106 The Australian Women’s Weekly | MAY 2019
Mother’s Day
PHOTOGRAPHY BY EDMOND TERAKOPIAN. NEWSPIX.FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHS SUPPLIEDAND USED WITH PERMISSION.Lisa remembers
her mother as “always
working, always trying
to juggle. I remember
the times when she
tried to visit my brother
at boarding school
every weekend and
tried to take us to mass
on a Sunday night and
tried to cook us dinner. If you have
four children and you have the
ambition that my mother had, my
belief is that you cannot have it all.
Women can’t sadly. You can’t be June
Dally-Watkins, with two boys and two
girls, while you are trying to establish
a deportment school in Queensland
and NSW, and take fashion tours all
over Asia to promote Australian
fashion. Somewhere along the line
someone is going to suffer. It is either
the mother or the children who wear
the consequences of those decisions.”
In the end, after some disastrous
nanny experiences – including one
who stole her jewellery and another
who threw wild parties while she was
away – the children were sent to
boarding schools. Lisa was only six
when she was sent to board, during
the difficult time of her parents’
divorce. Her older sister, Carel,
who was also a boarder, became her
“surrogate mother and took care of
me. She did my hair every morning.”
When she was nine, Lisa moved to
Gib Gate school at Mittagong in the
NSW Southern Highlands, and she says:
“Nobody visited me or anything like
that. But this is not a misery memoir in
any way, shape or form. I thrived on
routine, on schedule and an organised
lifestyle. I needed that structure. It was
much better than being a latch-key kid,
with a nanny having parties.”
Even though her time with her
children was “sacrificed”, Miss Dally
says she tried to provide the best for
them materially.
“They had enviable
compensations –
a privileged
upbringing, a
wonderful home,
exclusive private
school education,
international
travel and as
much love as
I could give them.”
And were Miss
Dally’s children
expected to
uphold herimpeccable standards? “Oh they had
to behave themselves, yes they did.”
Says Lisa: “I always wanted the mum
who was home baking cookies, yet
I never doubted that she loved me.
To achieve what she has and have four
kids, she clearly couldn’t have been the
mum at home baking cookies. Mum
fought the war of having a right to
work and having a voice. She took
the territory in battle terms that her
generation were fighting.”
Miss Dally once debated Germaine
Greer on The Mike Walsh Show, and
came off decidedly second best. Lisa
knew then that she was going to be
more of a Germaine girl than a MissDally girl. “It was the first time I was
ever exposed to my mother being held
for more than questioning. Watching
that happen to her brought out a lot
of loyalty to her, but it also made me
question the good girl point of view.
I could see that what Germaine said
was more important than the way
she looked while saying it.”
When she was 13, Lisa became a day
girl at Rose Bay Convent. At 16, without
a parent supervising homework, falling
behind and terrified of the HSC, she
persuaded her parents to let her take
a gap year in Italy, where Carel was
working in a prestigious model agency.
“I was gangly, pimply, almost six feet
tall. I never felt beautiful enough,
definitely. By leaving and coming to
Italy, I could be myself,” Lisa admits.
“She wanted to be independent,”
says Miss Dally. “She wanted to be her
own person. I respected that. I think
that is fair and reasonable. She didn’t
want to be me again – she wanted to
be herself. Lisa was always caring and
very intelligent.”
It was in Florence that Lisa met
local Paolo Consumi, then a medical
student, and began the lifelong love
affair, the saga, that she wrote about
in her best-selling book, The Promise.
With a mother who was blazing
the trail of an independent working
woman, she was bound to come into
conflict with a culture where women
were still in the kitchen. As much as
she loved Paolo and Tuscany, as much
as she was embraced by his family, she
missed Australia and knew she needed
a career, an education.
“I’m an Aussie girl,” she wrote, “a
Bondi bather, a beer in the garden kind
of girl.” She missed the cicadas, the
beaches, her family. For 18 years, they
went back and forth between Sydney
and Florence, between worlds that
were polar opposite. “Oh, for God’s
sake, Lisa,” she writes at one point,
“make a decision. Do you want to live
in Italy or Australia?”
There were long periods without
contact with Paolo. She studied at the
Australian Film, Television and Radio
School, and worked in radio. Then
she would give it up for Florence and
Paolo. A wedding was called off over“I never felt
beautiful
enough,
definitely.”
Above: Miss Dally dated
movie star Gregory Peck.
Right: Miss Dally as an
in-demand model.