Back from the brink

TV’s MasterChef mum Julie Goodwin built a career doing what she loves best but, she tells Michael Sheather, the drive that helped make her a success also pushed her to the edge.

- Michael Sheather

Sometimes we need to see ourselves as others see us before we can finally see the truth. For Julie Goodwin, the woman who cooked her way into our hearts as the very first winner of TV’s MasterChef, that moment of clarity came through the eyes of her loving husband, Mick, one evening in January this year.

“We were in the car, on the way home,” recalls Julie, a 49-year-old mother of three. “I’d been at the kitchen where I run my business and cooking classes and it had been a long day. I was due to begin back as a morning radio host in just a few days and I could feel the stress and anxiety building in me. I got into the car and I was telling Mick how I couldn’t see how I could keep going, how I could keep doing what I was doing. It was too much, too much.”

Julie’s intense distress was all too obvious. Tears were streaming down her face. She was holding her face in her hands, sobbing as she detailed all the things that she needed to do.

Though she didn’t know it, Julie had finally reached her emotional and physical tipping point. She thought she was fine. She thought she just needed a few minutes to get herself together. But Mick, Julie’s partner since they were teenagers, knew that time was the one ingredient his wife no longer possessed, and that she was teetering on the precipice of a psychological catastrophe.