Actor Kate Mulvany on the personal toll of the Vietnam War and why she's 'proudly disabled'

When actor Kate Mulvany delivered a compelling portrayal of a complicated and intriguing woman accused of murder in the multi-award-winning court room drama, The Twelve, what most viewers wouldn't have known was she filmed the series in crippling pain.

Pain she's endured through every performance of her career as a screen and stage actor, through every word she's penned as a writer and through every activity of daily life, since childhood cancer left her with scoliosis (sideways curvature of the spine).

"Chronic pain is the worst thing, I wouldn't wish it on anyone," she says.

"I really feel for people who get pain later in life because I've always had it and it's normal for me.

"Every few months, I might turn to my husband, Hamish Michael, and say, 'Oh my God, pain free, pain free' and it'll last a minute, maybe two minutes and then it returns.

"In fact, when I'm pain free, it scares me because I don't quite know how to move in that body, I feel like I'm in the wrong body.

"When I write it gets worse because I have to sit at a desk all day but on performing days, when I'm upright and distracted, it dissipates quite a bit because, for a couple of hours, I'm in someone else's body.

"It might be just a psychosomatic thing but when I have a job to do, when there's 500 people sitting in a theatre waiting for me to do a job, the pain, while always conscious, can get put on the backburner but that's honestly because I'm so used to it.

"And then the pain is always waiting for me in the wings."

At the age of three, Mulvany was diagnosed with advanced renal cancer when a tumour the size of a football was discovered on one of her kidneys.

While the cause has never been confirmed, it's suspected her father's service in Vietnam and exposure to Agent Orange, a powerful herbicide used by American forces to defoliate forests and destroy enemy crops, is to blame.

"I've always been told that was the reason I was born with renal, possibly adrenal cancer," she says.

"It's one of the suspected cancers attributed to Agent Orange and dioxin — we could never get a straight answer one way or the other, but pretty much everyone said Dad was exposed in Vietnam."

While it's believed Mulvany was born with the cancer there'd been no sign she was sick until, on a trip to from her hometown of Geraldton to Perth, she fell over at a park and couldn't stop crying.

Her mother took her to hospital and so began an aggressive fight to save her life – surgery to remove the tumour, one kidney and two ribs, chemotherapy and high doses of radiotherapy.

"Chemo was horrific, I had to be held down," she recalls.

"Radiotherapy was weird because I was laying on the table and Mum and Dad would be on a television screen in the corner.

"Everyone would just run out of the room while I just lay there.

"I remember that very clearly and turning into an alien, of living this alien life with bits removed from me, my hair falling out and people treating me differently.

"There were moments of 'is she going to make it or not?'

"But the thing that almost killed me was I developed anorexia.

"I thought all the food they were giving me was making me sick, rather than the chemo or the radio so I stopped eating and I got very, very thin.

"I think I got down to nine kilos. It was just appalling.

"The hospital said to mum, we can't keep her here, she doesn't trust doctors so maybe go back home to Geraldton and see what happens.

"My dad's community there included a Sicilian soccer team and they fed me spaghetti.

"I trusted the Sicilians, ate a lot of spaghetti and olive oil, cray fish and beetroot and got my blood cell count back up.

"When I went back to hospital, they said whatever you're doing, keep doing it and I haven't stopped eating spaghetti since!"

Mulvany spent seven years in and out of hospital before being declared in remission.

She was cancer free but burdened with lasting side effects that damaged her developing body and, later, denied her the chance to have children.

The physical toll was horrendous, but it was the trauma she witnessed her parents, particularly her father, endure that is seared in her memory.

"My first memories are of watching my parents deal with my cancer, I housed the cancer, but they had it, my family suffered it more than I did," she says.

"Dad had to keep working in Geraldton, which was a six-hour drive from Perth but he would show up at the hospital like Santa, wanting to make everything better, but at the same time feeling guilt-ridden that he and I had this toxic legacy in our blood.

"It made us very, very close, but he felt guilty that he'd passed this along to his family — he was not responsible, but he saw it that way.

"I look at my parents and I think they're heroes.

"I don't know how parents can get through that, but you know what? They do.

"And I know many of them through the Vietnam veteran's community."

This Friday, a National Commemorative Service is being held to mark the 50th anniversary of Australia's withdrawal from Vietnam and Kate Mulvany is sharing her story ahead of the release of a three-part ABC documentary series, Our Vietnam War, which she agreed to narrate after producers outlined their vision of a broad-ranging exploration of the war and its impact.

"It was very, very important to me that there was an in-depth interrogation of what exactly was the journey of our involvement in the Vietnam War, what it was to be an Australian at the time, and what the ongoing effects were for Australia and Australian veterans, and their families but also the story of the Vietnamese and refugees who arrived in Australia," she says.

"I said to the producers; 'Please tell me that you're going to have a section on Agent Orange and dioxin', and they said, absolutely so I said, I'm in, I'm very happy to be the narrator of this.

"I love that they've respected that everyone had a different journey in and out of that war and hopefully the viewer can take it all in with an empathetic heart and mind and acknowledge what all of the people involved went through."

Mulvany's father, Danny, was a 'ten-pound Pom' who left Nottingham for work in Geraldton and found himself called up at the age of 22 despite not even being an Australian citizen.

He tried to avoid service, as many conscripts did, by getting a mate to punch him in the face but to no avail.

Mulvany says her father got a taste of the anti-war sentiment before he even left Australia, making the mistake of wearing his uniform while on recreational leave from training at Puckapunyal and suffering a broken leg after being "beaten up by a Combi load of hippies".

His Australian friends had encouraged him to do a tour of duty because soldiers usually get a great welcome home and he might get citizenship.

Instead, he returned to a community that shunned Vietnam veterans, a future of health issues and disabling PTSD, and a constant wondering about what he'd been exposed to and the impact it might have.

"One of Dad's first jobs was to mow the lawn outside Nui Dat base, and he remembered a spray on that day — that happened a lot — and he said he mowed it once and the grass never grew back," Mulvany says.

"He said he was there for a year and he never had to mow it again, it just didn't grow back.

"He was living and breathing on that land and that's what he talked about when he talked about dioxin.

"He got rashes and [six years ago] he died of oesophageal cancer, which is dioxin related but also a smoking related illness and he was a smoker.

"My mum had several miscarriages [before I was born], a lot of his mates battled with leukaemia, and, when I was growing up, many of the kids in the cancer ward had veteran fathers.

"So, we in the veteran community discussed this amongst ourselves but no information has ever been properly forthcoming, it's really frustrating and it makes me angry.

"To me, the issue of dioxin/Agent Orange is a huge, collective jigsaw, with many people and organisations holding different pieces of the puzzle.

"Some of us are revealing our single piece of the puzzle, others are hiding their jigsaw pieces.

"As a result, none of us can see what the big picture actually is, which makes it very difficult for those needing definitive answers.

"That's why we must keep pushing, keep questioning, keep interrogating.

"The "children of the mist" [as we are known] have the right to know what picture we are a part of."

One positive to come out of Mulvany's illness was that the long, dull periods in hospital led her to a career as an actor and writer.

As well as The Twelve, her screen credits include a leading role as Nazi-hunting nun/spy opposite Al Pacino in the Amazon Prime series Hunters, playing record producer Marion Keisker in Baz Luhrmann's Elvis and portraying Robbie Williams' mother in the upcoming biopic, Better Man, plus award-winning and leading theatre roles.

"I go to children's hospitals now and there's people doing gaming, and clown doctors and fish tanks to distract the children, but back [when I was sick] hospitals were so boring, we were all in the ward together, all very sick and all very bored," she says.

"I loved reading books and stories were my escape, I would also impersonate my favourite Muppet or Frank Spencer [from TV show Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em] or my beautiful, adoptive Sicilian family that I missed, and it would make the nurses laugh.

"Dad would come in and do puppet shows with his English accent and we made the other kids laugh so when you see what joy you can bring through performance, even in an oncology ward in a children's hospital, it gives you a certain love and respect for the craft."

That craft enabled some healing of the emotional wounds Mulvany and her father suffered when she wrote and starred in a play, The Seed, about their experience and the legacy of the war.

Years in the writing, The Seed premiered at Sydney's Belvoir Theatre in 2007 then toured nationally.

"The best thing that I think ever happened in terms of our relationship was writing that play" she says.

"Because I got to ask Dad all the things that I'd always been too afraid to ask or wasn't sure if I was allowed to ask him.

"He had PTSD — he couldn't walk through crowded areas or go to fireworks, if a young member of the family came up to him and was excitable, he was frightened, he had nightmares and 'white outs' as we called them, he drove into a house after having a seizure.

"He was such an unwell man but he was never de-briefed, no-one ever told him you don't have to feel on edge with this constant adrenaline underneath your skin.

"Then he had this lifelong guilt that I was born with cancer and it was hard for him to see me dilapidated.

"So, he came to see the play, downstairs at Belvoir, and it was jam-packed with veterans and their families.

"And something shifted that night.

"It was like the army got back together and they talked about 'this has happened to me', and 'I have the same thing' or 'I wish I'd known that about you'.

"When the play toured, more and more veterans and their families came to see the show and I had children of Vietnam veterans get in touch.

"It made Dad feel less alone and I think it made me feel less alone."

What's also made Kate Mulvany feel less alone is opening up about her disability.

While she hid it for a long time, she says she's 'embraced' it since needing to use a cane for support.

"I've never been backwards in saying I'm sore, but I just could never say how bad it was and then a couple of years ago I was doing a television show and I badly injured my back, fracturing it, and the specialist suggested I use a cane and it was actually a beautiful thing for me," she says.

"I was really scared because the moment you start using that you have to reveal to people just how much pain you're in and what your disabled body actually is but now I have an array of canes and staffs that I take with me everywhere.

"They don't help me walk, they help me stand on long nights [at the theatre] or long shoots or if I'm having a bad pain flare.

"So that made me have to really step up and say I am disabled, I'm proudly disabled, and disability is not a bad word.

"Disability does not mean inability.

"It means, in fact, you come at the world in different ways.

"It's often the world around us, that makes us disabled, not our bodies.

"It's the world around us that put steps in front of us, or holes in the ground, or makes sidewalks slippery or makes people look at us with a certain bias when, really, we're perfectly capable.

"Disability makes us very creative, very imaginative, funny and quirky and that's the community that I'm so, so happy to be a part of."

Mulvany's deep connection to the Vietnam veteran community has led to work with charities supporting victims of Agent Orange exposure and clearing landmines in South-East Asia.

She hopes the 50th anniversary of Australia's withdrawal from Vietnam and the Our Vietnam Documentary will move the nation to listen to those who share their experience and think about the legacy of war for all who are caught up in it.

"I miss my dad and on anniversaries like this he's very present, he continues to be my hero," she says.

"War is so complicated, some wars are good, some of them not, but the most important thing is that our service personnel and their families are taken care of when they get home.

"The wonderful thing is that there's a great community of Vietnam veterans out there, many of whom have chosen to share their stories in this documentary.

"It's finally giving the voiceless the chance to tell their side of the story and I hope that, as the children of veterans, we continue the legacy of sharing and not letting their experience fall into silence again the way it did for so many of the past 50 years."

The three-part documentary, Our Vietnam War, premieres on ABC TV and iview on Tuesday, August 15 at 9.30pm