Just So Stories

Awards:

Short-listed, APA Book Design Awards, Best Designed Book (Hardback), 1998, AU

Short-listed, Book Data/ABA Book of the Year Award, 1998, AU

Allen & Unwin

January 2025

ISBN: 9781761472916

RRP: $34.99

TV and fashion personality Maggie Tabberer dies aged 87

When Maggie Tabberer died in early December last year, I felt her loss almost personally, because, like many I’m sure of my vintage, I had grown up with the presence of this woman always in the periphery of my life. Then A&U announced they were reprinting her memoir and I boldly requested a copy – thank you Allen & Unwin for not blinking but sending it to me. I felt that reviewing it and sharing it would be, in some small way, my own tribute to a woman for whom I always had real regard.

It is a read and a half, and I learned so much more than I had known whether about Maggie’s history, publicity or media gossip. What a read! What a woman! She was loved and admired by so many, myself very much included but she was no prima donna or princess in an ivory tower.

All her life, she had elegance, grace, style, beauty, diplomacy but all of that was underlaid by a tough Australian working-class psyche and attitudes. I loved every word of this. From reading about Margaret May Trigar’s childhood, youngest daughter of 5, with a tenacious and loving mother and an equally loving but slightly flawed father (a drinker) to her later years.

She went out to work in her teens, as many young people did in the post-war years, was photographed around the age of 14 for a media shot, and was, over the next few years, given more and more modelling assignments, especially after completing a modelling course [anyone else remember the June Dally-Watkins courses we could access in school or was that just my girls’ school?].

She was never a shy little flower. A teen pregnancy, an abortion and then taken up by older man Charles Tabberer and married to him at 17. Two little girls and 7 years later, Maggie was not going to be contained by a controlling (and inadequate) husband threatened by her growing success, they split, and undaunted by lack of funds or home, she forged her way ahead.

When Maggie realised she was never going to be the same svelte pre-motherhood figure, she pivoted and went to TV and then journalism as a fashion editor, later established her highly successful PR business, and down the track her own clothing label and much more. She was a powerhouse, and always a strong woman, in her own right.

She had temptestuous relationships including further marriages, experienced real tragedy with the cotdeath of her baby boy, many love affairs and was never afraid of using the vernacular. [No wonder she always felt like a kindred spirit! hahaha!]. It is also clear that she had deep and long friendships, many of them spanning back to her younger years, and that these friends were her bulwark against life’s vicissitudes.

For whatever reason: you like biographies, you admire the woman, you are a Mighty Girl advocate or just want a great read, I would urge you to seek this out. It contains some beautiful photographs and, I can assure you, that much of it will be a real revelation.

Big 5 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐rating – thanks Maggie for being a part of my life.