Kathy Lette, Gabrielle Carey and Puberty Blues

Sadly, Gabrielle Carey died on 4 May 2023. I was just about to publish this story about Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey growing up in The Shire, and wasn’t expecting this to be her obituary …

Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette wrote Puberty Blues, sharing their stories as teenagers growing up in the Sutherland Shire and Cronulla. Published in 1979, the novel became an iconic Australian classic, and the 1981 film, directed by Bruce Beresford symbolised the quintessential ’70s Aussie beach lifestyle.

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Puberty Blues tells the story of two teenage girls, Debbie and Sue, from Sydney’s Sutherland Shire growing up with bongs, boys and the beach.

Kathy Lette left Gymea High School in 1975 and Carey had left a year earlier against the wishes of their families.

“I escaped The Insular Peninsular aged 16, desperate to get out into the big, wide world”

“… the only examination I ever passed was a cervical smear test.” – Kathy Lette said.

The stories in Puberty Blues were mostly true anecdotes, sometimes combining characters to fit the narrative.

Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey at Sylvania High School, 1974, before they transferred to Gymea High School. They are in the front row of girls – Gabrielle is second from the right and Kathy beside her third from the right. The groovy teacher is Mr Adams.

Gabrielle Carey went to Gymea High from 1st form, then transferred to Sylvania High for a few months in 1974 before she left school completely. Kathy went to Sylvania High until end of 1974. Kathy transferred to Gymea High for year 11 in 1975.

“In 1979 I co-wrote a novel depicting this surfie tribal culture. When I watch the film and TV adaptations of “Puberty Blues” (Bruce Beresford’s 1980 film and channel Ten’s 2012 mini-series) I’m torn between hilarity and nausea, as both bring back in a raw rush how it felt to be treated as nothing more than a life support to a pair of breasts.“

“Surfie girls were runners up in the human race. Forbidden to ride boards, our only job was to fetch the boys’ chiko rolls, massage their egos and mind their towels.” – How to Kill Your Husband (and other Handy Household Hints), by Kathy Lette

Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey shared a flat together, hung out with Spike Milligan and wrote Puberty Blues, which was based on real events. They also wrote a column for the Sydney “Sun Herald”, and did busking street performances under the name “The Salami Sisters”.

Kathy Lette, Spike Milligan and Gabrielle Carey

The Salami Sisters with their mentor and friend, Spike Milligan

“Compassionate, passionate, profound and poetic, he was also exceedingly generous. Not just with praise, but also with practicalities.”

“Having run away from Sylvania Maximum Security High School, I had absolutely no money. I was busking on street corners with a girlfriend for a living. Spike used to feed and water us and talk to us about life and literature, and even put us up in the odd hotel occasionally.”

“It was like having a sugar daddy, but without the sex: a saccharine daddy.”

“His manager, however, furious at the cost of another hotel room on the bill, brought round his undies and socks one night and demanded we wash them for him in the sink. But that was as dirty as it ever got on tour with the gentlemanly Spike Milligan.” – Spike Milligan and me – Kathy Lette

From left: 1. The Salami Sisters: Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey busking as street performers.
2. 1985 Festival of Sydney production of Kathy Lette’s play “Wet Dreams” at Cell Block Theatre, Paddington, Sydney. © 1985 Mark Anning photo

Gabrielle Carey

In later life, Carey was an academic and scholar with a Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Western Sydney. She taught creative non-fiction writing at the University of Technology, Sydney.

In her early years, Gabrielle Carey was a wild girl. In her early twenties she married a long term Parramatta Gaol inmate Terry Haley who she had met while she was assisting a group of prisoners work on theatre productions in 1979.

Haley was a convicted rapist, armed robber and prison escapee.

“I’m still really, really attached to him, but I can’t afford to be as attached as I am… You can’t go on living on the edge of a precipice” – Carey told The Sydney Morning Herald before leaving for Ireland

After a few years of her relationship with Haley going nowhere, especially after his transfer interstate following a prison riot, Carey moved to Ireland and took up with one of the IRA bosses and spent a year in Ireland in the mid-1980s. During that relationship Carey converted to the Catholic faith.

At 27 she married a coffee worker in Mexico, and returned to Australia in the early 1990s.

Her 2020 book, Only Happiness Here, was shortlisted for the 2021 Nib Literary Award

This is an extract from her 2014 book “Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and My Family”

“My older sister was notoriously rebellious – six years older than me – I always looked up to her. Expelled from school, she was sent to boarding school, then became a runaway and took acid. She even had her own little business making tie-died T-shirts, which she sold at the flea markets – a pretty, blond hippy drop-out with a boyfrind who also had hair down to his waist, sang the blues and screen-printed radical posters at Sydney University’s swarming centre of insurrection: the Tin Shed. Man, my sister was cool. I had a lot to live up to by the time I got to high school.“

“During my first year at Gymea High I soon realised that I would never achieve my sister’s legendary standing. She was a way better rebel than me – more effective, more articulate. I couldn’t get expelled even when I tries; I had to walk out in a huff at at lunchtime one day. And even then, no-one noticed.“

“Now I realise that we both were trying to be like our father. Our father was the best rebel of all. As a child, I sometimes went to the university during the school holidays and could see that my father wasn’t like anyone else there. All the other men wore ties …” – an extract from Gabrielle Carey’s 2014 book “Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and My Family“

Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette had a falling out after Puberty Blues.

“She’s got the talent to do some serious literature, but she doesn’t do it because she prefers fame and fortune and Mickey Mouse, high-profile sort of stuff.” – Gabrielle Carey said of Kathy Lette

In 2002, they both appeared on ABC TV’s Australian Story and the relationship reconciled, to a degree.

Kathy Lette

After writing Puberty Blues, Lette moved closer to inner-city Sydney and married Kim Williams, then head of the Australian Film Commission, who went on to head Foxtel, then News Corp in Australia. In January 2024 it was announced that Kim Williams is taking over as Chairman of the Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC) from Ita Buttrose.

“Its not an open marriage, but it is slightly ajar” – Kim Williams said during a breakfast TV appearance with Lette in 1985.

In 1988 during the TV show “Hypothetical”, Lette met human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson who was dating TV chef Nigella Lawson at the time. Two weeks later, Robertson proposed and Lette followed her “knight in shining Armani” to London.

“The best things about being a writer are that you can work in your jammies all day; have affairs and call it research; drink heavily on the job and squander whole afternoons xeroxing your labia.” – Kathy Lette

Robertson and Lette married in 1990 and they have two children, Julius and Georgina.

Kathy Lette’s books on Amazon

Left: Kathy Lette at Cell Block Theatre, during production of her play, Wet Dreams.
Right: Wet Dreams cast: Christina Totos, Sandi Lillingston and Gia Carides. John Doyle (of Roy & HG fame) played the male antagonist. © 1985 Mark Anning photos

Kathy Lette, Shire girl

“When I tell European pals that I’m a “Shire Girl” they think I’m some kind of hobbit. In 1955, my father, Mervyn (he worked in Optic Fibre; his four cheeky daughters nicknamed him ‘Optic Merv’) won a hundred-pounds in a race to find rugby league’s fastest front row forward. He used the prize money to buy a block of land on Oyster Bay.“

“Dad built a garage on the block and that’s where we lived. This was not because Dad was abnormally fond of his automobile, but the post war shortage of tradesmen, money and materials meant it was common practise for couples to live in the garage until they had enough money to expand, room by room. Sewer mains were not constructed until the 1980’s. In other words, The Shire was a suburb in the bush.“

“And what a heavenly haven. Bordered by Botany Bay, Cronulla Beach, George’s River and the great lungs of the Royal National Park, it’s known as the Insular Peninsular. Growing up here in the 60’s, the most dangerous thing in a ten-mile radius was a bad oyster. Not that we ever found one. These plump, succulent molluscs were in such plentiful supply that we kids fed them, with Marie Antoinette insouciance, to the cats.” – Kathy Lette

another Gymea High alumni, Debra Adelaide

… The Household Guide to Dying by Debra Adelaide … another Gymea High alumni.

“Adelaide was not raised for the intellectual life she has led. She grew up in “the Shire” of southern Sydney and went to Gymea High School with Gabrielle Carey, who remains a friend. But while Carey became a surfie chick, dropped out of school and found fame with Kathy Lette as co-authors of Puberty Blues, Adelaide was a “goody-goody” whose strict parents did not allow her to go to the beach.”

“It was Carey’s mother who said she could do better than hairdressing and her English teacher, the feminist writer Lynne Spender, who said she was smart enough to go to university and perhaps teach English. Adelaide got herself to Sydney University on a teacher’s scholarship and after coming second in her English honours year slid into tutoring and then a masters degree.” – Debra Adelaide

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