Amanda Keller on her project, The Piano, and her 40 years in the media

At 63, Amanda Keller already has her hands full, waking at 4am each weekday to co-host the Sydney breakfast radio show Jonesy & Amanda. She wasn’t looking for anything new, but then came the ABC TV series The Piano. “I watched one episode of the English version and bawled my eyes out. I thought, ‘Bugger, I’m going to have to say yes,’” she says, with a laugh.

The Australian version of the heartfelt British series brings everyday Aussies to public spaces to play a piano. Keller hosts while musician Harry Connick Jr and concert pianist Andrea Lam observe, Big Brother-style, from another room.

A constant on Australian TV and radio since the 1990s, Keller says age has brought a new clarity to the projects she chooses. In her 20s and 30s, she was charging ahead in her career. Now, she gravitates towards things that feel purposeful. But she never expected a show about public pianos to move her so deeply.

“The breadth of the people who came down to play for us – from young to old, from those who hadn’t played for years to others who play every day – it’s the emotion of the piano that took me by surprise. Every day I laughed, cried, held someone’s hand and said, ‘God, you’re amazing.’”

Keller began her media career in the 1983, working as a researcher on Simon Townsend’s Wonder World before moving onto Midday with Ray Martin in 1985, then landing a breakout on-air role on the science and technology program Beyond 2000 in 1987.

Her path to fame was far from orchestrated. Even her regular guest appearances on the chat show Denton in the mid-’90s felt more like a happy accident than a grand plan – she and host Andrew Denton had been friends at university. However, she is now reported to be the second-highest-paid female radio host in Australia after Jackie “O” Henderson.

“Working behind the scenes as a researcher and segment producer, that’s where I learnt how to put a story together and work in a team,” says Keller, who graduated from what is now Charles Sturt University with a degree in journalism in 1982. “I learnt how the system worked without having to be in front of the camera, and that was my saving grace.”

And she’s still learning. Last year she discovered the word “sonder”, a term coined by John Koenig in his book The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows to describe the realisation that everyone around you is living a life as rich and complex as your own.

“When I’m on air, I’m with people on the best day of their lives and the worst day,” she says. “We all save each other in the soup of humanity and I appreciate that more as I get older.”

In 2017, Keller became the first woman inducted into the Australian Commercial Radio Hall of Fame. But the milestone coincided with heartbreak – her husband, Harley Oliver, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease that year. The couple, parents to two sons now in their 20s, kept the news private until 2023.

This road hasn’t been easy for Keller and her family. “I have learnt to appreciate the journey people are on, and I don’t think this is something I could have understood or been able to do at 20 or 40,” she says. “But now, in my 60s, I see the universality of what we’re all going through. My husband Harley has always said, ‘We all have an asteroid coming for us; some of us know what it is and some of us don’t.’”

For Keller, it’s the small things that provide solace: a close-knit book club that meets every five weeks and weekend dog walks with her friend Anita, a forensic psychologist who “goes to great pains to not be a psychologist to all her friends”.

She laughs when she talks about retirement. “I can’t imagine that for myself,” she says. “I like to wake up and know I have something to do and somewhere to be. It’s good for me. I thought that by the time I got to this age I wouldn’t want that any more, but it’s been a nice revelation that I still like work, still need it and have enthusiasm for it.”

With those 4am alarms, she’s strict about self-care. Nothing happens after midday – no coffee catch-ups, no dentist appointments, no haircuts. “I take my afternoon sleep very seriously,” she says. “I factor in time for myself in ways I might not have before, and my self-care ritual isn’t bottom of my list any more.”

Keller was born and raised in Sydney in a loving but “not particularly artsy” family. As a girl, she once told her mother she wanted to be an actor and was mortified when her mum repeated it to the lady next door. “It felt like such a show-off thing to say,” she recalls.

Teenage Amanda poured her feelings into dramatic diary entries and a love of Barry Manilow, but rarely shared her emotions. These days, she occasionally dips into her archives to better understand what she was like growing up. “I can see how I completely internalised the way I felt about anything dramatic,” she says. “I never showed it or talked about it. We were so boringly modest as a family, and I think I still am.”

For Keller, it was seeing Australian journalist Jana Wendt on 60 Minutes and A Current Affair that planted the seed that a life in the media might be worth pursuing. “I thought about how amazing it would be to have such a glamorous job,” she says. “Jana was smart and held her own – I really liked that. But once I got the job in media, I realised it’s not as glamorous as I’d thought.”

Keller made up for that shortfall in glamour in other ways. A 10-year stint on Network 10’s The Living Room, for instance, remains a favourite period of her career.

“Barry Du Bois is in the middle of renovating the front of my house as we speak,” she says of one co-host before turning to the others. “Chris [Brown] is always amazing, and we talk all the time, and it’s often Miguel [Maestre] who is off somewhere and makes catching up a bit harder.

“I made some of my closest life friends on that show. The genuine chemistry we shared and continue to share is rare.”

When nominated for Gold Logies in 2018 and 2019, the diary-like panic of her youth reared its head again. “That’s why I found it so hard to sell myself for the Gold Logies,” she admits. “It’s not an easy position to put yourself in, and I much prefer doing the work than talking about the work I’ve done.”

Keller’s mum, who died over two decades ago while Amanda was raising her sons, is still present in her thoughts – especially now. “I miss Mum every day and realise this more as I get older,” she says. “As a parent I now realise so clearly that love is a doing word. I wish I could say to Mum, ‘I really get it now.’“.

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Filming The Piano brought her mother – who had played piano as a young woman, but gave it up when she started a family – even closer. “Mum always felt she missed out on a career,” says Keller. “She was the eldest in her family and left to go and work in a bank. That’s where she met Dad and then married.

“Back then, the rules were different. You had to leave your job when you got married. And to think that my mum’s sister, who was 10 years younger than Mum, got two degrees and travelled to Afghanistan. All that change happened in one generation – it’s quite extraordinary. I always felt a bit sad that my mother missed out.”

Keller’s memoir, Natural Born Keller, was published over a decade ago. Surely there will be further acts in her career. “When I look at shows like Fisk and Utopia, I think it would be good to do an acting gig here or there,” she says. “But if that doesn’t happen, I am OK with it, too.

“The older I get, the happier I am with my lot. If you can choose your dismount in this industry, that’s a lucky thing because in media you never know when that time will be. But I don’t have any firm ambitions and I don’t look at anything in life with jealousy or burning desire either.”

The Piano airs on ABC TV from May 4.

Fashion editor: Penny McCarthy; Hair: Michael Brennan using Hask; Make-up: Linda Jefferyes using M.A.C.

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