Several months ago, my youngest sister threw a party. Back then, I didn’t know her friends too well, but it wasn’t long before my boyfriend and I got caught up in a conversation that was friendly and foul-mouthed in equal measure: our favourite kind of chat. We all started talking about our lives—their undergraduate studies; our daytime jobs—until I must have said something that made them look at us with suspicion.

“Wait a minute,” they said. “Exactly how old are you guys?” Slowly, we told them our ages—I’m turning 28 this year—which prompted something odd to happen. Everyone began to shriek. And by “shriek”, I mean that what came out of their mouths was truly awful: scandalised, wraith-like howls that you’d only make in the presence of Death. For the first time ever, we were the oldest people in the room. I’d hit my late 20s and was already a goddamned hag.

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My parents lost their business and went bankrupt, so I left school at 14. It meant I had totally unformed ideas of what I could do, so I tried a million things. Back then, ingenuity and quick brains could get you into all sorts of positions. So, in my 20s, I talked myself into jobs as an assistant to a geophysicist in Libya, a cook in a sailing school and an air hostess with British Airways. There was nothing stopping you, because there were so many options. They just needed bright young people.

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In the early 90s, my embarrassed Year 3 classmates were given permission slips for their parents to sign, so they could watch VHS copies of Where Did I Come From? and What’s Happening to Me? These were tame sex education cartoons, featuring footage of smiley-faced ovaries and cats falling in love. Personally, I found none of this necessary. My family was open about sex from Day One—possibly too open. We’d spend our evenings making pots of tea, before gathering around the television to watch informative segments about anal pleasure on Sophie Lee’s Sex. It’s what we called Family Time.

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I went to Sydney University to study arts, but ended up ditching my English Honours and switching to anthropology. It was the closest thing you could find to journalism in the academic world in those days. So the study of human society – social interaction, religion and politics – was pretty close to what I do now. The Study of Man. [laughs]

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Oscar Wilde once said, “Hell is the absence of other people.” For most of my life, I’ve thoroughly agreed. I’ve never lived by myself and can’t imagine I’d handle it very well. For 27 years, I’ve been a human relay baton, happily passed from a big family (childhood) to friends (teens and early 20s), before finally bunking down with my boyfriend. I’m like a tapeworm or oral herpes: something that needs human warmth in order to survive.

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THÉRÈSE REIN

Australia’s present-day first lady, since 2007. Superpowers include rapid weight-loss, global business smarts, scaling African mountains, deploying mega-watt smiles and searing people’s corneas with pink blazers.

Family: Married to current Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who she met through the Australian Student Christian Movement in university. They have three children.

Famous for: being the first Australian prime ministerial wife to retain her own name and continue in the workforce, running a multi-million dollar international employment agency (Ingeus), no less.

Trivia: She is a trained psychologist.

Dress sense: Infamous for early fashion faux-pas (sail-like satin coats; shopping-bag sleeves), the newly svelte Rein now favours sleek slimline coats, shoulder-exposing gowns and angular shoulder pads.

Charity interests: Disability (Rein’s father became wheelchair bound after a plane crash), unemployment, homelessness and Indigenous youth literacy.

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I was in my 20s in the 1960s. This was the decade of the referendum to include powers on the Federal Parliament to make laws in respect to Aboriginals. It was a time of the gradual abolition of the laws on the White Australia Policy. But it was also a time of the Vietnam War. So it was a mixed bag, but there were some steps in the direction of progress.

I came to the Sydney Law School in the last year of my arts degree. I was working in a lawyer’s firm as an article clerk earning £6 a week. When I graduated in law, I got a job as a solicitor. I was working as a full-time solicitor with a very heavy workload, and doing an economics — and then a master of laws degree — at night and in my own time.

Looking back, this infatuation with university was an anaesthetic to postpone my engagement with the real world — and with human relationships. It was a lonely time. Most human beings seek out personal relationships and sexual experiences, and I did none of the above. I simply concentrated on my studies, but I knew there was emptiness in my life. In 1968, I came to the end of my studies — Master of Laws — I couldn’t keep doing more and more degrees. I realised I had to face up to things.

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When I was a kid, scoring a luxurious $5-per-week in pocket money, I thought millionaires were the richest people in the world. “One million dollars!” I’d think to myself. It was my personal yardstick of astronomical wealth, a sum only Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump and Scrooge McDuck — suited-up white men and cartoon birds — could have possibly earned. For the rest of us, it was a nice daydream. Sometimes I’d list all the things I’d buy with a million dollars, like a vending machine in every room, or a pet dolphin in my waterfall pool. A million dollars: it was a dizzying amount of money that bordered on the ridiculous.

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