Susan Carland: Much more than just Mrs Waleed Aly
SHE is half of one of the most prominent couples in Australia — but the highly accomplished Dr Susan Carland is about to step out of the shadow of her famous husband once and for all.
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ACADEMIC. Author. Media personality. Dr Susan Carland wears a number of hats professionally, but she argues her best title yet is “quizmaster”, which has been bestowed upon her thanks to another new role — as the host of SBS’s new quiz show Child Genius.
Not least, we imagine, because she can now throw random questions at people.
“I agree. That’s now what I do,” Carland jokes with Stellar. “I just ask my kids, my husband, ‘What is the capital of Chile?’ That’s my job now.”
One would think that her husband Waleed Aly — academic, columnist and co-host of Network Ten’s The Project — would have it in the bag on Child Genius, a show that features highly intelligent children vying for the coveted position of Australia’s smartest kid.
But one would be wrong.
“The questions [on the show] are so hard,” Carland says. “I was practising one day and I said to my husband, ‘How do you think you would spell this word?’ and he had a go. He got the first letter wrong.” The sheer brilliance of the child prodigies made her feel “like a complete fool from day one”, she admits.
It’s hard to imagine many occasions the accomplished Carland does feel like a fool. Bright and curious as a child, she lived with her parents and brother Michael in Melbourne’s Forest Hill until her parents divorced when she was seven. Despite being raised a strict Christian, at 17 she decided to look beyond Christianity to see what might suit her better.
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“I just started to wonder why I believed what I did,” she says of that time. “I wondered, ‘Is it because I think it’s true, or is this just the religion I’d been raised to believe in?’ So I decided to investigate different faiths and different ways of being and to my surprise, Islam made a lot of sense to me.”
Despite initial assumptions that Islam was a violent and sexist religion, Carland changed her mind. These days she’s nonchalant, but she recalls how nervous she was to tell her parents of her decision.
“I can really understand now, as a mother. I’ve got a 15-year-old [daughter Aisha] and an 11-year-old [son Zayd] and I can understand if one of them came home to me and said, ‘Oh, I’ve decided to join this religion that you don’t really know much about and everything you do know about it looks pretty bad.’ I’d be pretty concerned too,” she tells Stellar.
“But I have an amazing relationship with my mum and my dad — they’re both incredibly supportive and encouraging.”
It’s commonly assumed that Aly, who is also of Muslim faith, was the reason Carland renounced Christianity, yet she insists it isn’t the case. At the Logies this year while onstage addressing the audience, media personality Bert Newton said to Aly, “You and I have a lot in common. I think the beautiful story is that your lovely wife made the decision to convert to your faith. It’s news now that Patti [Newton’s wife] has done the same for me. She now drinks and she has her own TAB account.”
Carland shrugs off both the assumption and Newton’s joke. “It’s something that I get a lot. That’s sort of the way that it is,” she says. “In [Newton’s] defence, I actually think he was trying to be as polite and respectful as he could while just trying to get to the joke he was trying to make. As much as possible, I’m always going to try and give people the benefit of the doubt and let things slide.”
In a story worthy of a rom-com, Carland and Aly met when they were both 16 and a few years later he called her and asked her out, telling her they would make a good match. Her response was brutal: “I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last person on Earth.”
According to Carland, Aly handled the rejection graciously. “He moved on with his life and I moved on with mine, but I realised, in the back of my mind, I was always comparing other guys to him. And I was, ‘Why am I doing that? I don’t even like this guy.’ And then I realised: ‘Oh, I really do like him. Oh no, what have I done?’” she says with a laugh. “So I had to go grovelling back.”
Aly acknowledges the rejection was “obviously pretty crushing, but what else could I do?” He tried to move on but admittedly didn’t get very far. “Anyway, turns out I must be at my most endearing when I’m completely absent because it actually wasn’t that long before she got back in touch to say she’d made a terrible mistake,” he tells Stellar. They were married in 2002 and now live in Melbourne’s inner-city Richmond.
After 16 years of marriage, Carland says the secret to their union is that they both have a healthy — and sweet — sense of gratitude. “We both sort of look at each other and go, ‘How did I get so lucky?’”
As for Aly, The Project host appears in awe of Carland. “Whatever impression you have [of Carland], you’re underrating her,” he says, perhaps pointing to the habit of some in the media referring to her as “Waleed Aly’s wife” in spite of her impressive credentials.
“On the flip side, if we turned up at the UN or something I’m sure I’d very firmly be Susan Carland’s husband,” Aly points out.
Certainly for her other new gig, hosting the awards ceremony in Melbourne this Thursday for the prestigious L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Fellowship program, which recognises the most outstanding female scientific researchers in Australia, the focus will be firmly placed on women. L’Oréal Australia has now expanded the program to include two Girls in Science forums as well as a mentoring program for female secondary and tertiary students. For Carland, it is a subject close to her heart.
“I did a science degree in university as well as an arts degree. I love science. I remember in my chemistry class, there were maybe only two other girls in there,” she says. “[The program] is about pushing women forward and saying, ‘This is what women in science look like. This is how it’s successful and good and something you can aspire to.’”
While Carland is increasingly used to being in the spotlight in a professional capacity, she finds the attention on her personal life more difficult to reconcile.
She is not afraid to be vocal with her opinions — from the hijab (“How I dress is not a statement on how anyone else dresses. Morality is not defined by the clothes you wear”) to how feminism and Islam can coexist (“I did my whole PhD on Muslim women who fight sexism. I find it a lazy misunderstanding that people just fall back on old tropes, and this can come from inside and outside the Muslim community”).
“What I realised very early on is that if you try to keep everybody happy, you will go bananas,” she says of the risk that can come with speaking her mind.
“There will always be someone who has a problem with what you do. Since when did being universally liked become the goal? The most important people in the world had people who hated them. All I can do is try to live a life of integrity.”
Child Genius airs over two weeks at 7.30pm, November 12—14 and 19—21, on SBS.
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