Dorinda Hafner

She speaks five languages, and has spoken openly about the battle with her weight. Over the five years up to 2012, she reduced her weight from 168 kg (370 lb) to 72 kg (159 lb) She wrote the book Honey I've shrunk the chef, published in 2012, about how she did it.

In 1988, she was one of a four-woman dance troupe who called themselves the African Dance Group and performed a show directed by Robyn Archer at The Space Theatre in the Adelaide Festival Centre for the Adelaide Festival of Arts, entitled AKWANSO (Fly South). The others in the group were Pitjantjatjara dancer/actor Lillian Crombie, African-American dancer and choreographer Aku Kadogo, and Jamaican Jigzie Campbell. Each woman tells her own story of racial prejudice, which is followed by a dance by all four women, choreographed by Mary Barnett of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.

After leaving school, aged 18, she went to London to train as an ophthalmic nurse. She was the first black registered nurse (RN) trained at St George's Hospital. In London she met her future husband, psychiatrist Julian Hafner, with whom she emigrated in 1977 to South Australia. After settling in Adelaide, she worked as an RN. At that time, there were very few people of African descent in Adelaide, and she was met with a lot of misunderstanding, and mostly "just annoying and stupid" discrimination rather than deliberate racism.

Dorinda Hafner (born 1947) is an Ghanaian-born Australian storyteller, actress, dancer, choreographer, public speaker, writer and television chef.

Hafner was born in 1947 in Ghana, when it was British crown colony called Ashanti. Her father was a surgeon, and her mother a midwife, with her family part of the Ashanti royal family, and she grew up in an affluent family but with a mother who taught her how to do manual work as well. Her maternal great-grandfather emigrated to Ghana from Scotland in the 19th century.