LISA WILKINSON:
losing mum changed everything
Pushing a shopping trolley down the sparsely stocked aisles in her local supermarket, Lisa Wilkinson is stopped by a sudden thought. “I wonder if Mum needs anything,” she ponders, pulling out her mobile phone and preparing to make a quick call to find out.
It’s then – not for the first time, and certainly far from the last – that the crushing realisation her mother, Beryl, is no longer here hits her afresh. At the age of 89, Beryl lost her battle with cancer close to two years ago.
Yet The Project host admits with raw honesty, “I’m still not used to her not being around.”
As she speaks to The Weekly today, that sense of missing her mother is especially keen. For Lisa, now 60, has recently delved deep into her past, filming an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? for SBS, and the litany of tragedies she found there broke her heart.
She discovered a long line of ancestors on her mother’s side who had struggled with unimaginable poverty, abuse and institutionalisation. Generation after generation had been dealt the harshest of blows and while some had come out the other side, others had not.
It was a journey that saw Lisa shed many more tears than she was prepared for. But it led her to more keenly appreciate the incredible resilience Beryl possessed, despite her traumatic start in life.
“And my greatest sadness,” she says now, her voice catching, “is that I can’t share this with my mother.
She passed away having so many huge question marks still hanging about who she was, what her background was, what led to her difficult childhood.”
Lisa’s own childhood was idyllic. Raised by homemaker Beryl and rugby union-mad sales manager Ray Wilkinson, she was the middle child of three, the only girl and the apple of her parents’ eyes. Days were spent climbing trees, catching tadpoles and playing cricket with her brothers, Kyle and Brett.
“I wouldn’t change a moment of the childhood I had,” she says now with a smile. “It was very happy. We lived in a house that my dad had built in what is now the inner city of Campbelltown [in Sydney’s western suburbs] but we had a dirt road at the end of our street that went out to the bush. We rode our bikes until the street lights came on, played with all the kids in the street. It was a classic Aussie childhood.”
Yet for all that, there was always an unspoken presence lurking in the background, a sense that her mother had faced a multitude of demons which had shaped her irrevocably, taking away her sense of trust, of confidence, of self-belief.
Born to a single mother at a time when the stigma of being fatherless was overwhelming, Beryl was not only illegitimate, she was completely in the dark about who her father was.
It would not be until she was 50 that she learnt his name, another decade or so more before she learnt that he’d actually died of tuberculosis at the tender age of 21, shortly after she was conceived. He left no surviving family members, nobody to step up and help Beryl’s mother, Marie.
And help she desperately needed. Marie struggled with parenthood, and with the shame of being an unwed mother. To cope, she turned increasingly to the bottle, repeatedly placing her young daughter into care when finances were straightened.
“My mother grew up with the stigma of not only being out of orphanages but also being considered a ‘bastard child’. And the coping mechanism that my grandmother employed probably didn’t help her parenting skills,” Lisa says.
“Mum had three half-brothers to two different men but those marriages
never lasted – those men were not kind to her at all. Her mother, God rest her soul, had difficulty with the challenges of being a parent and it was easier for her to give my mother up to orphanages when she couldn’t cope. That left an indelible mark on Mum when it came to trust issues and self-esteem and accepting love.”
It also left her with a deep distrust of the Catholic Church as, adds Lisa, “there was a lot of cruelty, physical cruelty, in the orphanages she went to as a child. They were all Catholic orphanages. And yet, for all the difficulties that Mum went through, her kindness really blew me away, because it wasn’t something that in many ways she was shown.”
Until, that was, she clapped eyes on Ray Wilkinson. Devastatingly handsome – “he was the spitting image of Frank Sinatra,” Lisa says now – Ray was playing double bass onstage at the Sydney Town Hall on a Saturday night. The pair didn’t speak but “Mum was just smitten,” Lisa says, smiling. Unfortunately, she was also engaged to another man. Ray. too. was coupled up with a long-term girlfriend he affectionately called
Skippy. But fate intervened the following Monday morning when Ray turned up to interview for a job in the sales department at locomotive manufacturers Clyde Engineering, where Beryl worked on the switchboard. The rest, says Lisa, is “beautiful history”.
Falling hard and fast for each other, both swiftly ended what were happy relationships in order to follow the path of true love. It was a move neither would regret, and it gave Beryl a life she’d never dreamt possible.
“My father was an absolute angel who loved her unconditionally and accepted all the challenges that came from my mother’s childhood. So there was, in many ways, a happy ending for Mum. But her childhood never left her.”
In an unexpected twist, it turns out that even Ray’s former girlfriend was happy for the blissful duo. Just two weeks ago, Lisa was completely taken aback by a private message sent to her on Instagram. The sender was Skippy’s daughter, Janice.
Her mother, she said, had always spoken fondly of Ray, of the love they had once shared. For Lisa, who has never truly recovered from the early death of her father in 1990, this was just further proof of the extraordinary nature of the man she calls “kindness personified”.
“She sent me a lot of beautiful photos of my father,” she recounts, pausing for a lengthy moment as she struggles with tears. “Janice said that her mother always had such lovely stories about what a beautiful person my dad was. And I was so thrilled that I could say the same of her.”
Like Beryl, Ray is “never far away” in Lisa’s thoughts nor, indeed, in the home she shares with her husband Peter FitzSimons, 58.
Ray would have delighted in knowing that she married a Wallaby, she says, her face lighting up with that beaming smile that has greeted audiences since she shifted her career →
from magazines to television in the late 1990s.
And incredibly – despite not meeting her future husband until after her father’s death from cancer – Peter also played a treasured role in their last days together. Ray’s favourite sports column was penned by Peter for The Sydney Morning Herald. As she sat by his hospital bed while her dad drifted in and out of consciousness, Lisa would read them to him aloud.
“As we speak, Ray’s photo is on the mantelpiece looking down at me, sitting next to photos of my own loving parents,” the former Wallaby tells The Weekly from the living room of their long-time abode on Sydney’s north shore. “While Buddy, the kids’ adored floppy rag doll that Beryl bought in an op-shop for two dollars 25 years ago, sits atop a cupboard in the kitchen, gazing down on us all every day.”
The suburb they are based in honours another treasured memory. In 1984 Ray – then the secretary of Sydney Rugby Union – organised a six-week tour for the Sydney representative side that Peter was then playing for.
“We trained at Balmoral Oval and played six European teams, including Rovigo in Italy and Brive in France,” he says. “I subsequently played a year in Rovigo, four years in Brive, returned home to meet and marry Ray’s daughter – sadly 18 months after he passed away – and we now live so close to Balmoral Oval that I run around it three times a week.”
For Lisa, it’s bittersweet to know that the two most important men in her life had such great respect for each other. They would, she believes, have got along like a proverbial house on fire. Beryl, however, was a much harder nut for Peter to crack.
Mother and daughter had become even closer in the wake of Ray’s passing. But when Lisa announced her plans to marry Peter, in a ceremony to take place just nine months after their first date, Beryl was sceptical.
“My mum was not a believer in Pete. It took many years,” Lisa laughs.
“She thought we got married way too quickly. She always acknowledged Pete’s extraordinary generosity towards her but a few times she told him she was unconvinced we were right for each other. Pete, to his enormous credit, would never be challenged by it – he found it kind of amusing. And he said to me, ‘I know I’ll win her over one day.’”
“Beryl was a very hard marker when it came to sons-in-law,” Peter recounts of his dogged pursuit of approval. “She always wanted the very best for Lisa – perhaps especially because of her own very tough early experiences – and it took me some time to warm her up. But I think by the time of our 25th wedding anniversary she had really come to the conclusion that I was a stayer. What I will most remember Beryl for was being a completely devoted grandmother to our three children, who she adored without reservation. And they her. They were the absolute joy of her life.”
While Beryl was just 60 when Ray passed away at age 68, she never looked for love again. Instead, she focused on her love for her grandchildren, moving in to help out when Jake was born in 1993 and staying on for the arrival of Louis and Billi in 1995 and 1997 respectively.
It was a godsend for Lisa and Peter who were both juggling busy careers along with parenthood. And it meant their children built special bonds with Beryl who, says Lisa, they “loved all the more” for knowing the hardships she’d experienced.
When she moved into her own place nearby, the kids would always know the
second Beryl arrived, thanks to family dog Scout, who was also privileged with their grandmother’s fierce love.
“There was something about the way she opened the gate that Scout would just come running,” Lisa recounts fondly. “We’d immediately say, ‘Where’s Grandma?’ and Scout would go nuts.
“Mum always had a huge connection to our animals. I think I was about 15 when I really started to get a handle on Mum’s childhood. And my dad explained it to me. He didn’t tell me a lot, but he said, ‘One of the reasons your mum pours so much love into the animals is because she’ll never be disappointed by an animal; the love is so unconditional’. I think the kids could see the gentle soul that Mum was, and they knew that was to be treasured.”
“Beryl was right in the heart of the family,” Deborah Thomas – Lisa’s close friend of 33 years and a former editor-in-chief of The Weekly – recalls. “She was absolutely there for Lisa and for the grandkids. Their relationship truly blossomed.
“For Lisa, family has always been one of the most important things in life – family in her immediate family and family in her group of friends. Once Lisa brings someone into her life, they are there for life.”
It’s a sentiment proffered by many people close to Lisa. The woman we see on The Project desk, they say – warm, intelligent, passionate and empathetic – is very much mirrored in the Lisa you get off screen. On her first day on The Sunday Project, Hamish Macdonald was nervous about her arrival, intimidated by the seasoned presenter’s stellar CV, not least her stint as the longestserving female host on breakfast TV before taking a stand for equal pay. Both he and co-host Tommy Little were “these little kids who muck about,” he tells The Weekly. “And suddenly we’re sitting there doing the show with one of the most respected and revered names in Australian television. How is that going to work?”
Tommy, he recalls, went pretty hard on the newcomer, calling her ‘Your Royal Highness’ and poking plenty of stick. Hamish was sick with worry at how her first day on the job was going when, all of a sudden, “without skipping a beat, she leant into it, she genuinely enjoyed it. I learnt in that moment that she has a great sense of humour and doesn’t take herself too seriously.”
The pair became fast friends, regularly catching up off screen as →
well as on. When Hamish was wrestling with the decision to step into Tony Jones’ shoes on
Q&A, Lisa was his greatest champion, encouraging him to take the leap. “I’ve had huge decisions to make workwise in the last eight months and Lisa’s support has been unwavering and unquestioning,” he says.
He was also there when she decided to take on the challenge of filming Who Do You Think You Are?, which came very close on the heels of Beryl’s passing.
“She went through a lot personally,” he says. “She’s a very human person and when things do impact Lisa, they impact her deeply. I know that the journey was quite profound for her. To do that within a year of losing a parent who she was very close to – that had to have a big impact.”
As we speak, ahead of the debut of the SBS series, Australia’s lockdown restrictions are beginning to ease. It means, Lisa says with relief, that all three of her kids can come home to watch it together with her and Peter and a “big box of tissues”.
Billi was the last to leave the family nest just three months ago, decamping to a share house with friends. Usually, though, all three were still regular fixtures, until COVID-19 forced them to replace their visits with frequent Zoom calls. For Lisa and Peter, that has meant spending more time alone together than ever before. And like many couples, that’s thrown up its own challenges. “Suddenly you have to take another look at your relationship and you go, ‘Oh, there’s a couple of raw edges here,’” Lisa admits. “And let’s just say we’ve had to address some of those raw edges, which has been good for us.”
“That undiluted time has allowed us to work a couple of things out that have long niggled,” Peter adds, admitting one of those things is him stepping up on the domestic front (although he gallantly declines to name any changes Lisa may have needed to make). “We realised we really had to sort them out to make isolation work. We have sorted them out and, quite genuinely, I really think it will make our marriage even stronger.”
Over 28 years, their marriage has weathered the losses of parents, survived the years of having three children under the age of five – and three teenagers in the house at one time – and life’s many inevitable bumps. But it’s clear, as he leans in for his parting words to The Weekly, that Peter’s love for his wife has never been stronger.
“She is a one-off, Lisa,” he says with obvious pride. “Fiercely focused, intensely loyal and incredibly hardworking. She’s climbed higher in her career than she could ever have imagined possible. But at the base, she really is just a humble girl from Campbelltown who feels incredibly grateful for every bit of good fortune that’s come her way. It’s never been lost on her, more than ever in fact, that it could all have been very different. And for all that career success, our kids are far and away what she’s most proud of. She’s part rock star, part rock. My rock.” AWW
“When things do impact Lisa, they impact her deeply.”
Who Do You Think You Are? (featuring stars including Bert Newton, Lisa Curry and Kat Stewart) airs on Tuesdays at 7.30pm on SBS. Lisa’s episode aired on May 16. Catch up on SBS On Demand.