Matt and the Media

Australian Story

To the Test and A Small World
PROGRAM TRANSCRIPT: Monday, 21 June , 2004

CAROLINE JONES: Hello. I'm Caroline Jones. Later, some surprising developments in the lives of people you've met on the show over the past few years. But first, the story of a suburban mother, Cheryl Dobbie. Cheryl works as an extra on the set of the police drama 'Stingers'. But, as you'll see, she leads a more interesting life than any of the fictional characters. Right now, she's having quite an impact on the world of cricket, although she knows very little about the sport. This is her story.

PETER PHELPS - COLLEAGUE: Cheryl isn't your stock standard background artist at $124 a day, and that's the first thing I noticed about her. Often you're working in a cocoon with something like this with long running television you know. And Cheryl's like the butterfly that comes out of the cocoon. She's got that sense of wonderment that is like a child. And that's what all actors should be like, you know? And it's, it's an inspiration.

CHERYL DOBBIE: With 'Stingers' they make me feel, as an extra... they make me feel just as important as the rest of the crew. I've put myself in a position that everything I do, I do because I want to do it and I enjoy doing it, you know what I mean. There's nothing I really do in my life that I go, oh, God. I've got to do this today.

KATE KENDALL - COLLEAGUE: I think I remember going, who's this girl? Like, who is she? I wouldn't say she was... irritated me, but she was, there was something about her that was, like... that she was right there, in your face. Just incrementally, things have happened over the years that you kind of keep hearing little inserts of information. It's just things that have dropped into the conversation. And then, after a while, you start going, what. And then you start going, what!

SALLY SPALDING - FRIEND: With everything that happened to Cheryl, you would've expected maybe she wouldn't have been able to break through that. But, yeah, she's a survivor, and she's just been able to deal with everything with incredible resilience and humour in her life, and an incredible amount of hardship. And yeah, maybe really build something for herself.

GARY SWEET - COLLEAGUE: It doesn't surprise me that Cheryl invented the Bat Mat, because she is not only delightful to have around, but she's kind of bizarre as well. I think with all inventions, people go, how come I didn't think of that? When you think of Chezz, it's quite phenomenal. Especially when she knows nothing about cricket. You know, if I'd had that Bat Mat, I could've been playing test cricket now.

ROSS HAND - FRIEND: And I said, Cheryl, you're the most influential woman in the game of cricket, yet you know nothing about the game of cricket. She thought Don Bradman still played for Australia. She doesn't even know one of the current Australian players. It's, yeah, it's unbelievable for someone who can be so influential in the game now, with what she's invented. And yet she knows nothing about the game. In a lot of ways, Cheryl was no different to most other parents, in that she knew nothing about cricket but she wanted to provide an opportunity for her kids to play it.

CHERYL DOBBIE: This is where it began - Warrandyte Cricket Ground, yeah. So I've turned up here on a Sunday morning, and I had to teach these children, and they were all talking. I'm going, shh, shh. Just let me, just work this out for a minute. I was looking at this drawing, thinking, this doesn't make sense. Because I don't know anything about cricket, I needed something to teach me, so as I could teach the children.

MARTIN GLEESON – CRICKET VICTORIA: Cheryl rang me just completely out of the blue, and said, is there anything out there that I can use that’s going to help me run a better program? My reply was, at the moment, to my knowledge, there wasn't anything of that sort of ilk that was going to help.

CHERYL DOBBIE: I found this tennis court grass that was getting thrown out. And we brought it home, and made, like a basic stencil, so I could say, well, this is where you put your foot. This is where your feet stand. The following week, I brought my old tennis court grass matting. And I placed it down, and all the children instantly were… I'd say, OK, now we're doing an on-drive. And one of the fathers and the coaches said, you should put it in your car and go and get that patented. And I said to my husband, I've been told that I should patent this idea. And he said, oh, don't be silly. It'll be too much work you know. Too hard basket.

JOHNNY DOBBEY – HUSBAND: I could just sort of see the expense of going through the channels of trying to patent something which was basically invented by, you know, a housewife. And, you know, initially I thought, well, don't bother, because I could see it costing too much for what we could afford.

SALLY SPALDING – FRIEND: And, of course, typical Cheryl, everything Johnny says, she does the opposite. So, it grew into something much, much bigger than she probably ever anticipated. But then anything Cheryl does, it's just no surprise. It’s like, yeah, I'm not surprised she could do that. She's got the mind of an inventor. If you know the story of Cheryl's life, she had a lot of things thrown into her path as a young person growing up that most people really wouldn't be able to recover from, that they wouldn't be able to bounce back from and survive. But Cheryl is such a survivor that what happened to her when she was growing up, she actually was able to turn all of those things around and turn them into something positive. And she always says to me, Sall, I was never going to be a victim, I was never ever going to be a victim with what happened in my life.

CHERYL DOBBIE: I was made to grow up very quickly. There was no time for me to be a little girl. My father had an affair with this woman and left, and it was about a week after Christmas. My mother couldn't cope with it at all. She took a bottle of sleeping tablets. I don't know how it happened, but we ended up being left alone until my sister's birthday. My father came to give my sister a present and realised that we'd been on our own for just under three months. I was only about ten, not, not quite eleven years old. I had a six year old sister, Karen, and my baby sister was only about three years old, so I stopped going to school to look after her. And I would drop Karen off to school every morning. And there was not much food.

KAREN GIANNOPOULOS - SISTER: Cheryl used to send me around the streets doorknocking for bread, milk, eggs, whatever Cheryl asked for. And I'd go, Chezz, I can't go and ask her for more eggs. I can't do it. She's, they've given us so much.

CHERYL DOBBIE: My sister always says, I don't get it. She says I don't get why the neighbours didn't say something. I don't get where the rest of the family was. I don't get why Dad didn’t, why Dad could sort of leave for three months and not come back. Why the hospital that my mother went to, the ambulance - why one person didn’t say, hey, wait a minute. There's three little girls left on their own.

KAREN GIANNOPOULOS - SISTER: When we wanted to find out something, we used to get on the phone and just keep ringing a number until we got someone. And we'd say, well, maybe you can help us. Do you know the ingredients so we can make pancakes? And, some people were very helpful, and then some people just told us to nick off and used to hang the phone up.

CHERYL DOBBIE: As a ten year old, I think that what was going through my mind is, if I did tell somebody, when Mum gets back, or Dad gets back, I was going to be in big trouble, and I didn't want a smack. We were a very private family. Because there was a lot of fighting and a lot of arguing growing up, we were always told you know, you don't let the neighbours know. If I had my time again, I would've gone to the next door neighbours and said, Mum's been taken away by the ambulance and we don’t know where Dad is. And it wouldn't have happened. But we didn't know. I didn't know that was what I was supposed to do.

KAREN GIANNOPOULOS – SISTER: I still don't know how she, how she handled that, and how, how we lived the way we lived. And I'm glad Cheryl was the elder sister and it wasn't me, because I don't know where we'd be. And that's, yeah, that's the truth.

CHERYL DOBBIE: There's so many things in my life that I think back to, and I can't think about all the negative things in my life. If you're walking around with a head full of negative thoughts I mean, it's not going to do you any good, and it's not going to do anyone around you any good. So, you just be positive, positive, positive, all the time. And the thing is, if you're positive, good things come. Good things come your way.

KAREN GIANNOPOULOS - SISTER: Cheryl's come out of her childhood being a fighter. Nothing gets her down. She just finds a way. And if that door shuts, she'll find another one, and she'll just keep on looking until it gets done. There's no thought of, it can't be done. It's, gee, those ten ways haven't worked, I'll have to try more ways. She's got to be doing something, got to be building something.

ROSS HAND - FRIEND: She's a very giving mother and she wants the kids to have a better life than what she had.

KAREN GIANNOPOULOS - SISTER: Cheryl's always had wildlife, and always worried about the welfare of animals and insects and anything.

CHERYL DOBBIE: As a child, I always wanted animals everywhere, and didn't really get the chance to do that, due to money, I suppose. So, here we have a full menagerie.

ROSS HAND – FRIEND: It was basically a Stephen King novel. She was out on her own at a very young age.

CHERYL DOBBIE: I loved my father, and I believe my father loved me very much. He loved all three of us.

ROSS HAND – FRIEND: Well, her dad moved to Western Australia and remarried. She got a phone call from her father, could you please come over and see me? And, unfortunately, her boss at the time wouldn't give her time off work, and I think within a couple of days, she'd found out that, that her father had committed suicide, he'd hung himself.

CHERYL DOBBIE: Things didn't go to plan in his life, and he found it, unbearable. So, he took his own life, just after my 17th birthday. Things went downhill big-time. I started to drink. I think it was my only way out of reality. I spent a lot of Christmases on my own, with my bottle of bourbon and a lot of tears. A lot of crying, and, you know, a lot of lonely, lonely nights on my own.

ROSS HAND - FRIEND: Yeah, really the turning point in Cheryl's life was when she met her husband, Johnny. She showed me this photo of this new man in her life and he had a twelve inch beard and he looked like a big bikie. My first impression was, oh, it's going to get messy. Being a close friend of Cheryl, and I'd always stick up for her - but I was terribly wrong. You know, Johnny probably is the first big positive influence in Cheryl's life, 'cause it was just total love for her.

CHERYL DOBBIE: Because of what's happened in my life I think that was my payback. OK, Cheryl, you've done it really, really hard. Here, now we'll give you a saint. And I love him, more than, more than when I, when we first fell in love. I think he's just, he's just precious. Yeah, he's just beautiful. He's just, he's just, he's just really special.

JOHNNY DOBBIE: I don't think she really cares about being the most influential woman in cricket. If Bat Mat is extremely popular, yeah, I think she's achieved what she's wanting to achieve by just getting it off the ground and probably getting into production.

GERARD CLARKE – CRICKET CONSULTANT: It's amazing the amount of people who have said this is such a simple idea that they can't believe that somebody else hasn't thought of it. It's quite amazing. There's a group of businessmen involved in the sales and marketing of the Bat Mat product. And we hold regular meetings where Cheryl comes in and cracks a whip at those meetings and makes sure things are happening. There's a lot of countries around the world continually look at Australia at the moment, being the leading cricketing country. I had a call from a guy from India who was interested in the product and I actually thought it was a friend of mine taking the mickey out of me. But it was a legitimate call. He'd seen the product here in Australia on a visit, and since that time there's been a container load of Bat Mats been shipped off to India, also Sri Lanka. And we've had the same inquiries out of New Zealand and South Africa and the UK, and as far as Spain and Denmark, who are very small cricketing countries, but have actually, you know, purchased the product, which was just amazing.

MARTIN GLEESON – CRICKET VICTORIA: Maybe it produces our next test cricketer or it has a hand in that. I think it's the same as anything, I don't think anything is the actual answer, but if it goes to developing somebody and teaching a young player their first steps and that player goes on and plays at high-level cricket than that's fantastic. If it's come from a housewife who knows nothing about cricket then that's even better.

CHERYL DOBBIE: It's sort of my little mark. It's my little mark that I've done. To know that your product's selling and being played on by little Indian children and Sri Lankan children and English children - it's sort of a bit overwhelming actually.

GERARD CLARKE – CRICKET CONSULTANT: Well, just with the cricketing population in India, they play cricket from you know dawn until it's dark at night, you know. I think the sky's the limit for the Bat Mat.

CHERYL DOBBIE: My dream started out as wanting to be in Harold's coffee shop on 'Neighbours'. But things have changed. Things have changed now. And now I'm looking at winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I figure if Bat Mat makes enough money, I want to go into water purifying or cheap housing for the Third World. I'm...I'm glad people say that I'm inspirational. It's a good thing, isn't it? If I can do it – if I can be knocked and knocked and knocked and knocked down all through my childhood and I can do it, then I suppose anyone can do it.

CAROLINE JONES: Hello again. And just before we go, a little discovery to share. It seems that some of the people we've featured on Australian Story have been talking behind our backs. As a matter of fact, they've started talking to each other! And we’ve tracked mission control to a farming property at Warialda, in northern New South Wales, where Sam and Jenny Bailey, who appeared on the show four years ago, have been very busy on the phone.

SAM BAILEY: Hi. I'm Sam Bailey.

JENNY BAILEY: And I'm his wife, Jenny.

SAM BAILEY: We appeared on Australian Story four years ago.

JENNY BAILEY: And you know our life has never been the same since, 'cause Sam spends most of his time on the phone.

SAM BAILEY: I can't help it. I just get carried away by their inspirational stories.

JENNY BAILEY: So how many people have you called?

SAM BAILEY: Oh, I've lost count. Charlie Teo, Victoria Friend, Gail Shann.

JENNY BAILEY: But who started it all? There was one that started it all.

SAM BAILEY: Matt. Matt Laffan. Matt was born with a rare genetic disorder which meant that his limbs would not grow to a normal length. He was given a week to live. Matt survived and is now a lawyer with the New South Wales Director of Public Prosecutions.

MATT LAFFAN: Just after Australian Story aired Sam Bailey gave me a phone call here at home and we had a bit of a yarn.

SAM BAILEY: And, I guess right from that very first word, Matt and I just hit it off. And we were lucky enough to actually meet each other last year. We were both invited to speak at a spinal cord conference in Sydney. One of the great things about Australian Story is that it's given people like Matt and I exposure to the outside world. Now a lot of us do a lot of public speaking and it's just really nice to be able to help other people. Nothing is impossible. I mean, Matt's done some dynamic stuff, and one of the things that I'm really inspired about that he chose to run for lord mayor of Sydney. Matt, to me, is six foot tall and bullet proof.

MATT LAFFAN: Those elections took place in Sydney in March 2004. That was a fantastic experience. Now, I wasn't elected to the position of lord mayor, but I certainly pulled in a big percentage of the votes. Fortunately, just recently I had a promotion confirmed at the DPP. So life has been on the up and up for me. And, as always, I'm looking forward to the next challenge, the next opportunity, which awaits me around the corner.

SAM BAILEY: Dr Charlie Teo's a Sydney-based neurosurgeon. He's unconventional, not always popular with other doctors.

CHARLIE TEO: Since Australian Story I think things are looking better. More of my colleagues are now supporting what I've been doing. I guess about 99% of the comments that I've had from people have been positive and illustrate to me the great Australian battler attitude. Sam and my paths crossed when I met him at lunch with Christopher Reeve, when Christopher Reeve was out here promoting stem cell research. I was immediately impressed by the aura around Sam, and his amazing strength and willpower.

SAM BAILEY: He is an absolute card! I was just totally blown away by what this guy's done, what he's doing, and his future visions.

CHARLIE TEO: We spoke many times on the phone and we actually have organised for my family to visit him and his, on his property in the country. Yeah, I guess we had an immediate bond and affinity. We had a mutual sort of respect for each other, so, yeah, a match made in heaven.

SAM BAILEY: Victoria Friend is another person I know. After a light plane crash in remote bushland Victoria Friend and her fiance, Geoff Henderson, waited for forty hours, with horrific injuries and severe burns, for the rescuers to find them. Tragically, Geoff died. Victoria remained physically and emotionally scarred after the accident. Her slow and painful recovery has been an absolute inspiration to me. Victoria and I actually were at school together, so we had an instant bonding. And it was just nice to speak to her and to bounce things off her. Again, it was just another story that inspired me and, I guess, helps me get from one day to the next.

VICTORIA FRIEND: After my Australian Story aired I received lots of beautiful letters and phone calls. Getting a letter from a complete stranger who's been touched by my story is so humbling, and the words that he's written are so, so lovely and they mean so much to me. And I can't even return the letter because he doesn't have a return address. And I'd love to reply, but, anyway, this letter means an awful lot. It's helped bridge the gap between me and sort of the outside world, because I'd cut myself off so much. And that's helped me, made a big difference.

DERMOTT SHANNON: Well, we'll slowly drag you out the door now, kicking and screaming. Come on, we're going to have a good time! But the resistance is getting less and less now. She's swinging back into the social groove.

VICTORIA FRIEND: Well, Derm, he's my best friend, and he's made a huge difference to me.

DERMOTT SHANNON: I think the fact that I knew Geoff so well, he was my best mate.

VICTORIA FRIEND: Yeah.

DERMOTT SHANNON: And I think that's the reason why we're together now, I think, because, because of Geoff, because of our…

VICTORIA FRIEND: Yeah.

DERMOTT SHANNON: ...relationship with Geoffrey.

VICTORIA FRIEND: The guilt factor of even thinking about anyone else is enormous and that affects your whole sort of perspective on a new relationship, I think. And I've had to overcome that to, to learn to, that it was possible to, you know, to love two people.

SAM BAILEY: Well, for us nothing much changes. We're still madly in love, still living in the same house.

JENNY BAILEY: And we tried IVF but we didn't have any luck there, so there's no kids on the way. But we're doing lots of public speaking.

SAM BAILEY: And it's been great, it's taken us to all corners of the country - Perth, Townsville, Brisbane.

JENNY BAILEY: So life's pretty good really, isn't it, Sam?

SAM BAILEY: Life's great.

back to the top of the page