‘Everything was on the table’: What it was like to be Dani Laidley’s biographer

Dani’s early legwork thereby established the framework for the book, making it possible. She says the process was almost cathartic. “All this stuff was so heavy. I suppose that’s why we got very raw and emotional – both of us – going through it,” she says. “But I also felt that was the best way to lighten the load.”

The process became an education for her, too. The day we began working in earnest – a sunny November morning last year – we sat in her apartment and she told me about her childhood in the Balga backblocks, and her immediate family, and the tone was oh so dark. There was her tempestuous mother, “Mad Carmel”, and her father David, the roofer who was injured and drank and ultimately kicked Dani out of home when she was 12. There was her little brother, Paul, with whom she only sparingly connected. But as we unpacked those stories over the intervening months, and as Dani returned to Perth and further picked at all those threads, she came to learn the loving and sympathetic side to all her kin.

“That was a great part of this whole thing. I see my mother and father in a completely new light. I’m in touch with Mum constantly. My Dad’s been gone almost 20 years, and gee I wish I’d got to know him better, and pushed our relationship more than I did.” Her brother now has a line that he loves to trot out to anyone who will listen: “You weren’t a very good brother,” he tells people, “but you’re a crash hot sister.”

Getting it all onto the page was fraught though. At times rocky. Dani was emerging from pandemic lockdowns like everyone else, only with a dangerously adrenalised mix of legal actions against Victoria Police looming over her head, and red carpet invitations bombarding her inbox. Everything was too big, too much, too dark, too bright. As her lovely partner and childhood sweetheart Donna likes to say, Dani would be forced into a fight-or-flight situation one day, and offered a sugar hit of attention and love the next – each scenario followed by an inevitable crash. For days on end she would go to ground, go quiet, barely able to get out of bed, and certainly unable to talk to me. We often spoke late at night, her voice cracking until I told her to stop and sleep. I didn’t want to coax and nudge and probe and push any more – I needed to do the opposite.

“It was highly emotional. I’d go from anxious to depressed during the process. Sometimes I felt it was so therapeutic, and other times it was like I was getting beaten over the head,” she says. “It took trust in you – knowing when to push me and hold me, and not let me fall over the edge. I needed those days when you would pull back and say ‘No Dani, that’s it, we’re stopping today, you need a rest’.”

She remembers other parts fondly, as do I. I remember her partner Donna and my partner Nikki talking together in corners, thick as thieves. I remember my son doing magic tricks for Dani. I remember near the end, how “the DLs” (Danielle Laidley and Donna Leckie) found an old suitcase to add to the decorative collection of such suitcases we keep, and how I accidentally interrupted them while they were painting a surprise “thank you” message on the outside, in pink and blue and white, the colours of the trans community. I remember us all going to see an AFLW Pride Round match at Arden Street, and cooking in the January heat. 

Dani guesses we spent at least 100 hours together last summer. “It wasn’t always talking and typing. It was lunches and dinners. Time here, but also at your place in the country. People say they can hear my voice in the book, and it doesn’t happen without that. And don’t underplay the emotion and care and empathy,” she adds. “If we didn’t have that, I would have been tipped over the edge and called it quits so many times.”

Some of the words came as a shock to read. She remembers holding the first pages, getting halfway through and having to put it down. “It was too hard. It was way too raw,” she says. “It took time for me to pick it back up and go through it wondering ‘What will my family think?’ and ‘What will my teammates think?’ There’s stuff that’s extremely personal, not just to me but others. And I learned that through you, or maybe we learned it together? We had to put it all out there first, reel it back in, polish it and change it and watch it come to life. It wasn’t until the end that I started to feel comfortable and proud, and willing to share.”

She’s nervous about the book going out into the world. I’d be stunned if she wasn’t.

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“There’s a gamut of emotions, from excited to nervous. Excited that we’ve worked together for so long, and here’s this thing that’s now a living breathing piece of literature that’s there forever,” she says. “But there’s also the other end of the scale, nervous. Are people going to like it, and are they even going to read it?”

They will. The rollout has begun. Her management company – TLA – has a 15-page itinerary of interest, from media interviews to corporate speaking gigs and talks in correctional facilities, to a formal book launch on Thursday in the Long Room at the MCG. Once, that might have been all too much for Dani – another series of sugar hits before another crash – but she lives in the present now, walking on the beach and making time to breathe.

“All in all, it’s my story – the highs, lows and in-betweens – and I’m proud to share it. Hopefully, it’s an education,” she says. “With this platform, and given what I’ve done in the first phase of my life, I’m hoping that people will stop and listen and look, give me their ears and eyes, and understand the journey. I hope they don’t look away.”