Why Tara Moss Skypes with her pet python
She may have a new story coming out, but Tara Moss is anything but by the book. The Canadian-born, Aussie-adopted model-turned-author Skype’s with her pet python and has an Instagram account for her walking stick.
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Tara Moss arrived in Australia in 1996 as a young model on assignment.
In 2018, she returned to her homeland of Canada a best-selling author, TV host and leading advocate for women’s, children’s and human rights.
While some may never get over the whole “bombshell with brains” thing, Moss has come far enough to know exactly where she stands.
“When I broke out and everybody found out I was actually an author all this time, the internal shift was easy,” she says.
“But the external one was very difficult because it was more about other people’s perceptions.
“With my new book Dead Man Switch, it’ll be 20 years pretty much to the day since my first novel Fetish was published. It feels like the initiation is over. I think it’s OK for me to call myself an author now, with a dozen books under my belt in 20 years. It feels good.
“I like the history I’ve had and I like that it’s been difficult sometimes, too.”
What the sceptics didn’t know in 1999 was that Moss had been an author since she was 10, Fetish just made it official.
When the novel launched, Moss’s father Bob climbed up into the attic back home in Victoria, on Vancouver Island, to retrieve the manuscript for her very first book.
“He posted it to me without warning, so I opened this parcel and was like, ‘What is this?’,” she recalls with a laugh.
“It was called Black & White Doom and it was a Stephen King homage. I’d drawn little goats and things in the corners of the loose-leaf paper. But believe it or not, you can see in this very early expression of my writing that it was all about these punchy paragraphs, a sense of movement and ‘what will happen next?’.”
This is exactly the manner in which Dead Man Switch opens: with an attack on a young man whose disappearance in 1946 Sydney is a case for private investigator Billie Walker, a war widow with a returned soldier for an assistant and a knack for finding herself up to her wet-set curls in gangster types.
“What did they call her in the trades?” mulls Moss, thinking back to how Billie was described when US and Canadian deals for the novel’s release were announced.
“‘A staunchly feminist, champagne-swilling, fast-driving, Nazi hunter’. I thought, yeah, right on! I want to meet that woman.”
With those freshly minted international deals, Moss is taking a glamorous vision of post-war Australia to the world.
“I can totally see myself doing Billie Walker tours one day,” she says.
“Sharing little back alleys, a balcony here and a laneway here, all these incredible places in Australia that probably get overlooked a bit too much these days.”
If there’s a hint of nostalgia in her voice, that’s because last year, Moss, her husband Berndt Sellheim and daughter Sapphira relocated to Vancouver to be closer to her father, stepmother and older sister Jacquelyn.
The novel isn’t the only piece of Down Under to follow her back.
“I definitely have some of the Australian accent, as everybody here likes to tell me,” she laughs.
“And probably some of the Australian humour has followed as well.”
The move may not be permanent, and Moss will be in Australia this month to launch Dead Man Switch, “but right now being with family in Canada is important, so we’re prioritising that,” she says.
Moss and Sapphira are dual citizens. Sellheim, a writer, poet, photographer and academic, is “working on it”. The couple will celebrate their 10-year anniversary before the year is out.
“I really firmly believe it gets better,” Moss says of her third marriage.
Moss’s first marriage was in her early 20s to Canadian Martin Legge, while her second — to Australian film producer Mark Pennell — lasted two years after a 2004 wedding at St John’s Anglican Church in Toorak which was famously shielded from the press by security guards toting black umbrellas.
“Our lives have been across these different countries, with these different experiences and with this amazing little human that is our daughter … it’s a beautiful privilege to be able to build a life with someone.”
Unfortunately, one member of the family is too elderly to have made the move: Moss’s beloved black-headed python, Thing.
They stay in touch over Skype (no, really).
“He’s being very well looked after,” Moss assures, “and I don’t care how old he is, he’s still my baby.”
Moss turned 46 on October 2, marking the occasion with an Instagram post in her now signature 1940s garb, asking “Am I vintage yet?”
Her “lifelong obsession” with the ’40s began with the stories of her maternal grandparents, survivors of WWII.
“The women of the 1940s have fascinated me since I was a little kid, so it’s surprising that it took ’til book 12 in my career to fully commit to a world set in the 1940s and with this type of central protagonist,” she says.
“Billie Walker embodies my love of women with grit, women who are adaptable and smart and have to deal with difficult circumstances — and she does it in a very stylish way.
“If you know my work and my personal interests, you can see all of it coming together in this character: her obsession with research, the 1940s, the clothes, her ‘Fighting Red’ lipstick — and she’s possibly the first detective in fiction to mend her own stockings and solve murders at the same time.”
From her PI credentials to her patronage of the Australian Sewing Guild, you can certainly see a lot of Moss in Billie. As the face (and lead-foot) of Ford Australia’s latest Mustang campaign, Moss even has her own equivalent to Billie’s classic roadster.
However, the author is adamant she and the character are not one and the same.
“Billie is as close as blood to me, but she isn’t me. She’s my kind of gal, to put it mildly. I would love to be her housemate, follow her on her adventures and be in the passenger seat as she drives her fast car.”
The outbreak of WWII sent thousands of previously housebound Australian women into the workforce. It’s a period in which the country gained its first female radio announcer and federal parliamentarians.
“I imagine some women were forced out of the house, but others were banging on the door,” Moss says.
“Then, post-war, everybody said, ‘Thank you very much ladies, you can go back into the kitchens’.
Of course that didn’t suit everyone — and certainly not someone like Billie Walker.
“After the events of the war, how could she possibly step back into that sort of a life?
“So that immediate post-war period in Dead Man Switch reflects quite authentically this tension at the time: ‘Who am I?’ ‘What do I do with this vastly changed world?’
“Whether it’s a returned soldier who is physically and mentally changed, or whether it’s a woman who was a war reporter in Europe and now is thinking, ‘Do I cover the Easter Show?’”
More than just gritty noir dames, Moss uses Dead Man Switch to explore the echoes of the 1940s that run through so much of our headlines today.
“I felt it was a really potent time to examine again, to look at things like the rise of fascism, racism, bigotry and gender roles through the lens of fiction.”
In 2014, Moss blended memoir (discussing her sexual assault and miscarriages) and social analysis of the representation of women in her first nonfiction book, T he Fictional Woman.
It prompted many women to share their own stories with her.
“It was an honour, but difficult as well because you’re constantly being brought back to the worst of things that human beings do to one another,” she says.
Many also asked how they could make positive change. Her 2016 follow-up, Speaking Out, gave them a practical feminist road map.
Among its pointers were tactics for dealing with the abuse that so often follows when women speak out.
And it’s not just grown women: witness the recent response to 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg.
“Oh, I think she’s marvellous and strong, a true mighty girl,” says Moss, who sees the reaction to the Swede as a case of an individual becoming a lightning rod for an issue.
“I think that’s the case for pretty much anyone you can pick from movements over the years, whether it’s Malcolm X or it’s Greta — they wouldn’t exist without this bigger picture.
“There’s an incredible amount of focus on Greta and her ability to handle that is remarkable. I hate seeing the vitriol that she’s copping, as if somehow it’s about the messenger. It seems illogical to me that people would focus so much on the individual when we’re talking about something so much bigger.”
Moss is well acquainted with vitriol.
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When Fetish was published, some suggested it was ghostwritten. When she revealed she had been raped in her early 20s, a Twitter troll accused her of lying to sell books, adding, “I hope you do get raped for your lies”.
Moss is accustomed to using such hostility in her work as a jump-off point to “grapple with issues in that broader context”, or to shine a light on issues such as domestic violence. Yet she admits it’s not always possible to maintain that intellectual distance.
“When you’re on the receiving end of vitriol, yeah, it’s gonna feel personal. But this would be my advice: if you are experiencing vitriol right now, just know that you’re not alone.
“It’s not about you — it says more about them than it does about you. And if you look at the bigger pattern, you’ll probably see it’s part of a type of vitriol that’s aimed at particular people right now. You don’t need to own that.”
Moss’s daughter Sapphira is eight, and “very much a young person who speaks up for herself,” her mother says.
“She’s a fairly well-rounded person for her age and she knows there are many facets to what she has to offer.”
Moss began modelling as a teenager. Did it take some time to understand she had more to offer than just her face?
“Absolutely. I spent a long time being hired for a very specific, one-dimensional thing and I benefited greatly from that, being able to travel and having experiences not a lot of other teenagers got to experience. But it was challenging as well.”
Of course, Moss was a model long before social media gave a voice to the faces on the magazine covers. Nowadays she is embracing the medium as a vehicle to do as she encourages others to do: speak out.
It may be about a cause, or it may be about her newly discovered natural hair colour. “Somewhere along the way, I was a smoky, film noir brunette and I didn’t know it — with silvers.”
Recently, Moss started a separate Instagram account to celebrate her walking stick, named Wolfie, and empower others using mobility aids.
“I’ve been using a cane on and off for the last 3½ years,” she explains.
She has what even the medical professionals refer to as a “bad hip” — chronic nerve pain and mobility issues from an injury.
“Although I studiously avoid the word ‘bad’,” she points out.
“I tell my hip it’s a great hip: ‘I love you hip, you’re doing really well.’”
She’s hopeful she’s on the road to recovery, but in the meantime has decided keeping it real is more important than keeping up appearances.
“After a while I thought, yeah, let’s do some photos with Wolfie, ’cos Wolfie is part of my world.”
Dead Man Switch (Harpercollins, rrp $32.99) is out on Monday.
See Tara Moss in conversation at Monash University Clayton October 29 at 4pm
Free but rsvp required
Or a Ginger Fox in Beaumaris October 30 at 7.30pm $35.