Jill Farnham, the famously private wife of Australian music legend John Farnham, has written two chapters in her tell-all memoir inner voice,
Known for shying away from the limelight, Jill’s contribution of over 6000 words provides a candid insight into a marriage full of 51 years of adventure, “mostly a lot of fun” and, as she puts it, “an interesting life”.
The wife of the famous chart-topper said that after his marathon 12-hour surgery to remove a cancerous tumor in late 2022, she is not sure if her husband will ever sing again.
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“I don’t know if John will sing again,” he wrote. “It just depends. Due to the radiation, his entire face has become hard as a rock. Flesh, muscle, tendons, none of them are flexible.
“The surgeons need to figure out how to loosen it up, so we have to be patient. He’s naturally disappointed because he won’t be able to be on a stage again, and he likes that.
Jill also revealed that she was the one who pushed Farnham to see a doctor before her mouth cancer diagnosis In August 2022.
“There was a big white mass on the inside of his cheek and you could physically see it,” Jill wrote in the memoir. “For several months I was telling him, ‘Let’s see about that thing in your mouth,’ and he’d say, ‘No, it’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine.’ He kept putting it off and putting it off. I begged him to see a doctor and finally he did.”
Jill said her husband “is a classic oncologist” when it comes to making big decisions, and his natural tendency not to waste time – and his fear of losing it – helped the Farnham family navigate the removal of the tumor and subsequent recovery. Allowed to be disposed of quickly. ,
“Over the years, I’ve had to be strong,” Jill wrote. “I’ve had to be a wife, a mother, a psychiatrist, a doctor, I’ve had to be all of these things at the same time. To keep the family together, to keep moving forward, I had to be strong and dominant and I did that because I love John and I love my family.
Jill added, “John is a classic Cancer, he likes to move sideways and get around everything, rather than confront any issue head-on.” “Till date whenever he faces a difficult decision or situation he behaves in the same manner. He’s always skirting around instead of dealing with it and then, of course, that makes the situation worse for him.”
Later in the chapter detailing Farnham’s health, Jill sets the record straight on some media reports concerning surgery to remove a cancerous tumor.
“And, just for the record, they did not take his jaw,” she wrote. “I know a lot of people think that’s just what happened, but in the end they removed the cancer from her cheek and they even scraped her jaw to make sure it didn’t go into her bones.
“Thankfully the cancer wasn’t in his bones, which was great news, and so his lower jaw is still fine, even if the radiation has messed it up a bit.
“In the hospital they were feeding him through a tube in his stomach, which was quite serious. I started cooking my home food. Things I knew John would love. He will eat two or four mouthfuls and that’s it, he won’t be able to handle it anymore. For a while, John felt as if one thing was on top of another.
“It was a painful time for all of us, but we got through it. Now he’s back to eating, which is a good sign, but he can’t open his mouth very far, so it’s hard.
Jill met John Farnham in the early 1970s when they were both working on the musical Charlie Girl. Known at the time as Jillian Billman, she was a dancer in the production. Shortly after the musical performance in 1973, the pair married at St Matthew’s Church of England in Glenroy, Melbourne.
Jill revealed that as soon as fans found out she was dating Farnham, she “became a target”.
“Mom and Dad kept getting prank phone calls, and one day a girl knocked on our front door,” Jill wrote in The Voice Inside. “Luckily it was the weekend and dad was home, because when he opened the door she was standing there with a knife.
“Another time I was going to the theater and there were about 10 of John’s young fans in the lobby. They saw me and started bullying me about John. After a few minutes, I felt satisfied and told him, ‘Yes, we are dating.’ They were so shocked that I accepted that they had left me alone.
“A small number of John’s fans have given me a hard time over the years because they always thought they would marry him. But 99.9999 percent of them are actually good.
Farnham’s memoir, inner voiceCame out yesterday.
