Sarah Murdoch at auditions for 2009 reality show, Australia's Next Top Model
The TV career of Sarah Murdoch has gone from strength to strength since she made her grown-up debut as co-host of Channel Nine’s Today show over the summer holidays in 2007.
And now with the success of Australia’s Next Top Model tucked under her fashionable belt, the willowy blonde is branching out again.
Murdoch (she dropped the O’Hare a couple of years ago, but still several after she and media scion Lachlan Murdoch) has spent the past couple of months travelling around Australia filming interviews with ordinary Australians who have done extraordinary things.
The ever-popular 37-year model talked briefly about her new project while launching Battlelines written by Federal Liberal Party hard man, Tony Abbott, in Sydney on Tuesday.
She previously inked a deal with Foxtel, which produces Top Model, to make documentaries with her production company, Room 306 (named after the number of the hospital room where she gave birth to her two sons).
Murdoch, who recently finished filming the series, said she had interviewed a courageous fireman and a teenaged girl who took control of a runaway bus to save the schoolkids travelling on it, not to mention herself (that’s the teenager, not Mrs Murdoch).
The four-part doco-series will go to air on Foxtel’s Bio channel in October, and is linked with the News Ltd Pride of Australia awards.
Another piece of news from Abbott’s book launch came from Melbourne University Press boss, Louise Adler.
Contrary to popular belief that MUP is a left-leaning publishing house, they have published three books about or by Liberal Party politicians in the past two years (John Winston Howard, The Biography, The Costello Memoirs, and Battlelines) and will publish former Liberal Party Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s bio in 2010.
Wonder if he’ll have a Trousergate chapter?
“Melbourne University Press hopes to dispel the myth that books about Liberals don’t sell,” Adler told the crowd. Not for nothing is MUP’s motto, “books with spine“.
