Kate Langbroek: ‘Why I’d do lockdown in Italy all over again’
Kate Langbroek reveals what she learnt from the off-kilter experience of moving her family to Italy, just as her newly adopted home became the face of the global Covid pandemic.
Stellar
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Kate Langbroek believes every family has a special skill… which is why she’s concerned by the particular prowess shown by her own. “Our family is really good at lockdowns,” she tells Stellar half-jokingly.
“They say if you do the thing you love for an hour a day, within five years you’ll be at the top of your field, and I really hope our family thing is not lockdown.”
Being in Italy for the beginning of the pandemic and now back in Melbourne for what is hopefully the end of it, Langbroek points out that her tribe of six has had considerable practice with confinement.
Having moved in early 2019 to Bologna – from where she initially continued her Hit Network radio show with Dave “Hughesy” Hughes – the family saw its travelling adventure come to an abrupt standstill when Italy became the first country after China to face a major Covid outbreak and subsequent restrictions last March.
“We were the first in and it looks like we’ll be the last out,” Langbroek says from her home in Melbourne, which opened up again on October 22 – making it the world’s
most locked-down city, having lived through more than 250 days in lockdown during the pandemic.
It’s not lost on the radio and television presenter that her motivation for a family adventure, chronicled in her forthcoming memoir Ciao Bella! Six Take Italy, was to give her and her husband Peter Lewis a close and enriching experience with their four children. She just didn’t realise how close.
“We’ve had moments of frustration but I’ve realised my family are pretty nice people to be locked up with,” she says. “The kids are resilient, positive, never bored and happy… although I have a 16-year-old daughter, so that’s a relative concept.”
It’s also testament to Langbroek’s resilience that she’s still laughing even though her dreams of living another year of la dolce vita – they were only meant to be in Italy for a year but decided to stay for 2020 as well – evaporated once the pandemic struck.
Conceived from a deep desire to seize life after the couple almost lost their eldest son Lewis to leukaemia, the dream of living an Italian idyll might have so easily soured if any one of them had given in to negativity.
Instead, as she documents in her book, disagreements were ironed out, exercise became a creative concept, and even special anniversaries could be celebrated with a glass of prosecco in the garden as the sun faded.
Langbroek says it was an honour to witness how the Italians handled being at the forefront of the crisis, even if she would often turn to her children – Lewis, now 18, Sunday, 16, Artie, 14, and Jannie, 12 – and point out the odds of them choosing Bologna for their sojourn.
The fact was they had dealt with far worse. Back in 2009, Lewis was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, a type of cancer that affects the blood and bone marrow.
He was just six years old. At the time Langbroek was hosting her radio show with Hughes and while her co-host knew what the family was going through, she kept the gruelling and frightening three-and-a-half-year battle from her listeners.
Having seen her little boy so close to death, by the time he was given the all-clear in 2013, she decided she would embrace life and all its possibilities.
“During that time we didn’t have choices, and when you’ve experienced someone you’re entrusted with nearly dying, you start to focus on what really matters to you,” she explains.
“When Lewis was sick, it was too dangerous to be away from a hospital, so when that danger was removed I wanted to do what I thought would be good for our family.”
Naturally there were detractors. Some tutted at the children’s schooling being interrupted. Others queried how they’d get on not speaking the language.
There were mutterings about her leaving at the peak of her career, not just on radio but also on television, where she regularly appeared on Have You Been Paying Attention? and The Project. Even her parents hated the idea.
But Katherine Elizabeth Wilhelmina Sharon Beuving Langbroek was not to be swayed.
“Sometimes other people’s thinking overwhelms your own and if you try to see the little kernel of yourself, and serve that first, you might make different choices,” she tells Stellar.
“It’s your life and the things you choose to be a servant to are different to the things you’re forced to be a servant to.”
Having grown up as a Jehovah’s Witness and lived in different countries due to her parents’ work as missionaries, she could see the benefits of fresh experiences. Indeed, she says plenty of people who work in the arts come from peripatetic backgrounds and enjoy a wider world view.
“You form a different picture of yourself – not when you’re surrounded by people who are the same as you, but when you’re with people who are different from you. You realise where the outline of yourself is.”
A curiosity about her adopted country and her attempts to fit into it underpin Langbroek’s hilarious memoir, whether she’s scouting for mortadella (a type of sausage), observing locals’ inability to queue, or smiling as Italian men look up from their coffee to call out, “Ciao, bella” (Hello, beautiful).
As she reveals: “It’s ridiculous how much this thrills me.”
Italians, she’s concluded, are much like Australians in that they yearn for freedom, respect beauty, and embrace nature and humour. That said, she believes the notion of the laconic Aussie is now a myth.
“You only have to see what’s happened in the pandemic to see Australians are not easy-going. We never think we’re this bunch of risk-averse, dobby neighbourhood snitches, but we are,” she observes.
In the same way her comedic eye addresses the nuances in our temperament, her memoir is not simply a gushing love letter to Italy, but also an exposé of its challenges.
Procuring, preparing and serving food to her brood is as much a frustration as an adventure, particularly as she loses her mind when she can’t find sour cream or her “stupid sticking frypans” ruin the pancakes.
But food also deepens her relationship with son Lewis, who, ironically, was the least enthusiastic to travel to Italy. During the Italian lockdown, the pair began cooking together; now back home in Melbourne, the teenager turns out restaurant-quality dishes, such as the homemade tortelloni filled with ricotta he recently served up.
During Stellar’s interview with his mum, he hears her chatting about him and she puts the phone on speaker mode. Does he miss Italy? “Just my friends,” he says. “Well, that’s missing Italy,” quips his mum. “People are the place.”
Langbroek has chosen not to be over-protective of this son she nearly lost and rarely reflects on what might have been. Illness, she says, can create an imbalance in a family.
While in Italy, she and Peter let Lewis go travelling through Eastern Europe with a mate even though he was only 15. When he recently announced he’ll move out of home once he’s finished school next year, she was thrilled.
“Lots of parents raise their children so they’ll stay because of what that means for themselves, but I’m like, ‘yes!’ – not because I want him to go necessarily, but because I love that for him.”
Personal freedom is a central philosophy for Langbroek, undoubtedly because of the curtailment she experienced being raised a Jehovah’s Witness. She broke away from the faith aged 18, and her brother and parents soon followed, but it still informs her perspective.
Recently she went head-to-head with co-host Hamish Macdonald on The Project over mandatory vaccines, saying that while she wasn’t anti-vaccination, she did feel uncomfortable mandating what others should put in their bodies.
“I’m confused that everyone is so militant and happy about it,” she tells Stellar. “I don’t want to see people disfellowshipped from their lives. I witnessed it growing up, and it’s a cruel and effective means of control.”
The legacy of the faith runs deep and it’s easy to see why her life is centred around family and loyal friends.
“The values and sense of community [within the faith] is good until you decide to leave, and then you discover all the love they supposedly had for you was dependent on what you believe. I was raised in a cult and to see the emergence of other cults is unsettling.”
Her background also informs her view on ageing. At 56, she feels she waited so long for her life to begin that she doesn’t feel as deeply into it as she possibly should. Consequently, she pays little attention to the passing years.
“I’m not mad about people who dwell on ageing,” she says. “I still have this belief that if I started practising for an event in the Olympics and I worked really hard, I could be in the next Games.”
Despite working alongside Hughesy for 18 years, she says she couldn’t put her family through a move to Sydney to co-host the breakfast show with him when she returned from Italy.
She’s grateful for the past year with her father Jan, who died in August, and is now hosting the 3pm Pick Up on the KIIS Network three times each week with Monty Dimond.
She loves working with women – pointing out that the conversations tend to be circular rather than linear, which they often are with men – though she believes mums are universally corralled into a narrow stereotype.
“You have to remember who you are,” she says emphatically. “It’s so limiting and depressing.”
With her husband’s Melbourne bar closed due to lockdown, Langbroek laughingly points out that few couples have spent so much time together pre-retirement. While her memoir covers the highlights – including getting stoned together in Amsterdam – she also chronicles the tensions.
“We’ve had such a beautiful time together, even in the worst of times when it’s been hard,” she says. “There’s no-one else I could imagine doing it with.”
So despite Italy’s dodgy plumbing, the absence of decent potato peelers and the European preference for dark chocolate (she prefers Milky Bar), one has to wonder if she would do it all again.
“Absolutely,” she says, already nostalgic about the time she spent in the “glorious boot”. As she says: “Life isn’t supposed to be endless ecstasy, but you’ve got to be responsible for your own life and your own happiness. So many people don’t do things they want, but I believe you have to be alive in your own life.”
Ciao Bella! Six Take Italy by Kate Langbroek (Simon & Schuster, $32.99) is out Thursday.
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