Mia Handshin shares how a series of setbacks saw her step out of the public glare

She was very much in the public eye as a columnist, star Labor political candidate and head of the EPAM. Mia Handshin explains why she then vanished from the public eye.

5th September 2024 – SA WEEKEND – Mia Handshin was an up and coming Labor star and has recently started the female empowerment podcast and networking community called the Oyster Sisters, with Taryn Brumfitt (Oz of the Year) and Dr Gemma Munro. Photo: Naomi Jellicoe

Mia Handshin shifts uncomfortably on the cushioned bench, as if wanting to realign the way her body fits together. This is how life is for her at the moment, seven months after a car accident that derailed her already complicated life and fractured her spine.

Handshin, 46, at the start of this year was stepping back into public life with an ambitious podcast driven by female empowerment, the Oyster Sisters, a collaboration with friends Taryn Brumfitt, former Australian of the Year and body positivity activist, and Dr Gemma Munro, a transformational speaker and coach.

The Oyster Sisters was Handshin’s creative re-emergence after a tumultuous time in which she was forced into retreat.

She juggled work as an executive leadership coach and facilitator with an exceptionally painful end to a marriage while facing life as a single mother with three young children. About resilience, she knows a lot.

Handshin, a golden girl in every way, was destined for public life from her start as an opinion writer for The Advertiser, aged 19. She was a climate change advocate, a feminist, a fearless public speaker and a leader with her own business, Mana of Speaking, that taught and inspired others.

In 2006 she fell in love and married and soon after her ascent began with a knock on the door from Labor asking her to run as their federal candidate in Sturt, the tightly held, affluent urban electorate of Liberal minister, Christopher Pyne.

After more than a decade of John Howard’s government, change was in the air and Handshin was seen as capable of winning. She did not hesitate.

“I wasn’t aligned to a party for many years of political activism before then, but leading up to the 2007 election I felt very strongly about issues like climate change and higher education and Australia’s international standing,” she says. “I realised it was time to put myself on the line.”

Mia Handshin was an up and coming Labor star and has recently started the female empowerment podcast and networking community. Photo: Naomi Jellicoe

Sturt was a good fit for a young woman wanting to make a difference and she spent her first wedding anniversary doorknocking with her husband at her side. She encountered sexism and some nastiness, although nothing compared with fellow Labor candidate, Nicole Cornes, whose campaign for the seat of Boothby was annihilated by criticism that she was unready for the job. They were both blonde women and Handshin admits she dyed her hair reddish brown in the hope of being taken more seriously.

It was a tough campaign and Pyne just held on to his seat in a swing that elected prime minister Kevin Rudd and established Handshin as a future Labor star.

To learn the political ropes, she became a political adviser and spent time in Canberra in the office of the member for Adelaide and federal minister Kate Ellis. Then in 2012 she was appointed, controversially, to head the South Australian EPA, a significant agency responsible for air and water quality and the control of pollution. Such a rapid rise pushed her self-belief to the limit and she was, by her account, experiencing episodes of burnout as she failed constantly to meet her own standards.

“(As a candidate) I felt that I had to work incredibly hard to prove myself worthy,” she says. “I may have changed my hair colour to try to change other people’s opinions of me, but what was going on inside my own head was what kept tripping me up.”

She was prone to self-doubts about how well she had managed a policy issue or handled a public meeting. Working for Kate Ellis, she would put in a long day then go home and write a list of things she could have done better.

“Those patterns of energy were very depleting of my energy and resources,” she says.

Handshin as an arts law student at the University of Adelaide, who was elected delegate for Republicans at 1998 Constitutional Convention. Picture: Supplied

Mia Handshin had been selected as the Labor Candidate for the seat of Sturt. Picture: Ray Murray

Walking into the EPA job attracted hostility from parts of town who were not about to accept a young woman boss with a good resume and a law degree but no background in environmental science. She met the challenge head-on and invited industry leaders into a conversation.

“I gathered myself up from these conversations and meanwhile what was going on inside my head was my own dance of doubt,” she says. “I was 35, there were a lot of people around my board table and stakeholders who were my seniors and had more experience in environmental regulation.”

She did the work, found mentors and called in advisers. Then out of the blue came one of the agency’s biggest public crises, the Clovelly Park toxic water contamination scandal that spread to neighbouring Mitchell Park and raised specialised questions about who knew what and when about the impact on groundwater of dumped toxic chemicals.

Handshin, who was just pregnant with her second child when she took the appointment, went to town hall meetings to confront 300 or more very angry people – armed, she says, with their notional pitchforks – whose future and properties were on the line.

She came through it scarred but with – again in her words – a whole lot of leadership learnings that she has gone on to share with thousands of others, about dealing with crises and communicating from the heart. It is no surprise that her greatest strength, her ability to communicate, was her legacy at the EPA which she says now has a renewed commitment to community engagement.

In 2016 she was down but not out and pregnant with her third child as she finished her EPA term. She did what so many women do, which is to juggle breast feeding and childcare with meetings and appointments and, with support, she would have gone on to another leadership role. But her private life was starting to shift.

“I found myself in a situation where at home I was with a person who I could not recognise as my husband, as the person I had married,” she says.

Handshin is careful to respect her ex-husband’s privacy but their relationship deteriorated and in 2017 they separated. She had just gone back to consulting and the youngest of their three children was still breastfeeding but she had to accept the stress and turmoil that separation was about to rain down.

“I had to take that decision, I had to make the leap,” she says.

Over the next uncertain year, she shared the children with their father every second weekend with growing concern until she noticed him fumbling around unable to locate the handle on a child’s bag. She urged him to see a doctor and within a week he was in surgery having a brain tumour removed. It was benign but huge and pressed on his frontal lobe which affects executive function including emotion recognition and regulation.

“They successfully removed the tumour that was about a third the size of his brain. It was clear now what he had been going through and why his personality and behaviour had been affected,” she says.

He began a 12-month recovery during which he could not care for the children and was left with no sense of taste or smell.

Handshin says he has since done a remarkable job of coming out the other side and was back to full-time work. They have gone through mediation to put the wellbeing of their children at the centre but their marriage was over. “I cannot gloss over it; it has been a really challenging seven years, of single parenting for nearly five. At times, in the early days, I had to pick myself up from the kitchen floor because my life was such chaos. Some kid had lost their shoe and another had lost their dummy and I’m trying to get out of the house so I could get to work. All of that time I was trying to rebuild my financial foundations,” she says. “It was hell.”

Handshin with supporters on Hectorville Road in Adelaide back during her political campaigning. Picture: Supplied

In 2019 as she began getting her life back on track, she started a new business, LeadersHP, with leadership facilitator and coach Matt Cesaro who she crossed paths while working for SA Health and the SAHMRI Wellbeing and Resilience Centre.

Handshin saw a psychologist while working through the trauma of her divorce and was at the coalface of practising resilience when life goes wrong.

Late last year, she began her first step back into a fuller career in the public eye. Her children, now aged eight, 11 and 15 were older and part of a “Brady Bunch” with Handshin’s new partner Clint, a kind man, she says, who has three children of his own aged in their 20s.

“I was leaning towards creative projects like the Oyster Sisters and writing a book and re-emerging in new ways,” she says.

Her friendships with Brumfitt and Munro are fairly new but also deep and strong. She went to the same school as Munro – a very Adelaide story, she laughs – although she admired Munro from a distance, cheering from the sidelines as Munro launched Inkling Women that supports women leaders across Australia, Asia, the US and Europe.

They met when Handshin, who works in a similar field, made what she admits was an entirely unsolicited approach to Munro after dreaming that they needed to write together.

“At the risk of being a crazy, dream-stalker lady, I reached out to Gem and said, ‘Look, we went to high school together and I had a dream about you and would you like to have coffee?’ I was prepared to push past the ego that says you don’t say that sort of thing. And we connected instantly,” she says.

Meeting Brumfitt, already a friend of Munro, came soon after when they sat together at a birthday celebration and realised they had so much in common. The timing was right for all of them to move forward with a new venture.

“Taryn’s marriage had just ended, I was emerging from a dark night of the soul and Gemma was starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel having sold her business and met her now partner, Ben,” Handshin says.

“We went away on a camping weekend together and sat around a fire, as three women who had been out there publicly, still pretty new in friendship but going pretty deep in terms of what we were sharing.”

The connection, the shared insights from different life paths and the ways in which they held each other accountable for being honest and real made them think it could be the basis of a podcast for women looking for their own campfire community. They gathered 50 women for a feedback session who said they would love to listen to something like this on their commute or at the gym.

The Oyster Sisters – it’s the gritty bits that make the pearl – is a podcast plus. It offers access to motivational content but also networking opportunities and coaching support.

The Inner Shell membership offers 90-minute, online group coaching and will increasingly respond to questions from members. It is a space for women to connect, Handshin says.

Oyster Sisters – Mia with Taryn and Gemma. Picture: Supplied

So the year began for Handshin on an upwelling of hope for her new venture, a degree of contentment with her newly stable life and the feeling she was reclaiming what the past few years had torn from her grasp. Over the summer holidays the three women, plus Brumfitt’s second husband Tim, met at Middleton to go boogie boarding and stopped on the way home, as is the tradition, at the Port Elliot bakery. Munro left first, then Handshin, followed by Brumfitt.

On their podcast, Brumfitt explains how the traffic was suddenly banked up and she mentioned to Tim there had been an accident ahead. She looked over and saw Handshin by the side of the road, at first standing then slumping to her knees and into total collapse.

Handshin, who remembers it all, says her car was T-boned when a woman smashed into her from the right, crashing into the rear passenger door and spinning the car around. “The car spun, the airbags went off. I got out of the car, I was in excruciating pain and very aware that I needed to get myself to safety,” Handshin says.

Brumfitt rang Munro who stopped and ran back and Handshin was flanked by her friends while an ambulance came. When she got out of the car Handshin had been reassuring the woman who caused the accident who kept saying to her, “I didn’t see you! I didn’t see you!”

In the accident Handshin suffered a T2 spinal compression fracture that has impacted everything, every day, and dented a lifetime of independence by forcing her to accept, and to ask for help. For several weeks she could not lift a finger at home and the automatic mothering that included making unmade beds and collecting strewn towels ground to a halt.

She was bedridden for two weeks but went into recovery thinking that bones take six weeks to heal. That was almost seven months ago. Instead of throwing herself into boogie boarding, she has had to make significant adjustments to manage her energy and day-to-day activities, and she experiences daily bursts of pain. She has chiropractic support, physiotherapy, remedial massage and acupuncture and will embark soon on a tailored exercise program to get her strength back.

“I’m 46 and I’ve always been a very active person and it’s been very challenging dealing with pain flares so I want to set myself up for being strong-bodied and capable,” she says.

She suffered nerve damage across her chest and shoulder which takes much longer to heal than bones and she has had to find new ways of doing things that once she gave no thought to. So averse to medication that she had three babies with no pain relief, she spent a time on heavy painkillers and still reaches reluctantly for anti-inflammatory relief.

But she is also humbled by knowing that a millimetre difference could have paralysed her for life. “This was not near-death but it could have been much worse,” she says.

On the podcast she talks openly about her difficulties and says she is still in the “messy middle” but wants to share some of her life’s grit because of what she has learned. She has a formidable toolkit accumulated over 15 tough years and she has developed enough clarity to manage negative ways of thinking.

Interestingly, a return to politics has not been entirely ruled out although, for now, she prefers coaching from the sidelines those who work in the political sphere.

“I feel compelled to continue using my voice creatively,” she says. “So no, politics does not feel as though it’s for me at the moment.”

She is reclaiming public life, on her own terms and with a solid home foundation that puts her children and their wellbeing at the centre. She continues to do leadership and speaking work both here and interstate and works with executive teams or one-on-one.

She is also writing a book, Diamond in the Rough, which she describes as a teaching memoir for midlife women leaders at risk of burnout.

Handshin as a young over-achiever had her first case of executive burnout in her early 20s and sought professional help to get her through. Her midlife unearthing, as she calls it, has placed her on more trusted ground.

“I have shifted the way I see myself, which doesn’t mean I don’t have self-doubt but I am just holding myself differently when it surfaces,” she says. “That’s what I am passionate about supporting other women to do. The truth is, there is a whole lot of stuff going on behind the scenes and when we open up, it actually connects because it’s a human story, right? That’s a really powerful thing.”