Pictures: Phillip Castleton
Zooming in for an interview with the Weekly from her new base in Melbourne, Sarah-Kate Lynch – for many years one of this magazine’s best-loved columnists – has a lot to be excited about.
Not only has she moved to Australia with her art director husband Mark Robbins, better known to Weekly readers as The Ginger, Sarah-Kate has also launched a new enterprise she’s calling Pavlova Pictures.
“I’ve just started a trans-Tasman production company with MaryAnne Carroll, a television producer here in Australia. It’s quite a bold move for ladies of a certain age.”
The women’s paths crossed when they worked together on Friends Like Her, a new TV thriller set in Kaikōura. The show stars Kiwi Morgana O’Reilly, who’s just finishing filming the third series of HBO mega-hit The White Lotus in Thailand, and Australian actor Tess Haubrich.
Although one can’t help but wonder, how does Sarah-Kate find time to write for television and form a production company? Best known as a journalist, a columnist and an author, with nine best-selling novels to her name, it’s a testament to the 61-year-old’s tenacity.
“There came a time when the books stopped making a viable income,” Sarah-Kate explains. “A combination of e-books and the global financial crisis, and I knew I needed to reinvent myself, which I’d already done countless times before. So I looked at the skills I had and redirected them.”
Armed with her can-do attitude and a decent dollop of courage, Sarah-Kate set her sights on writing for TV.
“In 2016, I went and observed how they wrote Shortland Street and from there. I cut my teeth on writing scripts for them.”
Proving her worth on the nation’s longest-running soap, Sarah-Kate was soon snapped up to write for other popular shows. She worked on 800 Words starring Erik Thomson, to The Bad Seed and The Sounds.
Traveling to Kaikōura sparked Friends Like Her in Sarah-Kate’s mind, transitioning from one hit show to another.
“I’d gone down there to write a story about the re-opening of the road after the earthquake and I fell in love with the place,” she recalls. “It’s one of the most beautiful parts of New Zealand. Such a special place, with farmland, mountains and ocean all blending into the other. I decided to write something set there.”]
Sarah-Kate had been thinking about New Zealand’s surrogacy laws, noticing how risky they can be in their current form.
“I wanted to write about the conflict in a surrogacy arrangement when things go wrong,” she tells. “I’m also fascinated by female friendships. The idea that no matter what you have, you want what the other girl has. And then the other girl wants what you’ve got too.”
The result is a compelling psychological drama. As for her productive new friendship with MaryAnne, that’s the icing on the cake.
“Even though her and I were working closely together on Friends Like Her, we’d only ever seen each other on Zoom. Then literally the day I arrived in Melbourne, I went round to meet her in the flesh for the first time. I’m in St Kilda and she’s in Albert, the next suburb over, and when she opened the door, it was so funny when she said, ‘Oh, you’re tall,’ because she’s tall too, but up until then, we’d only ever seen each other’s heads!
“We had such a great experience working together and setting up Pavlova Pictures felt like the best idea, so we can keep making television.
“I felt like this back in my fifties, when I wrote the book Screw You Dolores. It is all about a woman who reinvents herself. No matter how well you do in this business, no one else will do it for you. We have to do it for ourselves. Which I hope is a really powerful thing for the readers to hear.
“Don’t let anything hold you back, ladies, because it’s now or never. That’s what I want to say!”
Friends Like Her screens Mondays at 8.40pm on Three and ThreeNow.
