TONIA Todman is unequivocal. “You won’t find a skerrick of raffia in my house,” she declares. Nor, for that matter, a hessian mouse or anything that remotely resembles a sugar-stiffened crocheted swan. If that were not surprising, her next statement is frankly shocking.
“I don’t particularly like craft,” Todman says.
As her good friend and fellow former Channel 10 host Rove McManus might ask: “What the …?”
This from the woman who once coolly demonstrated on national television how to decoupage a rock? “What can I say … I was compelled,” she laughs. “All I would ever take responsibility for was the method. I gave people the method. Taste is another matter altogether.”
Here at Highbank – the 160-year-old bluestone homestead she lovingly restored with third husband Michael Dowding – good taste is redolent right down to the bowl of freshly picked quinces perfuming the air under the heat of the photographer’s lights.
On one wall hangs the rich scroll of an ancestor painting brought home from one of her trips to China.On the sideboard, a magpie’s nest blown from a tree has been raised to art. “I like to live among things that mean something to me, not just because they are fashionable or the right colour,” Todman says.
At 65 she is trim, her eyes bright with merriment and the voice as pleasantly modulated as ever. But as she sits in the lounge of her home on the outskirts of Kyneton, it’s hard to fathom that in her Channel 10 heyday Todman boasted a bigger mailbag than then Neighbours stars Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan put together.
She had two full-time mail openers to handle requests generated from Good Morning Australia and Healthy, Wealthy and Wise, once attracting more than 60,000 stamped self-addressed envelopes for a fact sheet on how to use PVA glue to cover wooden boxes with fabric.
There was hardly a segment that didn’t benefit from Todman’s appearance and she was game for anything. “For the international kite flying convention at Sale, they had me flying kites in a howling gale and I actually left the ground at one stage, being carried aloft by a huge Chinese box kite. While doing a story in Sydney Harbour about The Rocks area I took to a small rowboat, but no one had anticipated the strong outgoing tide and I was soon heading for the main ferry routes in and out of Circular Quay and had to be rescued.”
Appreciating her comedic talent, Rove worked her into his show with regular “Tonia Todman sightings”.She had a cult following among the gay community who, in one Sydney Mardi Gras, paid her the ultimate tribute with a Tonia Todman float.
Not altogether what was expected of a Tamworth farmer’s wife. “I had been brought up to be a good wife and mother. I was never expected to be a breadwinner and yet I have always worked,” Todman reveals.
She started sewing after the drought of the late ’60s put paid to her husband Tony’s ambitions of following his parents onto the land. “He needed to go back to university, and to pay the fees I started sewing.”
Todman started working for Vogue Patterns, first making up samples, then as a demonstrator, and she eventually became editor of Mode Made magazine for Kerry Packer. “The closest I usually got to him was when I used to park my car beside his in the basement and he had two rottweilers in the back seat of his BMW. It was terrifying if you accidentally happened to brush the car.”
She was already 40 when a Channel 10 programming director asked if she could demonstrate some Mode Made projects on television. It wasn’t her first time on TV. Tonia Barker was a student at the Newcastle Church of England Girls’ Grammar School when she audaciously auditioned for the infant NBN network.
“My headmistress thought I was going to hell,” Todman recalls. “I wanted to be a journalist and a newsreader. My mother made me this wonderful dress of chartreuse peau de soie silk with a belled skirt and satin shoes dyed to match, and a little floral jacket.” She didn’t get the gig but landed a season as a presenter on Swallows Juniors – forerunner to Young Talent Time.
After school she attended shorthand classes in Sydney, but the script was written. She married Tony – her boyfriend of four years – quite oblivious to the young man who sat behind her in that class who still recalls the tortoiseshell clasp at the nape of her neck. He may have waited more than 35 years, but eventually Michael Dowding got the girl. By then Todman’s sons Angus and Simon had grown and she had put a short-lived second marriage full of “mental anguish” behind her.
But now, running her cookery school and B&B, Todman is in a very good place, away from the glare of television which, when it ended, was brutal. “Twenty years and it was all over in five minutes. As I was leaving Channel 10 for the last time I was encouraged to take the large photo of me that had always been on the wall of the green room. This I did, but as I drove out of the car park I got a call asking for the frame to be returned.”
She still has her share of public exposure with the steady stream of B&B guests and students. “There are people out there who still remind me about Wreaths and Garlands and other books [there are 28] I wrote 20 years ago. I can’t escape it – I think it will be with me until I die. I think someone will crochet my headstone.”
On the way out we pass a collection of birds’ nests salvaged by Todman. “I think they are miracles. No one teaches them how to do it. There is no book,” she says.
I raise an eyebrow, imagining the possible title.
“No way,” she laughs. “Absolutely no way.”
