Lisa Wilkinson pauses just inside the entrance to Sydney’s Waverley Cemetery and rummages in her handbag. “I’m just going to put some lip gloss on because I’ve been talking all day,” she says. The former television presenter has rushed here from a book signing in the city.
She dabs on some pale pink balm as the mid-afternoon autumn sun throws gold across a backdrop of marble obelisks, leaning headstones and weathered statuary and on to Wilkinson’s styled hair. Her face still carries traces of heavy television makeup.
She started the morning on the Today show with Karl Stefanovic – as she did for a decade until 2017 when Nine bosses exited her after she embarked on negotiations to close the pay gap between her and her co-host. This morning, though, Wilkinson and her new book about Evelyn Marsden – a young nurse who was the only Australian-born survivor of the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 – were the subjects, Stefanovic the interrogator.
“When I was told that I was going to be on the show, my first reaction was, ‘Oh, I hope no one’s uncomfortable with this,’” Wilkinson tells me. But despite reports that she has barely spoken with Stefanovic for years, she says: “Everything’s fine between us.” The interview turned out to be “just like getting back on the bike”.
“Not all of us can have a great exit from the place though, can we?” Stefanovic riffed early in the interview, slapping his knees and laughing at himself. Wilkinson kept her broad smile on and laughed along. She has a book to talk up. Stefanovic proceeded more seriously. “How have you been – there’s been a lot going on,” he said in a grand understatement.
Now Wilkinson asks the young publicist hovering at her elbow to carry her bag and leads us into the cemetery with its sparkling view of the sea and celebrity residents including Henry Lawson, Dorothea Mackellar, Edmund Barton – and Evelyn Marsden, who lived in Bondi until her death at the age of 54.
The publicist, sticking close to our heels, has previously warned me about “Lisa’s parameters”. Off limits: her 2021 interview with the former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins on The Project in which Higgins alleged she had been raped in Parliament House by her colleague Bruce Lehrmann. Off limits too: Wilkinson’s 2022 Logies speech after which the Australian Capital Territory chief justice delayed Lehrmann’s criminal trial, citing concerns about his right to the presumption of innocence, and Lehrmann’s subsequent defamation case against Wilkinson and Network 10. (Wilkinson resigned from The Project in late 2022; in an interview with Stellar magazine this month she said Channel 10 had decided to take her off air and she had “no choice” in the matter.)
Nevertheless, Wilkinson hints at the toll the past few tumultuous years have taken. “To go through defamation proceedings is not fun for anyone, particularly when someone is so determined to take it all the way to the high court,” she says. “It was a long process but we got a great outcome.” This month the high court dismissed Bruce Lehrmann’s final application for special leave to appeal in the defamation case.
Given the challenges of the past few years it’s little wonder there is a sense of cool reserve about Wilkinson. She’s here in tiny body – a carefully curated modern-preppy look (wide-legged jeans, pink long-sleeve, buttoned-up shirt, on-trend jelly sandals) – but seems elsewhere in spirit. Her answers are polite but sound practised.
Now she veers right, taking us past the worn grave of “Wee Davie”, who died of diphtheria when he was four in 1878, and shifts the conversation to Evelyn Marsden. Her story might have been lost forever if not for a casual 2023 conversation between Wilkinson and her husband, the author Peter FitzSimons, about the Titanic.
Were there, Wilkinson wondered, any Australian-born passengers or crew onboard the ship? Speculation turned into investigation; Wilkinson’s searches quickly revealed there were six. But there was only one survivor – a plucky South Australian rower and horsewoman who, in the first decade of the 20th century, shrugged off convention and took off to work abroad as a nurse.
“I love working, so not working and spending time with lawyers felt very unbalanced to me,” Wilkinson says. The book project allowed her to divert her thoughts away from affidavits and court hearings. “Evelyn was my safe place. She was my refuge through all of that. It felt like I was doing something that had meaning, being able to elevate a woman’s story. We have a tendency to allow women’s stories to be lost to history.”
Evelyn gave only two interviews after the disaster, one to the Sydney Evening News in late 1912 after her return to Australia with her Welsh-born ship surgeon husband, William James, who, by a stroke of luck, was not a crew member on the Titanic. “It doesn’t do to think of it,” Evelyn said. As a stewardess/nurse and crew member, she helped passengers board lifeboats until she was ordered into one of the last ones to be lowered. “When I do I find myself wondering if it really happened, or if it was just some awful nightmare.”
Wilkinson pauses to get her bearings at an intersection in this disorienting city of the dead, a sea of stone memorials stretching to a boardwalk hugging the cliffs over the glittering ocean. She has, she says, a very good sense of direction, “unlike my husband”.
Whatever FitzSimons might lack in terms of navigational abilities, he makes up for in his knack of knowing the direction a “ripping good yarn” should take (he is the author of more than 30 books including Kokoda and Batavia). He was heavily involved throughout the project, Wilkinson says, and “graciously let me borrow his two main researchers”.
Now Wilkinson is exclaiming – “Oh, there she is!” And here, under a modest arched marble headstone, is the resting place of Evelyn and William James. Someone has left a candle and two small arrangements of plastic native flowers on the grave.
Wilkinson reads out the faded words on the headstone, revealing a final poignant twist: Evelyn James (née Marsden) died on 30 August 1938. William died a week later on 7 September. The couple, who never had children, were devoted to each other.
As well as her deeply moving story, Evelyn gave Wilkinson something else to work with – a powerful metaphor. Rowing on the Murray River as a teenager, Evelyn came to love the feeling of pulling against the tide. On the lifeboat, she grabbed an oar and helped row against the pull of the sinking Titanic.
“As I heard those words, that Evelyn rowed against the tide, I immediately thought, ‘I wonder how many Australian women feel like they are regularly rowing against the tide?’ I’ve certainly felt that a bit,” says Wilkinson, who has had a front-row seat to the shifts – and increased pressures – in women’s lives since she took the helm as editor of Dolly magazine in the 1980s when she was 21. She then spent a decade as editor of Cleo magazine – one of her first decisions was to axe its past-its-use-by-date male nude centrefold – before moving into television hosting and commentary roles in the late 90s.
The publicist herds us back towards the entrance of the cemetery. A photographer is waiting. As we walk, I suggest to Wilkinson that perhaps the media landscape for women, young women particularly, has not improved much since the 80s. “I think we’ve gone backwards, no question,” she says. As Dolly editor she felt it was enormously important to put the information that young women wanted through a responsible filter. “We were a trusted source of news and advice and information; you only need to go on the internet to see what girls of a similar age are exposed to now.”
She is concerned about the “appalling” effects of social media not just on young people but on older people too. “The amount that we consume is not healthy.”
The photographer interrupts our conversation and asks Wilkinson to sit on a wall in front of a grave. She is relaxed, glowing. With the high court’s dismissal of Lehrmann’s appeal application, a great weight has lifted from her shoulders. She is regaining control of her own narrative.
“After five years of this nightmare, it felt like someone had a hand in that, and I’m convinced it was Evelyn,” she says, looking skywards. “It felt like Evelyn was somewhere up there, watching over me.”
The Titanic Story of Evelyn by Lisa Wilkinson is out now through Hachette
