ROBIN BAILEY
On losing her husband
At a time of utter despair and grief, the sight of a pair of laughing kookaburras perched on her back deck brings a slight smile to Robin Bailey’s face. Her husband of less than a year, Sean Pickwell, died in her arms on September 26 following a courageous battle with cancer.
Shortly before he died, Pickwell told his wife that seeing a kookaburra would be a sign that he was still with her. “He obviously couldn’t tell me to look for a panda – that was what I called him, Panda – because I’d never see one,” Bailey, 50, tells WHO. “So, he settled on a kookaburra. Another friend of mine, who also died from cancer, had told me that was what she would return as, so Sean said I should look out for a pair of kookaburras and it would be them. Well, you wouldn’t believe it! I saw two of them on our deck not long after.”
Pickwell had been told his cancer was terminal just days before they became engaged, but the couple hoped they would have a long and happy future together. They tried alternative treatments in Australia and overseas before eventually having to accept the doctor’s grim prognosis. “In the end, the cancer was in every organ except his heart, his brain and his lungs,” she said. “It was everywhere. It’s impossible to rally against something like that.”
As the end neared, Pickwell wanted Bailey to be near him so she left her popular Triple M breakfast show to be at his bedside. “Even though you know it is coming, nothing can prepare you for the moment that it does,” she shares, through tears. Bailey is heartbroken
but grateful for the time she had with her husband. “There are some people who spend their whole life looking for the sort of love we had and never find it,” she says.
“The thing about terminal cancer is it forces you to really see what’s important. So, there was nothing left unsaid between us. In his last weeks so many friends and family members came to see him. Even the men hugged and kissed and told each other how much they loved each other. It’s a shame that we have to wait until the end to tell each other how much we love and value one another. That’s the greatest gift of dealing with something like terminal cancer, you say what needs to be said.”
Grief has been a constant companion in recent years. It was Pickwell who Bailey credits with helping to heal her family after the suicide of her first husband Tony Smart in 2014. Unknown to Bailey, Smart had been battling depression when he ended his life. “My youngest son asked me why this keeps happening to us,” she says. “It just doesn’t seem fair.”
Bailey must now face her 51st birthday on November 13 and then her first wedding anniversary on November 17 without the love of her life. She will spend her birthday with her three teenage boys in Brisbane and then travel to Sydney to mark the wedding anniversary with Pickwell’s children, friends and family.
Soon, Bailey is off to India with her sons on a trip she says will help them “reconnect as a family”. “I don’t know what the next challenge will be, but I will face it.”
“Nothing can prepare you for the moment”
After being crowned the winner in 2004, Trevor Butler dropped to one knee on stage and asked his girlfriend of six years, Breea, to marry him. Fifteen years on, the couple are happily married and have two boys, Maika, 12, and Creedence, 8. Butler appeared in reality series Celebrity Overhaul and had a cameo in Summer Heights High. As for the $1 million prize, Butler says, “We ended up buying a house. We invested some money, we lost some money, but we’ve still got a house that’s doubled in price.”
They fell in love in 2002 and scored a spin-off series, Marty & Jess: An Outback Wedding, two years later. But by 2006, Big Brother’s biggest love story was over and Nathan ‘Marty’ Martin and Jess Hardy divorced. After another stab at reality TV on Dating in the Dark in 2012, Hardy settled into a radio job on the NSW Central Coast’s Star 104.5, while Marty now runs his family farm with wife Lexi and their children Sam, Billy and Joel.