Julia Baird on publishing her bestselling book while fighting cancer

Journalist, TV host, and author Julia Baird. Photo / Alex Ellinghausen

Journalist, television host and author Julia Baird has gone four rounds against cancer in the last decade. Four huge operations have left her body scored with a map of her fight for survival. Still recovering from her most recent, brutal surgery, Baird, a familiar face on ABC’s political round-up The Drum, and a familiar byline in The Sydney Morning Herald and The New York Times, is understandably a bit fed up.

“I’m kind of tired of life lessons,” she says over Zoom from her living room in Sydney, her generous mouth twisted in a familiar, wry grin.

“Like — I learn a lot from suffering. But I think I might be done now. I’d like to have a bit of the other stuff.”

In 2020, Baird published a book while she was in remission from her third bout of cancer. It not only became an international bestseller, but won numerous literary prizes, as well as prompting a Ted Talk.

Phosphorescence: On awe, wonder, and the things that sustain you when the world goes dark is a collection of writing that is a call to the light, to the shimmering magic that exists in the world, and is easily forgotten when things get hard.

Baird details how, both during and between cancer battles, she went searching for the awe and wonder that could make her feel small and bring her perspective on her place in the world. It’s a beautifully written, often funny, painful and affecting book.

Phosphorescence largely escaped a New Zealand audience upon release in 2020, when our country was in the first Covid-19 lockdown and grappling with a new way of life. However, it hit a nerve in Australia, arriving at exactly the right moment to soothe and inspire readers into finding awe in lives that felt bleak and out of control.

Re-released in paperback this month and as pertinent as ever, Phosphorescence now presents a new challenge to its own author. In it, Baird speaks to how grateful she is to be in remission, to finally be free of cancer, and of never, ever wanting to go back there. But in the months since publication, her cancer, initially diagnosed as ovarian, has returned for the fourth time. Baird has been dragged back into the dark. How do you hold on to awe and wonder when your mortality is being pushed to its limit again?

Book cover for Julia Baird's 'Phosphorescence'.

Twisting the gold necklaces glinting around her neck, Baird breathes in, then exhales several times, not weary, but careful.

“I really do live my life that way, in terms of pursuit of awe and wonder, and I’m very, very deliberate about it,” she says. “I build it in as like a need that we don’t normally factor. Like it’s a mental health need. It’s not just mental, it’s not just physical — it literally is another thing. The word ‘spiritual’ is always used in a bit of a woo-woo sense, but there’s something in us that is incredibly sustained by experiences of awe and wonder.”

You’d have to question just how closely you can hold beautiful things to you, when facing that kind of darkness again.

“Last year was really, really tough. Like — it was really tough. Having it [cancer] come back was just quite devastating. I was a bit at my wit’s end. And there is a point where there’s not a lot of words that are necessarily that comforting.”

Baird tilts her head away for a moment, and then visibly brightens.

“So I just packed my stuff and I went to Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia.”

Baird grew up in a close-knit Anglican community in Sydney. Though today she actively rallies against some of the oppression and hypocrisy she’s witnessed in her own church, she remains steadfast in her own “quiet and stubborn” faith. She explores the concepts of awe, wonder and grace in a secular sense in her book.

Those words, long associated with the religious, are the scaffolding which have held her up in her worst moments, and she holds them out as an offering to the reader. Phosphorescence is her search for ‘living light’ on Earth, and she finds it in remarkable people: the Aboriginal First Nations of Australia, LGBTQI advocates, members of her church, friends, rebels, and unusual characters. But the natural world, and especially the ocean, is the source of true fascination for her. Looking for bioluminescence becomes the thread that leaves a glowing trail through the book. So it’s not surprising that when she ran from the relentless darkness of cancer treatment last year, she ran to the reef.

“It was the most beautiful place I’ve ever been in my life. I couldn’t get over it.” Baird shakes her head, her long fingers grasping at the air as she tries to conjure Ningaloo Reef into the room.

“It was just me sitting with these whale sharks, these ancient dinosaur beasts, and you’re just swimming along beside them. The beauty of being in their world; they’re not stuck in some friggin’ pool. And you’re observing them, right? You’re in their world, and this thing is the size of a bus, and they’ve got all these little fish swimming behind them. And it was … everything just goes silent.”

Baird had her two teenage kids with her and, after their time on Ningaloo, she dropped them with their dad and went right back to the reef.

“I’d see all these astonishing things in this turquoise water and then I would just go and get, like, a fish burger and a bottle of wine, and it was like heaven, it was so great. I was facing these really massive existential questions, but I was just so happy. I was very content.”

In part, that contentment has something to do with the soothing effect of making ourselves small, something Baird expanded on in her 2022 Ted Talk. “When you sit on a hill and you’re seeing these stars. What is that feeling that you get? And it’s so soothing? And why is it so soothing to be in a forest where they’ve got these enormous trees? And why is it so soothing to be at the fringe of a vast ocean? I think that we underestimate smallness so much. There’s a whole other dimension to being human, which is recognising that we’re ants in the universe. And that’s a really good thing.”

Baird is interested in research that demonstrates experiencing smallness in the face of awe and wonder makes us feel connected to one another, as well as more altruistic, and more available to our fellow human beings.

Phosphorescence has provoked many extraordinary conversations for Baird, as readers have shared with her the beauty they have experienced in their own lives.

“I actually genuinely find it a real honour that when someone’s at their absolute lowest point [they] find any comfort from anything you’ve written. That’s amazing that you’ve accompanied them in some way. A lot of people who’ve been through really bleak times have written to me to tell me that, and that makes me happy.”

However, Baird is emphatic that she doesn’t want Phosphorescence to become some kind of breathless and preachy manual for self-help.

“I really didn’t want this book to be like, ‘Oh, so when you’re sick, not only do you need to get through it, you’ve got to be shining like a light bulb,’” she says.

“I would hate for it to be a burden, or to think that there was a panacea for when you’re dealing with really s***ty awful things that life throws at you that you can lie under a tree or jump through some waves and everything’s fine.”

Baird is stopped often by strangers who have read her book. Occasionally their enthusiasm and connection to her writing lands in a different way.

“I was walking outside my house the other day, and there’s a woman who keeps walking past me who’s [been] reading my book. And she’s like, ‘Oh, I have to hug you. I’m almost finished your book. I had cancer myself one time.’ Then she just left this big wet patch of tears on my shoulder.”

Baird touches her shoulder briefly to demonstrate.

“It’s lovely that she’s got this affection to give me because of [the book]. But that is also heavy on one level as well. I feel that on my shoulder.”

Baird’s fingers return to her shoulder, patting gently there, as if to comfort herself.

Phosphorescence contains letters to Baird’s two children, Poppy and Sam, detailing all the things she hopes for their lives — how they will go through their time on Earth as decent, kind people, making space for wonder, love, and friendship. The book acts as a legacy document for them, full of everything their mother cares about and has fought for. It adds extra poignancy to her health battle to remember these two sweet, beautifully drawn children are there with her on the journey.

Baird drolly adds that they still haven’t read it. They’re teenagers now, she says, and jokes that to them it’s like another lecture from their mum - though she suspects they have absorbed some of it without even realising.

She describes for me the night, shortly after finishing the book, when she heard there was phosphorescence on the coast, and dragged her kids along with her.

“We got to this beach and I was like, ‘Oh no, it’s pitch black.’ Then this big wave comes in and it’s a curl of neon blue. YES. They ran in it, and they were swimming. We were covered in light, like glowing specks, and our footprints had stars in them. And they just cavorted like puppies. It was great. Then I heard Poppy telling one of her friends that was one of the greatest nights of her life.”

Baird is smiling now, a huge triumphant infectious grin. She talks about how she now gets up with her daughter to watch Sydney’s incredible electrical storms in the night, how she and her son are getting their boating licences. She’s passing on the awe and wonder whether they like it or not, and it’s in the way she talks about them that I see where she gets some of her strength and resilience to carry on.

Later this year Baird will publish a collection of writing that will act as an answering conversation to Phosphorescence. It does not surprise me at all when she says the subject of the book is grace. It is something, along with great humour and pragmatism, that she possesses in great depth.