I keep going for my girls

As a teenager she seemed to have the world at her feet, gracing the covers of magazines and appearing in an iconic music video. But an undiagnosed condition saw Sarah Nursey's life unravel. Now the mum-of-two reveals how a diagnosis of ADHD as an adult has helped her make sense of the chaos.

- ALEX BROOKS

Images can arrest our senses and enslave us to dreams. When 15-year-old cover girl Sarah Nursey graced the cover of Dolly magazine no less than three times in 1984, she was like an incantation commanding me to perm my hair. Sarah's dazzling smile, round face and inviting eyes are proportioned in the same golden ratio as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. To my chubby teenage self, Sarah's lean, 178cm body - honed by athletics and aerobics, and sporting Dachet jeans - was the impossible dream.

When Lisa Wilkinson edited Dolly in the 1980s, she worked closely with fashion photographer Graham Shearer, discovering fresh-faced and friendly girls to put on the cover.

"From the very first time I put Sarah on the cover, the readers fell in love with her and demanded we keep using her," says the journalist and broadcaster. "Graham also came to me with some Polaroids of a young up-and-coming model he'd found called Nicole Kidman. I put her on the cover straight away, and it was my first ever sellout issue."

Yet Sarah would beat the A-lister to-be in the popularity stakes, gracing the bestselling cover of Lisa's editorship.

Sarah appeared to have it all before she'd even finished Year 10 at high school. Sports Illustrated's 1985 swimwear issue showcased her beachy athleticism in a Baywatchstyle red swimsuit, inspiring piles of fan mail from male admirers and prison inmates, as well as teenage girls like me.

"I was stunned - all I could think was, 'Why would they write to me?'" Sarah says. "I wish I could look back on that time and see it for what it was. I am completely dissociated. It's like I'm looking back on someone else's life when I look at those old photos."