‘I was bored - it was tedious’:How Deborah became a dealmaker for the stars

When she was a literary agent,Deborah Callaghan represented some of the best known names and brokered some of the biggest book deals in Australian publishing.

These included Olympic swimming legend Dawn Fraser,whom Callaghan helped to break publishing records at the time with a whopping $400,000-plus advance for the 472-page 2001 tomeDawn:One Hell of a Life.

During the frenzied bidding war when Callaghan put it out to auction,it was Fraser’s daughter,Dawn-Lorraine Ware,who was to be the author. That didn’t quite pan out,but that’s often how it rolls in non-fiction. More on that later.

Then there is journalist Les Carlyon,former editor of Melbourne’sThe Ageand editor-in-chief ofThe Herald&Weekly Times,whose bookGallipoli,sold 250,000 copies and became a bestseller in Australia,New Zealand and Britain.

Former Midnight Oil frontman and ALP politician Peter Garrett came to Callaghan via her brother-in-law Mark Callaghan,is GANGgajang lead vocalist,and enlisted her help to publish his 2015 memoir,Big Blue Sky.

She was known as a formidable dealmaker for some of the biggest names in non-fiction,including Margaret Whitlam,Dr Catherine Hamlin,Kerry Stokes,Ray Martin,Major John Cantwell,Bert Newton,Michael Gudinski,Matt Moran,Greig Pickhaver (H.G. Nelson) and Gerard Stone.

She was relatively richly rewarded – taking home between 10 and 12.5 per cent of the spoils.

So why would she give that up for the tenuous world of writing fiction? That’s one of the questions I have when we meet for lunch at the newly renovated Dry Dock hotel in Balmain.

After decades of pushing other people’s stories,Callaghan has penned her debut novel,The Little Clothes.It’s about Audrey,a Sydney lawyer in her 30s who feels unseen – and starts pushing the boundaries of how much she can get away with as an invisible woman,until a reckoning from her childhood heads the book in a completely unexpectedly dark direction.

We share oysters and insights about the difference between being an agent and author. For mains,she chooses New Zealand snapper,while I have a beef shin ragu rigatoni with salad as we chew the fat on the book industry.

Callaghan lives nearby in one of the Balmain peninsula’s beautiful old sandstone houses,with her husband and two daughters.

She grew up in north-west Sydney on the border of Epping and Cheltenham in what was then the city’s Bible belt. Her father sailed into Australia from England on the first ship after World War II,while her mother sailed out of Australia on the first ship out. But luckily for Callaghan,her mother returned. The electrician and homemaker would later meet at a 21st birthday party,and Callaghan and her brother were raised in left-wing family. “I think there were only three of us left-leaning families in our part of Epping.”

She attended Cheltenham Girls and Carlingford High,leaving to work as an interstate train host to save money to travel to Europe. On her return she studied for a BA in information studies while working fulltime as a librarian at Hornsby,then the State Library and the Supreme Court Library. And read lots of books by Edna O’Brien,Elizabeth Harrower,Daphne du Maurier and the like.

“I was bored. I would sit there thinking,I’m not interested in series cataloguing. I’d just daydream. One day,I remember thinking,I can’t keep doing this. This is so tedious. So I just sat down at my desk,and wrote a story. I sent it off to the editor ofThe Australian,and they published it.”

From freelance writing she entered book publishing first as a publicist and,after stints at a host of different houses,eventually set up Ironbark Press with writers Larry Writer and Ian Heads,specialising in publishing sport and true crime.

“People were horrified,you weren’t meant to publish true crime back then,but now everyone does,” she says. The literary publishing world may have scoffed,but they brought in the bucks. Cricket,car racing and football of all varieties became her specialty,from AFL – she published Hawthorn legend Robert DiPierdomenico’s autobiography,which then prime minister Bob Hawke launched – to rugby league,publishing Balmain Tiger Wayne Pearce’s story by the late Ian Heads,known as the gentleman of rugby league.

“I crashed Wayne Pearce’s red sports car driving him around to promote the book. Oops.”

Having been raised in a non-footy loving family,suddenly rugby league players like Paul “Fatty” Vautin,Steve “Blocker” Roach and Greg “Brandy” Alexander became clients and friends.

Callaghan and her co-owners sold the company to Pan MacMillan when the publishing world realised how lucrative sports stories were. They kept her on as non-fiction publisher. There she started the Carlton and United Brewery sports writing award,which lead her to “stealthily” and strategically meet some of the best sports writers in the nation including Carlyon. “It was great to be in publishing at that time,we spent a lot of time in the Bayswater Brasserie.”

Next Jennifer Byrne employed her at Reed Books,which was bought by Random House,which she then left with a contact book full of connections to become an agent for 15 years.

At an Allen&Unwin Christmas party,she met husband Rory Callaghan,who was working as a television producer for Nine (the owner of this masthead) and went on to become chief executive of Endemol and Screentime Australia.

“A lot of my clients came to me via Rory because he was in TV. We were invited onto Kerri-Anne Kennerley’s boat once and Dawn Fraser and her daughter Dawn-Lorraine were there,and we got chatting. I didn’t know much of Dawn’s story at that point. She was being managed by Rene Rivkin at the time.

“I’d go to her apartment in the Olympic village where she was living in 2000,driving out with my new baby Rose in the baby seat. I’d hand the baby to Dawn and let her just talk. I interviewed her for about 14 to 15 months.

“We were going into the Sydney Olympics,they were heady days,and she had never told her story before so I made sure she did. Dawn is taciturn but we got on really well. She was honest with me. I pushed her a lot. You can’t tell your story if you’re not going to tell the significant bits.

“I landed the book,sold it,wrote it,” she says,revealing it was her work,not Dawn or Dawn-Lorraine or any of the other writers contracted to help.

This was often how it worked out with celebrity clients who came to her via her impressive network. “Dawn’s is an incredible working-class story,” she says of the Balmain-raised Olympics swimmer,whose family home,where she was raised as one of eight,is not far from where we eat.

She considers Ray Martin,whose 2009 best-selling autobiographyStories of My Lifeshe sold,a friend,and he will be at her book launch next week. He came to her via her husband’s Channel Nine connections. She heard about Catherine Hamlin via an aunt in Beecroft.

While she never sold a book for Michael Gudinski,he asked her to represent him in a dispute when someone wrote an unauthorised biography of him. “And this is the problem with being an agent,you end up being the attack dog.”

The final book she worked on as an agent was with rock star Peter Garrett in 2015.

“I went to visit him and Doris his wife in Mittagong. Pete was very engaging,but …” she trails off before completing her sentence. “My husband always says only the words after but are the important ones.”

“This is not in reference to Peter particularly. But I did a lot of fixing up of other people’s writing,which I found frustrating sometimes because you think ‘I can do this. What am I doing? Why aren’t I writing myself?’”

“It taught me that I’m resilient. It’s a hard job,a highwire act. These people live off their charm,but they ring you wanting you to fix their lives basically. ‘Can you fix my TV?’ ‘Shouldn’t you have got more money than that?’ I mean I’m talking hundreds of thousands of dollars in advances here. No one was awful to me – but I just started to feel the weight of their expectations of me.”

She says she doesn’t have the same expectations of her own agent Jane Novak,who has already soldThe Little Clothes in Australia and Britain.

Callaghan worked on her first fiction manuscript from 2016 to 2020 but abandoned it. “Meredith Curnow,my publisher at Penguin said that was my practice run.” Then she started something else completely which became her debut novel.

“People always thought ‘Deb Callaghan is sports,blokes,non-fiction.’ But I sent my manuscript to Jane Novak,and she promised to represent me within five days. I burst into tears when I came out of that meeting. I’ve always written,but people never knew I could do it. I think writing fiction is kind of an escape. It is like a form of therapy.”

Her book has some themes that touch on the zeitgeist – misogyny and childhood sexual abuse – which may hit a nerve. She’s already working on her second novel.

“But it’s very hard to get the keys to the club. It’s a very,very protected industry,Australian fiction. Certain people already own the territory. They all are friends with each other. I don’t know that anyone wants me in their club.”

You’d have to think given her track record,if anyone can break into the tightly-knit world of Australian fiction,Deborah Callaghan is in with a fighting chance.

The Little Clothes,published by Penguin Random House,is out now.

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