It’s 2.15pm on Sunday and I’m standing on the first floor of the Crown Promenade hotel in Melbourne alongside dozens of other journalists, celebrity publicists and television presenters, all there to cover the 57th Logies.
I’m new to this game, so I approach one of the media staff, introduce myself and ask her where online journalists are supposed to go. “Follow me,” she replies.
We walk a few metres, she stops and takes a phone call. She hangs up, notices me standing next to her, and I realise she has genuinely forgotten we met just seconds ago and is perplexed that I seem to be following her. “I’m sorry, who are you?” she asks.
Finally I arrive at the red carpet, where journalists are allocated a tiny spot on the sidelines marked with the name of their respective news organisations. I’m between fashion website Pop Sugar and BuzzFeed Australia – whose journalists are kind enough to answer my endless questions of “Who’s that?”
We wait two-and-a-half hours for the first of the celebrities to filter down the red carpet to where we are waiting and for journalists to begin to compete for their attention to ask them questions that are often much the same.
“Who are you wearing?” is asked rapid-fire as women swish past the lineup of media, something never once asked of the men, though I am intrigued by Ray Martin’s pairing of a designer suit with a crisp, white scarf.
Time is short, too, with the names of the celebrities being yelled by journalists, all vying for a few seconds of attention from Delta Goodrem and Dannii Minogue so that they, too, can be asked who they are wearing.
I ask Ita Buttrose if it bothers her, all of this fashion talk and samey questioning.
“Oh look, not really,” she tells me. “People dress up, it’s about fashion, so of course they’re going to be asked about what they’re wearing.”
Buttrose, as well as having a prolific media career, now dedicates her time to championing medical education and healthcare. I ask what topics are interesting her at the moment.
She replies that she has been busy reading research about ageing, and that it bothers her how women, in particular, over a certain age become invisible.
“I’m giving a big speech about this in May, about superannuation and ageing,” she says.
“Older people after a certain age sort of become invisible. But they’re still contributing in so many different ways. And I think superannuation is an important issue; people are worried about what they need to retire on and don’t know where to get information.”
Today Show host Lisa Wilkinson walks past. I ask her about the importance of women-focused websites and whether they are necessary.
“I was devastated that [women’s website] the Hoopla closed earlier this year,” she says.
“It was a really important website with really good journalism, and part of a diverse range of voices in the media. I was really sorry to hear that voice close down.”
Wilkinson and Buttrose are generous with their time and genuinely warm despite the chaos surrounding them.
But what chaos: some women clad in tiny bikinis with the Australian flag on them, on the arms of men dressed like racing-car drivers, walk past. “They’re from Bogan Hunters,” someone says.
“Were you excited by the birth of the royal baby?” a journalist asks a celebrity I do not recognise. “No,” she replies, before moving on.
I ask a woman dressed head-to-toe in gold if I can take a photo of her, though to be honest I’m not sure who she is. She immediately assumes I want a selfie, places her arm around my waist and leans in close. It turns out she’s one of the cast of The Real Housewives of Melbourne. Being a housewife is the best job in the world, she tells me.
It’s clear the best way to cover the Logies, as a newcomer, is to throw yourself into it and embrace the madness.
And so I talk theatre with Ray Meagher (Alf Stewart from Home and Away), and marathon preparation and recovering from injury with personal trainers Michelle Bridges and Steve Willis (The Biggest Loser). Then Austrian pop recording artist Conchita Wurst walks past, and I grab her.
She’s wearing a beautiful sleeved, vintage-style gold gown and she says until a couple of weeks ago she’d never heard of the Logies. But she loves red carpets and any excuse to walk down one.
Then it is all over and we are led to the “media room”, a room behind the room where the celebrities are, where media watch what is unfolding on a television screen.
Denise Scott uses her award-presenting to call out the Logies for only having one woman in the Logie Hall of Fame, saying that she had stumbled into the men’s toilets earlier in the nightm “and here I was in a room full of men, and I thought, where am I – the Logies hall of fame?”
Comedian Julia Morris also gives the night a genuinely funny moment when she announces the winner of the most popular entertainment program before she had read the list of nominees, looking genuinely mortified upon realising her gaffe.
There are calls on social media for her to host next year.
The winner of both most popular new talent and most outstanding newcomer, Miranda Tapsell, seems to have put a lot of thought into her acceptance speech and gives the evening one of its few meaningful moments.
“Put more beautiful people of colour on TV,” she says. “Connect viewers in ways that transcend race and unite us. That’s the real team Australia.”
She gets a standing ovation.
I keep getting distracted, though, by two men, journalists, sitting next to me, who have been fighting all night. “Why are you so tired?” “Don’t you know how to edit?” “Do you know how rude you are when you speak to me like that?”
As the evening draws to a close, Gold Logie winner Carrie Bickmore, of The Project, uses her acceptance speech to raise awareness of brain cancer. Speaking of her husband who died of the illness, she places a beanie on her head in his honour as she highlights a lack of funding for research into the disease.
“I want to get the nation talking about brain cancer. It receives next to no funding, which is ludicrous because without funding more people are going to die,” Bickmore says.
Eight out of 10 people diagnosed with brain cancer would die from it, she says.
It’s easy to see why moments like Bickmore’s and Tapsell’s receive such praise. They’re rare on a night so chaotic, and where media time with the celebrities is so short and the glitz and glamour of the night is so in-your-face.
But I also get the sense that many of the women, in particular, are aware of the lack of diversity in television and the need to encourage and promote women beyond “best newcomer”’ status and into the “hall of fame”. They’re willing to use their celebrity to point out the inequality they’ve had to fight through to succeed.
These are the stories that make the night worth celebrating.
