No rage. No remorse. No re-Joyce for Natalie

Forging a new identity after her marriage breakup, Natalie Joyce is thinking about reclaiming her name.

Natalie Joyce. Picture: Harold David

She let go of rage and remorse. She left behind bitterness and her husband’s betrayal. Now there’s only one thing left for Natalie Joyce to move on from: her name.

“I’m thinking about going back to my maiden name,” says Barnaby Joyce’s former wife. “It feels like it could be a new beginning.”

In The Weekend Australian Magazine, Ms Joyce gives a raw, open-hearted insight into exactly how she survived watching an ­already difficult marriage implode in public after news broke in February last year that the then deputy prime minister had father­ed a child to his former media ­adviser, Vikki Campion.

There were black days. There were crying days. There were days spent in bed watching Netflix. But then came the days when the curtains opened and she saw the light of every suddenly achievable dream that she had long considered sacrificed and abandoned for a husband she thought, heart and soul, had the smarts and the goods to become prime minister of ­Australia.

“It was time,” she says. “It was time to take control of my life.”

Her first itch to scratch was a dream she had since the age of 18: to enter a bodybuilding competition. She marched on down to the gym and for three hours a day she thought about anything other than Barnaby and she pumped her legs and arms so hard and so long that soon enough, her body turned to granite and her burdens turned to bucket lists.

When snaps of her bodybuilding competition physique went viral, social media celebrated the country mother of four’s “revenge body” as “the ultimate f..k you” to her former husband. Yet that washboard body represented something deeper than revenge for Ms Joyce. “It wasn’t supposed to be some big moment,” she says. “I went into it for me.”

She now receives daily cold drop messages through Messenger from mothers whose lives have been destroyed by their husbands’ infidelities. She gives honest advice when she can. “You can get through it,” she says. “You need to get through it. You just feel like crap but you need to move on. It took me a while. I didn’t want to go anywhere. I didn’t want to go out. I didn’t want to be happy. But now it’s like, you know what, I’ve got a life to live. And my girls have got a life to live. I don’t want them to see me unhappy. And I want them to be happy.”

Now — so close to her 50th birthday next month — nothing feels off the table. New work. New travels. New relationships. New name. Natalie Abberfield.

“Maybe I’m not defined by that name anymore,” she says.