Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Antonella Gambotto-Burke (née Antonella Gambotto, born 19 September 1965 is an Italian-Australian author, journalist and singer-songwriter based in England and known for her writing about sex, death and motherhood.

Gambotto-Burke is best known for her memoir The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide, and her memoir/maternal feminist polemics Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution and Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine. In 2004, The Sydney Morning Herald named her as a high-profile member of Mensa International.

She released her first single with Mama ft. Antonella in 2023.

Early years
Gambotto-Burke was born into a Northern Italian Catholic family in North Sydney and lived in East Lindfield on Sydney's North Shore. She is the first child and only daughter of the late businessman Giancarlo Gambotto, whose High Court win against WCP Ltd. changed Australian corporate law, scuppered the NRMA float, made the Australian front pages, is featured in Oxbridge law exams, and was the subject of a book edited by Ian Ramsay, Professor of Law.

She did not speak English until she went to school, where she was known for her academic excellence and her singing. Gambotto-Burke began contributing to magazines and major newspapers while still at school, where she captained two debating teams and was selected for the State Debating Trials. Paul Fletcher (politician), who later became a Liberal Party MP and held ministerial office in the Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison governments from 2015 to 2022, was her first speaker; she was third. Gambotto-Burke has said that despite their "wildly" differing political opinions, the two have remained friends.

"I was raised to believe that I could achieve anything", Gambotto-Burke said in a North Shore Times cover story.

Fiction and poetry
Gambotto-Burke was first published under the pseudonym "Clavis Lumen" in The Sydney Morning Herald at the age of sixteen: a satire of poet Les Murray's "An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow", which was later included in Michele Field's anthology Shrinklit: Australia's Classic Literature Cut Down to Size.

Her first short story was published in the first on-sale issue of the Australian literary magazine Billy Blue in July 1982.

Gambotto-Burke contributed to Peter Blazey's short story anthology Love Cries: Cruel Passions, Strange Desires (1995). In The Sydney Morning Herald, Gail Cork described her contribution as "outstanding" and in Who, Margaret Smith noted its "darkly sinister" overtones. "The Astronomer", a short story presaging many of the themes in her first novel, was published in 1989. Eight years later, Gambotto-Burke's novel The Pure Weight of the Heart (also featuring an astronomer-protagonist) was published by Orion Publishing in London, and went to number six on The Sydney Morning Herald's best-seller list. It was also Tatler magazine's book of the month in the UK.

Gambotto-Burke was commissioned by artist David Bromley to write his series of short films, I Could Be Me, which were narrated by Hugo Weaving and premiered at the Adelaide Festival in 2008. In an essay, Gambotto-Burke noted that, "As scripts are founded on what Alan Alda calls the 'subsurface tectonics of emotion', the result can sometimes be a psychic slam dunk." Bromley, in a separate interview, described the film as "like a kaleidoscope of images and it is run by my poetry and short stories by Antonella. And it has a large animation component."

Journalism
Gambotto-Burke was first published in The Australian at the age of eighteen.

After moving to England in 1984, Gambotto-Burke worked for the music press in London - notably, the NME and Zig Zag. She won UK Cosmopolitan magazine's New Journalist of the Year Award in 1988. She also worked for The Independent on Sunday, notably a cover story on cardiothoracic surgeons.

In 1989, Gambotto-Burke returned to Sydney, where she resumed working for The Australian as a senior feature profile writer and literary critic. She also began writing for The South China Morning Post, The Globe and Mail, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Vogue and other major global publications. Channel Nine Entertainment Director Richard Wilkins said in an interview that, "if you're on her wavelength, the interview is a most enjoyable experience. If not, it could be quite disconcerting. The key is to be open and honest with her."

Of her journalism, author Matthew Condon wrote, "Her razor eye for the architecture of pretension and her ability to record untidied dialogue, especially the way it can betray the human mind and soul, have made her an object of fear and derision. To have been 'Gambottoed' is to have had a vein opened."

Gambotto-Burke's interviewees include Martin Amis, Elle Macpherson, Gérard Depardieu, Morrissey, Thierry Mugler, Marc Newson, Deepak Chopra, Flavio Briatore, Robert Smith, Erica Jong, Colleen McCullough, Jeffrey Archer, Princess Haya bint Al Hussein, Jerry Hall and Naomi Wolf.

Her best known comic interview – with Warwick Capper, a retired Australian rules footballer, and his wife – is included in The Best Australian Profiles (Black Inc., 2004). "The best profiles lodge deep in the public mind, such as ... Antonella Gambotto's cheerfully dopey Warwick and Joanne Capper, which presaged by years the arrival of Kath & Kim", Professor Matthew Ricketson wrote in 2005.

“The Blonde leading the Blonde” (Gambotto-Burke's interview with the Cappers) was, as writer Richard Cooke reported, reprinted several times, "and its descriptive passages – one of which described Joanne’s pubic hair as 'white as the froth on a pint of Castlemaine' – became legend."

In the interview with Cooke, Gambotto-Burke said, "Warwick was voluble, enthusiastic, wild, mad, emotional, straightforward, carnal, intense, passionate, ambitious, unintelligent and hysterically funny, if not always intentionally. I loved his spirit if not his avidity, which I found disconcerting … It was so shocking – I’m laughing here – but not because of the sexuality. The whole thing was shocking – the frankness, the spa bath, the chocolate-covered nuts (or raisins, or whatever they were). They were so artless. I felt as if I’d entered another universe."

In Undercover Agent, Murray Waldren noted that "an interview with [Gambotto-Burke] often has the studied savagery of the corrida amid the crystal cruet ambience of high tea at the Ritz. Such ritualistic disembowelling, highly entertaining and in stark contrast to the asinine, PR-driven pap of most modern profiles, leave the gored stirred and very shaken."

Controversy
In London, Gambotto-Burke was employed as a music critic at the NME by editor Neil Spencer and, on the advice of her live editor Mat Snow, wrote under pseudonyms Antonella Black and Ginger Meggs. Her review of Cliff Richard's concert, in which she referred to him as "Satan" and which made national newspaper gossip columns, provoked him to sue the music journal.

Gambotto-Burke then wrote "A Man Called Horse", the first cover story about alternative rock star Nick Cave to document his since-widely reported heroin addiction. "Shifting from bad to worse the interview collapses, along with Cave, into a series of broken thoughts and unfinished sentences," British author Adam Steiner has noted.

Cave, retaliating, stated in an interview with Sounds that Gambotto-Burke had "brought her pyjamas along to the interview in place of a tape recorder". The male journalist added, "Hi, Antonella, and if you ever need to borrow my Sony …". Gambotto-Burke's editor Mick Mercer, who had published the cover story about Cave, wrote to Sounds: "I heard the tape of the interview and have yet to recover … the piece eventually stated what other writers hadn’t been brave enough to write. So what’s the problem? Little Nick whittles his woodenly creative brain and makes sly insinuations about Antonella hauling in the bunk beds, anxious for the earth to move … Cave dribbling in one corner."

Mercer’s letter was printed with the paper's apology: "Sounds entirely accepts that Ms [Gambotto-Burke] conducts herself properly and professionally at all times and apologises to her and to [the magazine] for any suggestion to the contrary in Bill Black’s interview with Nick Cave."

Cave, who had told Melody Maker journalists that he wanted to "kill" Gambotto-Burke, then wrote a song about her and Mat Snow entitled "Scum"

The Cave interview was included in Gambotto-Burke's anthology of interviews Lunch of Blood, while Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds included a version of "Scum" on their 2005 box set, B-Sides And Rarities. In turn, Gambotto-Burke wrote about her experience of interviewing Cave for an Australian magazine in 2006, and her interview with him was again reprinted in the anthology Nick Cave: Sinner, Saint.

Gambotto-Burke, in 2022, wrote at length about her experience of Cave in Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine, describing him as a "narcissist" and a "liar", and elaborating on the impact of his actions on her life and daughter.

Interview anthologies
Lunch of Blood (Random House, 1994), Gambotto-Burke's first book and first anthology, peaked at number six on the best-seller lists. The Newcastle Herald observed that Gambotto-Burke's "command of language is delicious to the point where one wonders which came first, her wish to display her ability or the desire to share her impressions." In 1997, An Instinct for the Kill, her second anthology, was published to mixed reviews by HarperCollins. (The Age critic Katherine Wilson singled out the Capper interview as "laugh-out-loud" funny.)

In  The Best Australian Profiles, Professor Matthew Ricketson wrote the introduction to Gambotto-Burke's work: "[She] is probably the closest Australia has come to having a profile writer who is a celebrity in their own right ... and from the early 1990s readers became as interested in Gambotto-Burke as they were in the people she profiled."

Recent journalism
In 2017, Gambotto-Burke returned with her daughter to England, where she began working for The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, and other newspapers.

Gambotto-Burke's writing about human trafficking has been syndicated around the world. She is also a widely published essayist, and has written lead and front page news stories about legal issues, and, in the wake of the Israel-Hamas conflict, antisemitism.

The issues of pornography and gender inequality also heavily feature in Gambotto-Burke's journalism.

As of January 2023, Gambotto-Burke has been writing the back page of The Weekend Australian literary section, and is now a senior feature and cover story writer for The Daily Mail and other major newspapers, including The Sunday Times, in London.

Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution
Gambotto-Burke dedicated her first book about motherhood, Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution to her daughter Bethesda. The foreword was written by the French obstetrician and academic Michel Odent.

Gambotto-Burke, a high-profile advocate of increased parent/child intimacy, was a working, breast-feeding SAHM who practised co-sleeping. "The association of maternal-infant separation with developmental havoc is not new, and yet despite the evidence, little change has been made to the way mothers and babies are treated, both by hospitals and by society at large", Gambotto-Burke wrote.

In a Life Matters interview with Natasha Mitchell, Dr. John Irvine described Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution as being to motherhood what The Female Eunuch was to feminism, and Professor K. S. Anand, 2009 Nils Rosén von Rosenstein Award laureate and professor of paediatrics, anaesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine at Stanford University, described it as “undeniably the most important book of the 21st century”.

Controversially, Gambotto-Burke also home-schools her daughter.

The Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution excerpt published in The Guardian (UK) went viral.

Apple: Drugs, Sex, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine
On publication of Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine, a 3000-word excerpt ran in The Australian. Gambotto-Burke's strong opinions on the routine administration of obstetric anaesthesia attracted siginificant attention.

In a review of the book, British author and The Daily Telegraph writer Gwyneth Rees wrote, "Argued with intelligence, force and the fury of righteous indignation by lauded feminist thinker, author and critic Antonella Gambotto-Burke, the book explores how the manner in which we enter the world has a profound and lasting impact on our lives, and by extension upon society as a whole. As we come to learn, modern obstetric practices are deeply connected with an increased likelihood in later life of drug use, sexual fetishes, anxiety and mental illness, chronic and potentially life-threatening illnesses. They are also linked with the breakdown of relationships between men and women, and the erosion of the bond between mothers and children. This all comes to light through Apple’s central question: why is our culture governed by the principle of separation?"

Personal life
At the age of 22, Gambotto-Burke became engaged to the notorious American-born UK GQ editor Michael VerMeulen. She left VerMeulen in 1995.

After her brother Gianluca, a Macquarie Bank executive, gassed himself in his car at the age of 32, Gambotto-Burke began reading "obsessively" about death and suicide, trying, as she said in a national Australian cover interview, to make sense of the experience, trying to become big enough to let go of my brother. That's what bereavement is about – surrendering the memory, the relationship."

The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide (2004) is about her brother's 2001 death and her engagement to, and the death of, VerMeulen. In another interview, she said: "I wanted to explain depression as a valid emotional response rather than as a disease".

In his 2023 review of the Finnish edition of The Eclipse, poet Kimmo Leijala wrote, "Sometimes [Gambotto-Burke] goes through a strict, even self-critical monologue, which also includes a lot of universal reflection and existential questions ... [and] the versatile use of language can read like poetry". The Eclipse is a Good Grief Trust recommended book, and the American Psychological Association website describes The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide as "brilliant".

On 24 November 2023 Gambotto-Burke and multi-platinum record producer Gavin Monaghan announced their engagement. The two had been working together since late 2022 as Mama ft. Antonella. She has since said that the city of Wolverhampton, where she records at Monaghan's studio Magic Garden, is her "portal to joy".

Monaghan has described Gambotto-Burke as "a hurricane" and as his "crowning glory".

Music
From June 2019 to February 2020, Gambotto-Burke hosted The Antonella Show, her own programme on London's independent Boogaloo Radio, which featured guests such as the acclaimed producer and composer Magnus Fiennes, the award-winning sculptor Beth Carter, former PiL bassist Jah Wobble and other internationally recognised artists and writers. She only stopped, she said on air in January 2020, to commence work on Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine.

Gambotto-Burke told the BBC that she started singing in 2021, after lockdown, on the advice of Alan McGee and a Grammy-Award winning producer. In late 2022, she formed Mama ft. Antonella with Monaghan. Their debut single "I Want What I Want", which was released on 23 June 2023, had over 36,000 Spotify streams in the first few weeks. It was followed by their single Real Girl.

Creation Records founder and Oasis manager Alan McGee revealed that in her twenties, Gambotto-Burke had refused his offer of singing with the Jesus and Mary Chain. He said that she is "forever surprising".

In 2024, Gambotto-Burke and Monaghan posted that they had finished mixing their first album, although neither has revealed the title.

The couple were then photographed with Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant, who was working with Monaghan in his studio. “Spending time with Robert has been such a privilege,” Gambotto-Burke said. “The thing that surprised me most was the intense magic he brings with him. It literally fills the room. Spiritually speaking, he’s a giant, and the music is, of course, untouchable. I’m still flying!”

Gambotto-Burke is also collaborating on an EP with British EDM artist Chris Budd.

Anthologies

 * An Instinct for the Kill (HarperCollins Australia, 1997)
 * Lunch of Blood (Random House Australia, 1994)
 * MOUTH (Broken Ankle Digital, 2013)

Novel

 * The Pure Weight of the Heart (Orion, 1998)

Memoirs

 * The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide (Broken Ankle Books, 2003)

Motherhood

 * Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love (Arbon, 2014)
 * Mama: Love, Motherhood and Revolution (Pinter & Martin, 2015)
 * Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine (Pinter & Martin, 2022)

As a contributor

 * Write A Letter to Your Twenty Year Old Self, edited by Kim Chandler McDonald (2020)
 * Nick Cave: Sinner, Saint: The True Confessions, 30 Years of Essential Interviews, edited by Mat Snow (Plexus Publishing, 2011)
 * My Favourite Teacher, edited by Robert Macklin (University of New South Wales Press, 2011)
 * Your Mother Would Be Proud: True Tales of Mayhem and Misadventure, edited by Tamara Sheward and Jenny Valentish (Allen & Unwin, 2009)
 * What Is Mother Love?, edited by Selwa Anthony (Penguin, 2008)
 * Some Girls Do ... My Life as a Teenager, edited by Jacinta Tynan (Allen & Unwin, 2007)
 * The Best Australian Profiles, edited by Matthew Ricketson (Black Inc., 2004)
 * The Thoughts of Chairman Stan, by Stan Zemanek (HarperCollins Australia, 1998): afterword by Gambotto-Burke
 * Love Cries: Cruel Passions, Strange Desires, edited by Peter Blazey (HarperCollins Australia, 1995)
 * This I Believe: 100 Eminent Australians Explore Life's Big Question, edited by John Marsden (Random House Australia, 1996).
 * ShrinkLit, edited by Michele Field (Penguin, 1983)

Direction/ Scripts/ Storyboards

 * I Could Be Me, directed by David Bromley (artist), narrated by Hugo Weaving (2008)
 * Storyboard/direction for I Want What I Want by Mama ft. Antonella

Television appearances
Gambotto-Burke has appeared on many television programs, including Beauty & The Beast (Channel Ten, Foxtel), The Midday Show (Channel 9), Meet the Press (SBS), Wake Up(Channel Ten), Mornings (Channel 9) and performed cameos on Paul Fenech's SBS sitcom Pizza.

Discography

 * 'I Want What I Want, by Mama ft. Antonella'
 * 'Real Girl, by Mama ft. Antonella'

Digital singles

 * I Want What I Want, as Mama ft. Antonella, produced by Gavin Monaghan (2023)
 *  Real Girl, as Mama ft. Antonella, produced by Gavin Monaghan (2023)