Poh Ling Yeow dances her bare feet across the dry riverbed, sand between her toes. Behind her, the edge of the red escarpment glows like firelight as the sun creeps above the horizon. A black-footed rock wallaby watches from behind a boulder as Poh picks up her skirt and runs toward the camera.
It’s sunrise at Rungutjirpa, or Simpsons Gap, a place of deep significance to the Arrernte people, whose storylines and dreaming trails cross at this ancient spring.
There are no tourists here yet. The air is still and warm and smells of eucalyptus, and Poh is as curious as a kid about this country, in Tjoritja/the West MacDonnell Ranges. She stops at a grey-limbed ghost gum, puts her ear to its trunk and listens for the sound of water trickling. She calls The Weekly crew over to listen too.
“I love the landscape up here,” she says. Tomorrow she’ll travel to Hermannsburg to meet that community’s famous painters and potters, and she’s eager to hear their stories and see their work.
Poh is in her element, immersed in nature, forging deep links with people and places. “I love finding those connections,” she adds.
And there’s something about being here, surrounded by beauty, that is rekindling Poh’s connection to her mother. She reaches into her bag, pulls out a pouch and tips a pair of earrings and a translucent aquamarine ring into the palm of her hand, which she wears for today’s photo shoot.
“They were Mum’s,” she explains. She’s carried them from her home in Adelaide — her mother Christina’s spirit travelling with her.
“I’ve been thinking about Mum a lot since I’ve been out here. If she was still alive, I would have brought her because she loved fashion and she loved The Weekly … The process of shooting and the beauty of the red centre would have captivated her.”
Poh’s mother passed away two years ago. Poh was travelling for work at the time and has wrestled with a deep regret that she wasn’t with her.
“She was ill, she encouraged me to go, but I shouldn’t have — it will be a wound forever,” she says solemnly. “A filial daughter would have been more cautious, but we had a complicated relationship. She never complained once in all her treatment — so stoic. I was convinced she was going to win the battle and buy at least a couple more months, if not years. I took her courage for granted, but it turned out to be the worst rolling of a dice ever.”
Poh managed to FaceTime with her mum not long before she died.
“I think she waited,” says Poh. “She must have been ready to go. She waited until my god-sister, who she’s close to, got back from Sydney. As soon as Wei Yee was beside her and we’d spoken, she passed the next morning. I found out via texts of condolences. It’s the wildest tornado of emotions I’ve ever experienced.”
The healing process began when Poh returned for her mother’s funeral.
“I knew I had to be the one to do her hair and make-up,” she explains. “Selfishly, I was desperate to find something to absolve what felt like insurmountable guilt for missing her final breath. She was well known for always being very well put together and I wanted her to be sent off as everyone remembered her.
“To lift and put a wig on her heavy head, bald from chemotherapy; to wriggle studs through her pierced lobes then paint her nails, holding each finger like I’d never, never done before, was profoundly healing.
“To face death in such a tender, intimate way dissolved the most jagged parts of my sorrow. I suspect the remainder will stay with me forever, and in many ways, I treasure it.”
Standing here in the desert, those aquamarines clasped in her hand, Poh has found her peace.
“I am good with grief,” she says. “I’ve experienced many kinds and assign it to the natural order of life. I’m very head-on with it, and I stay curious. Every time, big philosophical shifts happen and all that’s superfluous falls away. You have the greatest clarity when you’re on your knees.”
Unsurprisingly, the woman who stole the nation’s heart as the impish runner-up on the first season of MasterChef, back in 2009, has a string of childhood memories to share about food, and her mother. The two often converge. On weekends, all through Poh’s childhood, they would bake together.
“Mum’s sponge cake is in my top five favourite food smells in the world,” she says, smiling. “She used to make a jam roll, and it’s pretty much the first thing I aced. And taught me how to delicately fold flour into the whipped egg and sugar, and line a tin meticulously. She never adjusted things to be age-appropriate. She expected me to learn properly right from the get-go — a perfectionist. And that dogged obsessiveness in the kitchen — like when you make something over and over again, making your family eat it six days in a row — I definitely get that from her.”
Next come memories of Malaysia, where Poh lived until she was nine. Of bicycle bells ringing late at night to signify hawkers riding by. “And everyone would be scrambling for change to run outside and buy a char kway teow [a favourite noodle dish] for supper.
“I also have fond memories of the women in my family squatting in a circle to share the kitchen tasks while teasing each other mercilessly or arguing about which was the best street vendor to buy kuih [an Asian street snack] from.”
Poh loved sitting on the periphery, listening to the women, and she loved reading (book after book) and playing alone in her room.
“I was a painfully anxious child,” she explains. “I loved being at home. I’m pretty certain I had some kind of undiagnosed learning difficulty and I had chronic separation anxiety, which made me incredibly nervous and unsuccessful at school. Also, I went to school in an old convent. The hallways were massive, dark and spooky. I was perpetually terrified and would wail until recess every day.”
All that changed, however, when Poh’s mother announced that the family would move to Australia.
Poh had a premonition.
“It sounds so weird, but I knew immediately that all that anxiety would go,” she explains. “I knew it like a fact — life is going to make sense now. Up to that point, every day had been such an emotional struggle for me, and no one knew about it.”
Poh spent her birthday in the air, travelling from Kuala Lumpur to Adelaide, and arrived at a new and endlessly fascinating life.
“It felt like my life had been this oppressive, weird bubble, and then the bubble popped and I was in a wonderland,” she says, still wide-eyed.
“I found everything about Australia delightful. The warbling of magpies, the scent of eucalyptus. I remember finding the street signs beautiful. I remember having pizza for the first time and finding that mind-blowing. My uncles had pools and we would go over to swim and then go to the supermarket and buy Icy Poles. Everything was new and a marvel to me.”
There were a few months with “all of us squished into the guest room of my Uncle Ken and Aunty Su.” This was before Poh’s parents, Dad Steven and Christina, found a place of their own, bought a newsagency, and settled into their new life with Poh, her brother, Casper, and their much-loved Aunty Kim.
Poh started school, and that too was a revelation. “I didn’t have many friends in Malaysia because I was just so consumed by anxiety,” she admits. “When I came to Australia, right away, a little group of Aussie girls — guardian angels — took me under their wing … I felt an affinity with this country. I knew I belonged here.”
Poh was lucky, she says, to have two mother figures in her life. Both her parents worked long hours. “So it was always Aunty Kim who I came home to. And she was also the one who would wake me up and get me ready for school and make my lunches.
“I get my nurturing side from Aunty Kim. She also taught me a lot about cooking. She encouraged me to expand my palate from a young age … She’d introduce interesting flavours and textures, like chilli, all kinds of tofu — a lot of traditional Buddhist vegetarian dishes. The dishes I find hardest to execute are often the ones she cooks because they require few ingredients but a lot of nonna know-how.”
Famously, when Poh was 15 years old, the Mormons (or Church of Latter-Day Saints) came knocking on her door, and she and her family answered the call.
“My family was in a bad way,” Poh explains. “We were going through some financial woes and we were in a very vulnerable state. These two handsome American boys knocked on the door, and I immediately crushed on both of them.
“Through my teenage eyes, it was such a perfect environment, and it gave us an immediate social infrastructure to tap into. We felt incredibly welcome and supported. At 16, I also loved that the Church gave me a safe environment to explore dating. So there were lots of things that were very appealing about it. But there were also things that didn’t fit well with me. The stiff doctrine clashed with my artistic mind and suffocated my curiosity.”
While exploring that Mormon dating world, Poh met Matt Phipps, the man who’d become her first husband and with whom she is still close today. They forged their friendship in their struggle to break away from the Church.
“Coming out of it was really hard,” she says, “because, when you’re in a religion, all the rules are set up for you to obey, and when you don’t have that, your moral compass has to be reset and redefined by you. It’s harder than you think to rebuild that on your own but I’m definitely grateful for the experience because it’s given me a savagely critical mind that questions everything.”
She’s thankful that she and Matt made the transition together.
“I don’t know if I could have found the strength to leave the Church without him,” she says. “We had a wild, tempestuous relationship, but we’re unbreakable as friends.”
Matt went on to marry Poh’s friend, Sarah Rich. In 2009, Poh met Jonathan Bennett on the set of MasterChef. They married in 2014 but split three years ago. Again, they’ve remained close.
Now, as she approaches her 51st birthday, Poh has learned a thing or two about love.
“I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately,” she says, then stops and ponders for a moment. “It’s funny, because this is probably the most contented I’ve ever felt — like so contented I don’t know how I’d operate with someone else in my life.
“I’ve been through two marriages, and I think I need to find a new model. I think keeping separate residences is brilliant. You don’t have to fight about all those daft domestic things that shouldn’t really be part of love. So much stuff that destroys love has nothing to do with it …
“I don’t think I ever want to lose myself in a relationship again. I want to be an uncompromising version of myself for my next one, if I’m lucky enough to find it. And I’m not being pessimistic, I just know love is luck — meeting that compatibility at the right time and place … Maybe I’m running solo from here on. The thought would have horrified me just a few years ago but now, I’m loving the ability to duck and weave as I please.
“At 50, I feel blessed to have an amazing bunch of female friends — all of them really strong, hardworking, no BS women. We don’t see one another often but we do have intense philosophical discussions and 100 per cent meaningful exchanges. So my life is full. I’m very fulfilled.”
It’s late in the afternoon now. Poh and The Weekly team drive along a winding red dirt road beside spinifex and desert oaks. An eagle circles overhead. We pull in at Wurre, or Rainbow Valley, to find its immense wind-and-rain-hewn cliffs glowing brighter every minute as the sun dips closer to the horizon. The beauty of this place takes Poh’s breath away.
“Nature is where I find my god — in nature or creativity,” she says. “This is very much the centre of my identity.”
Poh took a collection of seeds along when she appeared on Shaun Micallef’s Eve of Destruction, and she posted on Instagram: “Gardening is humbling — I love how the trees, soil, wind and possums remind me I’m not the boss.”
Poh laughs when she re-reads it. She has a wonderful, fulsome laugh.
“I love being immersed in activities where you’re just a little dot or a cog in a bigger picture,” she says. “If you can internalise that, then when something challenging happens, you realise, of course, it’s happening to me, because it happens to everyone. I’m not special. It’s a healthy state of mind. I want to live a full life and I know that comes from receiving the good and the bad — you have to treasure both equally.”
This is wise Poh — the Poh who had to recreate her own sense of meaning and purpose when she walked away from organised religion. “I have a lot of time to think,” she chuckles. “On my Saturday bake, that’s what I do.”
Most Saturdays, Poh bakes non-stop for 10 hours, and then she and Sarah sell their wares under the banner Jamface at the Adelaide Showground farmers’ market.
“I never want to forget the thing that put me in the spotlight. It’s not the TV or any of the trappings but the doing, using my hands to create, that I love most.”
There will be baking for Christmas this year. Both she and Aunty Kim will “hit the tools”.
“Christmas has always been a bit of a funny ritual we go through,” she laughs. “We adopted the festival when we came to Australia, and it’s always an eclectic mess. The buffet is ham next to curry and kuih next to trifle. By the way, [the trifle] is always my contribution and everything is out of a packet, except the strawberries, just how my family likes it! I used to be horribly embarrassed by it as a kid but now I realise it perfectly represents our migrant story.”
Christmas is also a time, Poh says, for counting her blessings, and this year, the MasterChef contestant who finally became a judge has much to be thankful for. She reels off a list, including friends and family, laughter, love and “finally feeling comfortable in my own skin”.
Then she casts back to her formative years. “I’m so grateful,” she says at last, “that my parents took a phenomenal risk and migrated to Australia, because I doubt I’d ever have found my full potential in Malaysia. They knew I’d never succeed in that unforgiving, academic environment. Here, my creativity was nurtured and I ran with it … ” She stops for a moment and laughs.
“Never in my wildest dreams,” she adds, “would little migrant Poh have imagined being decked out in glam gowns, running on a desert floor and shooting a cover for The Australian Women’s Weekly.”
On location
This Christmas, The Weekly was invited to visit the Northern Territory. We shot our cover photo at Rainbow Valley — known as Wurre to the Southern Arrernte people.
Over 400 species of plant grow here. Wildflowers dance across the dunes. Rust-headed Fairy Martins dart in and out of Desert Oaks and Bloodwood trees, and as night falls, cave bats swoop among the boldly striped cliffs.
“It’s a really majestic place,” says Paul Ah Chee, a Yankunytatjara, Wankangurru, Arrernte man who is a Traditional Owner of this Country and First Nations Community Engagement Consultant for Tourism NT.
Paul has been coming here since he was young, as have generations of Arrernte people. “There’s a sense of being at home here,” he tells The Weekly. “It’s a place we can relax and feel safe.”
Rainbow Valley has a deep cultural history, which archaeologists date back 30,000 years. They’ve found significant rock art and evidence that Arrernte people used traps to fish and ground seeds to make bread.
Behind these cliffs, palaeontologists have uncovered the fossilised remains of two enormous marsupials that walked here 25 million years ago. It is an unfathomably ancient landscape.
“When we look at the land, it’s a part of us, not just a pretty sight,” Traditional Owners have said. “The landscape identifies us and connects us with our past, present and future.”
0‘Altyerre’ is the Southern Arrernte word for creation time, and Rainbow Valley abounds with Altyerre stories. Some sites are so sacred that visitors are not permitted and Traditional Owners cannot share their stories. All over this land, the message is to tread carefully and respectfully. To Southern Arrernte people, Wurre is a place where culture and nature are inextricably linked.
Paul hopes that The Weekly’s readers will “take away an understanding of how important the land is to us all, and especially to people who have been entrusted to protect this site for future generations”.
Poh Ling Yeow and The Weekly team are grateful to the Traditional Owners of Wurre (Rainbow Valley) and Rungutjirpa (Simpsons Gap) for permission to shoot on their Country.
