A life in the loudest rooms in Australia

Annie Wright walked into RCA Records in 1974, at a moment when the Australian music business ran on cigarettes, telexes and men who assumed a young woman was there to make the tea. She was not. Within a few years she was running promotion campaigns for some of the biggest records the country had ever seen.

The seventies were extraordinary. ABBA fever, Bowie's arrival, John Denver selling out arenas, a homegrown scene finding its own swagger. Annie learned every lever of the machine — radio programmers, retail buyers, television bookers, journalists on deadline — and learned that the difference between a hit and a shrug was often simply who bothered to fight for it.

In the early eighties she opened Mushroom Records branch in Sydney and continued on in the world of Mushroom and Frontier, working with the great Michael Gudinski, and then onto Los Angeles to run Oz/Mushroom Records, carrying Australian repertoire into the American market long before that was a well-worn path. Music opened a second door: film. She worked publicity on independent features including Angel Heart, Barfly, Walker, Blood Oath, Turtle Beach and Wind, bringing a rock promoter's instincts to movie sets.

Back home from 1989, Annie built her own PR firm — publicity, artist management, tours, festivals and the occasional full-scale crisis. Decades of contacts, and a refusal to be intimidated, made her the person people rang when something had gone wrong at midnight.

More recently she has turned that same voice toward community and advocacy work, and toward writing. Her memoir, She Does Difficult, is the story she spent five decades collecting: warm, funny, unsentimental and completely unafraid.