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On Channel 7’s quiz show The Chase, Anne Hegerty is all the things you’d expect from her English Governess alter-ego.
Formidable, stern and for the wannabe quizzers who come up against her, I imagine even a tad scary.
But little about the real Anne Hegerty is quite as conventional.
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“I’m really quite an optimist. My feeling is that life gets better and better” the 65-year-old tells me.
“There are so many people my age who sort of look back nostalgically to earlier times and say ‘Life was so much better in the good old days.’ And I look at them and think, ‘No, no, no. You think it was better because your joints didn’t ache and everyone wanted to have sex with you’,” she says.
(Did I mention she’s wickedly funny?)
“I didn’t really have a particularly good childhood. The music was better, but there’s not much else that was better when I was a kid, to be honest.”
Curtis Mayfield’s 1970 hit Move On Up served as the inspirational soundtrack through some of Anne’s darker days.
The opening verse is apt:
“Hush now child
And don’t you cry
Your folks might understand you
By and by
Just move on up
Towards your destination
Though you may find, from time to time
Complication”
Anne’s childhood was indeed, complicated.
Her undiagnosed autism meant she was seen as “odd and unhappy” by people who should have supported her.
“I just grew up feeling like I couldn’t really do anything. My mother never told me I could accomplish anything.”
And while Anne’s father did encourage her, people said he was wrong.
“My dad (was) a complete incompetent in all walks of life. So I did grow up thinking, ‘I’m not really sure I can do things, I’m not sure I can learn to do anything’.”
At the age of 12, Anne’s mother sent her to a child psychologist, followed by boarding school for the next five years.
At first, being in the classroom was a challenge for the now professional quizzer.
“I was so confused by everything, that I basically did what I always do when I’m confused, I just kind of stopped dead and didn’t do anything.
“The grades came out and I was right at the bottom of the class,” she explains.
Those grades were posted publicly.
Mortified at being beaten and considered the “class idiot” Anne put her head down and soon went from the bottom, to the very top — a competitive streak that clearly stuck.
But the deep scars from her childhood have never fully healed.
Years later, when her mother Shirley was dying, Anne raced to be by her side.
Sharing this deeply personal story for the first time, Anne explains through tears how the little girl who was cruelly ignored then was made to feel invisible once more.
“I remember getting to the train station and getting into my aunt’s car, and my aunt thumping the steering wheel and say, ‘Now listen to me. Listen to me. Shirley is very ill. She’s very ill indeed. She may be dead by the time we get there’.
“And I was like, ‘Yeah, could we, could we get a move on? Would that be OK?’”
Anne’s aunt made her promise to do exactly as she was told and leave the family home when she was instructed.
She spent just 15 minutes with her mother, who was unconscious.
“And then I had to leave. Aunt Jill made me leave and go back to the hotel.”
Her mother died a few days later and Anne received a letter from a relative.
“It basically said, ‘We are so grateful that you stayed away. If you had been here, she would have died in chaos and confusion.’ I just remember looking at this letter and thinking, ‘That’s me. I bring chaos and confusion, apparently’.”
It was, says Anne, the worst thing that’s ever happened to her.
“Not so much my mum dying, as just that whole feeling of just being un-personed,” she says.
Feeling invisible was for a long time a theme of Anne Hegerty’s life.
Like more than 200,000 Australians, she lives with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Anne was diagnosed at the age of 45, after stumbling across a TV documentary about the developmental disorder.
“Something in it clicked with me,” she says.
“I had a look at the actual diagnostic criteria and I thought, ‘oh my God’, this is bringing together so many things that I did as a child or possibly still do that seem to have no connection except that they were weird and inexplicable, and I did them and nobody ever knew why.”
Nowadays, structure is the key to keeping her life on track.
Anne’s house is organised — very organised.
It’s designed in a way to complement how her brain works — a giant table in the dining room divided into sections to lay things out, sits next to colourful boxes allocated to different aspects of her work and travel.
Anne mentally writes herself “a critical path” daily.
“It will be something like, ‘OK, put your knickers on. Now put your bra on. Clean your teeth, then put your top on, and then, right, you are now up. Now you can pull back the curtains.’ Just kind of trudging through all this stuff that everything else can do absentmindedly,” she explains.
What Anne does absentmindedly (and phenomenally well) is quiz.
It’s a skill she turned into a profession in 2010, first on Britain’s ITV quiz show The Chase, before joining Seven Network’s version five years later.
“I always felt I have a brain like a Rolodex. If I know it, then it’s there.”
It’s a job that’s turned her life around; from financial debt and emotional turmoil to fame and fulfilment.
“There’s one thing I can do and it turns out people like watching me do it and would even pay me to do it and that gives you a bit more confidence” she tells me.
She’s humble, but Anne Hegerty has also become a role model for people living with autism.
“A lot of people are terrifically excited, you know, that there’s a famous autistic person out there, talking 19 to the dozen, holding down a pretty damn well paid job, doing OK and going to parties and so on.
“I think it makes people happy seeing I’m coping, as it were,” she says.
After spending time with the wonderful Anne Hegerty?
I’d say the last verse of Move On Up sums it up perfectly.
“Take nothing less
Than the supreme best
Do not obey rumours people say
‘Cause you can pass the test
Just move on up
To a greater day
With just a little faith, if you put your mind to it
You can surely do it.”
Watch 7NEWS Spotlight: The Secrets of The Governess on 7plus.