy, didn't understand any of that, but I knew you [00:17:00] just know these things. It's a big one for me.
Nina: It's quite remarkable, isn't it, that even at 10 years old kids are using pack mentality to control and dominate and completely create power. And you experience that firsthand and what it was like to step outside.
Merita: And I'd been that girl and I actually thought, you know, I don't want to be the person who's making someone else feel like that. I knew what it was like.
Nina: And what about your parents' parenting style? How would you describe it?
Merita: It was very strict. They had been brought up in a particular way and in a particular era, and they were in a foreign land. They didn't understand things like sleepovers. You know, why would you go sleep over at someone else's house? We will just come pick you up and you'd come home and sleep in your own bed.
Merita: It just seemed ridiculous. We were not allowed to go places that other children were allowed to go, and we couldn't catch public transport by ourselves. It was a long time before I was allowed to walk to school with my brother without my mom picking us up. There was a particular case of a child that was abducted that went missing, called Elouise Worledge, which was very big at the [00:19:00] time.
Merita: And that just made everything worse. And I'm sure we weren't the only ones. I was a, a friendly child and my mother saw that as a negative 'cause I used to speak to strangers and say hello and talk to them. Everyone else normally goes, oh, isn't she lovely? And my mom went, oh, well, no. She'll talk to everybody and she'll, she won't be safe.
Merita: But talking to other children of migrant parents, this was not that unusual given that I wasn't in an area at that time with other children that had a similar home situation to me. I'd had no one to talk to. And I just thought I was the only one. You know, other kids I went to school with, they were allowed to walk home by themselves.
Merita: Some of the boys did paper rounds. They seemed to have all this freedom that we didn't have. The girls had Levi jeans. I was the kid with the Target jeans, you know. And Target in those days was not a fashionable brand. As far as my mother was [00:20:00] concerned, they were perfectly good. And why would you pay for a brand when it was a waste of money?
Merita: And yes, she's absolutely right, but it wasn't how the pecking order went at school. And she and my aunt made a lot of my clothes as well. Girls would be going to school excursions, there'd be girls with jean shorts and that were fraying at the ends, which is the ultimate in fashion. And I would be there in a pair of brown gabardine shorts that my mother had made.
Merita: And they looked tailored. And they were tailored and they were lined. She was so proud. And I'd have, you know, white socks and black patent shoes. And of course, on the way to school, I'd take off the socks, I'd tie up my t-shirt differently, I'd roll up the shorts. I'd do anything to change the way it looked.
Merita: Of course before I got home, I'd roll 'em all down, put the socks back on.
Nina: It's so funny, isn't it? The views you have as a child about fashion and it's all about what your friends are doing. Absolutely. Whereas when you're an adult, a beautiful pair of tailored shorts is a lovely thing. [00:21:00]
Nina: Talk to me about high school and what was different for you from primary school years?
Merita: Well, I went to a different school than most of the children I went to school with. They all went to secondary school in Mount Waverley. I went to secondary school in Oakleigh, only next door, but it was like I'd gone into a different world. It was the cultural opposite of where I'd come from. So all of a sudden, I was almost the same as everybody else.
Merita: It was a complete cultural mix. There were lots of Greek kids, Italians, and a whole mix as well as Anglo Australians. It was a totally different environment, and it was the first time really in my life, I didn't feel like a great outsider. It was amazing. I only knew one other girl there, but I found my feet much more easily than I had in primary school.
Merita: It was just a completely different world. You often hear [00:22:00] people talk about how primary school was the fun years, innocent and fabulous, and secondary school was where life got a bit harder. It was completely the opposite for me, primary school was almost a nightmare for me. Secondary school was like a breeze.
Merita: It was also a stricter school. So even when there were showings of naughty gang picking-on sort of bullying behaviour, they stomped on it really quickly. It was so much easier just for me. It was like, you know, you're not getting picked on. You're not getting pushed around. You are not getting your hair pulled, you are not being dragged on the floor, all of which happened to me.
Merita: What are you complaining about? This is easy.
Nina: And so did you find yourself with a beautiful group of friends?
Merita: I did. In fact, we used to call ourselves the United Nations. Whilst the school controlled it quite well, there was a little bit of a [00:23:00] split every now and then that used to arise between the Anglo children and the Wogs.
Merita: So it was the Skips and the Wogs. The group of friends that I had was a mix. It was myself, who was Croatian background, one of the other girls was part German, part Maltese, another couple were Italian, another one was Australian. And so we were the United Nations. So we were accepted by both sides and it was great.
Merita: It was a nice group of friends. In fact, I'm still in contact with one of them.
Nina: One’s lasted the distance. That's fabulous. When you reflect back now, were there some teachers at your high school that helped you expand your ideas of the world and your place in it?
Merita: Oh, there were. Look, it was a working class school.
Merita: The parents were not educated in those days. If your father was a qualified tradie, that was a big deal. So we were mostly children of unskilled factory workers, [00:24:00] that kind of thing. So the school did its best. There were some great teachers in there. I wasn't always everyone's favourite pupil because I argued the toss on everything with everybody.
Merita: So I argued on politics, on religion, on everything. I had a contrary view on the world. And so if you're a teacher who liked everyone to be quiet and obedient, I was not your favourite pupil. But if you were one of those teachers that liked a bit of life in your class, they were the ones that really liked me.
Merita: I had some really fabulous teachers. There was a music teacher, she was passionate about music and I was the same. And she used to loan me her records for me to bring home, and I'd listen to them over the school holidays and there would be a mix of classical and folk. 'cause she was a huge old folkie. We learned all of the Bob [00:25:00] Dylan songbook and she would sit there and clasp the book to her breast and she would talk about what a magnificent poet he was.
Merita: And the music was really to help him get his poetry out. I actually couldn't listen to Bob Dylan for years afterwards. Took me a long time to get over that. But you know, we would sing, you know, Melanie songs and Joni Mitchell and all of that. She was just a wonderful woman. But she introduced me to a lot of classical music, which I hadn't listened to before.
Merita: She loved her subject so much and sometimes she'd be playing her piano and sometimes we would be singing along and sometimes we wouldn't. We'd all just sit there and she didn't care because she was just having the time of her life. 'cause she loved what she did and that was always inspiring. She was great.
Merita: I had a politics teacher who would take me to task in the most wonderful way, and when I would say something outrageous, which I would often do just to get people to respond, he would go along with [00:26:00] me and he would go, okay, well then he turned to the rest of the class and say, well, she has a point. He wouldn't actually slap me down.
Merita: He would encourage me to keep thinking in the way that I thought. One of my English teachers, she was again fabulous. She'd gone to university with Jermaine Greer and she used to talk about how she was always a striking human. She'd walk into the lecture theater and like you knew she was going to be somebody.
Merita: A wonderful art teacher who I stayed in touch with for many, many, many years afterwards, and again, would talk about music and art and she'd encouraged us. It didn't take a lot of encouragement to get me going to look at other things and see the world differently, but also to expand our world, and I loved all of that.
Nina: So with these beautiful teachers in your life, you're able to connect in with that passion for learning?
Merita: Yep. Absolutely. Yeah, and it's something I still have. I love going to new places. I love people who know things different from me, talking to [00:27:00] them, reading books about things that are different. There's so much to know in the world.
Merita: There's so much to learn. There's so much that's interesting. You could spend your whole life learning and it's so much fun.
Nina: So let's follow up on one of your passions and spend some time on music. What music really moved you as a teenager?
Merita: It's hard to sometimes explain to people the impact of say, one television show, but Countdown was that show.
Merita: So for one hour every week, half the country would sit down and watch the show. Countdown was really where I first saw The Sex Pistols when they hit, and I thought they were fabulous. I just thought this was awesome. I loved everything. I loved the rebelliousness. I loved challenging, and so it was the Sex Pistols, and the Saints here in Australia.
Merita: There was just so much. There was this whole movement that had started. It was negative, [00:28:00] it was positive, it was young. Music at that time seemed very old. The Eagles and Toto and all that sort of stuff, what they call now Yacht Rock. I just loathed it, I just couldn't stand it. I can't bear it. This was young.
Merita: It was fresh. Like I said, it was rebellious, and it was young people taking things into their own hands and saying, no, you know, we don't want this. No, we don't want your world. We want something different. I just loved it. Of course, that made me an outsider again, with all the other kids at school. I started to do things differently.
Merita: I started to dress differently. I dug out my mother's old dresses that survived and was pairing them up with black tights and her old pointy shoes. So I did the whole mod thing. I could get away with that, and then I did something that seemed really radical. I went and cut my long hair off. I did it in what seemed a radical way at the time.
Merita: It [00:29:00] really, it seemed so inane at the time that a haircut could be such a big deal. I found a hairdresser actually in Vogue. I made an appointment and I went and saw him in my school uniform. It was in South Yarra. And I said, I want a new wave haircut. I want something that's different. I wanna get rid of all of this.
Merita: I remember he said, are you sure? And I said, yeah. He goes, I'm going to tell you what's gonna happen. He goes, your parents are gonna freak out, but your grandparents are gonna be okay because they're just gonna look at it and roll their eyes and go, oh yes, it’s what kids do, but your parents are gonna be really flipped by this.
Merita: Are you sure? And I went, yep. And of course, I came home. I was happy as Larry. Had this fringe that went over one eye, different lengths at the back. My mother burst into tears. My father was speechless, and I was happy. She cried. I didn't actually mean to make my mother cry. I couldn't quite understand. But when I went to school the next day, [00:30:00] kids who I didn't know came up to me and were saying, what have you done?
Merita: What does it look like? But I saw there was a boy that I had a bit of a crush on. And when he saw me, he just went, oh my God, that's fabulous. I love it. And all was right with the world.
Nina: It's funny how you can have so much attachment to a haircut, but actually it's one of the ways that we mark ourselves out as our own individual self and make a claim on who we are.
Nina: Yeah.
Merita: Well it's funny 'cause I was dressing differently and I used to get things thrown at me in the streets sometimes. Again, like going back to my primary school years and punk in Melbourne was quite tame. It was not like in England, in the main as I was to discover later. It was really a very private school thing in Melbourne.
Merita: I really marked myself out.
Nina: So in terms of the music, [00:31:00] you've talked about the Sex Pistols and the Saints. Where would you listen to it and what would you be doing?
Merita: Well, my dad bought an FM radio. And I at night, used to take into my bedroom 'cause it was only one, I remember fiddling around with, the stations and I came across what turned out to be Triple R.
Merita: It was then a whole new world. A whole new world of music that I had not heard before. So there was a lot of the punk stuff. So there was like the Pistols, the Saints, Elvis Costello, all that kind of stuff that was being played there. But it was all these other things. So they had things like a folk show.
Merita: I mean, I heard a bit because of my music teacher, but this was extra, there would be jazz, there would be electronic music. And I was just glued to that radio 'cause it was this whole other world out there from my little bedroom that I discovered existed. And I didn't know how to get access to that yet, but I so desperately [00:32:00] wanted to.
Merita: There's all this new stuff out there and all this interesting music that I'd not seen of or heard of before. That was a great revelation. But of course in the mornings that radio would have to go back out so my dad could listen to the news again.
Nina: Did you do the thing of taping songs off the radio?
Merita: Yes, of course we all did. 'cause otherwise you weren't going to have it. We were not a wealthy family, so a record was a big deal. That was a birthday present. Yeah, I didn't get many singles. I did get a record, which was a big thing, which was Lulu's greatest hits and I've gotta say, she was great. That was To Sir With Love, and I loved it as a little kid.
Merita: That was a lot of fun for me, that one record. 'cause I would play it and play it and play it and dance around the lounge room.
Nina: In your view, how did loving alternative music start to shine through in your sense of identity in the teen years?
Merita: Well, it cemented in a way a lot of my alternative thinking.
Merita: Like I like to [00:33:00] see things a bit differently and I've carried that through, I guess, into my professional life later as an adult. But then it really cemented my thinking about challenging that just because something is the way it's always been doesn't mean it's the right way or the best way that it should be.
Merita: In my teen years, like I said, my dressing became different. I volunteered myself to become the outsider in a way. The big thing for me was then how I actually could get out and see some of this music. This was going to actually take quite a bit of planning and thinking. I actually had to go look it up and it was a, a benefit concert for three PBS, which is another community radio station that had started up in the interim and they were having a benefit at the Crystal Ballroom.
Merita: And given I had very strict parents, I had to come up with a bit of a plan on how I was going to get there. And there was one of my friends, she was gonna come with me. There was quite a bit of not being fulsome with the truth with [00:34:00] my mum and my dad. I said we were going out with one of my friends, going to a place, which came apart a little bit when I came home in a taxi, which had never happened before.
Merita: But we did. I'd dressed up, put on makeup in a more theatrical way, which is what I had started to do. I'd started to really play with makeup, and I did this for many years. I would actually draw my eyes right out. I went to the Crystal Ballroom. There was a group of bands, La Femme, Japanese Comics, Little Heroes. The night was divided.
Merita: There was an upstairs and a downstairs, but because we're under age, right? So I was not 18, so I shouldn't have been there anyway. So I was desperately trying to look older than I was. Wanted to look very cool and very with it, and like I go here all the time. Of course. So I was too scared to go upstairs to see the bands upstairs, because what if I got it wrong or I went [00:35:00] to the wrong place and then everyone would know that I was under 18.
Merita: So we just stayed there. So we swore the bands that were on downstairs, not the bands that were on upstairs. But that was the first time I went there and I would later go there. That was like a real hangout, but it was great. Everyone to me looked so cool. They were alternative. They were much more. I mean, I was desperately trying, but I was a little kid from the suburbs, daggy little thing and desperately trying to look like I was a grownup.
Merita: I have fooled some people, but you know, I really, I really wasn't.
Nina: How old were you?
Merita: 16.
Nina: Beautiful. So was that the first and only time you snuck out before you were 18 or were there a few other adventures that followed that?
Merita: That was the only time I snuck out. I did manage to harangue my parents into letting me go to a big concert.
Merita: Actually it was at Festival Hall and again, this same poor friend that I dragged [00:36:00] along and managed to get one of my cousins to come with me. With the three of us, we were allowed to go. And it actually turned out to be quite a significant concert. So it was a band called XTC, another one called Magazine.
Merita: And they were both from England and that was a big deal. And The Flowers at the time, who became Icehouse later on. They hadn't played a lot in Melbourne 'cause they're from Sydney and we were clearly the youngest kids there. But it's one of these concerts that you have bragging rights to later on.
Merita: So that stood me in so much good stead later on.
Nina: How did you decide what you wanted to pursue after high school and what were the expectations of your teachers and parents and what you were feeling interested in?
Merita: I tend to describe myself as falling into that group of kids who were sort of a little bit smart.
Merita: Not a brainiac, but a little bit smart, and being the [00:37:00] working class school that it was, if you were able to, you had to do science. 'cause I was able to do science. I was forever pushed into science. My mother, who was very big on education, that was a huge thing for her. She was of the same view. So if you are clever, you did science and maths.
Merita: That's what clever people did. And so I was somehow supposed to have this career in science and or maths, and I was passable, you know, I could do them. I had tried at the end of year 10 to get more into the humanities because I liked art, I liked the humanities. I didn't sit around talking about physics.
Merita: I would sit around talking about politics. I would sit around talking about art or literature. Again, very working class views. They're nice to have things. They're not things that you make a living from. I remember at the end of year [00:38:00] 10 sitting there with one of the teachers saying what I wanted to study, and she sat there and went, Merita, don't be silly.
Merita: You are a clever girl. Don't be silly. I was like, oh. No, come on. Come on. Physics. Chemistry, okay, maths one and two, as they were at the time, and I kept French. It wasn't a good thing to have done. I used to still hang out with my art teacher. I missed doing that. I missed the music. I missed all of that.
Merita: And part of the way through the year, I thought, now this is really silly. I actually don't wanna do this for the rest of my life. Just 'cause you can, doesn't mean you should. And so I really put my foot down at the end of year 11 and switched over. And again, my mother was very upset with me, and the compromise was that I had to keep maths, which meant I couldn't do legal studies.
Merita: And I had thought maybe I'd possibly [00:39:00] do journalism. But you sort of look at journalists and they're all very super confident and they're pushy. And I thought, oh, I'm not sure that that's what I'm like. So I thought maybe being a lawyer, like I know there used to be a show called Petrocelli where he used to stand up for the underdog and I thought I'd do that.
Merita: I wasn't really sure. And then my mother thought, okay, alright, you can do the humanities. 'cause in her mind that meant I was going to be a teacher and I just humoured her. I had never any intention of being a teacher. I would've been a dreadful teacher. I think I would've been terrible. And in those days a lot of teachers went and did a degree first and then did a diploma of education.
Merita: And that was the path that I had said I was taking.
Nina: And what was university like for you?
Merita: University was great fun for me. Again, it was a bit like finding my tribe. The world seemed a much bigger place than where I was and I [00:40:00] wanted to find that world. Whilst it wasn't always like that, but there were other kids like me, so there were other girls that wore black tights like I did.
Merita: 'cause that was your marker was black tights. That was a thing. I still wear them by the way. I made friends and we liked a lot of the same music. And my world grew in size, which is what I'd wanted. And I loved meeting my tutors, getting to know people who knew so much, people who could teach you things that we knew was great. I loved it.
Nina: So as much the personal as the educational? Yeah, yeah, it was for me too. Definitely. In your second year at university, a really significant event occurred that changed your way of thinking. Can you talk about that?
Merita: Yeah. It was actually at the end of the year and I was going out with some friends.
Merita: So there were two guys and myself and [00:41:00] my friend in the backseat of this car. And it was a very old car, I think it was an EH Holden. In those days, if you had a car over a certain age, you didn't have to have seat belts in the back. So there were no seat belts in the back, and we were driving to the Universal Theater to see a play there, and we were involved in a fairly catastrophic car accident.
Merita: I still don't quite understand how it happened. There was a six-car pile-up behind us. We bounced off a heavy wooden fence and hit a telephone pole, and I actually hit the telephone pole. But because the two of us weren't wearing seat belts in the back, the injuries to my friend were life changing. So I had been sitting differently from her.
Merita: I had my feet on the ground, 'cause there was a radio on the floor, so I had my feet on either side of the radio and there was a strap there and I was [00:42:00] holding the strap. She wasn't, and she was chatting away and was sitting with her legs crossed and sort of talking like she was sitting in a cafe. So when the car crashed and bounced, she was thrown around.
Merita: The injuries were quite severe. There were brain injuries. So it changed her life. Absolutely. And for me, I had been in car accidents with my parents before and it was like this one really finished off the thinking in a way. That you actually just dunno what's around the corner. I'd come from a family where we had saved and scrimped, and everything was about the future.
Merita: And my parents were not unusual. It was very much the thinking at the time. People had come through the war, depression, everything was about safeguarding yourself. And I remember, and its still stuck with me. You can't safeguard your future completely. You can plan a little, you can be a little bit wise. You don't have to be totally [00:43:00] reckless, but you dunno what's around the corner and you can't put your life on hold for all those things that you'll have later.
Merita: Security is good, but you don't know what life has in store for you. It can be a car accident and that can happen in the blink of an eye, like the absolute blink of an eye. And you can be a passenger in a car. It has nothing to do with you, and your life is completely different from then on. Or it can be cancer, it can be anything.
Merita: Things that you don't necessarily have any control over. So you need to live your life. You need to be present. You need to take on life in a way and live it. I came from a family where everything was about the future saving and not doing things. Now you could do something later, you might not have a later.
Merita: My mother, when I would argue with her about things and I'd say this and she'd say, oh, you're so negative. And I'd say it's not negative actually, I don't see it as negative. You need to appreciate what you have now. [00:44:00] 'cause life is now, we don't know about tomorrow. I was really determined to take life on and live it.
Merita: You know, we are here, and we're now, and that's all we really know.
Nina: Perfect. Thank you. So what did you do once you finished university?
Merita: I had always wanted to travel. So again, I wanted to see what was out in the world. And so I took on cleaning jobs, waitressing at night, all that kind of stuff to save up to go to Europe with some friends and did the post university degree backpacking tour of Europe.
Merita: And that was great fun. Again, a bit like university where you see there is a whole other world, whole other communities that are there. And look, we didn't go anywhere wildly radical, you know, went to England and Europe. It was good and it was fun and we had some hairy moments and you learn how you respond in an absolute and utter crisis.
Merita: There was this one time, [00:45:00] so we were on the train from London to Dover. When we got on the train it was packed with people commuting and as the train went on, it emptied out and at one point we realized that we were the only three people in that carriage. Anyway. One friend went to the toilet and we were both reading our books.
Merita: 'cause that's what you did. We're actually sort of thinking, gee, Chris is taking a long time. And the next thing we knew, there were these two guys sitting next to us and one of them had a knife at my friend's throat. They're asking for our passports and any money, passports were the big thing. So my friend’s there with a knife at her throat and I start to giggle.
Merita: She did this amazing thing. She turned to him and she put her hand underneath the blade of the knife and with an almost school marmie sort of tone, which wasn't her normal tone. She turned to him and she looked at him in the eye and said, [00:46:00] “Now put that away. Don't be silly.” He just sort of looked at her, said, come on, put it away.
Merita: Don't be silly. And he did. I had stopped laughing by that stage. I was like! Then, 'cause we both realized we needed to chat to them, so we chatted to, them they started talking to us. And we asked about our friend and they said, oh yeah, we played with the lock. We'd seen the three of you. And we thought, there's only two of us.
Merita: And we were a bit worried about taking on the three of you. So they'd played with the lock at the toilet and our friend was in the toilet. They'd locked her in. We chatted away. 'cause you know he still had a knife. Right. And they asked us out.
Nina: As in on a date?
Merita: Oh, on a date, Yes. And we said yes, if they would let our friend out of the toilet.
Merita: Absolutely. Yep. We would, [00:47:00] we'd meet them. They said there is a central square in Dover. And we were to meet them there at 10 o'clock that night. 'cause they had to go home and see their parents, I guess. I don't know why 10 o'clock. And we said, not a problem. Absolutely. We'll be there. Can you get our friend?
Merita: Got our friend and we parted ways, needless to say, we didn't go the date.
Nina: I'm so glad you didn't go on the date with the boys, with the knife. Imagine being in the kind of head space where you could go from threatening someone with a knife to, well, why don't we hang out and just assume that that would be fine.
Merita: Yeah. Again, they were working class kids. We were working class kids. We knew how to talk to them.
Nina: You'd put them at ease. Yep. Yep. Yeah, that makes sense. In doing so, made yourself safe. Yep. When you got home from your travels, you started to think about a career and you went into journalism. Tell me how you got your [00:48:00] first break?
Merita: I didn't go directly in first. I actually got a job at an academic bookshop. Then thought, this really isn't going to do, I can't do this, and I just left. Because I had an interest in film, and I'd done some sort of short courses in film, I managed to get a job at TV Week doing film reviews and working with a wonderful man called Ivan Hutchinson, who used to present films.
Merita: Lovely, lovely human that he was, and I thought, you know, I really need to take this further. I'd always written, I'd written terrible poetry as a teenager and was always writing, and so I thought, this is what I wanna do and I need to make a living out of doing this. I have to actually make a living, pay my rent.
Merita: I'd moved out of home into a share house by that stage, which had been a family scandal. So I left my job and managed to get this job and they offered to make me a cadet there. But my boss at the time, he took me [00:49:00] out for a drink and he said, Look love. The only problem with being here, he said, is this is the only place you'll be able to work.
Merita: He said, being an entertainment reporter and training as an entertainment reporter makes it really hard to go work anywhere else 'cause you're better off going in one of the newspapers. He said, you know, like, you really are. He goes, we'll give it to you here if you want. 'cause I was there already. He said, but you know, I'd really advise that you go somewhere else.
Merita: And to do that, I really needed to get myself published. Sure, I'd edited the school newsletter, I'd done that kind of thing, but it wasn't that easy thinking about what I could do, what I could write about. I'd had a few goes at a couple of things that weren't quite right. Then I'd heard that a really prominent feminist had had come back to Australia and she was going to be in Melbourne and she was speaking at a pub with Kate Grenville, I think it was as well, and launching her book.
Merita: Her name was Dale Spender. [00:50:00] I thought there'd been no coverage of her coming back, and she was a big deal feminist in England. So she used to get covered and reported in the papers and she used to write for the newspapers. So over there she was like another Jermaine Greer. She'd had no prominence and I thought, oh, that's a mark for me.
Merita: I was a big fan. So I went to this reading and I remember she's a tiny woman and I'm not very tall and she's small to me, but she's a huge brain. The talk had finished and I'm there sort of behind her and I'm actually quite terrified. Eventually I remember like my friends behind me going, go on, just tap her on the shoulder.
Merita: I did. I tapped her on the shoulder and I said, look, hi, I'm a big fan and I know you don't know me, but I'm trying to get into journalism and I'd really like to write an article about you. Would she be able to give me some time? And she did. So here I was a total [00:51:00] stranger in a pub in Melbourne. She wasn't even from Melbourne.
Merita: Young woman with a silly haircut. Taps her on the shoulder, asks for some time, and she did. And she gave me two lots of time, in fact, because I initially wrote a big story on her and sent it to a good weekend, and they came back to me and said, we like her, but she's just not big enough for us to run a story this size.
Merita: Can you do one of our back pages? So they used to have these q and a back pages. And so I asked her again if she could give me some time, and she did again. And that got published. And I got the call. It was like two or three days later and I got a cadetship.
Nina: And who did you get your cadetship with?
Merita: It was with The Leader, with the suburban papers.
Merita: But it was good. I mean, the plan had been to stay there for a year. [00:52:00] I ended up being there for four. It was a great place to learn everything. 'cause you did everything. You reported on sport, you reported on council, everything, which was a great rounded way to actually learn your skill.
Nina: Absolutely. So you weren't pigeonholed into any one area.
Merita: No. And you, you learnt you had to work really hard. It wasn't one story a day, you had to really pump things out. I learned how to write more efficiently and more quickly and more succinctly, which I wish I'd had that skill when I was at university.
Merita: It was a wonderful skill to gain.
Nina: So when you look back now, what did you think your life would be like when you were a teenager? What have you learned on the way?
Merita: So when I was a teenager, I really wanted to write again, novels, be a bohemian in Paris, wear velvet coats, all that kind of thing. That didn't [00:53:00] happen clearly 'cause I'm still in Australia, still in the same city I was born in.
Merita: And then along the way, the writing, okay, I wanna write, so I wanna be a journalist. And I did that. And for a long time I thought that writing was going to be what I was going to do. And it was what I did for a long time. I wrote speeches. I left journalism and did communications, and I went back into journalism for a while at BRW. I just thought I would have a career doing different types of writing.
Merita: I wanted to do film writing, so screenplays. I discovered that I liked using my brain in different ways. And I still love writing, but there was other things that I could do and that I liked doing. The exploratory things. Everyone will talk about, the lightweightside of communications, the frippery side, which is fun, but the side that I discovered and the side I discovered I could do was the strategy side, [00:54:00] and that's what I loved and I had no idea about that.
Merita: I had no idea about strategy, but what you thought about career and life were quite narrow in those days. I knew I thought differently. I knew I had a low boredom threshold. I got bored easily. I like things to be new and different and exciting. And my version of exciting can be a little different from others.
Merita: Reflecting back, you don't know what life has in store and you don't know what you can do. People, we tend to put ourselves into boxes and we put each other into boxes and we limit ourselves so much. And people don't mean to, sometimes families don't mean to limit you, but they do 'cause they worry about you.
Merita: 'cause doing something different comes with a risk, and that's not for everybody. But it was for me. The strategy side and learning how to do things differently. Challenging my own brain, which is something I love to do, [00:55:00] was something I found I was of use to other people. Thinking in an alternative way about how you approach a problem or an issue or a disaster or any kind of crisis.
Merita: Sometimes the obvious answer is not there because the problem isn't what it seems, it's something else. And finding that to me is actually really quite exciting and something I just didn't ever know I could do. 'cause you just don't, you know, you are young and you see the simple things. So you, you know, everyone thinks about being a doctor or a lawyer, but there's so many more ways to approach life and your career.
Merita: It takes hard work and it's challenging and it can be risky and not all risks pay off. You gotta have the stomach for that. A boss that I had when I was freelancing had seen something in me that I hadn't, I hadn't seen in myself. It was a problem that was coming up [00:56:00] again and again and again, and I thought, well, this is just silly.
Merita: Why isn't someone dealing with this? You know, it seems so bleedingly obvious to you that this needs to be dealt with. And I sat down with one of the people for whom this was a problem. I said, okay, how can we approach this differently? How can we do this? We talked it through, we set up a process and I took it to my boss and I just said, look, what do you think?
Merita: Is this okay? People keep coming to me with this thing. It's obviously an issue. If we do this, we can deal with it so much more quickly. And she looked at the paper and she looked at me and she said, I'm gonna make a manager out of you yet. It was like a small thing. And she probably won't remember that she even said this to me, but for me it was like, oh, actually there's something else.
Merita: I had not even thought about it. I had still just thought of myself as a writer and all of a sudden, hang on a minute, there might be something else.
Nina: What do you draw [00:57:00] on to hold you in good stead in the harder times?
Merita: Well, music obviously still, that's a big thing for me. But really my life partner David, he is very different from me, but very similar in as much as he has a wild curiosity for knowledge, information.
Merita: And so I would come home after a really hard day and there were some days that were really beyond tough, and I would open the door at home and he would greet me and then say, did you know that Ulysses S Grant… And would talk about that American president or American revolution or skiffle music or something completely different. Whatever passion he had at that time, whatever book he was reading, whatever knowledge he was acquiring at that time.
Merita: My whole world would be different. All of a sudden, I wasn't [00:58:00] in that emergency, that crisis, that other world that I was living in. I was in this world of knowledge and warmth and love, and it really, really helped me because it reminded me that there is another world. The world is what we have. Like people get so caught up in their work, and I so understand that, and they forget and sometimes don't see the rest of the world.
Merita: When you're in a crisis, you can get caught up, even if you're just working very hard, you get caught up and your whole world becomes work, and that's really not good. It's not good for you as a human. It's not good for your work either. So for me it was coming home and having some interesting, quirky piece of history or tidbit about Bob Dylan or John Lennon.
Merita: That just would change my world, [00:59:00] I would think. I'm home. I'm safe. It's great. It's fun. Really, that helped me.
Nina: Thank you. I love that. What does living a great life mean for you?
Merita: This is really hard. I thought about this. For me, living a great life is leaving the world a better place. And that can be a whole bunch of things.
Merita: It can be the grand things, it can be wonderful art, wonderful music that's inspiring. Or it can be living a wonderful, peaceful life, being good to your neighbours, bringing up your children to be good humans, leaving the world a better place. That to me is living a great life. And it can be small, it can be big. And the small is just as important as the big.
Nina: Thank you, Merita, for being my guest today and sharing the journey of the world you knew as a young person, through to the world, you kept nudging and [01:00:00] expanding. Merita is far from done on expanding her world. She continues to seek out new opportunities and adventures in life and in work.
Nina: Merita, your story is full of heart and inspiring to me because you had humble beginnings, which you never lost sight of as you worked hard for each achievement. At each step in your journey, you have taken the lead to get yourself to where you want to be, with the brash wildness of your beloved punk rock, and all the compassion and kindness of a beautiful human.
Nina: You have been listening to when I was young, an exploration of the formative years of authentic, outstanding, and inspiring humans. I'm your host, Nina Fromhold, and this is a Memory Lane Life Stories production proudly made in Naarm, Melbourne, Victoria, on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri people. If you've enjoyed this [01:01:00] episode, please follow the show to hear more of the series and share this podcast with your friends.
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