Tina Arena sits down with Sandra Sully for an incredibly revealing interview

I’d met Tina many times before and my initial reaction is always the same — where does one so tiny pack such a big voice! But this time I noticed something different — a sense of calm strength and a new openness in her always warm greeting.
I had this crazy thought that I was catching up with a dear and respected friend so I quickly checked myself, launched into professional mode and hoped Tina would be as open with her words as her demeanour.
What unfolded was a revelation — Tina Arena unplugged and ready to share.
I knew she had disappeared for a decade, from 2002-2012, but I never really understood why — until now.
Tina never turned her back on Australia to seek bigger markets, but needed time out for herself.
It was partly because she wanted to explore her Latin heritage; she also yearned to learn, but mostly she needed to unravel herself, because the girl from Melbourne’s Moonee Ponds, who’d first won our hearts as a child star on the hit TV show Young Talent Time, was lost.
“The gap was very, very important,” she says. “I needed to live — I needed to know who I was, what I was doing, why I’m existing.”
Something else was happening when Tina went AWOL. She was hurting. Deeply.
“I had a complete and perpetual sense of being misunderstood,” she says. “My marriage breakdown was ... horribly aggressive in so many ways.”
So were the consequences.
“I was spiritually malnourished and emotionally devoid of any kind of love,” she says. “It was a brutal realisation.”
The marriage failure was the trigger to question everything, including her successes.
“Yeah, totally,” she says. “Everything intertwined. There was no clarity, there was no separation. I was struggling to try to compartmentalise things.”
Then Tina stops and drops her voice to almost a whisper.
“I had to run away Sandra — I didn’t have a choice,” she says. “It was run away or die. I knew my only salvation was to walk away, because walking away was going to allow me the time to process what on earth I had gone through.
“There’s grief, there’s loss, there’s greed, there’s power, there’s ego, there’s narcissism, there’s all sorts of things that are all put in the same basket and you go WOW! You can’t deal with all those things at the same time.”
So Tina escaped — to lose the pain and find herself.
“People told me I was mad, which I also think is kind of mind boggling, that people would have the balls to say: ‘How dare you check out!’,” she says. “Well ... how dare you tell me what you think I should do! Keeping up with the Joneses is not my thing, I certainly hope people have cottoned onto that.”
In Europe Tina caught up with herself. Proving the naysayers wrong was never the intent — it’s not Tina’s way, but she did so nonetheless. During her ‘gap decade’ she kept working and also found fame in Europe, singing in French and Italian as well as English.
In France alone she notched five million sales and was honoured with the coveted Order du Merit, the French version of a knighthood.
“On the other side of the world I had a sense of anonymity and I had less judgment,” she says. “The judgement! I don’t think people understand the level and the grief of that kind of perpetual scrutiny.”
Something else Tina found in Europe was the love and family she’d been craving. Her partner, is French artist Vincent Mancini and their son Gabriel was born in 2005.
 “Vincent would push me,” she says. “He’d go: ‘Come on! You’ve been in this industry all or your life so why are you so apprehensive about taking a leap and making decisions, learn to trust your instincts.’ And that was when everything started to change.”
They’ve been talking about marriage for years. One day it will happen and one thing for certain is it won’t be a contrived traditional affair for this typically unconventional Aussie girl.
“True — yet by the same breath, I’m unbelievably conventional,” she says. “So go figure that — my values!”
Now she’s here to stay. Australia is home for Tina and Australia’s identity is something she will always be proud of and always champion.
“I’d always felt that I was apologising for who I was and I got into my 40s and knew I had to stop that,” she says. “And I don’t want to hear anyone else doing that. I want Australians to stand proud. That’s why this record IS Australian.”
Tina’s talking about Eleven now, released in October and debuting with I Want to Love You — a slow burn ballad showcased in a black and white video, starring Australian actor Vince Colosimo as Tina’s love interest.
Eleven is a watershed album in many ways. It’s the culmination of a creative collaboration with a clutch of young Australian and European artists yet equally inspired by a new-found peace within, and a drive and determination to just be Tina.
“That’s why I wrote Eleven with these amazing young Australian artists ” she continues. “At first they were asking, ‘why would you write with us kids’ — well why wouldn’t I write with you kids!”
Finally, there’s the album title. Why Eleven?
“It’s a spiritual number,” she says. “Again I don’t want to put it in a box. It’s a really strong number, it’s a number that represents somebody who is in charge of their own journey, somebody that has the vision about things and that has a sense of peace and centring. And I think that after the storm, that lasted a few years, it’s indicative and definitely representative of where I am now.”
It’s also where she started — her date of birth is 1 November or 1/11.
So it somehow seems appropriate that the opening track bursts into life with the lyrics of Unravel Me. Because that’s exactly what Tina has done.