And yet, on the eve of releasing her memoir, Harmer recounts being subjected to the sort of male behaviour which would cancel a career today. And not just during her early work years. Even as the best paid and most powerful woman on Australian radio, she was still “putting up with it”.
She praises fellow male comedians who encouraged her to break into Australia’s male-only stand-up comedy circuit, and yet it was Harmer, an avowed feminist, who quit theafter thwarting the unwanted advances of a senior male colleague. Her rebuttal resulted in being overlooked for key story assignments.
Harmer writes she saw Dunn’s “penis more times than I care to remember” and recalls her increasingly fraught on-air banter with him being “like the fabled Kilkenny cats”.