Poverty is an extremely salutary experience. No-one ever tells you how boring it is. Being poor means you have no choices – you can’t buy a new book, or new clothes, or go to the movies. We never missed a feed, but we had some very ordinary feeds, I can tell you.

The guy I worked for was your basic office lech. He seemed to find the idea that I was still breast-feeding extremely titillating, and delighted in making grabs at milk-engorged boobs just for the thrill of causing me to spring a leak.

I had to come up with a plan. So I started talking to all the successful blokes who passed through my boss’s office about what else I might do, and eventually one of them offered me a job selling time on Channel 10.

Now I didn’t know that such a job existed – the notion of selling time struck me as weird – and further, the job being offered was based in Melbourne, and as I had never been out of the State, it was a big decision.

However, it was clear to me that I had to seize the chance, and I said yes. So then the bloke who had offered me the job told his Melbourne Sales Manager what he’d done, and the Melbourne Sales Manager flatly declined to have me, on the basis that Melbourne wasn’t ready for a female rep.

So they had to move a male representative from Sydney to Melbourne, and I washed up in Sydney, feeling distinctly unloved.

Two years later, I was still feeling unloved. The Sydney Manager had left, and I was passed over for promotion in favour of a younger, less-experienced male. When I confronted his boss, he blithely told me that it didn’t matter how long I stayed, or how good I was, they would never promote a woman.

That was 28 years ago, and prior to the Sex Discrimination legislation that protects us these days, so he could say that with impunity – although God got him in the end. Last heard of, he was bankrupt, and driving a cab.

At that time in my life, I acquired my first important mentor. Absolutely outraged at the unfairness of it all, I wanted to storm out, punching somebody’s lights out on the way.

But my mentor had good advice. He suggested I evaluate my position, and decide what would be the best possible next job for me, and then work towards achieving it. That process took 12 months, and it was my first exposure to the notion of patience as a strategic tool.

I am by nature an impatient, impulsive person, and like most people, I manage to rationalise that my weak points are really my strong points, and that patience was merely the outcome for people too nervous to make a decision. The idea that patience was a tool that could be used to deliver what you want was a revelation to me. I’m still not as patient as I’d like to be, but I’ve worked very hard at getting better at it.

The job that I waited for was at Family Circle magazine – then owned by the New York Times – the first magazine to be sold in supermarkets – difficult as it may be to believe it now, in those days, Family Circle was a hot book, and I was its first female ad sales representative. It was probably the happiest time in my working life. I worked my way up to State Manager and then National Sales Manager, with a staff of 6, a budget of $6,000,000, and my first company car. It’s amazing how exciting a white Ford Cortina can be when it’s your first company car.

3 Years later I was headhunted by the Fairfax organisation, initially to work in newspapers, and then 12 months later, I transferred to their magazine division as Group Advertising Sales Manager.

At about this time, I remarried. After 8 years on my own, I finally met a 37 years old straight bachelor, fell madly in love, and finally mated for life. It remains one of the most improbable things I’ve ever done, but it’s certainly one of the most successful.

And about this time I began to work on the project that would change my life for ever.

I developed a plan to launch a version of Dolly magazine in the US. Dolly at the time was per capita the most successful teenage magazine in the world, and the US had nothing like it.

The most successful teenage magazine in the US, then and now, is called Seventeen, and at the time its editor was a 60 year old former nun. The notion that a magazine could be edited and run by a group of young women not much older than their target audience had never been tried in that market, and all our testing indicated that it would be a huge hit.

The process of getting the project approved was a huge test of the patience I was working on acquiring. It was two years before the Fairfax board approved the project, and when they did they wanted me to be in New York in 3 months time.

Mercifully, my new husband manfully shouldered the responsibility of getting both children to the end of their school year, and I left for New York in June 1987, to launch the magazine we had decided to call Sassy.

And it was in New York I met the woman who was to be my business partner, playmate, and great friend, Anne Summers, author of the classic Damned Whores and God’s Police, and then Bureau Chief for Fairfax in New York.

We knew Ms magazine was for sale.

Ms is a feminist icon, founded by Gloria Steinem and friends in the 70’s, and with Gloria still very obviously at the helm, we formed the view that two magazines were better than one, and if anyone could fill Gloria’s shoes, then Anne was just the girl to do it.

Persuading the Fairfax board to cough up for a second magazine was not too difficult, because a number of predators were circling the share registry at that time, and the Board was anxious to be seen as proactive.

So the deal went through in November of 1987 – our first issue under Anne’s leadership appeared in February, and the first issue of Sassy appeared one month later.

And then, in mid April, we discovered that Fairfax had been sold to young Warwick Fairfax, who had put all their overseas assets up for sale.

He did however offer us a 6 week window to see if we could raise the money to buy ourselves out.

What followed was a frenetic round of visits to bankers, and venture capitalists, and somehow it all came together, and we were able to raise $20 million US, and launch Matilda Publications Inc., the new home for Ms and Sassy.

That deal was concluded on July 1st, 1988, and 6 weeks later – just as I was starting to enjoy my new incarnation as a media mogulette – disaster struck.

Sassy was targeted by the religious right with a letter writing campaign to all our advertisers. In the space of a week, we lost our 5 largest advertisers. The campaign was started by a woman from Wabash, Indiana, who ran a little group called Women Aglow. She contacted a much bigger group, called Focus on the Family Citizen, whose leader had a syndicated radio program across the US.

The most letters any advertiser got was 300, but off the back of a clever pr campaign, it was enough to almost sink us.

Kids loved us, of course. Our budgeted circulation for the first issue was 250,000. We debuted at 330,000, and circulation climbed rapidly from the beginning. The sex education content of Sassy was similar to what is in Dolly here – about 1% of the total editorial package, but in the country with the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the western world, girls were still expected to just say no.