Marieke Hardy seem to be everywhere at the moment. She writes a her own blog, Reasons You Will Hate Me, and a weekly television column for "The Age", she has a monthly role as part of the panel on ABC TV's "The First Tuesday Book Club", and now has a new job in Sydney co-hosting the breakfast show on Triple J radio. Elicia Murray profiles Hardy for "The Sydney Morning Herald".
As career trajectories go, it seems like a meteoric rise for the 31-year-old blogger from Melbourne who describes herself as a milky-skinned girl who wears short skirts and flowers in her hair. But the path of blog ownership has not been smooth.Her profanity-laden online musings have also drawn lashings of vitriol from critics, most notably a bollocking in print from the right-wing columnist Andrew Bolt after an incident she refers to as Pandagate. More on that later.
Writing is in Hardy's blood. Her parents are Alan and Galia Hardy, whose television writing, producing and editing credits include All The Rivers Run and The Sullivans. Her grandfather was the left-wing author and communist, Frank Hardy, whose 1950 novel Power Without Glory has been hailed as the most influential novel published in Australia in the 20th century. A fictionalised version of the life of the Australian Labor Party powerbroker John Wren, it delved into crime, gambling and political corruption and landed the young author in prison on a criminal libel charge. He was acquitted on the grounds that the work was a mixture of fact and fiction.
