Spicer - The Good Girl Stripped Bare

So you thought working in television was all glamour?
This is a cautionary tale, candid and funny, and a must-read for all working women.

Caroline Jones AO

Wow! What a ride! Tracey Spicer puts her feminist beliefs into action no matter the risk. Her memoir made me laugh, cry and chew my fingernails to the quick.

Jane Caro

It glows with the wisdom of a woman who has learned essential truths about love, life and happiness at work and at home, a woman and who has emerged triumphant, with a message of hope for us all.

Caroline Overington

I want two inches off your hair and two off your arse! Tracey Spicer whittles the Aussie newsroom down to size. Wickedly witty and wonderfully wise.

Wendy Harmer

Tracey Spicer is a force of nature. And this book like her is in equal measure fiercely smart, foul-mouthed and ferociously funny, shining a 1000-watt light on the howling batshittery of male-dominated media and life in general. I defy you to finish this and not demand she be your best friend and mentor.

Benjamin Law

TRACEY SPICER is an iconoclast whose TEDx Talk The Lady Stripped Bare has been seen by almost 1.5 million people. Tracey has anchored national news, current affairs and lifestyle programs for several television networks, and she has brought her sassy style to talkback radio. Her columns appear weekly in metropolitan newspapers and opinion websites. Renowned for the courage of her convictions, passion for social justice and commitment to equality, she has a wicked sense of humour something of a prerequisite for a career in the media.

The ABC Wave device is a trademark of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and is used under licence by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia.

First published in Australia in 2017

by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited

ABN 36 009 913 517

harpercollins.com.au

Copyright Tracey Spicer 2017

The right of Tracey Spicer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.

This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

HarperCollinsPublishers

Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street, Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand

A 53, Sector 57, Noida, UP, India

1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF, United Kingdom

2 Bloor Street East, 20th floor, Toronto, Ontario M4W 1A8, Canada

195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007, USA

ISBN: 978 0 7333 3563 1 (paperback)

ISBN: 978 1 4607 0726 5 (ebook)

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Creator: Spicer, Tracey, author.

Title: The good girl stripped bare / Tracey Spicer.

Subjects: Spicer, Tracey.

Women television personalities Australia Biography.

Women journalists Australia Biography.

Sex discrimination in employment Australia Biography.

Sex discrimination against women Australia Biography.

Pregnant women Employment.

Cover design by Lisa White, HarperCollins Design Studio

Cover photography by Steve Baccon

Hair and makeup by Wayne Chick

Photographs from the collection of Tracey Spicer, except as noted.

For Grace, Taj and Jase.

For Marcia, Suze and Paul.

For Gunga and our beloved Olive,

whose story was hitherto untold.

A crew from A Current Affair is chasing me like a dodgy plumber down the street in front of the TV station.

Ive been kicked to the kerb after more than a decade at Network Ten for committing a crime against television: spitting out sprogs. A wraparound dress covers the lumps and bumps of the woman formerly known as a yummy mummy. (Apparently its a pregnancy pouch, as though Id somehow morphed into a marsupial.)

Gone are the power suits, tight-fitting frocks and camel-toe trousers that are de rigueur for a television newsreader. Im beyond the AMAZING POST-BABY BODY stage, lauded by the trashy mags after the birth of my first baby. Such stories are the children of commerce and envy, chimeras designed to deceive women. The publications that propagate these myths should be destroyed in a bonfire of the vanities.

Will you ever work in television again? the journalist asks, thrusting a microphone towards my mouth.

Its feeding time and I need to express. As I spin around, I feel the let-down and breastmilk almost squirts in his face. It seems theres nothing dodgy about my plumbing, after all. The milk seeps through my bra, saturating the dress. Imagine the tabloid headline: Twin Peaks Leak. (Its so surreal, I expect The Man from Another Place to appear speaking backwards from Agent Coopers dream in the David Lynch series.)

I hope so, I say, scuttling into the adjacent caf. But what are the chances of that? No one sues a television network and gets away with it. Perhaps I should have signed that press release saying Id elected to leave for family reasons. Thats what a good girl would have done.

But I cant let them get away with it. I want to fight not just for me: for all women.

Still, questions niggle like chafed nipples. Can women stand up for their rights without retribution? Should you cry over spilled milk? And what happens when a good girl turns bad?

On ne nat pas femme: on le devient.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

Simone de Beauvoir

I am born with something missing. Mum knows it. Dad knows it. But the doctor is oblivious.

Are you sure its not there? Mum inquires. Shes a teenage bride barely nineteen and this is her first child. Her new beau is somewhat of a closed book, but she does know this: a girl hasnt been born into his family for almost four centuries.

Ive checked, the obstetrician says. She doesnt have a penis.

We dont have a name for a girl, Dad says. We were going to call the boy Tony.

What about Toni, the female version? Mum asks.

No, thats a boys name. How about Debbie?

They settle on Tracey, which in Celtic means fierce or fighter. In this era, such characteristics are flaws: girls should be sugar and spice and all things nice, according to the nursery rhyme. (However, these attributes are awfully handy in adulthood...)

Despite being born in a developed country one where girls are wanted I learn early that vaginas cause problems. This is reinforced repeatedly over the next five decades, with the extra X of lesser value than a Y. To compensate for this deficit, Im determined to be the good girl: ingratiatingly polite, in eternal apology for my gender. Which is not to say my parents are to blame. Theyre egalitarian and open-minded, scrupulous about avoiding sexist stereotypes.

Mum and Dad Marcia and Paul fell in love over the phone talking about transport logistics. Romantic, I know.

Theyre Yin and Yang. Shes an effusive ex-model, who dances on tables and stands on soapboxes; hes the shy son of Methodists, who loves books and loathes crowds. Paul is a reservations clerk at Ansett in the golden age of air travel. He dons a leather jacket to ride a motor scooter to work. (No helmet, of course. It might muck up your hair.) Marcia is the first female courier driver for TNT. (Thomas Nationwide Transport, not trinitrotoluene. Thatd be a dangerous delivery.)