Claire Harvey on the joys of motherhood

 

She gazes down at the newborn in her lap: baby Reg does not reciprocate his mother’s smile but stares past her at the ceiling with wide blue eyes.

“It’s a bit like having a crush on Justin Bieber or something. I mean, I just worship him but he seems to tolerate me.”

Claire Harvey is beaming as she adjusts the banana-shaped, red and pink striped, breast-feeding pillow from beneath her tiny son. He isn’t hungry anymore and his mother gently strokes his tiny head while he lies in silent contentment. It’s hard to believe that Harvey joined motherhood just in September last year.

The younger of two children, Claire Harvey was born to Peter and Anne Harvey on March 14, 1977 in Canberra. She has been married to Ross Neilson, director of the Salmon Neilson company, since March 2011. They met in 2008 when she was profiling his former boss Nathan Rees, Premier of New South Wales from September 2008 to December 2009.

Grandma Anne is taking the baby for a walk around the block in the pram. A friendly quiet ensues in the living room where bibs and baby overalls hang from a mini clothes line in the corner, a baby bouncer stands still beside it, and an almost finished cup of coffee is perched on the little table beside the couch where Claire sits. In a black tank top, colourful, knee-length skirt and sandals, with one leg crossed over the other and an elbow resting atop the backrest of the couch, she is chatting animatedly about her family’s journalist ancestry.

“Dad was the fifth generation journalist and all Dad’s uncles were journalists. So Uncle Mac Corbett was the sports editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, his other uncle worked at The Sun, his grandfather was the sports editor of The Sun, and his great-grandfather had been a journalist as well.”

Now the deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph and on maternity leave, Claire knew she wanted to be a journalist since her early high school years. Along with her 39-year-old brother Adam, she is the sixth generation of journalists in her family. But it wasn’t always her dream, and she beams embarrassedly as she recalls a childhood fantasy.

“I’d sort of toyed with the idea of becoming a nurse before that. Like all kids, I had this romantic idea of what being a nurse would be like that didn’t involve bedpans and cleaning the floor. Nursing is hard work – it’s a real job.”

While still a student at Canberra Church of England Girls Grammar School, Claire worked voluntarily at television and radio stations but she didn’t stop when school did.

“I finished school when I was 17, and I knew that I wanted to be a journalist. I spent the Christmas holidays doing work experience at The Australian in the Press Gallery in Canberra. I had noticed that all the other newspapers in the Press Gallery had juniors like copy kids who were making coffee and sending faxes and stuff – The Australian didn’t have one so I asked Dennis Shanahan who was the Bureau chief if I could do it for free. He said yes, and I spent the rest of the Christmas holidays doing it for free.”

Claire continued doing work experience at The Australian even when she began her Bachelor of Arts at the Australian National University, majoring in politics, English and history.

“I knew I wanted to be involved and then they started paying me.”

Now and again as she talks, Claire looks down at the polished, wooden floor, or at her lap, and as she does, the fringe of her shoulder-length, blonde hair falls across one side of her face, curtaining her eyes. Then suddenly, she flings her head to the side, exposing her bright blue eyes and a smile.

“And in between making bad instant coffees, I was writing little stories and getting published on page 150!”

These days, her work involves news conferences, management meetings and working with a team of journalists and designers to plan and produce the weekend newspaper.

“It’s been great as a learning opportunity for me because instead of working on just one story at a time, I’m helping people work on fifty stories at a time, so it’s all that journalistic problem-solving. It’s one of those jobs where you’re not quite sure what you’ve been doing all day but you’ve been busy all day,” Claire laughs.

And what’s her favourite part of being a journalist? “Whenever something interesting is happening in the world or in Sydney, we get paid to go and check it out,” she says, smiling.

“So it’s a great job for a nosy parker, for a curious person. It’s different every day too.

“I was growing up seeing Dad having great adventures and really enjoying going to work every day, and it just seemed like great fun. I loved writing and I was very curious.”

Claire remembers being posted as The Australian’s New Zealand and Pacific correspondent when she was 25.

“It was straight to Wellington and, like with most of those correspondent jobs, they give you a plane ticket and just say off you go. So you show up and start looking for stories. It was…”

She searches for the word.

“… daunting in that sense, you know. How do you start?”

She is smiling again.

“So I remember ringing Dad on my first day in New Zealand and saying, ‘oh my God, like, what am I going to do?’ And he said, ‘you’ve got to have a story on your first day; you’ve got to get in the paper, whatever it is, just find something you can get in the paper with.’”

And she did, but she shrugs and admits she can’t remember what it was: “Something that was happening in New Zealand, politics or rugby or something.”

The journalist in Claire Harvey comes largely from her father, Peter Harvey, who passed away on March 2 last year in the Royal North Shore Private Hospital.

Peter was a veteran journalist and broadcaster with Channel Nine for 38 years, and had received a Walkley and British Reporter of the Year award.  He had been diagnosed with stage five pancreatic cancer in October of the previous year.

As Claire remembers her dad, her smile widens and her voice softens.

“He was a great ham, he was a great show-off and a real character. He loved his job, he loved being famous, he loved it when people recognised him, and he loved being able to make bad jokes on television. And all of those qualities concealed the fact that he was really, really good at what he did,” she says, her tone thoughtful and reminiscent, her voice filled with admiration.

“No story was too trivial for him and he knew that if you tell it right, those stories are the ones that people remember.

“In his private life, he was a fabulous enthusiast for everything. He worshipped my mother and he loved shopping. Shopping was his great passion – he loved buying watches and leather bags and clothes.

“If you ever said, ‘oh what do you think Dad? I’ve seen this really lovely dress but it’s really expensive…’”

Her volume doesn’t change, but now she mock-shouts and stretches her words in a raspy tone.

“He’d always say, ‘get it, get it, go on, buy it, I’ll buy it for you!”

She bursts into laughter and adds, ‘you know’.

“He’d buy mum beautiful necklaces and when I was a little girl, he bought me a great collection of dolls from all over the world.”

Harvey describes her relationship with her father in her adult years as a ‘friend’s relationship’.

“It was really warm and casual. He was the number one person on my speed dial on my phone, and still is actually. We used to talk about music and books and work and stuff. With mum, we would hang out and go to the movies and go shopping. It was a lovely friend’s relationship.”

She remembers her father as being “incredibly joyful” as a parent.

“He made everything a big occasion. So he had this very jangly set of keys and as he came up the front steps he’d be rattling his keys to make sure we all heard him, and then he’d fling open the door and we’d all squeal and throw ourselves at him. And then, when it was bedtime, he’d give us a horsey ride to bed, so he’d crawl from the room where we watched TV with both of us on his back to our bedrooms, drop us off and then he’d tell us a story.”

Claire can’t wipe the smile from her face as she tells her story – the same special story she shared in her tribute piece to her father, Goodbye my dear Dad.

“He used to make up some stories – he had this elaborate series of stories about ‘When I Was In The Pirates’, and when he ran out of made up stories, he read us all the Roald Dahl books, doing all the voices.”

Her voice softens again, and she chooses her words thoughtfully as she talks about how her family got through the tough times in the months before his death. She lets the curtain fall.

“I think Dad set the tone for it… He was an incredible optimist and… there were times after he was diagnosed when I wondered if he understood how serious it was because his reaction to the news that he had stage five pancreatic cancer was bizarrely… not happy, but unruffled.

“I remember at the time having anguished conversations with my brother. ‘I don’t think Dad gets it, I don’t think he understands that he’s dying’, and my brother saying to me, ‘he does understand. He’s just choosing to spin it in his way. He’s choosing to take the ray of light from this very sad situation’. Looking back, as it went on, I realised that it was his act of protectiveness and love for us. You know, he didn’t want us to be sad.”

Again her voice fills with admiration, and awe.

“Dad was someone who would carry on no end if he had a cold or… if he stubbed his toe he would make a big fuss about it and expect lots of sympathy and be a real drama queen. But when it came to having something seriously wrong with him and… dying… he was unbelievably brave.”

His death made her “a bit tougher”, she reveals.

“People have no hesitation in writing to me and saying, ‘what a stupid column, you’ve got no idea’. All columnists get it and I really dreaded opening my email inbox on Monday.

“But as soon as Dad became sick, I just could not care less what people think, if they disagree, so it really put all that into perspective for me. I think I’d been way too sensitive about all of that. I think suffering’s really good for you, in the sense that it makes you realise what’s important in life.”

Claire found out she was having a baby in January last year and says it was the happiest thing she could have told her dad.

“He knew it meant that Mum would have something to look forward to, there would be a baby in the family. We knew that life was going to go on, so I think being pregnant really helped, even though I had lots of morning sickness and stuff.”

She laughs, and the tears that had begun to well up in her eyes disappear.

“Life’s changed so much since then. I’ve got this little baby now and he makes me think of dad a lot. I suppose because he’s a boy.”

Reg was born on September 30, 2013 at Prince of Wales Private Hospital in Randwick. Harvey laughs as she reflects on her experience of being pregnant.

“I had this huge enormous tummy and at work everyone remarked on it all day long. It drove me mad! People would say, ‘oh my God, you’re huge! Are you sure you’re not having twins?’

“It’s funny. It becomes the dominant thing about you – people see you as a pregnant lady. Everyone’s rushing to give you the chair – which is really nice! People fuss over you and you get lots of attention.

“But it’s sort of like when you buy a red car, you suddenly notice all the other red cars on the road. I suddenly noticed all the other pregnant women and became really attuned to the signs of pregnancy.

“It’s funny how when you’re pregnant your body becomes public property. Not only do people comment on how you look, but people would come up to me in the park and say ‘oh, should you be running?’ I’d never realised before but our whole society is actually about babies. It’s something you don’t notice until you’re actually going through it.”

A month before giving birth, Claire Harvey wrote a piece entitled, Let’s be honest: newborns are yucky, right?

“I’ve always loved babies, always wanted to be a mother but I think I’d always been a bit sort of scared of newborns…

“They’re so needy and cranky and bossy. They’re either crying or sleeping, and I had thought, when I had the baby, I would just try and get through the first few months and then by the time he was six months, he’d be sitting up and laughing, and making noises and being interesting and loveable. But I’ve been surprised at how much I loved him from the first moment.”

Right on cue, Anne and Reg return from their walk, and outside the front door can be heard the cry of a baby in dire need of his mother’s arms. Soon, nestled happily on the banana pillow in mum’s arms, Reg satisfies his hunger.

“And of course, like all new mothers, I’m constantly terrified that he’s about to stop breathing or when he’s gone quiet in his cot for twenty minutes, I’m standing there going, ‘God, are you still alive?”

And is she faking it till she makes it as she said in her article?

“Yeah, totally!” she laughs but then her expression turns serious.

“It’s made me realise how lucky I am to have mum actually. I mean, how people do it without their mums around… It’s very humbling in that sense. You realise how much support you need.

“I’d like to have another baby sometime in the future. I’d love to. Although I don’t know how I’ll do it – I’ll just send Reg away or something; send him round to Grandma’s!”

Claire is laughing, her arms wrapped around Reg and the pillow he lies quietly on.

“There are so many theories of motherhood out there. Everyone’s got a theory, often involving routines… but he doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to grasp the concept of a routine so… just feed them when they’re hungry and cuddle them when they need to be cuddled.

“I think in our society we can be judgemental about other people’s style of parenting; you know, you see a toddler throwing a tantrum in the supermarket or on the bus and you think, mmm…”

Claire Harvey raises her eyebrows and tilts her head slightly to the side and concludes with a wide smile, ‘They require so much looking after, I think anyone who has managed to keep a baby going without losing it or dropping it is doing pretty well!”