Tara Moss: ‘Aren’t you too young to use a walking stick?’
Former model turned bestselling author and human rights activist Tara Moss opens up about why she was initially embarrassed to leave the house sporting a walking stick at the age of 46.
Stellar
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Tara Moss celebrated her 46th birthday last month doing what she loves most. That is to say, whatever she damn well pleases.
The former model turned bestselling author and human rights activist long ago made a name for herself by forcefully challenging conventional wisdom around how women should look, behave or carry themselves – at 46 or any other age.
So on her big day, as she has for the past 18 months, Moss stepped out rocking strands of grey hair, accessorising her look with a walking stick named Wolfie, which she has used intermittently since a 2016 hip injury left her with severe nerve pain and mobility issues.
And, she tells Stellar, she never felt more fabulous.
“Men look amazing with silver hair,” Moss says. “I find it very attractive. I find it very attractive on women as well.”
“Not everyone is going to like what I look like or my hair – and I can’t really care about that. I was a blonde when I was a little girl, but somewhere along the way I became a dramatic smoky brunette.”
“All that summery cheer has left my hair and I’ve become the woman in the backstreet bar in the film noir. Somehow it fits. I like the fact there is an integrated quality between my hair and my age.”
She’s documented her embrace of her greys – she prefers the term “wisdom highlights” – on Instagram, where she also keeps a separate account page for that walking stick, in the hope she can normalise the fact she uses one.
“I’m not super-young, but I’m young enough that I still get weird questions from people saying, ‘Aren’t you too young to use a stick?!’” she says.
“For the first few years, I avoided using it outside the house because I didn’t want the comments or the stares. But visibility matters. It’s about being comfortable with the image that someone who is not white-haired yet still needs to use a walking stick.”
Late last month it was reported that Moss is suing a doctor in NSW’s Blue Mountains, accusing him of professional negligence.
Regardless of the outcome, Canadian-born Moss is owning her condition with the same level of confidence she seems to have had in spades since she arrived in Australia 23 years ago. With her striking features, 1.8m figure, fondness for wearing vintage clothes (she doesn’t own a tracksuit and believes her most unglamorous outfits are the ones she hikes in) and signature red lip (worn nearly every day), she’d perhaps look more at home on the set of a film noir than at a social gathering in Sydney or Melbourne.
Top it all off with her full-throated championship of women’s rights and representations, and it is little surprise she has attracted equal amounts of praise and criticism.
“I’m pretty open,” is Moss’s explanation for the intense reactions on both sides. “And this is how I come. You have to live your life that way, particularly women. It’s helpful for us to spend as little time as possible trying to interpret other people’s interpretations of us. Especially the superficial stuff.”
It started in 1999, when a then 25-year-old Moss published her first novel, Fetish, and was forced to take a lie-detector test to prove to the naysayers that the words on the page were indeed written by a model.
Since then she’s authored a dozen books, all of which she says highlight feminine resilience and grit. It’s for this reason, aided by the fact she’s a massive car lover with a CAMS motor sport driving licence, that Ford Australia approached Moss to front a new campaign for its iconic Mustang.
“We wanted someone who embodies a rebellious spirit,” David Noonan, Ford Australia’s marketing and communications manager, explains to Stellar. “Someone who defies expectation, challenges stereotype and confidently expresses themselves.”
True to form, the campaign flips traditional car advertising narratives via a series of commercials that see Moss behind the wheel of the car, recounting personal anecdotes – like the memory of how, as a six-year-old, she was told she could not take a toy car home despite winning a race. Cars, she was told, were for boys.
“I don’t tend to do a lot of advertisements,” Moss says. “Mostly because I have to feel a really authentic connection with whatever it is I’m representing. But if someone tells me they want me to hoon around in a Mustang as the classic rebel, I’m there.”
She’s so much of a car lover that she has often willingly chosen to drive from Sydney to Melbourne instead of flying. On one occasion, she says, she drove down and back in a day.
And her idea of relaxation is taking her vintage caravan on a road trip with her husband, photographer and philosopher Berndt Sellheim, and their daughter Sapphira, eight, a keen karate lover.
“I’m that woman in the vintage caravan at the caravan park going to the pub in the glamorous frock,” she says. “These things aren’t mutually exclusive.”
The UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, who is also a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney, says she has been overwhelmed by early responses to the campaign.
“I’ve been getting messages from women saying they’ve just realised this is the first time they’ve seen a woman behind the wheel of a fast car in an ad,” Moss says.
“I know that in 2019 it shouldn’t feel at all revolutionary, but we don’t often see that, despite how many women are out there who love driving. For the most part, we have tended to see the soccer mum, if you see a woman in an ad for a car.”
Her passion for rethinking female representation is something Moss addressed in 2014’s The Fictional Woman, which featured her face on the cover with words like “feminist”, “inspiration”, “bimbo” and “gold-digger” written on her face in marker.
Inside, Moss revealed her experience surviving rape and numerous sexual assaults. In a horrible irony, taking centre stage and attempting to break down the stigmas on these issues resulted in vicious online abuse directed at her.
The death and rape threats became the genesis for her 2017 anti-bullying ABC TV series Cyberhate With Tara Moss and the subject of her speech at the National Press Club that same year.
Given the book came out three years before #MeToo burst into the mainstream, one wonders if Moss thinks she was ahead of her time in sharing her stories. “[Social change] comes in waves,” she replies.
“For example, I think there is a good movement in #MeToo that now looks at women of colour or disabled women that were not celebrities or otherwise very visible. It’s an important shift in focus, all part of an important wave of people telling their own stories.”
The online attacks have quietened down, though that may have less to do with systemic social change taking hold and more to do with the fact that for the past year Moss – who now spends the bulk of her time in Vancouver – stepped away from the spotlight to focus on writing her latest novel, Dead Man Switch.
“There is a lot of benefit to being out there, but there are also the negatives. The feedback I get online is overwhelmingly lovely,” she says. “But amongst it there are a few death threats. They are always hiding, between good, normal conversations with human beings.”
Dead Man Switch centres around the life of a staunchly feminist, champagne-swilling, fast-driving, red lipstick-wearing Nazi hunter named Billie Walker, who lives in post-World War II Sydney.
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“There are a lot of elements of me and my history coming together in this book,” Moss tells Stellar. “Like my love of vintage, which is very well known; my obsession with the 1940s, which has been lifelong; my love of strong women with grit; and my love of Australia and the crime genre.
Yes, it’s a romp and it’s fun and Billie is someone I would have a good time with. But again, there is a through line, as with all my works, about subverting stereotypes.”
Moss, who has been writing since she was 10 and has passed on her passion for reading and learning to her daughter, hopes that her latest concoction might be the one to be adapted into a film. “I’d love to see Billie Walker on the big screen and I think she’d fill it beautifully,” she says.
Many of the locations in Moss’s book are real and still exist today. And she jokes that if one day she’s not leading Billie Walker-themed tours around town, it’s an opportunity squandered.
But for the time being, Moss’s future is in Canada, primarily so her daughter can spend more time with her grandparents. But that doesn’t make things easy for her Australian-born husband or for his family.
“When you choose to live in another country, which I chose to do, [you] set up this difficult dilemma about where to be,” Moss says. “Each year it gets more intense because both our parents are getting older. They aren’t so into travel now, so I need to be proactive about making sure they can spend time together with their granddaughter.
“There are no guarantees in life, but we are just trying to do the best we can and making sure those memories get made.”