‘I didn't know how to unpack the pain': Home and Away star on facing teenage trauma

The Age

2 days ago

Huddled around their drinks, trying to stay warm in a corner of the rambling ­heritage hotel on an icy Saturday night in June, the group of otherwise nondescript middle-aged men and women barely receive a glance, let alone an inquisitive stare, from the other patrons. But back in the 1990s, when Home and Away was a hit TV soap, Mat Stevenson, Nicolle Dickson, Greg Benson, Sharyn Hodgson, Adam Willits and Les Hill were mobbed at shopping centres around the country.
This get-together of old castmates last winter at the Bundanoon Hotel in the NSW Southern Highlands is the first time the group have seen one another since the death of their former co-star and friend Dieter Brummer, who took his own life in 2021 at the age of 45 after lockdown deepened his depression. But because some of the actors were overseas at the time, and the memorial service was live-streamed, this is the first time the entire group has met in the flesh for many years. There's lots to talk about: the strange and exhilarating experiences of being major TV stars (and the fodder of the tabloid gossip magazines) at a young age and the challenges of moving on with their lives after their stint with the show ended. This is their opportunity to lay some ghosts to rest.
Standing in the centre of the group is Mat Stevenson, a slim, muscular middle-aged man with an unguarded smile. In his now-older features you can still see traces of the blond, sun-kissed youth he once was, when he smiled from the cover of TV Week magazine and was a star of a hit soap with an audience of millions across Australia and the UK.
On TV, Stevenson was the epitome of the surfie-guy shtick that was a staple of the 1990s Australian soapie genre. Board tucked under his arm, his on-screen ­alter-ego Adam Cameron was either causing a bit of a ruckus around Summer Bay or charming the local girls at the surf club.
Behind the dizzying success, however, Stevenson was battling his demons, the victim of a sexual assault that he never dealt with or fully recovered from. Some of his close friends knew, but most did not. In a less ­enlightened age, and without the right tools, nobody really knew quite how to deal with it. So they didn't.
For Stevenson, the pain receded until it was a dull, inescapable ache. Over the years, the inner turmoil burst out in small ways that his family recognised only too well. A short fuse. Easily distracted. A sense of social anxiety – a persistent unease – that sometimes left him paralysed.
Destined to be an actor
Mat Stevenson, now 56, grew up in the leafy Melbourne suburb of Wheelers Hill, in the city's south-east, in the pre-everything 1970s. Like most middle boys, he grew up in the shadow of his brothers: James, two years older, and Chris, two years younger.
His dad Walter was an insurance salesman, his mother June a full-time housewife. Nestled alongside the Dandenong wetlands, life in Wheelers Hill in the 1970s and early 1980s was Australiana writ large: the boys rode bikes everywhere and variously played ­soccer, cricket and Australian rules.
But home life was tough. Walter was a war orphan who had spent time in foster care as a boy. He was not demonstrably affectionate towards his sons and could be physically abusive. June, meanwhile, was wrestling with personal issues. 'When Dad got home, we'd go upstairs and there'd just be terrible stuff going on,' recalls Stevenson. 'Mum would take off, Dad would take off, and then three hours later when it was dark, our favourite aunt would come around and put us to bed.'
Stevenson is at pains to add that despite all this, he loved his parents and his childhood was not without its sunnier moments (his father died in 1990, and he maintains a strong relationship with his mother). 'We just saw a lot of stuff we shouldn't have seen as young kids,' Stevenson reflects sadly, looking away. 'That trauma as a kid is a really hard thing to wash off. It just sticks.'
On the soccer field, however, Stevenson discovered the kind of family he struggled to find at home as a ­rising star in the Victorian under-16 representative team. The single-minded nature of the game – to score goals – offered him a focus and an escape. In one ­memorable match, he scored an impressive six goals; pressing his father – who was also the team's coach – for a longed-for dollop of praise, he was simply told that he 'didn't push back hard enough'. Reflects Stevenson after a pause: 'My father simply didn't know what love looked, smelled, tasted or felt like. He just didn't know.'
Encouraged by his drama teacher, Stewart Bell, and propelled by a TV report on a performing arts high school, Stevenson was bitten by the acting bug at a young age. 'It was like an out-of-body experience,' he recalls. 'From that moment on, I just said, 'I'm an actor, that's exactly what I am.' ' The same year his dad brushed off his success on the soccer field – 1985 – Stevenson landed an audition for an ABC telemovie, Breaking Up, written by Frank Willmont and directed by Kathy Mueller, about the disintegration of a couple's marriage, seen through the lens of their 15-year-old son. 'I remember crying in my audition,' says Stevenson. But there was more going on. 'I felt like my head was in a washing machine the whole time. I was suffering from depression, and as a kid, I didn't know this. I didn't have the life skills to understand that. I was deeply traumatised.'
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given how much art suddenly imitated life, he nabbed the role. 'Stewart Bell was a mentor to me in more ways than he knew,' Stevenson says of his drama teacher. (Another of Bell's charges at Haileybury college, Adam Elliot, would become an Oscar-winning animator and filmmaker.)
As his young working life found its footing, Stevenson's home life disintegrated. His mother needed to focus on her own recovery. His dad remarried, started a new family, and often left Mat and his brothers – aged just 12, 14 and 16 at the time – to care for themselves. It fell to the eldest, James, to raise the trio. As Mat's profile rose, a TV adaptation of My Brother Tom, starring Gordon Jackson, followed, and then another series, Dusty, with Kris McQuade and Asher Keddie, who was then a child actor herself.
'This other bloke came out of nowhere. I was paralysed, I was a strong young kid, I was a good sportsman, but I was paralysed.'
Mat Stevenson
Not long after turning 18, Stevenson auditioned for a role on Neighbours. That involved a meeting with Jan Russ, the show's legendary casting director, at the Grundy Television (now Fremantle Media) office in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond.
At about the same time, he attended a business ­presentation about becoming a real estate agent. For a kid anxious to please his absent father, it sounded like a stable consolation prize, particularly if his career as an actor came to nothing, as his father had so often predicted. In a later meeting to sign off on a real estate ­licence, he was offered a drink by his prospective mentor and 'the next I knew, I became dizzy. This other bloke came out of nowhere. I was paralysed, I was a strong young kid, I was a good sportsman, but I was paralysed.'
The two men raped Stevenson. 'I blacked out, it was frightful,' he says. 'I woke up the next morning in that room; there was no one to be seen. I was in a fair bit of pain, and I was late for work. I told my dad, I said, 'I think I've just been raped', and he ignored it.'
The topic was far too confronting for his father; the subject was never raised again. Instead, it became repressed in Stevenson's mind in a miasma of shame and anger. The next day, Jan Russ's office called. Stevenson had scored his big break: a role in Neighbours.
From Ramsay Street to Summer Bay
Neighbours had been on the Ten Network for two years when Stevenson joined the cast. Ditched by Seven and resuscitated by Ten, it had been spun into a smash hit by Ten's marketing guru Brian Walsh, who energised its youth appeal by adding Jason Donovan, Guy Pearce and Kylie Minogue to its cast.
The role of Skinner – a local ruffian who nudged good-natured Todd Landers (Kristian Schmid) off the rails and, later, caused so much trouble that Ramsay Street matriarch Helen Daniels (Anne Haddy) suffered a stroke – put Stevenson in the spotlight. 'I just so badly wanted to be there that I suppressed that assault,' he says. 'I was just – bang – straight down into denial.'
After a few months, as his popularity soared, Stevenson was enticed to rival Seven to star in its Neighbours -killing soap Home and Away – this time in quite a different role. He played the mostly good-natured Adam Cameron, and became a mainstay of the series over several years, entering the pop-culture history books as a member of the show's original cast. 'I remember him being a beach-blond-bomb ­hottie,' fellow cast member Nicolle Dickson says now. 'He was just so easy to be with. So much fun. Lots of energy and really natural.'
Dickson played Summer Bay's bad girl Bobby Simpson, described by the show's writers as the town's 'premier juvenile delinquent; the product of 16 years of emotional rejection by her parents'. Dickson describes the experience of fast and furious fame for a cast of teenagers as 'pretty full-on. I don't think any of us ever expected to experience that sort of level of fame. We just wanted a job – and then everywhere you went, people were overwhelmed to see you.'
If Neighbours turned up the heat on Stevenson's personal life, Home and Away became a furnace. A relentless publicity schedule had the show's younger stars working around the clock. Stevenson, who had moved from Melbourne to Sydney for the role – the show was filmed at Seven's Sydney studios, then in Epping, and Palm Beach – found himself spending weekends doing interviews with teen magazines or making appearances at shopping centres, a publicity staple of the era.
'It is a very unusual experience, everywhere you go, that people stare at you, and it takes time to get at ease with that,' Dickson recalls. 'The boys got it more than the girls; teenage girls seem to make more of a fuss about the heart-throbs on the show. I remember the first time we did a shopping centre appearance; everyone was just full-on screaming.'
At the height of his popularity in 1989, Stevenson was on billionaire Kerry Stokes' private jet with Dannii Minogue, John Farnham and Derryn Hinch, flying to the annual Perth Telethon. He was sent to London, where the series had sent ITV's afternoon ratings ­skyrocketing. Interviewed on British TV, Stevenson was told he had the world at his feet. 'Every time I think about my success, I've just got to stop and pinch myself,' Stevenson replied.
'It was like I was allergic to myself ... I just couldn't handle life any more. I didn't have the skills to navigate my way through it.'
Mat Stevenson
Off camera, though, he remembers 'going back into the dressing room and just breaking down in tears. Inside, I just felt like my soul was being ripped out … I wanted to scream.' Stevenson pauses for a moment, adding: 'I didn't know how to unpack the pain, so I'd mask it. I built a character around me, which was the character that people saw. He looks laid-back, he looks laconic, he looks like he doesn't care about much. I had to hide those demons that were inside. It was really painful, and I found that it would spike whenever I had absolute moments of success or joy.'
When Stevenson's father died suddenly of a heart attack in 1990, he was given just three days of bereavement leave, such was the show's grinding production schedule. He had already resolved some of the earlier father-son conflicts, however. 'I was lucky enough to write him a letter before he died, just saying, 'Look, I know you had a tough life, I just want to thank you for everything',' says Stevenson. But despite having made his peace with him, the grief proved a trigger point for the young man.
'I was full of self-loathing,' he remembers. 'It was like I was allergic to myself. My dad's death really ramped up my high-risk behaviour: alcohol and gambling. I shut down. I put up this facade that I didn't give a shit. I just couldn't handle life any more. I didn't have the skills to navigate my way through it. '
Stevenson, who was living in a share house in Sydney's Lane Cove at the time, was wrestling with competing pressures. On a night out in Sydney he was targeted by street thugs, who called him 'that faggot from Home and Away ', and he wound up with a fractured eye socket, two broken ribs and three fractured ribs. 'I'm not a fighter,' he reflects on the encounter. 'I knew I was going to get flogged. I came out of that ­really poorly. I was put into bed, and then I woke up, and then I was back out in the street, having a drink. I wanted to find the bottom.'
The incident proved to be no wake-up call. Because the show was on a production break, Stevenson never had to explain his injuries to network brass or the press. The downward spiral he describes as 'full-blown self-destruction' continued, leading him to miss an ­audition that cost him a shot at a role in the Mel Gibson film Air America. Finally, in 1994, at the age of 25 and close to breaking point, Stevenson suddenly quit Home and Away. The teen magazines of the era noted only that Stevenson left the show 'to travel'.
Within a year, he was homeless. 'I was just in freefall, suffering in silence, spending what little money I had left and finding solace in the bottom of a schooner glass.' His enemies were 'alcohol and slow horses', he adds with a wry smile.
'I was in an extraordinarily large amount of pain. Not sure if I wanted to die, but really sure I didn't want to live.' An acquaintance from the local TAB offered him a small room. 'How does a bloke who is so driven end up $40,000 in debt, living in a broom cupboard, just destitute?' he asks. When he approached one of his brothers for a loan, he was given some tough love: 'Aren't you tired of making shit decisions?' they asked.
Crunch time soon followed. 'I walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge; it was pissing down, and I remember standing there and thinking, 'Righto, if you want to do it, now's the time,' ' Stevenson recalls. ''But if you don't do it now, it's time to move out of pity town. It's time to move on.' '
At his lowest ebb, it was TV that offered a flicker of distraction. Having found a place to live, Stevenson began to obsessively watch Survivor. 'It resonated with me,' he says. 'All those skills that you need to be ­successful in that show, just endurance on all levels – social endurance, physical, mental – were the skills that I abandoned when I self-destructed. It became an ­anthem for me.'
The parenting embrace
In 2000, when he was 31, Stevenson and his then-­partner Janine became parents to Grace, but not long after the birth, they separated. Still in Sydney at the time, Stevenson returned to Melbourne so the family unit could at least live in the same city, if not for long under the same roof. The following year, Stevenson put acting on hold, started working in a range of hospitality gigs and met his wife Marlene.
'She was the most beautiful person I'd ever seen, [and] I've got no doubt she saved my life,' says Stevenson. 'She comes from a staunch, loving family, and she didn't go anywhere. I tried to push her away because I still hadn't reconciled my depression. I was still drinking a lot. I was still medicating. But she hung in there while I dealt with my abandonment issues.' The pair had a daughter, Madi, in 2003, and finally wed five years later. Marlene, he says warmly, is 'the love of my life'.
I meet Marlene for the first time on a video call. Speaking over a cup of tea in her kitchen, she exudes clarity and sincerity. It's easy to see why Stevenson fell in love with her. In the early days of their courtship, it was difficult to break down his barriers, Marlene tells me. 'There were times where I could have gone, 'See you later,' but you hang in there, and you just have to. He's still ­working on it, but he's come a long way. You've got to admire someone who does that.'
It was Stevenson's younger daughter Madi, now 22, whom he describes as 'strong and courageous', who finally put voice to what everyone was thinking. 'Dad, your head's not right, you need to talk to someone,' she told him straight.
So, he did. He spoke to his wife. He spoke to his friends. He spoke to a therapist. And then, based on a trust which we had slowly built over time, and a kind of unspoken understanding because our professional trajectories had crisscrossed many times over the years, he decided to speak to me.
Before the courts
In 2008, a breakthrough in the investigation into one of Stevenson's rapists led to two other victims being ­identified. The case was headed to court. Stevenson confided in a golfing mate, Anthony Hart, who had ­become a good friend. 'He did not [share much of ­himself] to start with because obviously, he's a product of his celebrity status,' Hart says. '[He would] put on a facade and sort of try to make everyone happy, and he didn't let anyone in because he didn't know anyone and what their intentions were.'
Hart says Stevenson found strength in the realisation that other people had fallen prey to his attacker, and chose to testify in a closed court. His attacker was tried on three charges, including the assault that had haunted Stevenson for two decades. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two years' jail. His subsequent fate is unknown.
The experience was confounding for Stevenson. The police had persuaded him to downgrade the charge to more effectively secure a conviction. One of his schoolmates, Wes Byrns, was called as a witness because, critically, Stevenson had confided in him at the time. 'For Mat, there was a bit of closure in that, maybe,' says Byrns. 'But I also don't know if you ever get over anything like that, or if you do, how you do.'
Despite his frustration, Stevenson was able to close the chapter in his mind. And for the first time in his life, now as a husband and father, he felt like he was standing on terra firma, and better able to pour his energy and focus into others.
Stevenson's older daughter Grace, 25, came out as trans in 2012, aged 12. (Grace is now a social influencer using the Instagram handle @grace.hylandd; her journey has been well documented, including an interview that father and daughter gave to The Project in 2021.)
Grace's sister Madi lives with a number of tissue disorders as well as ADHD. 'She's so vulnerable, but so strong,' Stevenson says tenderly. 'It was she who said to me, 'Dad, your head's not right, you need to go and see someone about it.'
'For their early lives, all Grace and Madi knew of me was an angry dad who was discontent, who was drinking and gambling too much,' he adds. 'Madi was the catalyst for me to really, really address those issues, to get help to actually understand how my head was working. That was the last piece of the puzzle for me.'
Madi describes her father as a complex figure in her early life. 'As I've gotten older, and I've understood things more, we actually understand each other on quite a deep level,' she reflects. 'He's always the person that's cheering the loudest and always telling us to follow our dreams and to do what makes us happy.'
Death of a former co-star
If there is one event that still haunts Stevenson, it is the death of his former co-star and friend, actor Dieter Brummer. At just 45 years old, Brummer, who had played Shane Parrish, one of Summer Bay's seemingly unending supply of 'bad boys', took his life. It made front-page headlines across the country.
In isolation, the event was devastating for Brummer's friends, his former workmates at Home and Away and the legions of fans he had accumulated in just four years on the popular soap. In the context of Stevenson's experience – Brummer was the seventh of his male friends and acquaintances to take his own life – the news was almost incomprehensible.
It was a key moment for Stevenson, who began to realign his life around the issue of mental health: fixing his own, and resolving to help others with theirs. He had been in the process of giving a series of talks on diversity, inclusion and mental health in his day job – he now works in the public sector – and began to incorporate fragments of his own life into those presentations.
'I tell all my mates I love them now. It was awkward at first but we all now tell each other we love each other. It's a generational thing.'
Mat Stevenson
Stevenson rolls off a series of statistics: we lose ­almost nine people a day on average, or 61 a week, in Australia to self-harm; members of the trans community are 36 times more likely to self-harm; and there is a distinct correlation between self-harm and lack of support.
Brummer's memorial service in 2021 was 'a cathartic moment for us', Stevenson says, referring to the show's cast and crew – scattered across the world and isolated because of the pandemic. He organised a video call so they could reflect on Brummer, while also ­helping each other come to terms with their grief. 'I tell all my mates I love them now,' Stevenson says. 'It was awkward at first, but we all now tell each other we love each other. It's a generational thing. We're getting better at it. I couldn't imagine my dad telling his mates he loved them.'
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Stevenson doesn't miss being in the spotlight. 'I had to park my acting career because I didn't have the skills to navigate trauma,' he says. 'If my 18-year-old self knocked on the door and asked to take one of my daughters out, I'd kick him up the arse and send him away. I wouldn't let him near my daughters, let alone any other girl.
'So I had to start loving my younger self. When the clinical psychologist said, 'I'm surprised you're not dead', she gave me validation to go, OK, I didn't have the resilience to push through, but there was a tipping point, and my dad's death was that tipping point. I just faced one mountain too many.'
Though he has a day job, Stevenson never quite left acting behind. In 2020, he landed a small role in the miniseries Informer 3838. And then in 2021, he wrote and directed a short film, A Small Punch in a Little Town. It was not a return to showbiz, but Stevenson seems to enjoy dabbling in the craft that brought him out of himself as a struggling teenager.
His relationship with his now 79-year-old mum is also a source of gratification. 'My objective is to heal, not to hurt,' Stevenson says, reflecting on the complexity of their relationship. 'She's the most courageous woman in the world because she went to the brink, where not many people come back from, but she came back.'
He says that laying his cards on the table in our conversation might finally put to rest the generational trauma that, in his darkest hour, he feared would end up being passed on to his own children.
For Marlene, however, the telling of Mat's story was initially confronting from a privacy perspective. 'I've always been very private,' she confides. 'But I feel it's an important story for him to tell because of what he has gone through. If he can help one person, then I think it's a great thing.'
Madi echoes the sentiment. 'I knew it was going to be confronting, and I think I was a little bit nervous about our family being put out there and into that kind of spotlight,' she says. 'But seeing even just the way that this has changed him, I think it's helped him in a way that this has caused him to reflect so deeply on not only how that trauma had affected him, but how it affected the people around him as well.'
In a way, too, the reconnection with his Home and Away graduating class, and other cast members including Craig Thompson (Martin) and Amanda Bendon (Narelle), seems to have brought him full circle.
Dickson describes the reunion at the pub in Bundanoon late last year as 'awesome. It was just so warming and heartfelt, and it's just really special'. The depth of Stevenson's turmoil surprised her. 'I never had any understanding or inkling that he was going through a rough time,' she says.
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'For most of us it was our first big show, and we were late teens, early 20s, and we experienced something remarkable in our lives together,' she adds. 'I think it's very noble of him and great that he can come out and not be ashamed or embarrassed. And I think it's always good when people can have open conversations that make people feel safe.'
And for Stevenson himself? 'I love what I see in the mirror,' he says of himself. 'It's not always been like that. I can't be philanthropic financially because I don't have the money, but what I can do is be philanthropic emotionally.
'The word 'survivor' sums it up. And I couldn't say that before. I would've given you some bullshit excuse about, 'Oh, I've had a few things happen to me', but I now know that I had to deal with a fair bit. And when I look at myself in the mirror, I give myself space to go, 'You know what? You've come a long way and you should be proud of yourself.' '