As the ABC announces they have discontinued their weekly panel show, Q+A, after a record-breaking 18 years, we revisit our exclusive interview with host Patricia Karvelas, which appeared in our January 2025 issue. Read on…
Patricia Karvelas – best known to the nation as ABC’s “PK” – opens her front door with the hyperactive bundle of fluff that is Bindi the cavoodle hot on her heels.
“Sorry,” she says, holding back the family pooch whose exuberance, I soon discover, mirrors her mistress’s unquenchable zest.
To an onlooker, Patricia’s work life over the past few years seems jam-packed: early mornings on Radio National Breakfast, late nights hosting TV’s Q+A and a punchy podcast, The Party Room, all with an imperative to keep her finger firmly on the pulse of a febrile political landscape.
Fitting in a private life may sound like a stretch, but very quickly, I see that family is the necessary still point that allows her to succeed. It has always been thus.
Raised in the warmth of a Greek community in Melbourne’s western suburbs, Patricia was the youngest of the Karvelas family’s three daughters. “My sisters are eight and 11 years older. I think I was the mistake,” she laughs.
“My parents were born in Greece, migrated here together in their 20s and then had their children in Australia. I spoke Greek at home and went to Greek school at the weekend which at the time I resented. Now my eldest daughter, Luca, chooses to go to Greek school and loves it. That says something about the way generations work. She now speaks better Greek than I do!”
Patricia’s parents were economic migrants who spoke just enough broken English to buy groceries. “That was the norm then. The expectation on migrants has changed, but I’m pretty happy about it because as a result I’m bilingual,” she says, grinning.
This is a typical PK response. She’s an inveterate optimist – most clouds have a silver lining if you look hard enough.
“Dad was a builder,” she continues. “They came here because they wanted opportunities. Mum worked on an assembly line back when there was a textile, clothing and footwear industry in Australia. Feminists have these debates about work and it’s always funny to the working class that it’s framed as a choice,” she notes. “Mum always had to work.”
When Patricia came along, her mother stayed home for a while. “They must have been in a better financial position. I remember snuggly times with Mum and we make jokes in my family that I’ve got real baby behaviour. When I started school and Mum had to go back to work, I hated it.”
That work ethic is deeply ingrained in the Karvelas sisters and today when people baulk at PK’s punishing early rise for breakfast radio she smiles. “It’s not so bad. My mum used to get up at the same time but have to work in a cold factory!”
On their one family holiday back to Greece when she was seven or eight, Patricia remembers landing at Athens airport and being overwhelmed by “the mania, the chaos and the sounds. Scores of relatives I’d never met before turned up to greet us. They were hugging me and saying how cute I was – which of course I loved.”
That visit opened Patricia’s eyes.
“It’s the first time I realised what a privilege it was to be an Australian, because a lot of my cousins who had stayed there had tougher lives economically. It wasn’t about money so much – we were a very working-class family – but the value of the doors that opened for me and my sisters in Australia.”
An unspeakable loss
It was shortly after that trip though that tragedy struck. Patricia’s parents died, leaving the three sisters orphaned. She prefers not to go into the detail.
The loss was harrowing and that feeling never goes away. “It was literally something that happened overnight and changed everything for me. I was eight years old,” she says quietly. “I’m in my 40s now so I can talk about it in a way that’s much more processed than 10 or 15 years ago.”
The trauma was something Patricia says she “parked”, but adds: “I strongly recommend anyone reading this to work this stuff out earlier. Difficult things do shape you and it’s okay to admit it – and it’s shaped me enormously,” she says. “All of a sudden the structures around me collapsed. We were left with nothing and when that happens you have to work out emotionally who you can trust and how to feel nurtured.”
In the void, Patricia reached for her eldest sister.
“I love my sisters equally, but Sue was 19 and the closest to an adult.” Today Sue lives up the road. “It says a lot that I bought a house near her. She has two children of her own, but they joke that I’m like an older sibling because there’s not a day that Sue doesn’t text me to check how I am.”
The family home was sold and the sisters dispersed throughout the community. “No one knew what to do with me and I got passed around until we all worked it out. In that timeframe I had six different homes and many different schools. I found that very difficult,” says Patricia.
One aunt enrolled her in an elite girls’ school. “It lasted for not even a term,” she says. “I remember going from my multicultural primary school to this place where there was so much privilege. My eyeballs nearly fell out. Of course it was unsustainable. When they pulled me out it was happy days!”
Patricia eventually went to live with her grandmother and returned to her old stomping ground in a public school with what she calls “my people”.
That her grandmother only spoke Greek and was illiterate mattered not one jot to Patricia, who found a role model in the proud matriarch. “I adored her. She was super smart and knew it without being arrogant,” she says. “Her whole schtick was ‘I probably could have done anything’. She knew this. But she grew up in a Greek village where girls weren’t allowed to go to school and she was forced into a marriage. ‘None of these things have to happen to you,’ she’d say to me.”
Patricia loved school, with English literature, history and politics her favourite subjects. She was also a born performer, so her family scrounged together the funds to enrol her in the Johnny Young Talent School.
“That was my sisters supporting me. I was a jazzy hands kid but I think I realised that being a pop star wasn’t going to be my career path by the time I was 15 and I became much more distracted by writing essays and reading books.”
Patricia also started working on school newspapers and her passion for journalism ignited. “I was obsessed,” she beams, that thrill still evident.
It wasn’t just print media Patricia loved. Sister Voula would drive her at 5am for a three-hour morning shift on community radio and then pick her up to go to school. This was Patricia’s calling.
Her early battles
The upside of losing everything so young was that “I knew I had to make something of myself. There was no fallback,” says Patricia. But there were battles.
While she was popular at school and developed a skill of being able to get on with everyone, ugly anti-Greek racism was never far away and she can still recall every unrepeatable insult.
She first realised she was gay in high school, which added another negative feeling of otherness. “I had a crush on my best friend, who was gay. She had a very open-minded family and had come out in high school. Gay people didn’t trouble me. But thinking about myself as gay troubled me enormously, which is classic internalised homophobia.”
She finally came out at university. Her sisters had sensed it long before, but Patricia never told her grandmother.
“There’s no language for people who grow up in a Greek village for being gay. That said, she met my girlfriend at the time and knew we were living together. She understood what this was, and she did not tell me it was wrong.”
Pursuing a career in journalism as a Greek gay woman in the early 2000s was, she says, “very hard”, especially when she became a political correspondent in the Canberra press gallery inside Parliament House.
“I was actively ambiguous, which is how a lot of gay people deal with it still,” she explains.
If asked about who she was seeing, Patricia says she “fudged” her answers, never using gender-specific pronouns. “I’d only tell my most trusted people – my family, my close friends.”
Even so, she faced homophobia. “I found it hard to call things out when I was 22. I didn’t have much power in the workplace. I was disposable.”
Patricia describes a culture where “sexual harassment and smutty comments” were the norm and she regularly endured “gay jokes being made about me and it all being apparently funny … I never thought it was funny.”
She kept her head down and worked her butt off. “I thought, I’m lucky to be here, I don’t want to be excluded, so I’m not going to make it more difficult for myself. You have to work harder and you understand that early, but I don’t see it as a deficiency. I think feeling like an outsider can give you a sense of drive. I’ve hustled a lot and I was competitive.”
Who is Patricia Karvelas wife?
Patricia met wife Peta in Sydney when they were both in their mid-20s hanging out with the same group of friends. “We’re very different and I’m a real believer in opposites attract,” says Patricia.
Peta, a fine art graduate, was working in the Art Gallery of NSW, running her own private gallery space and driving around on her motorbike. “I thought Patricia was fascinating: attractive, funny and I really liked talking to her.”
When I meet them today, the yin and yang of their relationship is obvious. Peta is calm, quietly nurturing and sporty; Patricia noisy and joyously precocious with a penchant for dancing to George Michael.
Peta was born and raised in Sydney’s western suburbs and after they dated long-distance, decided to quit her job and move in with Patricia in Canberra.
“It was fun. I worked at the National Museum of Australia and started a master’s degree and then we decided to have kids,” she says smiling.
Having children was Patricia’s idea.
“I am very lucky that I am in that transitional generation, thanks to the women who’ve done all the work before, where some of the rules were changing. I could see role models. Not many, but I knew older lesbians who’d had children, so I started from a young age asking questions about how they did that because I had to have children.”
For Peta it was never part of her life plan, but when early in their relationship Patricia said she wanted kids, she was all in. True to form, Patricia buried herself in research and every decision they made involved deep thought and discussion.
“I had a hunch I’d have a kid as annoyingly inquisitive as me and that’s how we made the decision to have a known donor who would be part of their lives, not as a parent, but as someone they know well,” says Patricia.
With that in mind “we drew up a shortlist of men in our lives that we liked”, adds Peta.
Everything started to fall in place. Their first choice agreed, and daughters Luca and Stella are the happy result. It was an arrangement based on trust, not contracts, with a dear friend part of their rainbow family, coming on holidays and regularly looking after the kids.
“The girls are at an age now where they are very cognisant of these things, particularly the eldest who says, ‘Thank you, this was a great arrangement’,” says Patricia.
Peta stayed home when they were young while also qualifying to become an art teacher. “After that I felt I had to get back to work and started part-time teaching,” she says.
Is Patricia Karvelas married?
The family was now in Melbourne and in 2011 Patricia and Peta sealed their union with a commitment ceremony. “I’m a pretty conservative person. I just happen to be gay and getting married was important to me. It was like a proper wedding without the legal part,” says Patricia.
She told work colleagues, however, that she was going on holiday. “That says a lot about the culture I was in. Two women in my office knew but I made sure no one broadly knew in Parliament House.”
Then six years later when same-sex marriage was legalised they had a registration ceremony attended by their daughters. “And guess what, this one I wasn’t quiet about. Luca read a poem and loved it,” says Patricia triumphantly.
“At our commitment ceremony the celebrant had arrived late from a heterosexual marriage that went overtime. It was rude and I felt that there was a little bit of homophobia about it,” says Peta. “So then to be able to go to the registry and have our kids there was a thrill – I got a real kick out of it.”
The world had moved on and at the Melbourne public school where Peta is now a product design teacher and program leader she has no secrets.
“I know a lot of teachers who don’t identify their sexuality in the workplace. I do it deliberately because I think it’s good for the kids to be able to see it. I can be really out as a lesbian, as a teacher. Gay kids and queer kids can feel comfortable and while I don’t say I’m a gay mother, I’m always rambling on about my kids at school. Sometimes I say I’m married to Patricia Karvelas, which always cracks everybody up!”
Their daughters are part of that new world order where to have two mums – at least in their peer group – doesn’t register. “Generation Z don’t care. My kids tell me that, ‘It’s not even a thing, Mum!’” says Patricia.
For her, there are still hurdles. Like many women on TV and radio she is targeted on social media and much of that abuse is homophobic. “I’ve had rape and death threats and there was one incident a couple of years ago when we had to go to the police. I know everyone has their own threshold and mine is quite high. You have to accept that this is now part of the way it is to be in the public sphere. It’s not ideal, and I think we should always try and improve all parts of our society, talk about it and improve it.”
Patricia refuses to let ignorant abuse hold her back and in 2025 is moving into a new role, leaving Radio National after 10 years for an increased TV presence in her own national affairs show on the ABC News Channel.
“It’s the right time for me and I think as a medium people fully understand me on television because I talk with my whole body,” she says. “I can’t wait.”
This article originally appeared in the January 2025 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. SUBSCRIBE so you never miss an issue.
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