‘As an older woman, courage starts to wobble': How Marta Dusseldorp finds her strength

The Age

5 hours ago

This story is part of the June 8 edition of Sunday Life. See all 14 stories.
Walking through the rainforest in the remote west of her adopted Tasmanian home, actor Marta Dusseldorp finds beauty and brutality along the banks that are home to rare Huon pine. At one junction, the clear water of one river meets the yellow, soupy water of another, poisoned by copper mining tailings.
'It's just extraordinary, the confluence of man and nature,' says Sydney-born and raised Dusseldorp, 52, who, more than seven years ago, moved to the island state with actor-director husband Ben Winspear and their two daughters, Grace and Maggie.
Dusseldorp has just completed shooting the second season of ABC TV comedy-drama Bay of Fires, which she co-created, co-produced and stars. Filming took place again in the well-preserved main street of the small Tasmanian town of Zeehan, known for silver mining. But this spot, where the King and Queen rivers meet, proved a more elusive location. 'I tried to film there, but it's really hard to get to, and the safety issues weren't going to quite work.'
Surrounding mountains and valleys have nonetheless provided picturesque settings for the appealing Tassie-noir, to which Dusseldorp's picaresque character Anika fled with her two children after death threats were made against her in her former corporate life in Melbourne. Anika took on the alias Stella, and hid among a cohort of eccentric, protected witnesses: there is heroin being cooked, a religious cult that has arranged marriages, and an assassin waiting for the aliens to descend.
The second season has capitalism and greed on its themes as the townsfolk pressure Stella for more payouts from her corporate scam, which has already netted them $3.4 million, and inflationary pressures have pushed the price of bread to $23 a loaf. New threats may yet force Stella into the drug trade with her old foe Frankie (Kerry Fox), presumed dead by all at the end of the first season.
Like the twists in her show, life in the smallest Australian state has delivered what Dusseldorp did not predict: fertile, imaginative ground. While her husband was born in Wagga Wagga, he'd grown up in Hobart, and they both wanted their children to experience the Tasmanian lifestyle. But they did not know how long they would stay.
The couple found a network of like-minded actors, writers and directors, and started their own production company, Archipelago. Tasmania is also home to mycelium, the underground network of fungi threads that shares water and nutrients between trees, and which Dusseldorp says is a metaphor for the artist-community connections she's found in the state. The culture here appears to stimulate both artistic growth and biodiversity. Living here, says Dusseldorp, 'stops the clutter and gives you focus. You can get a lot done in Tassie as connections are just one step away.'
Today, Dusseldorp is wearing a fawn trench coat in the lobby of her Sydney hotel and drinking lemongrass tea with honey. Several years ago, life was more frenetic as she dominated television screens in three popular series: Janet King, A Place to Call Home and Jack Irish.
As if the pressures of playing the lead in the first two shows were not enough, Dusseldorp would also carve out three months each year between TV seasons to do a theatre play, including War of the Roses, The Crucible, Scenes from a Marriage and A Doll's House, Part 2.
Theatre became her 'weird' way of researching what the public was feeling, she reflects now, which helped her decide when she went back onto a TV set if she was playing her long-running screen characters 'too tough or not tough enough'.
'[Audiences] come as these beasts, and they sit as one, like in a colosseum, and then turn on you,' she observes. 'If they don't like [the play] or whatever, you have to work out a way to re-engage them, unite them, and give them something to go home with; it's like being a conductor. You find out politically where people are at and what's funny, because it changes depending on the climate.'
The Australian playwright Benedict Andrews said Dusseldorp is a 'very brave and captivating and muscular actress'. (She played the eponymous lead in his 2016 play Gloria.)
'Oh my god,' says Dusseldorp when I remind her of performing this role in Sydney's tiny 105-seat Stables Theatre. ' Gloria was a very particular beast. She was basically a cry from me about what it felt like to be in the spotlight. Benedict did a really great job of showing the internal shattering of Gloria as a mother and a partner, and what the costs are of [fame].
'I didn't want to fully acknowledge [the costs of fame], and when I don't want to acknowledge something, I do a play about it, so I can be somebody else, live it out, and go, 'Got that out of my system!' I would often go home and fall in a heap, but it was done. Theatre is like severance: there it is, I did that, and I went through it, and now I'm OK.'
Dusseldorp met Winspear in 2003 when they were working on separate Sydney Theatre Company productions. 'He was like a ship: solid, unique,' Dusseldorp told me in a 2013 interview. The attraction was such that she 'had to splash cold water on my face'.
Since moving to Tasmania, Winspear has directed Dusseldorp in the plays The Bleeding Tree, The Maids and Women of Troy. What's her take on their relationship now? 'We still walk side by side, which I really love,' she says. 'And there's an intent to be the custodians of our daughters forever, and make sure we guide them as best we can. Our work together is sacred, so we try to make sure it's filled with honesty, mutual respect, care.'
In 2013, when I visited the couple's home in Sydney's Edgecliff, Winspear was preparing the evening meal for Grace, then almost 6, and Maggie, 3. He said he was mindful of how acting and directing obligations can invert family life, so they resisted employing childcare. 'His love of his family is his north star,' says Dusseldorp now. 'It comes down to mutual respect in a long-term relationship, understanding that people have their own ways of doing things, and trying to learn from that.'
Grace is now 18 and has left Tasmania to live in Sydney. A budding writer, she is studying English literature. 'She's written a TV series about the family, which I have not seen yet,' Dusseldorp laughs, 'and I have the right to vet, I've told her! Sometimes when we have a family situation, I see her jotting things down and I'm like, 'What is that?'.' Maggie, now 15, and like her sister was often on the set of her mother's shows. 'My kids feel very comfortable socially with adults because they've always been around them.'
Dusseldorp is mindful that with privilege comes responsibility. She is producing a film with a domestic-violence theme that is yet to go into production. She is also on the board of the Sydney-based charity, the Dusseldorp Forum, formed in 1989 by her late paternal grandfather, Dick Dusseldorp, founder of construction giant Lend Lease. The forum aims to improve education, health and social outcomes for children and their families through community-led projects.
After our interview, Dusseldorp is going to visit her sister Teya, who is the forum's executive director. Her younger twin brothers Tom and Joe are also on the board. Missing from this story of tight siblings is brother Yoris, lost to cancer in infancy when Dusseldorp was eight.
'When I lost my brother, I realised that life comes for everyone in very unexpected ways, and that the person opposite you may have had a particular experience that you need to listen to and care about.'
I ask Dusseldorp if she has a book in her. She laughs. 'If I do, it's just for me,' she says. 'I think it might help to put some stuff in order so I can work out what makes me creative, that way I can avoid losing courage. And maybe that's why people do it.'
She reflects now on the road ahead; she hopes for a third season of Bay of Fires, and that the roles she plays, as well as creates, continue to have meaning; she doesn't want to just work for the sake of it.
'As an older woman, courage starts to wobble,' she says. 'I want to keep my courage until the very end, and I'm finding that right now I'm having to remind myself of that. That's partly because you become slightly invisible [as an older woman], less relevant possibly, and post-menopause, you need to redefine yourself.'
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She adds women are finding strength in banding together post-menopause to 'bash through' the suffering of being ignored in this next stage of life. I suggest that shows such as Bay of Fires have proved there is an audience for engaging stories focused on older women. 'I think so,' she agrees. 'The courage to turn up is now something for me, but I want to have something to say. You've got to have a reason to be there, otherwise, shush!'
Bay of Fires season two premieres on June 15 on ABC TV and iView.