Mau, No Words for This.
In Conversation with Ali Mau
31st July 2025
Ali Mau has never been one to stay silent. In her searing new memoir No Words For This, the award-winning journalist, broadcaster and advocate lays bare a childhood marked by trauma — and the strength that emerged from it. In an unflinching conversation with Sarah Daniell, Mau opens up about the sex abuse revelations that redefined her purpose, the painful regret she carries over her colleague, the late Greg Boyed, sexism that still grips the media, and why the Gloriavale trial hits so close to home.
SD: You’ve just turned 60. Grace Jones said in her memoir that “my age is the least interesting thing about me.” How do you feel about it?
AM: So true. And in fact, it becomes less interesting because you become more interesting as you get older.
SD: The book is doing super super well.
AM: It’s a real surprise.
SD: Why a surprise?
AM: Mainly because of the subject matter, but I suppose that may have helped it. Who knows? I mean I tried to write it – and this is going to sound really odd considering the subject matter – like a thriller. I didn’t want the darker themes to overwhelm the book but I wanted to create a reason for the reader to keep turning the page. When I sent the chapters that concerned [my daughter] Paris in Melbourne, she Facetimed me and she said, “My god, mum, you’ve just made me cry.” And I’m like, “But is it any good? Does it read well? Don’t bother me with emotions.” Haha. I didn’t feel it was fair to drop a piano on the reader from a great height at one point in the book – you know, ‘nice, nice, here’s my life story, met husband, endured a bit of sexism’ and then bang! You’re crushed under a giant weight. I didn’t think that was fair to the reader and I didn’t think I could pull that off. I had to give them a sense that something was coming.
SD: How did the book come about? Were you approached? Was this the book that you were going to write?
AM: In 2018 when I first set up the MeToo project at Stuff, I had three different publishers contact me within the first six months and say, “Hey, Ali, will you write your book?” And I know from previous experience that there’s no money in books. So I said no because I was too busy. That was a really full-on five years which, as you know from the book, ended in burnout halfway through. The events in the last third of the book are driven by that explosive revelation from my sister in 2018. It would’ve been a very different book if I’d written it when I was first asked to.
SD: Then it all ended at Stuff.
”I witnessed his psychological torture of her for many years. Some people think that I’m some kind of avenging witch.
AM: I was made redundant for the fifth time in 2023 and I needed the advance no matter what, no matter what size. And I thought, well, if I’m ever going to do it, I can do it now. As it happened, just after I signed the book deal, I also started working full-time, unpaid, developing Tika. I had two full-time jobs in the end. The timing was right though. Also I could not have written this book and would not have written this book if my mother’s dementia wasn’t as advanced as it was by then, because whatever her part in our tragic side of our story as a family, we’re still protective of her.
SD: She’s a survivor too, as were many women of that generation, and I got such a strong sense of your mum’s sacrifice.
AM: I actually tried to get an answer out of dad at one stage about his treatment of her and I never got a satisfactory answer. But I witnessed his psychological torture of her for many years. Some people think that I’m some kind of avenging witch. But you have to bear in mind that sometimes there are generational cycles of trauma. My father’s behavior probably came, I strongly suspect, from his father. People aren’t black and white, good or evil, generally.
SD: Accountability is important but so is compassion and context?
AM: Yeah, I’m reading Louise Milligan’s books – the Australian journalist who broke the Cardinal [George] Pell story – and I’ve just read the chapter where she talks about how trauma affects people differently and some people seem unable to escape that cycle. I still think that people’s behavior is a choice that they must be held accountable, and accountability, of course, looks different for everybody. Accountability for us has been my father’s clear knowledge that he doesn’t get to have the love of his family anymore. He’s kind of holding his wife captive, but nobody else will speak to him and that’s entirely his doing. He is the only one that has created that. But I understand that behavior didn’t necessarily come out of a vacuum.
SD: Was there anything in the book that, on reflection, you would alter or add?
AM: I don’t think the book is missing anything crucial. But there are so many other examples of the same thing like examples of misogynistic and sexist biased behavior in the media. For example the time when the head of news at TVNZ asked me to take over Mike Hosking’s role on breakfast like the day after he’d been asked to vacate the seat. I said to Bill Ralston sure, I’ll do it if you pay me what you were paying Mike, and he laughed in my face as if that was a ridiculous notion. There’s disappointing things like all the promises that the Stuff management made at the beginning of the MeToo project about the kind of support that we would be given, psychological support. Those senior editors sat in our meetings in the early days of MeToo and in every meeting they said “you must take care of yourself” and that we’d be given unlimited support – and when it came down to it, that wasn’t the case at all.
Ali with her sister, Lisa, and nephew Benny in the mid-1980s.
SD: Wellness Washing?
AM: That was really disappointing. Eventually, my wonderful editor stepped in because being a hard-nosed journo, I didn’t want to complain, right? So, I just sent emails to HR and I reminded them every time I saw them in the work kitchen, but I didn’t create a fuss. Eventually, I mentioned it in passing to my editor and she was horrified and she kind of kicked up a stink and then came back to me and said, “Email HR and they’ll get it done.” And I sent her an email back saying I don’t trust them anymore. So, no thanks.
SD: Seven Sharp doesn’t get a big mention, other than it was the worst year of your working life? I remember when we worked there together, asking if you had time to talk. I’d never felt less valued in a workplace before. And you said, “I’ve had imposter syndrome my entire life.” I remember being so shocked because … you kicked arse, you gave zero fucks.
AM: How funny that we can create these images of ourselves, isn’t it? I mean, these days I literally, genuinely give no fucks. But I think that what was going on at Seven Sharp was well out of our control and we kind of knew it at the time. The editorial interference from executives. I clearly remember being told that Andy Shaw, RIP, wanted a game show at 7pm and was not interested in current affairs. And he and the head of television – another kind of diminutive, but very powerful man – had their fingerprints all over that show and you know, the rest of us never had a chance.
SD: Brutal but … regrets?
AM: Oh god I have so many regrets. I got Greg, lovely Greg Boyed, involved because I just rated him so highly. I knew what an incredible journalist and what a funny man he was and I just thought Seven Sharp needed his energy, and he hated it so much. I feel a lot of personal responsibility for what a terrible time he had. If I hadn’t involved him, he would have stayed in his other job. So, yeah, I mean that year was really, really bruising and ended with [gossip columnist] Rachel Glucina phoning me in the car on the way to work and telling me I’d been sacked or was about to be sacked.
SD: Terrible – also revealing – about the workplace culture.
AM: She told me, “I’m phoning you to, um, establish whether you know that you’re being replaced, blah blah blah blah blah.” You know, what say you? … I hung up. And then I got to work thinking nothing of it, opened my emails and found that John Gillespie had mysteriously cancelled my scheduled performance review for the second time. I thought, “Oh shit, she’s right.” I went running up the stairs to his office and I did that classic thing you see in the movies where you run past their EA and their EA is going, “No, you can’t go in there.” I just walked into his office and I may have called him a cunt.
SD: Fair enough. Probably got off lightly.
AM: I was very angry. He tried to deny it but in the end he wasn’t able to deny what he was about to do. That was the culmination of an awful year and I would never wish to work in an environment like that again. You’ve got to pick your battles when you write a book. For example, I never would have left out a chapter that was a big long poor me – my description of being outed – because that experience was just so horrendous and hopefully would not happen these days. I wanted to examine how attitudes had changed, if they’d changed in the 10 years since, but it’s useful. It adds something to the conversation.
Ali Mau, aged six.
SD: The great irony about being outed by a women’s magazine where you’d have thought you’d get much more support and empathy but it’s not – or wasn’t – the case.
AM: They tend to try these days to kind of angle the writing that way, but often it’s just a cover up for more of the same. Is Princess Kate too thin? Is she too fat? Is she … gosh, she looks old? It’s the same shit…
SD: … different decade. Do you think things have changed? I mean, maybe women’s mags got the memo, but then in comes social media.
AM: I feel extremely fortunate I managed to sneak both of my children through those really crucial years before the internet reached the depths that it has now, right? I think it was just dumb luck. I don’t know how I would deal with it these days. There wasn’t this kind of tide of anti-women Andrew Tates. Toxic masculinity tied to young, really young, men. That didn’t exist. I remember getting in the car with my son when he was 15, just starting to get interested in girls. And without telling him, without explaining why, I would always put on Mamamia Out Loud, the feminist podcast. And I would just have it playing along in the background as we drove along and chatted. And then one day he got in the car – he must’ve been almost 16 – and he said, “Mum, can you put that feminist podcast on, please?” I asked why and he said, “Well, it’s teaching me how to relate to girls. It’s like hiding the broccoli in the mashed potatoes. You’ve just got to slip it in wherever you can.
But it always happens in the car. It’s given me opportunities to talk to my son and my daughter about consent, sex and stuff that they would rather I not talk to them about.
SD: Captive audience.
AM: They’re brilliant adults, my two young adults, and I’m extremely proud of them. But I don’t think that that was by any great design of mine. I just got a little bit lucky with the timing and I was perhaps more willing than other parents to take my opportunities to plant these seeds. They know that their mother is very outspoken and they know that their mother’s choices have affected their life at times … back to when Paris was 11 and Joel was 8 and suddenly everybody at school was talking about how “your mum’s a lesbian”. So it’s a long game, parenting. And if you want to set an example for your children, you have to do that over years, decades.
SD: On misogyny, there’s some lovely photos of you with Jacinda Ardern in the book – but how do we get from having the highly intelligent female leader who had a child, was running the country and sure, made mistakes … but now there’s this kind of vicious, unhinged rhetoric. We were the first country to give women the vote – and now we’ve gone fully retrograde with regards to respect, and for women’s rights.
AM: I think it’s an extinction burst – the theory that every system that has outlived its usefulness, like the patriarchy in this case. When it’s really under threat in its final stages before collapse it will try and survive. There are people who don’t want to lose power and they are fighting till the death. That’s what I think it is. I was naive enough at the beginning of Me Too to imagine that there wouldn’t be a backlash. I certainly knew better very quickly. I know that what I’m doing now will also create some backlash and some fear, but what I always ask myself and my collaborators is yes, but is that a good enough reason not to do the thing? The answer is always no. With Tika, here’s some help from us to go do something meaningful that’s going to shift the dial, and make systemic change as well. New Zealand has a terrible record – one of the worst in the OECD – for domestic and sexual violence. But [more importantly] what can I do about it?
SD: Despite the backlash you are a self-described optimist?
AM: You can understand how people are gripped by a torpor and no longer read the news because why would you? I think a way to find some personal peace sometimes is to just carve out your own little space of usefulness. And even if it’s not changing the world, even if it’s not overturning the Roe versus Wade decision or saving the thousands in Gaza, it’s making a meaningful difference to somebody’s life.
SD: This week Gloriavale leader Howard Temple is starting a three-week trial in Greymouth defending accusations of sexual offending against 10 women complainants. Should there be a separate trial process for those alleging sexual abuse and what faith do you have that the arc of history will bend towards justice in this case?
Riding high – Riding Bex at Muriwai Beach. “I think my face says it all about how life has turned out.”
AM: Yes, I think there’s now plenty of evidence from the Sexual Violence Pilot Court to suggest we should. The SVPC began in 2016 – that’s coming up to a decade ago – and published results showed it met its aims to reduce delays and make trials a less traumatic experience for complainants, while preserving the rights to a fair trial for defendants. Crucially, it’s led to more early guilty pleas and shorter trial timeframes. The time it takes to get a case to trial is a real pain point for everyone involved. Those are two outcomes we’re hoping will flow from Tika’s collective action, too.
The SVPC results have shown that all the dire predictions that trials outside the Pilot would be negatively affected were wrong. So why wouldn’t you use ALL the levers to make it a better experience for everyone? Also – the trial in Greymouth is only in its first days and already the media has reported the Judge having to step in to warn the defence about their line of questioning.
SD: There’s that photo of you aged six with that quite brutal fringe. What would you say to that little girl if you could?
AM: Finding those photos and writing about that little girl was like an out-of-body experience because I did look at that photo almost as I would look at my daughter or a child, it was quite a profound experience. I suppose I would tell her that everything will be all right in the end … I mean, that’s not possible for everybody. Everybody deals with trauma in a different way and some people have not had the same opportunities that I’ve had along the way. It can profoundly affect your life. I’m very fortunate that I’ve ended up where I am, in the shape that I am. I look at that little face and I think “you poor wee thing”.
SD: And that last photo, horse riding. Your face says it all.
AM: Early this year I took my horse down to the beach for the first time in a long time and when I walked back in the house covered in horse shit and hay in my hair. Karleen was standing in the kitchen. She looked at me and she went, “Oh my god, look at your face. Just look at your face. You need to ride that horse more often.” That’s what being with those animals does for me. So, that little girl in that picture with the brutal fringe had just fallen in love with horses. And I guess if I was going to say something to that little girl, it could be, horses will save you.