What Natalie Joyce did next
From the depths of despair and page one public embarrassment, Natalie Joyce has forged a new beginning.
It wasn’t a “f. k you”. It wasn’t some calculated revenge statement, her livid last word on the affair of her husband’s affair. It was just a small and meaningful win for her to feel on the inside. From the depths of despair and page one public embarrassment and heartbreak and fear and anger, she jagged herself a little win. She got out of bed. She got out of her pyjamas. She turned off Netflix. She gave up the drink. She went to the gym. And at last she found herself a win.
On the last day of March, in the most unlikely place, out of the darkness and into the stage lights of the “I Compete Natural North Coast Classic” bodybuilding competition in New Lambton, Newcastle, Natalie Joyce had herself a victory. She picked up two fourth-place medals in the “First Timers” and “Miss Fitness Model Momma” categories of her first ever bodybuilding competition. But her win came after all of that. Her win was a smile in a backstage mirror. Her win was a belly laugh over a steak and mushroom sauce dinner that night. Her win was the way her eldest daughter, Bridgette, 22, looked at her when she said she was so deeply proud of her mum for doing something so brave and so truly off the wall and out of the blue as to process her separation from Barnaby Joyce by flexing her double-fake-tanned-and-oiled 49-year-old muscles inside a glittering green bikini that belonged in a Barbie doll box. Because her girls knew the secret to it all. Her girls always know. Social media said it was “the ultimate f. k you” to their father. But the girls knew the truth. It was never a “f. k you” from their mum. It was always a “free me”.
“It was time,” Natalie says. “It was time to take control of my life. That’s what it was. Take control.”
It’s 10am on a Friday morning in full sunshine and she sips a well-made flat white – coffee is an essential element through any lengthy divorce – in a small and private courtyard behind a small and private cafe in Double Bay, Sydney. “That was so far out of my comfort zone. I’m proud of that woman. I was proud. I felt really good up there. I felt like a little kid in a lolly shop, to be honest. That was a good moment. I was happy. I was really, really happy and that’s the one thing the girls noticed. I was so happy.” She shakes her head and stays in that happiness for a moment, smiling. “Yeah,” she says. “It felt like a win.”
READ MORE: Natalie Joyce’s moment of compassion at funeral | Vikki Campion ‘wanted my life from the get-go | How Barnaby’s affair played out
Here are the losses as they stand. Her husband of 24 years. Her heart. Her confidence. Her financial security. Christmas mornings as a family. Holidays as a family. Steak and mushroom sauce as a family. Her pride. Her privacy. Her tears. Her ability to give two stuffs about the small stuff. Her ability to read or hear a single word regarding the midday B-movie story of the straight-talkin’, heart-on-the-sleeve former deputy PM who ran off with his former media adviser, Vikki Campion.
If you’re looking for her gut reactions to it all then please trust that she’s felt every possible one. The seven stages of Barnaby. The eight, nine, 10 stages of leaving. She feels exactly the same as any mother of four would feel about it all and you already know how that song goes. How could you destroy what we have built? You. Stupid. F. king. Idiot. Look. What. You. Have. Done.
“But that’s a waste of energy,” she says now. “It’s not me. My friends know what I feel. No one else needs to know. It’s not doing me any favours. It’s not doing him any favours. And it’s not doing the girls any favours. You have to move on and be happy. You don’t want to be bitter. Because that’s really not a good place to be.”
She can’t stay back there in those awful, acid-in-the-mouth, bad-food bedroom days of summer and autumn and winter 2018, when the bad news was splashed across every paper in the country. Her daughters need her here and now. Bridgette, Julia, 20, Caroline, 19, Odette, 16. A call just now on her mobile from Bridge. Her car’s overheated and she’s stranded on the side of a road. Once upon a time, she says, she would have called her husband immediately in this moment. He was brilliant in a crisis. Not just the political ones, the home ones, too. Car trouble. Busted pipes. Broken fences. He’d dive into fatherhood, guns blazing, the same full-spirited way he’d dive into immigration debates and climate debates and debates over what was morally right and wrong for the people of Australia. But she doesn’t call Barnaby today. She calms her daughter down herself. She guides her daughter through the brief motoring crisis. She does what she has to do.
On the same phone are messages from Caroline about how she’s going to manage the logistics of attending three separate university medicine entry interviews across three distant locations throughout NSW and South Australia within two consecutive days. Incredible Caroline. She was completing her HSC when her father’s infidelity became the biggest story in the country. “But, lucky, she focused,” Natalie says. “She did so well.”
Natalie shakes her head, running logistics in her brain. No fake tan on her today. Casual shirt and jeans. Fit and hard but not crack-a-macadamia-in-your-elbow-hard like she was on competition night. “Nup, I’m going to have to take time off work and drive her,” she says. “There’s only so many airfares I can afford.”
And the picture becomes clearer. This is her life now. A single mum guiding four young women into adulthood while working through the complexities of a brutal and public divorce. “Yep, well, I’ve always been a single mum, I think,” she says. “But it’s easier when you do have the help of someone else.”
The last time I spoke with Natalie Joyce across atable like this was in March 2017. I was writing a magazine story about her husband who came across, in our time together touring his beloved New England heartland, as messy and brilliant and impulsive and flawed and human. Most of the time he came across as brutally honest. With himself, especially. He moved through multiple emotional states from calmed clarity and deep country wisdom to a kind of fizzing bottle-capped face-grabbing spontaneous self-combustion. “There are times in any career when you’re ready to tip,” he said. “You can’t let people know that. You’ve just got to keep it to yourself. I always say to Nat, ‘The moment you don’t want me in there, you say ‘bail’ and I’ll be out that night’. ”
Natalie painted a picture of a family grown accustomed to living without Dad in the house. “Odette’s never known anything but politics,” she said. “Every time he’d come home she actually wouldn’t go near him because, like, he hasn’t been home. It’s taken a long time to get that father-daughter rapport. She’s stand-offish because he wasn’t home. That’s really hard. She’s like, ‘Why is he home and how long is he going to be home for?’”
“I hate it,” Barnaby had said. “In the end they give up on you. They just don’t think you’re going to be there.”
That night, in an Indian restaurant in Tamworth, Barnaby walked outside to have a cigarette. Before he left he told his wife and daughters to feel free to say anything they wanted to get off their chests to the journalist sitting across from them. Something inside him that night caused him to leave that table wide open for a full-scale family bloodletting.
In the wake of the infidelity scandal breaking in February 2018 – when The Daily Telegraph splashed with the story that Vikki Campion was pregnant with Barnaby’s baby – Natalie made a statement in which she said she understood the affair “has been going on for many months”.
“Did you know that night in Tamworth?” I ask Natalie today. She can only half-smile knowingly and she can only choose quiet grace over flung dirt, like she’s always done. What she can say is that she worked at that marriage for a long, long time. She worked and worked until she could work at it no more. Make no mistake, she loved him a lot. One of the many laws of love is that the depth of it must be in equal proportion to the hurt of it when it’s lost.
I ask her about any times, outside of motherhood, she can recall being as happy as she was that night in the bodybuilding competition. She thinks for a moment. “I suppose when Barnaby got elected,” she says. “When he became Deputy Prime Minister. All of those moments were really good moments. Yeah, they were.”
She dwells on this. Another half-smile. Melancholy in it. “Yeah, life was good. It really was good. God, I remember when he asked me to get married. I was over the moon.”
Barnaby Joyce and Natalie Abberfield, the fun-loving and carefree country pair who met in the late ’80s at the University of New England, walking down the aisle hand-in-hand in 1993. Barnaby’s parents didn’t attend the wedding because they didn’t approve of the union. Nothing mattered more than Natalie, then, and Barnaby chose true love over mum and dad. A family rift developed that mended in time because time heals. Sometimes.
“Mmmm,” Natalie ponders. “Yeah … you know … it was love.” She gave her life to his career. She sacrificed her own career advancements. She put her own dreams on hold because she believed her husband had the smarts and the guts to go all the way. She had long abandoned the idea of bodybuilding but it was something she had wanted to do since the age of 18. And then the world collapsed in on itself.
“You always hear in your head, ‘Time heals everything’,” she says. “But it feels like your world is ending. Time can’t heal it. You don’t want to actually get out of bed. But I went and got a job. Before everyone else, I knew I had to get a job, basically. I thought, ‘My God, I’m 47 and my whole world has just turned upside down’. You know, the DPM. You’re supposed to be travelling with him and doing all these things and there’s really no time to work. My job was being supportive and being out there [for Barnaby].”
She found a job as a student support teacher at her children’s school, McCarthy Catholic College, Tamworth. “They actually got me through the worst of it. I had a focus. They were honestly my life-saving grace. That job made me get up every morning and the staff there got me through it. Doing that job. Hopping in the car. Going to work. Everyone at work was fantastic. No one ever talked about it. If anything ever happened in the news I’d just get a hug and then they’d shuffle off. One more headline, one more hug, and off we go. Radio off in the car. Didn’t buy papers. Didn’t read papers. Didn’t watch anything. Even the staff would hide the papers around me. They were incredible.”
Outside work her emotional rocks were three close girlfriends in Tamworth and then her mum, Melissa, her dad, Ken, her sister, Stephanie, and her brother, Derk. Family. Always family.
“I only had two times where I actually didn’t get out of bed or stayed in my pyjamas all day,” she says. “It was only twice. I’ve grown up like that. Mum was always, ‘Get your clothes on, have a shower, you’ll feel better if you get up and go’. Then your phone’s going off and you’re like, ‘Oh shit’, and you don’t answer it. And then it’s about 11am and I’m like, ‘You know what, just on this day, I’m not getting up. I just can’t do it today’. I put the computer on. I’m just gonna watch Netflix. And the next minute – and I don’t know how they got in – my mum and dad are walking into my bedroom and they see me like this and my mum says, ‘I knew something was wrong’. And I’m like, ‘I just didn’t want to get up today! Just one day I want to watch Netflix. I just want one day’!”
But she got up every other day. And every other day in between she dragged herself to her nearest gym to work out with a close friend and personal trainer and bodybuilder, Kylie Steel.
“Bodybuilding was everything I needed,” she says. “You feel so good. Just so good. Everything is clear. I’m a million miles away and I’m concentrating on what muscles I’m using. Mind to muscle. I don’t have headphones. I’m just listening to whatever music is playing in the gym. Legs sessions can be anything from an hour-and-a-half to two. Then you add your cardio. A 45-minute, really fast walk. Then I’d do probably a 30-minute hit session on the treadmill. Then right at the end you add another cardio session in. Some days I’d be at the gym for three to three-and-a-half hours. Then I’d be sick of the gym and I’d go for a walk. Go pound the pavement.”
She lost 15kg in 12 months. The tabloids called it her “revenge body”. She calls it the kind of body one gets when you cut out bad sugar, bad fats, bad carbs and worse booze. Random musclebound men now stop her in the street and compliment her on the ripped body they saw in the competition shots that went viral when coach Kylie posted them on Instagram. “It wasn’t supposed to be some big moment,” she says. “I went into it for me. I don’t post anything on social media because I don’t want to be out there.”
She shuffles to the side of her seat, hides away in a corner. “I’m the one who’s over here,” she says, leaning far to the side. “You can go and do what you need to do. Even with Barnaby, very rarely was I wanting to get myself in that frame during an interview. I’d step to the side. I’d be there for support, but, no, that’s not for me.
“Then Kylie posted an image of it and then it’s another morning and the phone’s going off and I’m just thinking something has happened and the first thing is, ‘Oh God, what’s he done this time?’, and then I look at the messages: ‘Have you seen the paper? You’re on the front page’. The funny thing is a lot of guys actually come up to me and say, ‘You look fantastic, you look great’, and I go, ‘Shit, you’ve actually seen me with no clothes on’. I’m wearing a bikini but …” She drops her head in embarrassment. “Everyone’s seen that photo. The funny thing is people think you look like that. Some think you look like some leathery old hag but that’s all fake tan and I’ve got two lots of it on and I can’t wash it off.”
She was so nervous that day in Newcastle. She remembers sitting backstage with her fellow competitors and looking at women half her age and wondering how many of them had a single clue about what brought her there. “Life’s all ahead of them. There’s no stretch marks. Beautiful skin. I’m there thinking, ‘I’ve had four kids’!” And one Barnaby Joyce.
But she owned her moment. The flexing and the posing went against every natural instinct but something else inside her that Sunday night made her double down, made her own that stage, made her feel stronger than she’s ever felt.
“Natalie Joyce is a bloody goddess!” Twitter hollered. “If anyone needs me, I’ll be at the gym channelling Natalie Joyce.”
“Natalie is all of us who finally got rid of a dead weight and started living our best life. I f. king love this story so much I can’t even deal. Go, Natalie!”
“Natalie Joyce gives a big ‘f. k you’ to Barnaby Joyce and Vikki Campion. Karma delivered with middle finger.”
She still receives messages through social media from women she has inspired. They are often going through divorces. Their hearts have been ripped out and left bleeding on the kitchen benches where they prepared chicken roasts every Sunday for their husbands. Their worlds have collapsed in on themselves. They ask for her advice and she gives it 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.”
Odette has her father’s fire inside her. In July 2018 she posted a picture on Instagram of Natalie surrounded by her four daughters. “The real Joyce family #WhosBarnaby,” she captioned the image. In August this year she posted an article titled “Barnaby Joyce leads Sydney anti-abortion protest”, with a line of text saying, “Once again, I do not support you.”
There are still some open wounds for those four girls and Natalie hopes time will heal them. They can be so headstrong like their dad. Stubborn. Immovable. Tough. “The girls are a really good mixture of the pair of us,” Natalie says. “They have our best qualities and our worst, to be quite honest.”
Natalie wasn’t intending to flip Barnaby the middle finger. There was no revenge in her bikini body and the building of it. There was only peace and ticked boxes and freedom and new beginnings. If there’s an overwhelming emotion one gleans from her with regard to her ex-husband, it is worry. Genuine concern for his wellbeing.
Her phone rings again. It’s Bridgette. She fixed the car and she’s parked outside the cafe, patiently waiting for Mum to finish talking about the time the world ended. Bridgette knows she needs to talk about it sometimes. The girls always know.
Natalie places her phone back on the table, finds her train of thought. “I mean, eventually, yes, I hope the girls have a relationship with their father but I think it’s going to take time,” she says. “It’s going to take a long time. But not on their side, more on his. He’s their dad. He wasn’t a horrible human being. He was always there for them.”
She shrugs her shoulders. Time heals. And sometimes it doesn’t. She can’t see the future clearly beyond mid-December and her 50th birthday. “Fifty,” she says. “Scary figure. But it’s the next part of my journey. I’ll probably spend it with the girls and my closest friends. We’re thinking of going for a girls’ weekend.” She howls at something. “No boys allowed.”
She wants to train for another bodybuilding competition, maybe as soon as March. She wants to travel. She wants to work. “I just want to do a few things for myself.”
A thought comes to her and she goes to speak and then she stops and then she starts again. “I’m thinking about going back to my maiden name. I didn’t want to at one stage because the girls are all Joyces. But I don’t know.”
The girls only want what makes her happy. The older girls like the longer name. Natalie Abberfield. Strong name. A single 50-year-old woman could do anything in life with a name like that. Her closed fist taps on the table twice. Arms toned and hard. Body ready to work. “It feels like it could be a new beginning,” she says. “And maybe I’m not defined by that name anymore.” She tilts her head to the side and smiles. “I’m me.”