When Anna Palmer landed in Australia in 1993, 18 and a few weeks old, she had but one reason to be in the country: to marry the love of her life. Her parents were back in her native Bulgaria and in accordance with her visa she had to be married within six months.
There was no way her mother and father would make it for the wedding. Anna still wanted someone to walk her down the aisle and both she and her husband-to-be thought it would be nice if she could have “stand-in parents” for the day. A couple to sit at the bridal table and to, just in general, be around for Anna.
Enter Clive Palmer, a longtime associate of Anna’s fiance, Andrew Topalov. Palmer walked Anna down the aisle. And, 14 years later, he would marry her himself.
“It sounds terrible now, but it made sense,” Anna told the ABC’s Australian Story in a rare interview in 2012.
“His whole family was there, which was quite lovely. Basically Clive and his wife, Sue, were there. They were there as my mum and dad. They sat at the head table with us, so little Michael [Clive and Sue’s son] came. It was quite a serious, solemn event for us. Great responsibility I guess, because they filled in the shoes. He made a lovely speech, which he’s very capable of.”
The road to Anna’s and Clive’s marriage was not paved with scandal, despite the circumstances of their first meeting. It was tragedy that brought the two together. Clive lost Sue to cancer after 22 years of marriage in 2005, the year before Anna’s husband died from melanoma.
Today Anna is a constant at Clive’s side, a discreet presence on the sidelines of the Clive roadshow. Her name has been put in the spotlight as a potential Palmer United party candidate in the Queensland state election, in a Gold Coast seat. There are two other hats in the ring for the pre-selection of Gaven, though they remain anonymous, referred to only as “local residents” by PUP director Peter Burke.
Clive made the announcement on Friday morning, and even if it is just baiting the sitting member, former PUP state leader Alex Douglas, who has accused the party of nepotism, the mere mention of Anna made headlines.
The headlines usually begin and end with Anna being Clive’s wife. Clive’s personality does not leave much room for others; he only has to show up to parliament in one of his cars to be leading news bulletins. Anna, on the other hand, remains largely unknown.
The glare of public attention has intensified since Clive created his own party and ran for parliament in possibly one of the most epic dummy spits in Australian history. (He was a life member of the Liberal National party but had a falling-out after the party won government in Queensland but did not grant him the approval for multimillion dollar projects in the Galilee Basin).
Anna was mostly on the periphery during the election campaign, scoring brief mentions along the way, most notably for Clive’s claims that she did not vote for his party and that a $42,000 donation to the LNP was actually made by Anna when dining with Tony Abbott.
Only a handful of times has she spoken to the media and, while she appears happy to accompany Clive to major events, such as the Captain’s Atlantic dinner to celebrate Clive’s ambition to build Titanic II, she is not a fixture in the social pages.
So who is she? A chartered accountant who worked for PricewaterhouseCoopers for years, Anna is also a qualified lawyer. She is said to have taken an interest in science and medicines for a year or so and became knowledgeable enough to administer her dying husband’s medications and injections daily.
After a few stints in Clive’s businesses Anna has mostly remained at home with the couple’s two daughters – Mary, born in 2008, and Lucy, born in December last year. Clive has two children from his marriage to Sue, Emily and Michael.
“Initially before having the children, I got involved [in Clive’s businesses] in a smaller level, because Clive didn’t and still doesn’t have a tax manager inhouse and that was my specialisation,” she told Australian Story.
“So I got involved to a small degree, and once we got very busy and I was having Mary and looking after Emily as well, [I] gave that up very quickly.
“I realise that we can’t really be working and living together at the same time, it takes away too much.”
Some might consider that Clive’s wealth – estimated in the hundreds of millions, possibly billions of dollars – might be a key part of his appeal, but Anna says she was unaware of the magnitude of it during her courtship. She says she thought Clive was talking himself up to impress her.
By her account, it was an understanding of each other’s grief that brought the pair together.
“He contacted me first through Andrew’s brother to say that if there’s anything I needed – he offered help I guess, and from what I understand he offered help to a couple of his other friends and families who were in that situation. There was also another friend of his that died of cancer in that time,” she said.
“He was very close in a way with Andrew, but as I said we hadn’t even spoken to each other for about six years, so I didn’t want to bother him in any way.
“I had never really spoken to him or had a conversation with Clive at that stage. But it was very nice of him to contact me later on, and we had dinner with him and Mike and Emily, which was nice … a little bit awkward, but it was quite lovely. They were all very nice and he was quite understanding, much of a relief to be able to speak to someone else without them wondering, being awkward I guess.”
Anna said she threw herself into a variety of activities after her husband’s death and with Clive so busy with his business interests it was a while before the two realised they had feelings for each other.
Deciding to get married was an especially difficult decision, she says, in the wake of their losses.
“Getting married with Clive for me personally – I don’t know what he will say – was not an easy decision, because I was still feeling very married. I was wearing my wedding ring for a long time and I think he felt the same way. So getting married as such was not a priority – getting remarried I should say was not a priority,” she said.
Whether she harbours similar mixed feelings about joining her husband’s political party is not clear.
