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The term “sexual harassment” was not one often heard in the offices of the Geelong Advertiser when Wendy Harmer started as an eager cadet reporter 50 years ago.
And yet, on the eve of releasing her memoir, Harmer recounts being subjected to the sort of male behaviour which would cancel a career today. And not just during her early work years. Even as the best paid and most powerful woman on Australian radio, she was still “putting up with it”.
Wendy Harmer at home in Sydney on the eve of her memoir being released.Credit: James Brickwood
“There was absolutely no one to tell,” she says, neither in the sleek 2DayFM studios in the early 1990s where she would end up earning over a million dollars a year to anchor its breakfast show, nor at the Advertiser’s drab offices, where she was its first female cadet news reporter in 130 years, and banned by her male bosses from wearing trousers in favour of skirts.
A school teacher’s daughter raised in regional Victoria and born with a hair lip and cleft palate, twice-married mother of two Harmer attributes her “tough carapace” to surviving a childhood riddled with bullying and emotional neglect, one which prepared her well for a roller coaster career in the spotlight.
“I did get caught up in the whole fame thing for a while. You can turn into an arrogant pain in the arse… You’ve got to be quite vigilant about your own behaviour,” she says, adding that when her career highs ended, usually amid a blaze of headlines, “I soon discovered how quickly you return to the back of the bus … in about two weeks!”
Despite her talent and independence, she writes in Lies My Mirror Told Me that men held the levers during all the most pivotal moments in her career, both good and bad.
She praises fellow male comedians who encouraged her to break into Australia’s male-only stand-up comedy circuit, and yet it was Harmer, an avowed feminist, who quit the Advertiser after thwarting the unwanted advances of a senior male colleague. Her rebuttal resulted in being overlooked for key story assignments.
“I was a kid, I soon developed a more assertive attitude … Many men I have worked with have said I’m a bit scary, they’re usually the ones who got second billing,” Harmer tells the Herald. “Certainly, I would not like my daughter to have gone through some of the things I went through in the workplace.”
Even as an undisputed star, about to make radio history by dethroning the once unbeatable Doug Mulray in Sydney’s fierce ratings wars, Harmer reveals male colleagues were still crossing “boundaries” in a workplace culture which not only allowed the behaviour but celebrated it.
Her co-host Jamie Dunn, the comic puppeteer most famous for his Agro alter ego, would “jokingly” expose his genitals in the 2DayFM studio, as part of an ongoing gag that played out on air.
Wendy Harmer centre, with Jamie Dunn (left) and Paul Holmes in the 2DayFM studio in January 1993.Credit: Barry Chapman/Fairfax Media
Harmer says she never found it funny, nor did she find it “particularly sexual, I suspect Jamie was a bit of a naturist”.
“I still can’t fathom why he would do it as a gag on radio,” she says.
Their other co-host Paul Holmes recalls the gag happening “a lot”, explaining in the book: “He’d drop his dacks, exposing his penis, raise his hands in the air and strike a pose … It was a good way to change the subject. You’d say, ‘Oh my God, Jamie, put it away!’ And on we’d go.”
Harmer writes she saw Dunn’s “penis more times than I care to remember” and recalls her increasingly fraught on-air banter with him being “like the fabled Kilkenny cats”.
Dunn eventually left the show, reportedly claiming at the time it wasn’t “big enough” for the two of them.
Unaware of Harmer’s book, Dunn told the Herald he remained a great admirer of her “undeniable talent”, but agreed they had “very different” broadcasting styles, and said he “only” exposed himself “once or twice”, as “a harmless joke”.
Their boss, former 2dayFM program director Brad March, told the Herald he had “vague recollections” of it happening. He said Harmer was a “trailblazer” for women in Australian radio, and that her “friction” with Dunn resulted in “some really great radio”.
“We were a bit naive I guess,” Harmer says about why women tolerated such antics from male peers. “We [women] put up with a lot of shit, really.”
Dunn was eventually moved to Brisbane radio, revealing to the Herald: “Wendy gave me a Voodoo doll of herself, along with a bag of pins, as a farewell gift.”
Harmer also writes about more clandestine sexism under a chapter titled Ducks On A Pond, a warning used by hunters to keep silent lest they startle their feathered prey.
“When I walked into the [Geelong Advertiser] newsroom the whole place fell silent. That was really challenging,” Harmer adds.
She details an unnamed senior colleague who would “grab a handful” of her skirt “in his huge fist and wrench me close to his side, so I was captive, and he had my undivided attention” as he loudly picked her articles apart.
“Somehow I never took this to be sexual harassment, although it was embarrassing and demeaning,” Harmer writes, pointedly adding. “He didn’t do it with the young male cadets.”
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