Barry Du Bois: ‘I’m not going anywhere’

THE Living Room co-host opens up about his cancer battle, his charmed career and “the most difficult conversations you’re ever going to have”.

Barry Du Bois: “If you looked up the statistics, you could comfortably say I’ve got five years to go, but that’s the average. And I’m not your average bloke.” (Pictured here with his The Living Room co-hosts Amanda Keller, Chris Brown and Miguel Maestre)

DROP into Barry Du Bois’s house on any given afternoon, and chances are you’ll find the TV star lying on his back in the garden, staring up at a tree overhead. His five-year-old twins, Bennet and Arabella, will be sprawled next to him, holding hands as they fix their collective gaze on the green patchwork of leaves above them.

“I tell them that if they stare at a leaf long enough, it will fall off,” Du Bois tells Stellar, a wicked smile spreading across his face. When a leaf occasionally comes floating to the ground the twins shriek with excitement, proof of their “magical” powers. It’s a whimsical pastime that’s a far cry from the hustle of Du Bois’s day job as a co-host of Network Ten’s The Living Room, but for the 57-year-old father it is the most cherished part of his day — and a meditative tool. It’s moments like this that give him the strength to fight cancer.

In June last year, Du Bois took a call from his doctor querying why he’d never returned to get his blood-test results. “I figured if there was something wrong, you would have called,” Du Bois said. “Well, Baz, there is something wrong, and I’m calling,” the doctor replied. After years in remission, his past cancer had returned as multiple myeloma, a cancer of the plasma cells, and had run riot through his body.

With Miguel Maestre and a nurse at Sydney’s St Vincent’s Hospital.

“It was all through my pelvis and spine, dozens and dozens of tumours,” Du Bois says softly. For a man who had already survived a giant tumour at the top of his spine and the three-month death sentence doctors gave him in 2010 when he was diagnosed with plasmacytoma, a cancer of the immune system, it was a particularly devastating blow.

The first person he told was his wife of almost 20 years, Leonie. “They’re the most difficult conversations you’re ever going to have,” Du Bois says of breaking the news. Leonie is a strong believer in the healing benefits of nutrition, so once the news had sunk in she sprang into action with plans to overhaul his diet. Then it was time for Du Bois to tell his other family — his co-hosts on The Living Room: Amanda Keller, Chris Brown and Miguel Maestre. As they held back tears, they assured their friend they would be there for him every step of the way. And they seem to have kept their word. In the few hours Stellar spends with Du Bois, Keller calls twice to catch up with the man she calls her “soul buddy”. Each time she rings, Du Bois answers the phone with a giant smile: “Hello, beautiful girl!” As for Brown and Maestre, they are considered brothers. “He said something nice the other day,” recalls Maestre. “He used to call Chris and I his little brothers. But now, since he’s got sick, and we’re looking after him, he says we’re like his big brothers.”

After surviving a giant tumour, Du Bois learnt last year that he once again had cancer.

Staring down the barrel of gruelling treatments and more heartbreaking conversations, Du Bois took stock — and went sailing. “The doctor said we needed to start three months of treatment straightaway, but I said to myself, ‘What if that doesn’t work and I can never go?’” he says of his decision to head to the Mediterranean with his family for a month. (Du Bois is an experienced yachtsman who spent most of his previous life sailing the world as he became a successful property developer.)

His none-the-wiser employer assumed it was just your average holiday. But for Du Bois, it was anything but. “The boat is a love fest. I’ve got those beautiful little babies with me 24/7. We are practically connected at the hip, and I can teach them more in that time than I can ina year in the regular world.”

It may sound like a charmed existence, but Du Bois certainly didn’t come from the wealthy elite. Raised in a fibro house beside a six-lane highway in Sydney’s western suburbs, he grew up arm-wrestling bikies in pubs. A struggle with dyslexia meant reading and writing has always been tough, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him from becoming a phenomenal success. After completing an apprenticeship in carpentry and joinery in 1976, Du Bois gained his building certificate and was mentored by architects before launching his own design, building and property development business. By age 45, a series of clever business and financial decisions meant he had made enough money to comfortably retire.

With his five-year-old twins, Arabella and Bennet, who he and his wife Leonie had via a surrogate after enduring 13 unsuccessful rounds of IVF.

On face value, life had worked out, but inwardly Du Bois was struggling. The grief of watching his mother die in 2004 after a long and painful battle with cancer — first in her breast and then her bowel — hit him hard. Then, the following year, Leonie was diagnosed with cervical cancer after she miscarried during what was the couple’s 12th unsuccessful round of IVF. While she went on to fully recover, Du Bois began to slide into depression.

“I was dark,” he says. “I don’t think I ever really considered taking my own life, but I didn’t want to be Baz anymore. I just wanted to leave my world and become a wanderer, to go places where people didn’t know me. Leonie could see me spiralling. She told me I wasn’t the guy she knew.” He credits his recovery only to her tireless persistence: she pushed him to seek help. These days, he’s an ambassador for mental-health charity R U OK?

As if all that wasn’t enough, along came his own cancer — but like with most things in hindsight, Du Bois can always see the silver lining. He recalls sitting in his doctor’s office in 2010, his wife sobbing beside him, as the couple digested the news he had three months to live after that tumour was found in his spine.

Then his phone rang — it was a casting agent who wanted him for a show. “You call me back in three months, and if I answer the phone I’m going to do it,” Du Bois replied. And he did — after making it through a high- risk 15-hour spinal surgery and a bout of intense radiation. The next year, he appeared in his first TV role as a building mentor and judge on reality show The Renovators. By 2012, he had landed the job on The Living Room and he and Leonie welcomed the children they had longed for after enlisting the help of a surrogate.

Barry Du Bois features in Stellar magazine.

Those children are one of the reasons Du Bois has written Life Force, a collection of his life’s stories and chronicle of his battle with cancer. It is co-authored by Maestre, who contributed healing recipes designed in collaboration with oncologists at the Chris O’Brien Lifehouse in Sydney’s Camperdown. The centre has been pivotal to Du Bois’s holistic approach to recovery, which has included overhauling his diet, working on his gut health, exercising regularly, having acupuncture, and practising mindfulness meditation. When Stellar meets him there, Du Bois’s cheeks are rosy and his eyes bright, despite a “double lethal dose” of chemotherapy in January.

“If you looked up the statistics, you could comfortably say I’ve got five years to go, but that’s the average. And I’m not your average bloke,” he says of the intense health regimen he started to ready his body for treatment. “The day I went into hospital, I looked like an athlete. I trained like I was training for the Olympics. I wanted to get myself into the best possible shape to fight. I can’t leave my children now, no way can I leave them. And my wife... I’m not going anywhere.”

Life Force by Barry Du Bois and Miguel Maestre (Echo Publishing, $34.99) is out on Tuesday, May 1.