Baz bravely told of his mother's death, his wife's cancer treatment and his own ongoing battle as he downed tools for a cuppa alongside fellow Cancer Council ambassador, chef Miguel Maestre,  for the Cancer Council's Biggest Morning Tea at Cafe del Mar on Tuesday.

Du Bois, 53, the proud father of 23-month-old old twins Bennett and Arabella, says he is "the luckiest guy on Earth". "I've got my two beautiful angels."

He told of his ongoing battle since he learned in 2010 that he had plasmacytoma myeloma, a cancer of the immune system which attacks healthy bone marrow. It has already destroyed the vertebrae at the top of his spine.

Yet he describes now as "just a beautiful time in my life".

"The most important thing was the birth of my twins. My life started again and the most important thing for me is their health and well-being."

Du Bois and his wife, Leonie, went through more than 10 rounds of  IVF treatments and then six surrogacy attempts to bring their beautiful twins into the world. He says his mission now is to make a difference.

"I was having a Christmas surf with my brother and nephew and I had a sore neck. Being a builder I was used to that sort of thing, and I went under a wave and cracked my C1 vertebrae. I didn't know it at the time but it was the last of my vertebrae caving in," he said.

He said the worst part was sharing the news with his wife.

"It upset her and I had to tell her I had something I didn't know what it was and it was attacking me. Once we got the neck stabilised [with a 15-hour operation] then we started on the radiotherapy – and I took the highest radioactivity  you could take. I was scheduled for chemo but at this stage we monitor it on a bi-monthly basis. I still haven't had to have the chemo but the cancer is still in my body. It's not going to go away and it is something we'll manage forever."

Du Bois lost his mother to cancer in 2004.

"It was hard to live through that and then just a year from that my wife was pregnant with twins and I heard that scream again from the bathroom. I realised for the 13th time we'd lost that chance again. Through complications from the loss of those twins, Leonie ended up in hospital and we discovered she had an aggressive cervical cancer."

Du Bois was keen to share his story as it is not an uncommon one and he wants to help others going through the same thing.

"At one stage of your life," he said. "Every single person in this room is gonna hear themselves say it or hear it from someone very dear to them 'I have cancer'. Just think about that for a second. For me it was harder to hear it than to say it. When you hear those words you say to yourself  'I will do everything I can to fix this' and straight after that you say 'what can I do?'

"You're powerless at that stage," he said, choking back tears "but what you can do is what you're doing right now. You can think it forward ... Every dollar you raise helps. When you say 'what can I do?' Well, you're doing it."

In trademark larrikin form, Du Bois says he was first called by the producers of his first television gig The Renovators while he was undergoing treatment. "I told them if I'm still around in a few months, give me a call and they kept calling!"

Now working on his dream show with Amanda Keller, Maestre and Chris Brown, Du Bois says he hopes that in a few years he can get back on his yacht and sail around the Mediterranean with his family.

Pain behind Tara Moss memoir

Author Tara Moss felt compelled to write her tenth book and her first non-fiction work, The Fictional Woman, because of her daughter, Sapphira.

"I was absolutely inspired by my daughter. The thing that has surprised me most about becoming a parent is it's made me more fierce," she told S after walking the red carpet at the InStyle and Audi Women of Style Awards on Wednesday night.

"I feel like I can't sit on the sidelines any more. This book is dedicated to my daughter, Sapphira,  and the women of the future. I hope they will find a world that is safer and more equitable, that has more freedom and opportunity where women have half of the sky – rather than the much smaller slice we have at the moment."

Moss, 41, launched her tome on Thursday. While she has been in the public eye for more than 20 years, some of her stories will shock.

She was raped in a terrifying sex attack when she was 21 and she also details several other sexual assaults and near misses she endured as a young model.

"My aim was for this book is to be a conversation starter about the experience of women and girls today and using the example of the culture I know best, taking what are perceived to be the major issues affecting women and girls today – everything from sexual violence to representation in the media, to problems with equal pay, problems women face in the workplace."

Moss says the book is a "very approachable" mix of memoir and social comment based on research and statistics. She admits it's a big step away from the crime fiction she is famous for, but that the bigger picture of social justice has always been there except it was covered in fiction and entertainment.

"What I've done now is to strip away the fiction and the armour really and write about issues I'm very passionate about," she says. "It's essential to have an argument abut this and I am putting forward a case that we fictionalise women in the public eye and that it's based on the archetypes which have been around since the middle ages which still influences the way we perceive women today.

"I hope it will engage a lot of people and debate and discussion. If we arm ourselves with some of these facts and stats and what that means moving forward, we can actually make things more equitable for women and for men and for boys and for girls. It's within our power to do so. It's important to cast aside ideas about division and finger pointing and and say we can do this together."

Wahlberg's star turn on Qantas plane

Talk Mark Wahlberg missed his flight to Sydney for the premiere of Transformers: Age of Extinction appears to be a little off the mark, with S's LA sources claiming the actor simply didn't like the plane he had boarded.

Apparently he demanded to leave the Qantas Boeing 747 jet, leaving flight staff at LAX to find his bags and take him off the plane.

He then boarded QF 94 – a Qantas A380 – which flew to Melbourne, where he then joined a domestic flight to land in Sydney for the film's sneak peek.

While a publicist said there were no direct flights to Sydney which would have delivered Wahlberg in town in time for his black carpet commitments ahead of the blockbuster's release on June 26,  our mail says he just wanted off the plane.

The actor had clearly chilled by the time he got here. He enjoyed swinging a club at a Sydney driving range on Thursday before his flight out on Friday.

Comedian Corinne Grant's court action

There will be order in the courtroom when comedian Corinne Grant completes her law degree from Melbourne University. Or not!

Grant, who narrates Seven's new documentary What Really Happens in Bali, which airs on Tuesday night, admitted to Sshe is moonlighting as a stand-up comic at the moment.

"It's fun," she says of her decision to embark on a law degree last year. "I feel like I'm double-dipping at the moment, working as a performer by night and studying by day."

Grant, 40, says she wanted change. "I just felt like doing something else. You get to a certain age and I still love comedy and still love doing it obviously, but I'm broadening my horizons and seeing where it leads."

She still isn't sure if she'll end up in a courtroom. "We'll have to wait and see, I think. At the moment I just want to get through this degree; they punch it out in three years – and I am enjoying it. Where it leads after that, I'm not sure. My worry is I will react to a judge like I do a heckler when on stage. I'll have to be very careful or I'd end up in jail!"

Meanwhile, she says the fly-on-the-wall doco on how Aussies behave in Bali was not about editorialising, but letting the people judge themselves, even though she does occasionally add some tone in her voice.

"We don't go just down to Kuta to look at drunk teenagers, but we also look at expats, people who are in Kerobokan jail, people working with charities, people working with disabilities and people who have married Balinese or are setting up a business there."

She says she is a fan. "I've been there five or six times and the unfortunate thing is, we only ever see Kuta and that's not Bali – that's for drunk Aussies. You can get a completely different experience and I wouldn't paint all the Balinese with the one brush."

Morsels

The demise of any show in the uncertain environment in which we work in the media is always sad. But the axing of Ten's breakfast show Wake Up was particularly sad for this occasional contributor. Downsizing and redundancies are not good for the industry as a whole. On the positive, I can truly say I have never enjoyed working with a bunch of people more than I have on this show. From the security to the production team to the makeup room, the sound guys and the coffee-makers right through to the gorgeous hosts Natarsha Belling and James Mathison – what a great bunch. There were conversations that didn't end when the cameras stopped rolling (unusual in the TV game!). The smiles also continued well into the ad breaks. It's a conversation I hope we can continue.

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Between stage and cabaret gigs and new LA-based management, PJ Lane, son of the late Don Lane, is a busy boy. But he's still determined to do his bit for Alzheimer's, the disease his dad suffered from. So yesterday PJ performed and spoke at the Better Brain Life Forum at the University of NSW about life with his dad when he suffered the disease.

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Prinnie Stevens is about to be seen as the co-host of new series The Voice Kids Australia, but she still knows how to wow a crowd leaving those at the Cambodia Trust Benefit Concert at The Enmore Theatre on Thursday night more than impressed. Dressing in a figure-hugging black top and embellished skirt, the chanteuse delighted guests with a stripped-back performance of her hit Don't Wake Me Up accompanied only by acoustic guitar and percussion, and she also unveiled her new song, MT.