Keeping it in the family
Over 15 years ago, Melissa Doyle experienced two events which would change the course of her life – one gloriously happy, the other heartbreaking. The former, needless to say, was the birth of her daughter, Talia, on December 18, 2003. With her today as she chats to The Weekly and clearly the apple of her mother’s eye, Talia is Melissa’s second child – son Nick is two years older – and completed the family she had built with her husband, sports marketing executive John Dunlop. The pair met when Melissa was just 23 and starting out in journalism, and from the outset they knew they had found a love that would last the distance.
The latter was an event which would rock people the world over. On Boxing Day 2004, a tsunami caused by an earthquake beneath the Indian Ocean near Indonesia devastated the region, claiming over 230,000 lives in 14 different countries.
At the time, Melissa was co-hosting and she – along with her colleagues and peers at the Seven Network – knew she had to do something, anything, to help. The major networks joined forces to put on
