This image is from my first ever published piece of work for a magazine, in 1989.
I was a junior writer/intern at Dolly magazine in Australia, and my editor at the time wanted to explore what it’s really like for vulnerable young women being ripped off by unscrupulous modelling agencies.
Her - quite upsetting but sound - reasoning was that anyone who would tell me I could be a model was possibly not being particularly honest (!). What this picture doesn’t show: my long, voluminous permed curls from the time.
Anyway, this is the girl I’m talking about for a lot of the following piece.
In 2012, I was asked to be the keynote speaker at the Qantas Australian Women of the Year Awards. It’s an event held in Australia House in London, to honour women who’ve made their mark in Britain, be it in sport, fashion, science, business, art, you name it. It was a joyous moment for me because these days, it’s very rare to find myself in a room with quite so many other Australians. So they laughed a lot at some stuff in here that might pass you right by. But it’s also a pretty comprehensive telling of how I ended up with the career I’ve had. As you know from my former pieces here at My Goodness!, the plot only thicked in the proceeding ten years! But that was then…. I hope you enjoy it.
I’m honoured to be asked to speak to you this evening, here at Australia House. Even standing here in this incredible building, surrounded by so many other Australians makes me feel connected to the country I love and miss.
I’m sure you all get asked the question that my British friends and colleagues ask me all the time: Why the hell did you come here?
Well, I have been working in the media since the late 80s so I’m afraid my story is not a short one. Some of you will have opinions on my accent. With each passing year, people do seem to find it hard to place. I promise you thought that I am an Aussie - any doubters could come and find me later after a couple of glasses of wine; that tends to unleash my full-blown twang.
I was born and raised in Sydney. And I’ve reached an unspeakable age whereby, I’ve actually now lived more of my life in the UK than in Australia. But to be really honest I still feel Australian first, British a close second.
I have been with my English husband for 18 years now and we live happily in our London house, with our London-born daughter. And even though I’m really not sure if I will ever live in Australia again, the word ‘home’ still refers to beautiful Sydney for me. I can’t help it.
So why live here? Basically, I can’t throw a ball and I don’t tan, so I was asked to leave. I think there was a meeting about it.
No, there’s a real wanderlust that grips a lot of Australians. It’s so far away. As a teenager I often had this nagging sense that everything I was into was happening waaaaaay over there on the other side of the world.
Now, I can pretend that I had noble journalistic intentions that led me to the British media scene. But this is a room full of Aussies, the nation of people with the strongest bullshit detectors in the world so I won’t even try and gloss it up.
The truth is, we can trace this journey of mine, this media career back to one universal phenomenon: teenage hormones. Burgeoning, raging, confusing, exciting, it’s really that uncomplicated. When I was about 12 or 13, I was obsessed with the horny pop stars of the day. The targets of my slightly unhinged devotion tended to be English, which necessitated me buying a lot of British magazines.
I started noticing the bylines of the journalists who got to do things like climb the Great Wall of China with George Michael, or tour Japan with Spandau Ballet. (to the younger people in the room, I promise these are actual words).
Also, by this age, I had clocked that I was not bad at stringing a sentence together – I’d shown an early aptitude for clear, communicative writing (and also being quite good at making things up, but let’s not go there). Once that lightbulb popped, writing for magazines was the ONLY thing I wanted to do.
So, as soon as they would have me, I went for work experience at that teenage bible, nay national institution, DOLLY Magazine. I’d managed to impress them enough for them to keep asking me to come back. So I learnt a lot about such things as, the art of coaxing a nuanced opinion about sexual etiquette from teenage boys on the street. And things I still cannot speak of from letters sent in for the magazine’s most popular page, the Dolly Doctor. (Seriously, there was a wall plastered with the most shocking questions – in fact I’ve already said too much).
When I arrived one day to find the features team packing up their desks after a failed attempted coup, I pretty much sat at the one of the desks and stayed there for three years.
I have to thank my first boss, Marina Go, for believing in me, hiring me, teaching me the fundamentals of journalism and also for saying, ‘Jo, for crying out loud, here’s my hairdresser’s number, please go and get rid of that perm’.
Look , I was a Westie – for the uninitiated this means I came from one of Sydney’s highly unfashionable western suburbs. When you’re a Westie, nobody tells you what a difference a good hairdresser and non-nylon clothes can make. If you’d met me back then, you might well have assumed my style icon was Jon Bon Jovi. He was not. I didn’t have style, or an icon.
So in a move that pre-dates Anne Hathaway’s Devil Wears Prada makeover by almost two decades, that job also set me on a half decent style path – I genuinely don’t think I’d be standing here now, if those stylish magazine girls had been polite about my horrible perm.
By the time I was 22, I really wanted to come and suss out the UK, which, due to my devouring of all British media, just felt like a calling. However I was persuaded to hang around on a short term contract, working as a publicist for Neighbours. I don’t know if any of you have heard of that TV show? Honestly, it doesn’t get much more clichéd does it, to have been an Aussie who worked at Neighbours. I even lived in Bondi Beach at the time. (
Actually come to think of it, I even once had a walk-on part in Home and Away too, for a Dolly story: This is 1991.
And no, it wasn’t the exciting ‘Kylie and Jason’ era – they’d long since fled the scene. It was my job to try and get the two Sydney newspapers to write about Neighbours. Which was no mean feat with plot lines to work with like, ‘Helen’s left the iron on’. (Sorry, obviously I’ve embellished that storyline a little bit).
But I thought it would look great on the CV when my ultimate goal was to come here. The best thing about the Neighbours job was that it confirmed that I really am a magazine girl at heart. I used to think being a publicist was having nice outfits and nice nails and having lunch with celebrities all day. Being chased around shopping centres by screaming teenagers and trying to stuff a Neighbours actor’s surfboard into the back of a taxi were just two moments that taught me otherwise.
After stints of backpacking, bar work and waitressing – and a LOT of rejection letters for magazine jobs in between. Recently the Daily Mail referred to me in an article as ‘former barmaid, Jo Elvin’.
But eventually I landed my first UK job, as deputy editor of TV Hits magazine. Which sounds pretty impressive right? But honestly I think I got that job because I was cheap. ‘Deputy editor’ on this small but lovely team of five also meant, sub editor, feature writer, picture editor, production editor, tea maker, editor’s dog walker, sometimes toilet cleaner (oh yes). But boy, did I learn a lot.
TV Hits was a Smash Hits rival, and it meant I spent a lot of time interviewing Take That. Yes, the first go-round. Man, I am old. From there, my career developed – I became the launch editor of Sugar magazine which, although it was Dolly by another name, revolutionised teen publishing here, with its glossy format. After that I launched a young women’s/older teen’s title B magazine, before becoming editor of a fully grown women’s magazine, New Woman, before being tapped to join Conde Nast and launch Glamour.
And yes, I’m still at Glamour! But Glamour is a dream job in so many ways. Almost from launch it’s been the biggest-selling women’s magazine in the UK, and I still, genuinely have ‘pinch me’ moments every week.
It’s funny, I started formulating what I was going to say to you all – thinking back over Neighbours, Dolly, my terrible perm – whilst sitting in Donatella Versace’s expansive Milan apartment having dinner just a few days ago. I’m from Werrington, near Penrith. How mad is that?
People often ask me, why Glamour has been so successful. And there are plenty of sound, concrete, ‘business-planny’ reasons, sure. We gained attention in a saturated market with our innovative ‘handbag-size’. We launched with a competitive cover price. We invested in marketing so you really couldn’t miss the fact that there was a new magazine in town. But now that virtually every magazine has copied our size, and competed with our pricing strategies and there has, a decade on, been a slew of other magazine launches, I think now I’m justified at looking at the creative and emotional reasons for why Glamour struck – and continues to strike – such a chord.
What an amazing time we’ve had, on the magazine that became the market leader. Almost overnight, Glamour toppled Cosmopolitan magazine from its decades of being No 1 in the market. We worked hard, we cared about every page and there are so many moments I look back and still can’t quite believe they actually happened.
I’m not just saying this because I’m standing here, I genuinely think that being Australian, and bringing that Australian sensibility to the magazine, has really helped us. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Yes, I loved my English magazines but I definitely brought the Dolly and Cleo DNA to this side of the world with me. By that I mean, the sunniness, the happiness, the vitality, the humour, the directness. I grew up reading magazines edited by Lisa Wilkinson – now the hugely successful co-host of Good Morning Australia on Channel 9. She was a career idol to me as a kid, then the slightly intimidating editor-in-chief to my junior writer at Dolly, and now I’m proud to say a friend. I’ve tried to tell her, but I’m not sure she realises how much I learned from her without ever really working directly with her. The best way I can describe the sensibility, I think, is that it’s a positive, ‘go for it’ attitude mixed with a sharp, occasional slap of reality.
I think Glamour is the most drily funny of the women’s magazines – even if I do say
so myself. One of my superiors at work said they can hear my voice in Glamour, she described it to me as the joke with the twist of lemon in it. And I take that as a compliment because I think it’s a big part of what gives Glamour its personality.
It’s not just me either. There are plenty of examples of Australians who do well in British magazines. Fiona McIntosh was a stunningly successful editor of Elle before going on to create the stunningly successful Grazia magazine. Dee Nolan launched In Style magazine at virtually the same time as I launched Glamour. I think the three of us probably share that instinct for gloss mixed with a bit of straightforward grit that brings some freshness to the scene.
I think another reason we do well - and it’s one of those clichés that’s a cliché because it’s true – is that we Aussies are flat-out allergic to giving up, giving in, giving less than 100%. I remember all too well, one bleak January morning in London – well, they’re all bleak mornings in January, but this one in particular was because I still had no job after weeks of trying and I had about £80 left to my name. And I swear I’m not making this up, as I sat with my tepid tea in a dreary greasy spoon, thinking, maybe this UK dream just wasn’t what it was cracked up to be, I looked in the sky out of the window and saw a Qantas plane coming in to land at Heathrow. Honestly, it felt like a sign – ‘Go home Jo, it’s OK, no one will laugh, and your mum will be thrilled’. But even at that point when the money situation was getting really dire to say the least, I just couldn’t turn tail – not when I hadn’t really achieved anything. If there are such things as national traits, I really do think that is one. That ambition mixed with – at times probably very unattractive – stubbornness and pride. It’s what makes us maniacally competitive – famously in sport but in many other areas as well, including, yes, the very cut-throat world of magazine publishing.
And I still need that toughness. The landscape of print journalism is like a different planet to the one it was when I arrived in the UK in 1992. Twenty years ago, we might have medicated someone who said the future was going to be all about a book… full of faces. My main competitors used to be rival magazines. These days the major rival is everyone’s phone.
But I’m too much of a stubborn Aussie to let that scare me. And actually it’s been great, creative fun to find the ways which new technology works WITH magazines. The next decade will be all about communicating with our readers, and our web users, and our social networkers. It doesn’t matter what we do for a living, we’re all in the midst of a revolution. And that’s just the way it is so we either get used to it, or get out of the way.
So I just try to remember that young, 21 year-old wide-eyed Aussie girl who didn’tstop for a second to think about all the possible risks and complications of just packing up and moving to the other side of the world. That me was just excited about all the things I didn’t know were going to happen. Sometimes as a 40+ year old and now a parent myself, I can’t quite believe I did it. But modesty aside, I’m also proud that I had that blissful ignorance, that ‘whatever life’s got, bring it on’ spirit. I think it’s quintessentially Australian and has served me so well. I hope it continues to, whatever challenges the next decade brings. Bring it on, I say.
Thank you.
Adored this, thank you for the inspiration and for sharing this piece with us.
Your title here reminds me of the book Hattie and the Fox by Mem Fox which you prob already know... that we love in American Kindergarten. One year, I had the whole class clapping their faces and saying with expression, 'Goodness gracious me!' along with Hattie every other page! And that was after I had switched to preschool special education where most of the students were non or very reluctant speakers. You just have to give them something fun to say and a reason to try!