Thrilled to be expecting her third child, Sarah Murdoch talks to Lee Tulloch about motherhood and what it’s like to have married into a high-profile business dynasty. Untainted by power or fame, Sarah has remained her own person, working tirelessly for a raft of charities – and on a documentary series she finds moving and inspiring.
“Please don’t let this be another story about Mrs Murdoch.” The most accessible member of the Murdoch clan rolls her eyes and smiles to let me know she’s not quite serious. “Marriage, motherhood – it’s always that. I’d much rather be private about my life.”
Sarah Murdoch is smiling because she knows there’s a contradiction in what she asks. The former supermodel, Bonds underwear ambassador, Australia’s Next Top Model host and tireless fundraiser for a slew of causes, from breast cancer to children’s health, pops up everywhere these days: running on a treadmill in Sydney’s Martin Place in the Foxtel Lap to raise money for the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, delivering a speech on a new breast cancer initiative at the National Press Club, sporting a big pink satin bow and a bigger grin on the red carpet at an Estée Lauder fundraiser, launching politician Tony Abbott’s book, Battlelines, before a savvy political crowd, and, from November 3, fronting a television series, Pride of Australia, that looks at the lives of 28 unsung Australian heroes, on Foxtel’s Arena.
Try as she might to keep her public and private worlds separate, the two keep dovetailing. She might be reluctant to talk about her family, but sometimes there’s no getting around it. For the past three months, she has been wearing caftans and baggy shirts to hide what is now obvious to everyone — she is expecting her third child.
Sarah, 37, and husband Lachlan, 38, are overjoyed that sons Kalan, five and Aidan, three, will have a new playmate, but Sarah is not looking forward to the scrutiny her growing baby bump is about to get. For the most part, she is feeling the vulnerability that most women feel early in their pregnancies.
“I wish I were further down the track before talking about it,” she admits. “There are ups and downs with every pregnancy and you don’t want to go through these with everybody.”
Yet there was little chance it would go unnoticed. The cat was well and truly out of the bag a couple of weeks ago when she appeared at a Breast Cancer Foundation event in a purple satin dress, displaying a very defined curve in front.
The evolution of Sarah Murdoch
Nor can she go to ground and ride out the next few months away from public view. In the first months of the pregnancy, she had to forge on with the narration of Pride of Australia, while suffering awful bouts of morning sickness. “I was quite nauseous through the whole thing,” she recalls.
Now that she’s feeling better, she has her causes and Pride of Australia to promote, as well as preparation for the new season of Australia’s Next Top Model, which will start filming in March. The newest Murdoch is due in April, so timing will be “tricky”, she says. Trickier still is a bad case of “pregnancy brain”, which, she says, gets worse with every baby. “I just walked into a wall!” she says, with a laugh.
Read more from this interview in the November issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly out now with Sarah Murdoch on the cover.
Sarah Murdoch appeared on this month’s cover of The Australian Women’s Weekly with no retouching or airbrushing. Would you like to see more of this in future editions of the magazine? And is she the ultimate role model? Tell us below!
