Tina Arena has been in the public eye for 50 years; a mainstay of Australian popular culture since she appeared on Aussie TV screens as a fresh-faced seven-year-old on Young Talent Time back in 1974.
You might think you know who she is. But as Arena says in the opening moments of her new documentary, Tina Arena: Unravel Me, which is hitting free-to-air television for the first time this week, the person you think you know, and who she really is, are two very different things.
“For such a long time, people saw me like that little ballerina in the music box,” she explains as the documentary begins.
“But they don’t really know who I am at all. I am a woman who has had quite the adventure — and after 50 years of work, joy, laughter, life and love, it was so important for me to speak my truth.”
And speak her truth she does, holding very little back.
“I was pretty sick in the guts to be honest,” Arena tells STM of the first time she saw the finished cut of her film, which made its debut earlier this year at the Melbourne International Film Festival.
Arena was executive producer on the project, but as she explains, it’s one thing to speak openly about your life, and quite another to see it played back to you, knowing full well the world will fill in the blanks on a personal life you’ve managed to keep relatively sheltered throughout most of your career.
The release of Arena’s film came at a fraught time for the star.
After having his identity suppressed for three years, Arena’s ex-husband Ralph Carr was revealed in early August as the high-profile man charged and convicted of the rape of a young woman in 2023.
Carr had been Arena’s manager at the peak of her 1990s Don’t Ask success (they were married for two years before separating in 1997), and is now serving a six-year-sentence. His public naming happened at the same time Arena’s film was set for its premiere.
The controversy is not addressed in the film, but on the night it was released, Arena told her audience: “You reap what you sow, so now he’s reaping what he sowed … I believe that justice has been done, and the right thing has happened.”
Around the time all this was unfolding Arena also lost her friend, mentor and father figure, Johnny Young, who died on August 13.
It all played out in conjunction with the release of Unravel Me, and standing at the centre of the noise was Arena.
“I was worried,” she says of how she imagined the film would land. “Because you can film something, but at the end of the day you never know how it is going to come out in the edit.
“You have your perspective, then the producer has their perspective, then the film company will have their perspective, and then there’s the general perspective of what you think an audience will take away and how they are going to perceive you.
“There is a responsibility all round, and I had to say to myself, ‘No, I have put enough into this industry to be able to have the capacity to judge what I feel and what I deem is the right thing for the audience to see — nobody is going to tell my story like me’.”
And it’s true — no one tells a story like Arena.
And in recent years, many of the protective barricades the singer has carefully constructed over a lifetime in the public eye appear to have been falling away.
It might be the fact she’s older now. Perhaps it’s because she has nothing left to prove? Maybe she’s just tired of being “the good artist”. Whatever the case, Arena is no longer playing by those old rules — she’s resolutely speaking HER truth, and doing it unapologetically.
“It’s the bulls..t for me: I don’t do bulls..t anymore,” she says with a knowing laugh. “I just don’t do it — some people can, but I can’t.”
It’s why in recent years she’s found it increasingly difficult to hold back on issues she feels passionately about.
She’s spoken out about a wide range of issues: everything from COVID-19 lockdowns to the Victorian Government, artificial intelligence, and social media have got her riled up.
Some of these are addressed in the documentary (many are not, and it’s interesting to see which get a look-in), with her infamous speech during her ARIA Hall of Fame induction in 2015 singled out as an important moment for the star.
Arena made headlines at that time for her condemnation of ageism and sexism in the Australian commercial radio industry.
It was a call to arms; a rallying cry for better equality in the industry — but not everyone took it well.
“I was accosted by a female in the music business after that speech, who ripped me apart because she thought (it) was inappropriate (to say those things),” Arena explains.
“I am not kidding at all! I thought, ‘Hang on a second, I have pondered on this speech for the past 10 days before I did it, I have run through the scenarios of potentially getting cancelled, and how I’d feel about that’.
“In the end I said, ‘I guess that is the price you pay sometimes for being honest’. And I realised that yes, that WAS a price I was prepared to pay.”
Eleven years on, it feels as though the world has caught up to many of the ideas Arena was trying to broach with that speech — it’s part of the reason she felt now was finally the right time to set the record straight on her storied life and career.
She wanted to give people a new perspective on the person she sees herself as, away from the “glitz and glam”.
“I was told many years ago, by my old manager, whose name is Bruce Pawsey … something that really hit me very hard,” she explains.
“I was frustrated by what I was feeling. I wasn’t able to intellectualise the frustration, and he said to me one day, ‘the problem you have, is that you are just a bit too ahead of your time’.
“I looked at him and initially thought, ‘What do you mean?’
“I said, ‘Unpack that a little bit because I don’t understand’. And he gave me some examples of creative decisions, and business decisions that I have made over the years. He pointed out some things to me that made it come home to roost, and I realised that was a lot of my frustration: I saw things much further down the track, and I would struggle to go, ‘Why aren’t we there yet?’
“I think the ARIAs speech was very much about that for me.”
The past few months have clearly been a time of great retrospection — and introspection — for Arena.
She admits Young’s death has had a huge effect on her, and the film is dedicated to his memory.
“John Young was an absolute stunner of a human, who made our lives really beautiful as children,” Arena says.” He created a really beautiful, safe, nurturing environment — and that’s not the case with a lot of the kids who came up through being child stars.
“I am very aware of the extreme fortune I had in having him in my life.”
Before he died, Young spoke with Arena’s documentary team, stating in glowing terms that she was “the greatest of all the people I had on Young Talent Time”.
“I am still not over the fact that he’s passed away,” Arena admits. “It’s been a very difficult few weeks for me — I have been going through a lot of emotions, and grieving.
“He was my second dad — he really was like my father, and it has been rough, and rough for his actual daughters, who I have known since they were babies.
“Dannii Minogue, Beven Addinsall and myself, we really sort of pulled in to make sure it was going to be OK for Anna and Fleur, because those girls are important to us.”
The subject of family is a big part of the doco, with Arena’s two sisters speaking extensively about their famous family member.
You get the sense the Arenas are close; that all members would go into battle for little “Pina” — “yes, my family still call me that,” she admits, referring to her given name, Filippina Lydia Arena — and it’s lovely to see them speak in such glowing terms.
They give a refreshing perspective, away from the performer persona Arena has built up over the years in the public eye.
And as Arena explains, her life is very much like any others away from the bright lights of the entertainment world.
She has ageing parents, her son is on the cusp of adulthood — she’s caring for both, a member of the so-called “sandwich generation”.
Life is decidedly un-glamorous for Arena when she’s not on stage, dressed to the nines — and she wouldn’t have it any other way.
And she’s not done: Arena has a new album coming out on October 16, a collection of covers of songs that have shaped her over the years.
As she says in the documentary, she has unfinished business.
“When I look at the body of my career, I look back with a great sense of pride,” she says. “And also, I finally like the woman I am.”
Tina Arena: Unravel Me premieres in WA on Sunday October 25 at 7pm on Seven and 7Plus
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