20 Natalie Barr exclusive: ‘My boys are behind me no matter what’
With two teenage sons, raising boys has always been an important part of Natalie Barr’s life. Now those boys are pressing for openness and conversations about consent to become a family discussion, and the Sunrise co-host couldn’t be prouder.
There are few more heartwarming experiences as a mother than that moment when your child returns the lessons they’ve learned at your side. Natalie Barr, the newly appointed co-host of market-leading Seven Network morning show Sunrise, encountered one of those moments on February 22 this year, when she received a telephone call from her 19-year-old son Lachlan.
Agitated and deeply affected, Lachlan told Natalie about a stunning online campaign created by Chanel Contos, a former schoolgirl who had posted a poll on Instagram asking if any Sydney girls had experienced or knew someone who had experienced sexual assault or had their consent abused.
“Lachlan said, ‘You have got to have a look at this, and we’ll get Hunter to have a look at this, too,’” recalls Natalie, 53, whose other son Hunter is 16.
“There’s this girl, and I know her,” Lachlan continued. “And I know people who she knows. This has blown up on the internet and there are so many posts. She posted this amazing thing online. It’s amazing and it’s horrifying at the same time. You have to read it.”
What Natalie encountered when she read Chanel’s post was indeed horrifying. Seventy per cent of respondents alleged they had been assaulted or sexually exploited in one way or another by boys from private schools in Sydney, and more than 17,000 young women eventually provided anonymous testimony.
“After I looked at the post, I got together with Lachlan and Hunter and we talked about it,” says Natalie, whose sons also attended a private school. “They talked about it a lot, all afternoon and later again that night. They talked about how brave Chanel was and also about how it had affected them. They started to wonder quite genuinely if they knew enough about consent and what it really means. It became a very personal issue for them.”
In a wide-ranging and intimate interview, Natalie, who has been a part of the Sunrise family for almost 18 years, tells us what it means to her to finally take the coveted role as co-host alongside David ‘Kochie’ Koch, and her relationships with former hosts Mel Doyle and Samantha Armytage. Closer to home, she talks about her husband of 26 years Drew, an Oscar-nominated film editor, and introduces Australia to Lachlan and Hunter, who both have such strong and articulate views that when asked if they wished to participate in our interview, they readily agreed. Their parents have always tried to shield the boys from the spotlight, but Natalie’s pride at the compassionate, aware young men her sons have become shines through.
Lachlan has left school and is now studying at one of the country’s leading film schools with the intention of becoming a director or a producer. Hunter is completing Year 10 and still unsure what he wants to do with his life. But both boys were struck by the outpouring of anguish that followed Chanel’s post earlier this year. It was a deeply personal issue for them then, and it remains so now.
“Some of the stories that we saw online were nothing short of awful,” says Lachlan. “They really motivated me to understand what I knew about consent and to make sure that Hunter also became involved in that conversation. I think that being open, talking about issues such as consent, is the way to make sure that we change what is happening. It has to change and I think it will change, but it has to start with being open about what consent actually means and why it is so important.”
Being open and facing issues is something that Lachlan and his brother have learned around the kitchen table. They were always encouraged to bring up an issue and discuss it, be it something that had happened during the day or something they might have seen in a newspaper or on TV. That freeflowing exchange of ideas has long been a part of the family dynamic.
“We have always discussed issues – very forthrightly, very abruptly and very honestly,” says Natalie. “That probably comes from both Drew’s and my upbringing. He has always encouraged discussions like that, and I was brought up by a father who watched five news bulletins a day and was vitally interested in the world around him. There was none of this, ‘Oh, the news is too violent, or the news is too confronting.’ We’d discuss everything. And Drew is very much the same. There are so many issues.
“We always try to sit down to dinner together if we can. We have an unusual situation in that I am not at home in the morning and Drew is often working in the evening, but we have made it work.”
Hunter says he has always felt encouraged to put his point of view, whatever it may be. “If I ever want to talk about something, I can always bring it up with either Mum or Dad,” he says. “And that goes both ways. If they want to know something about my life, then they only have to ask. They know they can come to me and ask. It’s an open relationship between us all.”
That openness, he says, has helped him and Lachlan develop independent attitudes and self-reliance.
“We have learned to think for ourselves,” says Hunter. “We’ve grown up not being so reliant on Mum or Dad. I feel we haven’t needed them sitting alongside us every minute. And not only can we act independently, but we also think independently too. We can disagree and we do disagree. I am very honest with my opinions. So if I disagree, I will tell them. We don’t let things build up to become a problem. We tell each other straight up, and that’s how the relationship goes.”
A few weeks after the Chanel Contos posts, the issues around consent and abuse leapt onto the national agenda once again when former political staffer Brittany Higgins spoke at a rally outside Parliament House in Canberra. She alleges that she was raped in the office of former Defence Minister Linda Reynolds by a colleague two years ago, and that the issue was swept under the carpet.
“Hunter and Drew and I were sitting at dinner, and Hunter saw it pop up on the news,” recalls Natalie. “He called us over. Hunter’s reaction to what that young woman had been through and what she was saying,
[it] was a total shock to him.
“It also made me realise that, as teenage boys, they do care deeply about these issues. They were horrified at what was revealed in some of the posts that followed Chanel’s post, the terrible things that had been happening to their peers. In a strange way, I was heartened that they were horrified. I was so glad they took it seriously, and perhaps as importantly, that they were listening to the women who were making their voices heard.”
Many of Lachlan’s attitudes and values also come from his parents, he says. “The qualities that I have from Mum and Dad are honesty, fairness and resilience. They are perhaps the most important ones. They have stuck with me and helped make me who I am.”
He says resilience is something that was always emphasised by them. “Growing up with parents who are career-driven and motivated to make the most of their situation and opportunities is very telling. It’s not always blue skies and butterflies. Sometimes there are disappointments. I can remember being told from a young age that there will always be times that are tough, when they don’t work out the way you think they will.”
Respect in relationships is the other
“If I ever want to talk about something, I can always bring it up with either Mum or Dad. That goes both ways.” – Hunter
important value Lachlan attributes to Natalie and Drew – something he has seen reflected in their marriage over the years.
“A big thing that Mum and Dad have always emphasised to me and Hunter is never to make an enemy if you can avoid it,” he explains. “That is a seriously big factor in my life, in my relationships when they have come to an end. I try to always make sure it ends on a good note and not close doors if you don’t need to.
“You never know when someone might come back into your life. I’d say that is a huge lesson to learn from them. And I try to stick to that as much as I can. It’s not always easy. When someone has hurt you, it takes a lot to take the high road and hold out your hand, but it’s also quite mature. Mum and Dad always make sure I remember that.”
Today, says Natalie, we are in a vastly different world to the one in which she grew up. She was born and raised in Bunbury, a regional city south of Perth in Western Australia. She attended Bunbury Catholic College, a co-ed school where she was both bright and popular, becoming the head girl in her final year before heading off to Curtin University in Perth.
Her experiences with teenage boys were mostly respectful, if occasionally awkward, but it wasn’t until she moved into a shared house at university that she found both a meaningful and lasting relationship in her future husband, Drew. He was at the same university, and as it turned out, he was also from Bunbury. He initially became one of her flatmates.
“We were really good friends for a couple of years and then we became more than friends, and essentially we have been together ever since,” says Natalie.
“My family are my life. I may have this amazing career, but Andrew and the boys come first.” – Natalie
Drew completed his degree in film, but Natalie yearned for something else and, after seeking her parents’ permission, dropped out to take a cadetship with a small WA newspaper, the Wanneroo Times. “Mum and Dad said I could leave if I got a job,” says Natalie. “I wrote to every newspaper, TV station and radio station in the state, and the proprietor of the Wanneroo Times was the only one to write back. “He said, ‘Come and chat to me’, and after reading my uni essays – that was all I had – he offered me a job. I’ve never looked back. I took voice lessons and after a couple of years drove my little Holden Gemini all the way out to Kalgoorlie to start work at a TV station.”
From there she followed Drew to
Los Angeles, where she worked as a freelance producer for a variety of TV stations, before they finally came back to Australia and she started a job at the Seven Network in Sydney in 1995.
Despite the obviously public nature of her work, Natalie has always been more private than public in nature. Her family is tight-knit, and she says they are her number one priority.
“My sons and my husband are my life,” says Natalie. “I may have this amazing career, but Andrew and the boys come first. Of course, I have always been able to run out the door to cover a story when I need to, but I only ever did that when the boys were old enough to deal with it and to be left at home.”
During her first decade at Sunrise, when she was the newsreader and a regular fill-in host, that proved difficult. “The boys were too little for me to do that,” shares Natalie. “I always made sure I was back by mid-morning. I would race home to take over from our sitter and then I was able to be almost a full-time mum for the rest of the day. That was the beauty of this job. I was so lucky in that respect, because the role enabled me to be there most of the day, even if it meant getting up at 2.30 or 3am. I could be with them and watch them grow up every day. In that way, it was magical.”
Suffice to say that Natalie is both excited and perhaps a little nervous at having become co-host at Sunrise. She has watched others do the job for years, happy in the security of her less high-profile but no less important role as part of the team. But when the departure of Samantha Armytage put her in the picture for the top job, she knew it was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up.
“It’s such an amazing job, and while I have only been in the seat for a couple of weeks, I have to admit that I love it,” she says. “A lot of people said that, ‘Oh, it should be a breeze, you’ve done it before.’ But that was only as a fill-in. So yes, I know what the job is, but that’s not always the same as actually having the job. It comes with a lot of responsibility. It really helps that I get on with so many of the people around me, too.”
Natalie knows that the new role comes with a bigger public profile, but she feels that she is all the more prepared due to coming to it at a later stage of her life and in the knowledge that her family are fully supportive of the move.
“Of course, that is all-important,” she says. “They are great and they are behind me, no matter what.”
Natalie says she and Samantha had a great working relationship, but away from the office they rarely saw each other. “We got along very well in the office, for sure,” says Natalie. “But the truth is we didn’t really see each other outside the office. We had vastly different lives, I guess. We were in different places. She was hanging with her friends, and I was spending time with my family. So, yes, we were in different places.”
When Sam left the show earlier this year, she went out with all guns blazing, saying that TV was full of narcissists and sociopaths – comments that rankled some people she worked alongside. But Natalie wasn’t worried.
“I don’t think that the rest of us took much notice of that, really,” she says. “You know, everyone is entitled to their opinion and entitled to have their say. But in the past, I have talked about the people in our office being like my family, and I am genuinely close to a lot of people there. For me it’s a wonderful place to be.”
Natalie also has a close relationship with Mel Doyle, who was co-host when Natalie joined Sunrise in 2003.
“I’ve seen Mel a few times during the past few weeks. I sat next to her at Carla Zampatti’s funeral, for instance. We talked together for more than an hour. We have always been close. She’s one of television’s great people. We text each other and keep up to date with each other’s lives. She’s a good, generous person. She was very generous with her congratulations when I was offered the job, and she’s incredibly supportive. We are both in a good space now, a good space for both of us.”
And that’s where Natalie hopes her sons will themselves be one day.
“What I want most for my boys is for them to find something they love doing,” says Natalie. “I don’t care at all what it is. I think Drew and I have been lucky enough to find careers that we love doing every day. I think that perhaps it’s unusual. Not everyone gets to do what they love. But it would be incredible if they could find that.
“Otherwise, all you ever want for your kids as a parent is for them to be happy and healthy. You know, to go out into the world and do what they want to do, to find something worthwhile and find someone who they love to be part of the life. It’s really basic, but it’s probably also the secret to a good life.”