Magazine covers featuring domestic violence victims including Rosie Batty and actor Rachael Taylor have had sluggish sales, according to the editor-in-chief of the Australian Women’s Weekly, Helen McCabe.
Batty’s son Luke was murdered by his father at a cricket game and Taylor was bashed by her former boyfriend Matthew Newton in a hotel foyer in Rome.
McCabe said in her Andrew Olle Media Lecture on Friday night that she was disappointed when the two issues of Australia’s best-selling magazine, published a year apart, had low sales figures, and that she did not understand why until another victim of domestic violence, Jules Allen, offered an explanation.
“If they took home a magazine celebrating a woman who had triumphed over abuse, what do you think their tormentors would do? As Jules said to me, ‘you just don’t want to give them another excuse to beat the shit out of you’.”
McCabe said the conversation around domestic violence was changing thanks to women like Batty and Taylor, and urged the media to keep the issue in the headlines.
“Thanks to the likes of Rosie and Rachael, and the work of campaigners like Quentin Bryce, there is considerable momentum behind tackling this complex issue,” she said at a black tie dinner at the Australian Technology Park in Redfern.
“I am old enough to remember being on the midnight to dawn shift when an assault in a home could easily be dismissed as ‘just a domestic’. When neighbours didn’t ‘get involved’.”
“I urge you all to be vigilant, long after it is fashionable, to keep these stories central to your newslists.
The Olle lecture is held annually in honour of the late ABC journalist Andrew Olle, who died from a brain tumour in 1995. Last year’s speaker was Fairfax journalist Kate McClymont and others have included Nine’s Lisa Wilkinson and the ABC PM host Mark Colvin.
McCabe criticised the “intricate web of laws” that prevented domestic violence stories from being reported, especially in NSW.
“I recently interviewed nine prominent women and unprompted four of them admitted being victims of domestic violence,” she said.
“Please do not doubt those statistics. It really is one in three women who are victims of family violence.”
A former television reporter and senior newspaper journalist at News Corp Australia, McCabe made light of criticism she received when she was named as the 2015 speaker.
“When Andrew’s friend and colleague Mike Carlton heard I was speaking, he was not unreasonably grumpy,” McCabe said.
“He tweeted: ‘Thrilled that the Women’s Weekly’s Helen McCabe is giving this year’s ABC Olle lecture. Twenty hearty Winter Soups! Chocolate Ganache! Jesus!”
But McCabe said the Weekly was proud of featuring exclusives and agenda-setting journalism alongside recipes and beauty tips.
She said the work of journalists is increasingly impeded by celebrity agents, lawyers, corporate affairs teams, marketing departments, PR advisers and press secretaries.
“They play us off against each other, shopping around their clients’ products, announcements, movies, books, even significant life events.
“I’ve been told about engagements before the bride, and pregnancies before the grandparents.”
McCabe said the Weekly had evolved and was featuring non-celebrities on the cover as well as celebrities. Putting women like Turia Pitt – who survived shocking burns – on the cover had not only made magazine history but had been a huge selling issue.
Older women such as 80-year-old Dame Judi Dench, 78-year-old fashion icon Maggie T and 50-year-old model and presenter Deborah Hutton had widened society’s idea of beauty, McCabe said.
“As I’ve said, we’re living longer and having children later, like Sonia Kruger at 49, Colette Dinnigan at 47 and Michelle Bridges at 44,” she said. “But it is also about our increased wealth and our changing fashions. More of us can afford botox and blow dries. There are more dress sizes on the racks. And the conventions around what a woman should wear, or look like, for their age, have disappeared. And we can thank women in their 70’s, like Dame Quentin, like Ita [Buttrose], who are rewriting the rules.”
