JACQUELINE MCKENZIE A family affair

There are equal parts tradition and modernity, we learn, in the relationship between Jacqueline and Roxanne McKenzie as the mother-daughter duo pose for our cameras.

- WORDS by TIFFANY DUNK

It's not just her 15-year-old daughter, Roxanne, that Jacqueline McKenzie has brought along to our shoot today on a chilly Sydney morning. The actress has also arrived with a treasured family keepsake. Covered in sticky, floury fingerprints from decades of being used in her mum Robin’s kitchen, a well-worn copy of The Australian Women’s Weekly Quick-Mix Cakes and Delicious Easy Muffins is proudly brought out to display for the team.

“Look, it’s Mum’s writing,” Jacqueline, 57, says, tenderly tracing the notes left on favoured recipes. “Our family are very food-centric. I never had been, probably because I left home and was off being an actress in Melbourne on my own. Most of that time I was staying in a hotel, the most you could do was boil an egg in the kettle!”

Learning to cook, she says, came much later – and is a silver lining of her adored mother’s four-and-a-half-year battle with cancer.

Robin was diagnosed in early 2012. Jacqueline and Roxanne, then two, returned from the US to base themselves in Australia to be on hand as much as possible during her fight.

“Her treatment was just hellish,” Jacqueline reflects now. “But one amazing thing was that she taught me to cook, and Roxanne how to read. When Mum was undergoing her treatment, she’d make cakes and take them to the technicians at the hospital. She was such an incredibly generous woman.

“Watching her undergo the treatment, she was really in a lot of pain a lot of the time, but she was so mighty with it. We didn’t really talk about dying at all. It was just, everything that they threw at Mum, she was like, ‘Right, we'll do that. We’ll move forward and get well.’ And then, all of a sudden she was no longer there.”

Those early days of grief, she says, were devastating. Russell Crowe, her leading man on their 1992 breakthrough film,