‘Women present so differently with symptoms’: Bianca Dye reveals shock health diagnosis as she turns 50

Bianca Dye has recently turned 50 and says a new health diagnosis has helped her to better understand herself, and be kinder to herself.

‘You’re running out of time.” Bianca Dye often hears that, and it used to signal a moment of panic.

But, having recently turned 50, the radio personality now responds, “Who am I running out of time for?”

Like many women, particularly in showbiz, the idea of turning 50 had lodged a lump in her throat.

To edge towards 50 was to walk slowly off a career cliff.

It was a race to reach career milestones, to appear youthful yet age gracefully, and to settle down and have children before plummeting over.

In the past 30 years, Dye – who co-hosts the 90.9 Sea FM breakfast show on the Gold Coast – has ticked off many milestones.

She landed jobs and lost them and found her feet in new ones.

She fell in love, and out of it, sometimes painfully.

She suffered the devastations of miscarriages and IVF treatments, and motherhood never came to be.

Bianca Dye recently turned 50. Picture: Glenn Campbell

The beautiful part of reaching 50, Dye says, is quitting the race and smashing up the clock.

“I want other women to know that life doesn’t stop at 50,” Dye says.

“I’ve wrongly pigeonholed myself because I’ve grown up in a showbiz world where I didn’t see many women my age on TV. Now I love that Amanda Keller, Julia Morris, Sonia Kruger – there’s so many women that are nailing it. They have so much more to offer.”

She adds, “I feel like I’ve just shut the book on my first 50 years and gone, OK, I had to deal with some trauma, some job losses, some miscarriages, guess what? The new chapter is going to be amazing – and if there are shit times, I know how to handle them and bounce back.

“I know what I bring to the table, I know my strengths, I know my weaknesses, and I’m happy to be open about all of them. I wouldn’t have had that when I was younger, this beautiful confidence that you have at 50.”

Dye is inspired by a generation of women challenging society’s obsession with youth and flipping the script on what life looks like for people over 50.

“Fifty is the beginning of whatever you want it to be,” Dye says.

“I remember growing up, it felt daggy and old. But what does 50 look like now? I look through social media at women in their 50s and think, you’re all rocking it.

“You just start to think, I know I’m a little different, or I’m wearing a push-up bra and I’m 50, so what? I’m still sexy, I still feel sexy.

“You don’t have to age gracefully; you age however the f--k you want to age.”

Dye was sick in bed in her Broadbeach apartment on her birthday in late August.

Admittedly, she was rundown after an indulgent Virgin Voyages cruise in Europe.

She didn’t see anyone that day, registering the pinging of her phone as messages flooded in. Friends, family, and a roll call of colleagues from Carrie Bickmore, Tommy Little, Dave Hughes and Erin Molan, to Fatman Scoop.

It felt emblematic that her birthday was one extreme to the other.

Dye has two modes: push- up bra or Kmart bed socks, and she proudly shares both.

“Fifty equals zero f--ks,” she laughs.

She was also formally diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) early that week, a neurodevelopmental condition often overlooked in girls and women.

“It was a big week,” Dye concedes.

“I did have some moments of darkness – not heavy darkness, but just moments of, ‘OK I’m 50, I’m not having kids, I’m single, who am I?’

“You have to accept that life doesn’t go to plan. I’m yet to find someone whose life actually has. I’m just letting go of whatever I thought it would be and I want to embrace what’s next.

“What you then have to do is trust the process, and that’s something that now I sit back calmly and do.”

Bianca Dye with her Sea FM co-hosts. Picture: Glenn Campbell

Dye has been a staple on Australian radio with her endearing sense of humour and brutal honesty.

She is disarmingly candid, ambitious, and outspoken, yet compassionate and relatable – bed socks included.

It is hard to imagine she would experience self-doubt, but the pressure of being a woman in the industry, and being expendable from the job she loves, has held her back.

“I still unfortunately am ageist towards myself,” she says.

“When you work in showbiz overall there is this feeling that when you get towards 50 there are going to be less gigs.”

Dye has won seven Australian Commercial Radio Awards (ACRA), including consecutive best music presenter awards in the early 2000s, the only female presenter to do so. She won best entertainment presenter in the provincial category in 2022 for her work on the Bianca, Ben & Lakey show and is nominated again this year.

She is trying to silence the timeworn ageism she internalised early in her career, realising there is plenty of room for her in a changing industry full of women bulldozing the career cliff.

“I have to open my eyes and look at the people around me in my own industry – there are heaps of gigs, and finally there are people respecting the fact that what we bring to the table is compassion, experience, knowledge that I didn’t have in my 20s,” she says.

Bianca Dye at the start of her radio career.

Dye was born with the gift of the gab. When she speaks to school friends now, they say, ‘Oh, you were always going to be in showbiz.’

She was born in Melbourne to parents Issi (Israel), a rocker, and Annie Dye, a former model turned English and drama teacher.

Her parents separated when she was two and while she lived with her father, she would shuffle between homes, spending time with her mother and grandparents.

She moved to the Gold Coast with her father when she was 12, but took herself back to Melbourne a few years later, where she finished school and graduated as dux in 1991.

She deferred a journalism degree – first to join the circus, landing a job on the Gold Coast as a ring master for the Great Moscow Circus, then as a Marilyn Monroe impersonator. Dye was eventually offered a radio gig in Hervey Bay before hosting The Night Mix Across Australia with Bianca Dye on the Gold Coast.

Bianca Dye with her father Issi. Picture: Chris Hyde

She was recruited to budding station Nova in Sydney and presented mornings for nearly eight years before moving into the drive slot with Tim Blackwell.

In 2009 she manoeuvred into a breakfast gig – her dream timeslot – in Wollongong. She was back at Gold FM on the Gold Coast in 2016 when she got the tap to move to Brisbane to replace Robin Bailey on 97.3FM’s popular breakfast show.

Dye was rising through the radio ranks and appearing regularly on TV.

But behind the scenes she was grappling with her identity as an outspoken woman navigating the cut-throat industry.

She reflects now on the competitiveness she felt around women, a by-product of the culture then.

“I was so threatened by another girl who worked with me. We were in our 30s, we hated each other … we were two blondes at the radio station,” she says. “I am so embarrassed and ashamed of how we treated each other. We should have been allies. The men around us weren’t great. There was a lot of pitching us against each other – competitiveness – and I think we both took that on board.”

They’ve each apologised since and become friends.

Dye is often floored now listening to the openness and confidence of young women in the industry, noting how the landscape has changed.

“I listen to Abbie Chatfield and think ‘My God, that was me at 27’, but no way would I have been allowed to do that kind of radio,” Dye says.

“And that’s nothing against my bosses at the time, it was just – no way.

“She’s in this incredible, different world now. There’s this real sense of ‘Go, you’ve got this’, whereas I, being a confident, young female, was very much ‘Oh, I don’t want to upset anyone.’

“I know I can be confident and quite feisty and speak my mind, but I work in an industry where that’s not always seen as a good thing when you’re a female. Would I go back and change it and not speak my mind? Probably not. Does that mean I don’t get the $11m mansion? Maybe. There’s still time.”

Bianca Dye and mum Annie Dye. Picture: Regi Varghese

Dye was blindsided by a high-profile sacking from 97.3 in late 2019.

She loved being on breakfast radio – it was her dream – and she wouldn’t have given up her job, but it was an unhappy environment.

“That night when I got home, I had a message from my old boss here (at Sea FM), saying, ‘There’s always a home for you here’,” she recalls.

She picked up her life again and has now been hosting the Sea FM breakfast show for more than three years.

She feels constantly uplifted. A colleague recently pulled her aside during a stressful day and simply said, “You’re Bianca f--king Dye.”

“What I’m learning is just because professionally someone doesn’t want you doesn’t mean you’re not a good person,” she says.

“We are all expendable in this industry. I’ve learnt that now and I don’t take it personally. That’s the beauty of getting older and going through so many of these things. It didn’t blow up my life, it wasn’t where I was meant to be, and I ended up bouncing back into a gig that I’m in love with.

“The universe takes care of it for you.”

Dye recently was working on a scrapbook when she came across a magazine article she was included in titled, Women who chose careers over family.

She wasn’t offended at the time, but seeing it now made her pause. “Is that what people saw?” she thought. “That was never a choice.”

“I might look like the woman who chose career over family, but it was just circumstances that fell into my lap,” Dye says.

“It wasn’t until later that I thought, ‘Oh shit, maybe I should try for a baby’ – and of course it didn’t happen.”

Dye had grown up in a split family when it wasn’t common.

She never had role models around her pointing to the white picket fence.

Rather, in her early 30s in Sydney, she was bolting through the doors professionally without willingly closing any in her personal life.

“I had my own show, Access All Areas on Arena, I was interviewing Nicole Kidman, Quentin Tarantino, Justin Timberlake, and I was number one on Nova,” she recalls.

“All this success happened at the same time as I was in a relationship that wasn’t going anywhere. That’s why I tried (for a baby) so late in life. The years just went really quickly. I was 37 and going, ‘Oh God’. I never said I want to be on radio and on billboards more than I want a family. Of course not.”

Bianca Dye with Mike van Aker, and Bob Gallagher at 97.3 FM. Picture: Annette Dew

Dye fell pregnant at 37 with her partner at the time and sadly miscarried.

She began expensive IVF treatments and suffered two further miscarriages before that relationship ended.

She discovered she had both endometriosis and adenomyosis, a condition which affects the uterus wall and makes it difficult to fall pregnant.

During her time working in Brisbane, Dye was in a relationship with a man who had children and she became a stepmother to his daughter.

There was a chance to become pregnant with the frozen eggs she still had stored, but it wasn’t meant to be.

It was painfully difficult, but Dye, after more than a decade of trying, made peace with not becoming a biological mother.

When that relationship ended in 2021, devastatingly so too did her role as a stepmother, a journey she chooses not to speak about publicly.

“Sometimes the detours are painful and what I’m learning is I can breathe and push through the pain and know that I can come out the other side and still be able to shine, and that is a really valuable lesson. It sucks that it takes to 50 to learn that,” Dye says.

“I loved being a stepmum. I loved having a little kid in my life and I love the idea of being a stepmum again. I’m hoping whoever I end up dating has kids. I really believe that he’s out there.”

Dye, who is traversing the unpredictable ride of dating apps, is always open to love – though having a profile does affect her romantically. Her message to any interested man is, don’t Google her.

Bianca Dye. Picture: Glenn Campbell

“It’s a shitstorm,” she laughs.

A quick search reveals everything from former flames to a recent headline about her “wild three-way romp with Russell Brand”.

“I get judged,” Dye says.

“Some people freak out. I don’t even know their last name and they’ve got 30 years’ worth of weird stories, a lot of them embellished.”

For the record, the romp was simply a backstage “pash”.

But she won’t close the doors to her life now that she has opened them so wholly.

“The reason I overshare is because there’s so much beauty for me when I am smashed back with messages from listeners and followers and whoever, going, ‘Holy shit, that’s me too’,” she says.

Her recent ADHD diagnosis is a new journey she will also share openly.

Symptoms of ADHD go beyond the behaviours typically associated with it — like not being able to sit still. They can display more as inattentiveness in girls, who can be dismissed as chatty or imaginative.

Dye had performed well at school. She was later diagnosed with anxiety and has been a proud RUOK? Day ambassador for 10 years, but ADHD went unnoticed until her late 40s.

“I would joke about it. That’s just what people said – ‘You and your ADHD’,” Dye says.

“It’s only in the last two years that I’ve gone, actually that’s not something to joke about.

“A lot of women aren’t diagnosing themselves because they think, well I wasn’t a naughty kid or running around having tantrums. Women present so differently with ADHD symptoms than men, so you need to be diagnosed as a child and it’s difficult for me because I came from such a split home. No one necessarily got to know me.”

Bianca Dye's gift from SeaFM for her 50th birthday.

Dye is glad contemporary society is receptive to positive conversations about mental health. The diagnosis simply gives her a greater understanding of herself as she puts aside the tumultuousness of her former decades and moves into her 50s with clarity.

“I feel the best, I’m probably the fittest and healthiest I’ve been,” she says.

“Fifty can be the beginning of a whole new chapter of your life. I have no idea what my next chapter is … but I just feel now that there’s a lot more confidence going into projects and it’s a really nice feeling of calm.

“Life never turns out the way you wanted it, and sometimes it turns out better.”

Dye is close with her mother, who is now 78 and moved to the Gold Coast to prioritise time together – her father often visits but lives and works in Melbourne.

She loves her life on the Gold Coast, cherishes the tribe around her, and enjoys regular weekend road trips.

She is hoping to add podcasting to her repertoire – the side of being a single woman in her 50s she can’t share in a breakfast radio timeslot – and is determined to write a book.

She will always continue radio, staying firmly in her studio chair, in her bed socks or push-up bra, “for as long as they’ll have me”.

And the beauty is, she has plenty of time for all of it.

Originally published as ‘Women present so differently with symptoms’: Bianca Dye reveals shock health diagnosis as she turns 50