Tara Moss. Photo / Berndt Sellheim
International model-turned-author and advocate Tara Moss talks to Craig Sisterson about untold stories, her passion for human rights, and the bravery of wartime women
Baking, a bicycle, and a very brave woman: three things without which Tara Moss may not have existed. There wouldn't be two decades of speaking up and looking to spark change for women and children and, more recently the disabled community, following an international modelling career in her teens and early 20s. There'd be no bestselling non-fiction books with Moss' name on the cover. No modern thrillers starring model turned forensic psychologist and private eye Makedde "Mak" Vanderwall; no historical mysteries featuring wartime reporter-turned-Sydney sleuth Billie Walker that give a feminist twist to hardboiled traditions.
"This is Oma riding a bicycle, just as she did during the occupation," says Moss, holding up a black and white photo in an ornate frame to the screen. "She would cycle to visit her husband, my opa, because he'd been taken by the Nazis and put into slave labour in Berlin, at a munitions factory. She would bravely smuggle flour and sugar in the hollows of that bicycle, and cycle across Holland to Berlin to give him those ingredients, because he was a baker by trade."
The flour and sugar weren't just for comfort or a taste of home in a hellish situation.
"That's how Opa escaped the Nazis," says Moss. "His bread was good, and he'd save up the flour and sugar my oma smuggled across for him in her bicycle and bake bread and bribe the foreman. Finally, the bribes worked — he got a day pass to be able to leave the factory, beyond the barbed wire and walls, and he used that to escape. He saw there was a checkpoint, and so he stole a horse and cart and went across the bridge, thinking 'They're going to shoot me, they're going to kill me,' and they didn't fire. He got to the other side, left the horse and cart in a field, and then just walked on foot at night, all the way back home and hid for the rest of the war."
Moss dedicated her first Billie Walker mystery, The War Widow, her 13th book overall, to her grandparents, who also survived two bombs hitting their house and the Nazis flooding their village. They went through "all of that" before moving to Canada for a new life after the war.
Her paternal grandfather also served in the war, in Quebec, and she's always been interested in how such tumultuous times impacted ordinary lives — and in the stories untold, the voices less heard.
Moss, 48, is sitting in her wheelchair as we chat, speaking over video from her house on Vancouver Island. After moving to Australia when she was 22, she returned to the country of her birth with her Australian husband and daughter in 2018.
With her bright red lipstick and vintage stylings, and black and white photos on the dresser behind her, Moss looks like she could have stepped right out of the 1940s setting of her engaging historical mysteries starring Sydney-based private inquiry agent Billie Walker.
Like her heroine, Moss is direct, charming, spirited. Whether it's the books she writes, the documentaries she's fronted, or the causes she's championed — from online child safety to humanitarian crises in war zones — Moss wants us to upturn myth and bias.
Moss says her captivating heroine Billie Walker was building inside her for years, refusing to take no for an answer. "She'll be incredibly charming about it — she'll probably offer me a glass of champagne or a roundhouse kick to the ribs — but she's certainly going to get my attention."
Billie Walker returns this month alongside her assistant Sam, an injured soldier, and her Aboriginal informant Shyla in The Ghosts of Paris.
"I feel like Billie is an amalgam of a lot of the women of film noir, the woman of that war and post-war period, the woman who were out there doing things that were progressive for their time," says Moss. "They were earning an income, running a business, or out there on the front lines. They had been told during the war, 'hey we need you in the war effort', but if you're a woman working post-war, it's a political issue. They wanted those jobs for returning soldiers."
Partly inspired by the likes of New Zealand-born spy Nancy Wake, Billie Walker is a woman who rejects entrenched views of what she can or should do, and pushes against many prejudices.
Looking back, Moss says that even while we may be amazed when we hear about the real-life exploits of women of that time like Wake, disabled American spy Virginia Hall or Noor Inayat Khan, who fought prejudice as a wireless operator sent into occupied France, we're bound to underestimate the social pressure they faced. "Even just being a heteronormative unmarried woman was a big deal at the time. You were a problem to be solved."
The Ghosts of Paris is Moss' second historical mystery with a diverse cast set against the backdrop of Sydney, London, and Paris in 1947.
Moss is naturally inclusive in her fiction.
"I don't think I could write about the fallout of World War II without writing about these different groups and how they were impacted," she says. "Your cultural, religious, or social background put a label on you at the time, and you were treated according to that label.
"I guess in my life, as a disabled woman, it's not something my eyes gloss over, I actually notice it," says Moss. After suffering a hip injury in 2016, she was diagnosed with Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS), and now uses a walking stick, a rollator and a wheelchair. "For me it's not an agenda but rather a natural flow of what happens when you're writing about a time period, and you're actually noticing what's going on.
"I'm interested in the stories of regular people who had to live in complete turmoil and having their lives uprooted entirely and trying to survive," she says. "They're not Churchill, they're not Hitler, they're not making the decisions. They're at the mercy of those who are, like most people were, and I find those stories just extraordinary."
Since she walked away from international modelling in her mid-20s, Moss has been a Unicef Australia Goodwill Ambassador since 2007, the National Ambassador for Child Survival since 2013, and a patron or ambassador for other organisations addressing online child safety, rape and domestic violence.
Moss has shared her own raw stories: about battling bulimia and depression, about dealing with miscarriages, her mother's death when Moss was a teen, about being raped as a young model. As she evolved from international model to a journalist, broadcaster, and author tackling some tough issues, Moss absorbed the blows and labels others directed her way, trying to silence her, to diminish her accomplishments: "bimbo", "dumb blonde", "party girl".
She even took a polygraph to prove she hadn't hired a ghostwriter for her bestselling crime novels starring model-turned-forensic psychologist and private eye Mak Vanderwall.
"I feel very privileged that I have a profile in some places that mean I have the opportunity to do something that might be useful sometimes, that's kind of the way I've always viewed it," says Moss, reflecting on all her advocacy work over the past two decades. "I'm fascinated by people and life experiences, and you can't talk with people without recognising there are human rights issues everywhere. I've always been interested in what's happening, and where I feel like I could be useful I've always tried to do some of that, where possible."
So, it may be surprising that when her own circumstances changed, Moss was initially uncertain about speaking out on behalf of the disabled community. "I wasn't really sure if I was disabled enough or not," she confesses. "There's this sort of idea that it needs to be something visible or static, or both. And that's because people with disabilities haven't been writing the stories, they've had other people writing about them. It gets to that issue of whose voices we're hearing."
That has a real-world impact on people who are newly disabled. The public are fed a "Hollywood narrative of disability" that doesn't reflect the reality for hundreds of millions of people around the world, she says.
"As it turns out, the vast majority of disabilities are in fact invisible, but I didn't know that. Even though I was doing human rights work, it's just stuff that wasn't clear and present because it's not mainstream understanding yet."
Any time Moss goes out and interacts with the world, the barriers faced by people with disabilities become stark. She says she's fortunate to have had some mentors and teachers to help her adjust, but she also had to do a lot more learning herself.
Now, her advocacy feels natural. "It's also reciprocal, like I'm learning from the disabled community. My advocacy brings me support, in terms of camaraderie and solidarity. I'm benefiting from it too. So, it's not like a purely selfless act to be out there; it actually helps me with a feeling of belonging. And it helps me with practical tips and tricks on how to get around in the world."
The Ghosts of Paris, by Tara Moss (HarperCollins, $35), is out now.
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