“You don’t know what you’ll do in those situations”
On an October weekend last year Mix 94.5 breakfast host Kymba Cahill was driving home to Perth when she was one of the first cars to come upon a head on collision on Indian Ocean Drive. Before and after police and ambulance arrived, she spent her time talking to and distracting five-year-old Henry, while his mum and others were tended to.
Tragically two young women died.
The next day, Sunday, Kymba had a commitment to take part in the Channel 7 Perth Telethon. When she returned to her breakfast show she didn’t think she would talk about it but not talking about it felt worse so she and co-host Pete Curulli shared the conversation below.
This is when I ‘met’ Kymba. I knew who she was, and where she worked, but that day, hearing that audio by chance rather than a glossy media release, I felt like I knew her. I asked myself the same questions she did. I hoped that I too would have been able to be there for Henry.
We judge a lot of our radio breakfast shows around the suitability of the content. In this instance I imagined a child listening in the car that day asking:
“What happened? Why is Kymba upset?”
This was and is such an important conversation to pass on to young and old, as none of us can choose when we encounter a critical situation, or our immediate reaction to it.
“If I found a wallet I’d return it with the cash inside.”
Ahead of my chat with Kymba I discovered she had the above on her X profile. Kymba told me that it was something she wrote quickly years ago without ever really using the platform again. As I was to discover, across so many stories from this wonderful woman who seeks to leave all who encounter her feeling better for it, she is literally the embodiment of a returned and intact wallet. Except I reckon she’d add a coin for good luck and measure.
Kymba has been working for SCA in Western Australia for 17 years now, 12 of them on breakfast. But this wasn’t her straight out of school decision. She went to WAAPA and got her Bachelor of Theatre Arts, and then to Uni to become a drama teacher.
I was listening to the show on the Monday after former West Coast Eagles (a WA AFL team) player Adam Selwood died by suicide. Selwood’s twin brother Troy, also a champion AFL player, had taken his life three months earlier. I was struggling to make sense of the loss and my feelings about it.
Kymba and Pete were talking to the CEO of zero2hero, Ashlee Harrison. Zero2hero seeks to educate, engage and empower young people to become mental health leaders and help prevent suicide in WA. I’d come in part way through the conversation, but Kymba circled back twice to Ashlee’s name so that I could find out more information about her and this incredible charity she had founded afterwards.
There was something in that interaction that told me a person’s name mattered to Kymba. It was a strange question to put to her but yielded one of the most profound answers.
But before I get to that I had also reached out to Kymba for another reason, one which many of you will have read about.
Nearly four months ago Kate Ritchie stepped aside from her Sydney Nova 96.9 breakfast show with Fitzy and Wippa to look after her health and mental health. She said in a social media post at the time:
“To those profiting from invading my privacy, a simple question – would you treat, say your sister, mother or daughter the same if they had similar challenges?”
Fitzy and Wippa include her in all their breakfast show branding and promotions and, after enquiring with the Nova Network about a return date, I got a healthy sense that her colleagues and workplace are quietly supporting her to do this on her terms. Honestly though, I think of her often and hope she is okay. The combination of breakfast hours, parenting, a high media profile and each day needing to bring your best self to work, takes its toll.
At the end of April, I received the Xtra Insights survey of the Karratha region of WA. Pete & Kymba with Ben Cousins had an extraordinary 52.6% breakfast audience share. It was then I realised that Kymba had also been absent from work for an extended period, with listeners questioning where she was.
She returned to work the following day and after heartwarming affirmations from Pete spoke of the toll of online bullying. She said:
“Every day we are trying to make everyone’s days better. We’re trying to bring you silliness, we’re trying to have laugh. Even the things that we talk about, the things that we think matter, and honestly I just couldn’t do it under the mental stress I was suffering. I just wasn’t okay.”
Your logical mind knows that this person doesn’t know you at all and shouldn’t therefore be able to affect you. But bullying and its impact is insidious. Kymba had decided alongside personal leave to take an extended break from social media, which is where my question about the importance of names came in:
“I had deleted my socials. I tend to live pretty much in the present, and I’m not much of an online person anyway. But I did have a public Facebook page which you can post or message me on.
I always wrote back when we had the text lines at work and while shutting that down has been for my own mental well-being at the moment, I have felt a bit of a disconnect because I always felt very present with listeners and that does matter to me.
I was hosting a ball recently for children’s charity Thriive that I’m ambassador for. At the ball a friend came up to me and said, I’ve been meaning to introduce you to this woman. She came over, introduced herself and said, I’ve been wanting to meet you. And then she showed me the lock screen on her phone.
It was a little boy that I recognised from Perth Children’s Hospital that I had met maybe two years earlier. He was dealing with a cancer diagnosis, and I had met him and his dad at the time.
I looked at this picture of the boy and said, it’s Tom! And she said, oh my God, you remember us? I asked are you Tom’s mum? She said yes. And I replied, oh my God, you’re Simon‘s wife!
Meeting Tom and Simon had an impact on me. When I started talking with them both in an interview we did, Tom openly talked to me about how he’d missed school, and he missed playing soccer with his friends. And when I spoke to Simon he started crying and Tom, this little boy, put his arm around his dad and was saying, it’s okay, dad, it’s okay.
And I started crying on air because he was comforting his dad.
About a year later, I happened to be at the Perth Children’s Hospital for another event, and Tom and Simon came over and said hello in the cafe. And I said, are you part of this event? But they just happened to be there for a follow up appointment. He was doing so well, but then to meet the mum and Simon’s wife!
She gave me this huge hug and was so excited asking for a photo together to show them when she got home.
I had just started my time off work. When I came home that night I told my partner what had happened and he said to me, this is why what you do counts, and this is why what you do matters.
It’s something that I’ve continued from my teaching career because I worked with kids from some pretty troubled backgrounds. I remember feeling that it was really important to try and remember all the kids’ names and to use their names in a positive way, because some of those kids might never hear their name said in a positive way that day or that week or ever.
I can’t control what other people think or how they conduct themselves. I can only try and inspire people to act in kindness, to try and do the right thing, try and say the right words, and to try and build people up so that they don’t feel like they’re in a position where they have to act out to get attention, or feel validated. I thought I could make a difference that way.”
Kymba introduced me to the shopping cart theory. What we do with our trolleys when no one is looking. Similar to returning a wallet with all the money in it or remembering someone’s name.
It is also about being true to yourself.
Working in any form of public media, now when your amount of likes and followers is a thing, you can gradually end up going down paths where increasingly your ethical radar comes askew. Kymba talked about a radio experience where she was asked to interview someone she lightly knew and get them to air in the immediate aftermath of a fatality that had impacted them.
She couldn’t, and wouldn’t, saying that had that been her last day in the industry, she knew that she was worth more than causing someone additional pain. I’ve walked in similar shoes and suspect many of you reading have too.
Kymba had to wrap up as she had Lisa’s hen’s night to attend (pictured main and above).
Alongside the many strings to her bow she is also a wedding celebrant, and this is the third Wedding YOU Built that listeners to Mix have helped create.
This Thursday Lisa will marry Josh.
Lisa will skydive to the ceremony, in a Temu dress. Josh will be decked out as the devil (a close vote in second was that he would be in his birthday suit – a love of TV show Lucifer won the day). They will be serenaded down the aisle by a Yr 5 rock band playing Don Henley’s Boys of Summer. Everyone will be dressed in Disney cosplay, except Kymba who will be in a balloon dress, and last but very much not least, the wedding cake will be made by Ben Cousins!!
Sounds tremendous and chaotic fun with my very best wishes to the happy couple. And to Kymba Cahill who’ll be bubbling away in the midst of it, surrounded by colleagues, friends and community who love her.
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Jen Seyderhelm is a writer, editor and podcaster for Radioinfo.
Bless you Jen, for writing about this wonderful Kymba and for reminding us that there really are some wonderful people in this world who make a difference in lives around her. Kymba, if you are reading this, thank you for you - may you be blessed in all areas of your life.