Speaker 1: I grew up, you'll be unsurprised to hear in a
Speaker 1: reading household. My mum in particular, would read to my
Speaker 1: sisters and I every day of our early lives, even
Speaker 1: once we were all keen readers ourselves, even when we'd
Speaker 1: grown out of being able to perch on her lap
Speaker 1: and the arms of her chair, Mum would still read
Speaker 1: chapter books to us. She was a primary school teacher
Speaker 1: for a period of teacher librarian and ultimately a literacy specialist,
Speaker 1: teaching reading recovery to kids who are struggling. Now with
Speaker 1: her grandkids, my children and my nieces and nephews, she's
Speaker 1: still at it. Summer is in part a glorious time
Speaker 1: for watching my mum instilling the many children in her
Speaker 1: life with a lifelong love of reading. Of course, it
Speaker 1: wasn't just Mum, countless teachers, aunts, uncles, grandparents, school librarians.
Speaker 1: In fact, special shout out to Marie Lithgow from Brunswick
Speaker 1: Southwest Primary School, a school librarian that dreams are made
Speaker 1: of Each of them played a part. From the younger stage.
Speaker 1: My reading was fed and rewarded and frankly indulged. I
Speaker 1: never had a chance, but there was one other person
Speaker 1: in my preschool years who I associate indelibly with developing
Speaker 1: that love of books. On weekdays in the afternoon is
Speaker 1: a special treat. We might be allowed to put the
Speaker 1: television on, and that meant one thing, playschool. And on
Speaker 1: the best days, playschool meant Noney. So to start our
Speaker 1: twenty twenty five reading year off right, we're starting with
Speaker 1: Nony Hazelhurst. I'm Michael Williams, and this is read This
Speaker 1: a show about the books we love and the stories
Speaker 1: behind them. All right, So I accept that amongst our
Speaker 1: read This listeners, there may be many who aren't of
Speaker 1: my exact vintage and experience, people for whom Noney Hazelhurst
Speaker 1: is something other than the patron saint of early childhood nostalgia.
Speaker 1: She's had a long and storied career on stage and
Speaker 1: screen in Australia. Maybe you're picturing her on Better Homes
Speaker 1: and Gardens or in Little Fish opposite Cate Blanchett. As
Speaker 1: I read this, listener, there's a better than average chance
Speaker 1: you're remembering her starring role in the film adaptation of
Speaker 1: Hell Garner's Monkey Grip. But our excuse for having her
Speaker 1: on today is her new memoir it's called dropping the Mask,
Speaker 1: where she reclaims a lifetime in the public eye and
Speaker 1: shares it back on the page. This dedicated interpreter of
Speaker 1: other people's words has now shared her own, and it's
Speaker 1: a memoir very much concerned with performance in all its forms. NONI.
Speaker 1: I wanted to start with your mum because she is
Speaker 1: the force around which so much of this book circles,
Speaker 1: and so much of this story circles, not least in
Speaker 1: the quote that you offer from her very early on,
Speaker 1: in the piece that gives the book its name, where
Speaker 1: she says, don't let it any anyone know what you're
Speaker 1: really like.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, that was a doozy. It's interesting that people
Speaker 2: have seen that my mother was sort of the driving
Speaker 2: force when now I wasn't aware of that when I
Speaker 2: was writing it, obviously, but yeah, so from a very
Speaker 2: early age, I was taught that I had to act,
Speaker 2: and I was not really encouraged to just be other
Speaker 2: than the version of this nice, little, slightly English girl
Speaker 2: that my mother hoped I would be and indeed groomed
Speaker 2: me as such. My parents were both in vaudeville before
Speaker 2: the Second World War. They met when they're on the
Speaker 2: same bill I'm a fourth generation performer, so I was
Speaker 2: sort of doomed from the start. But they made it
Speaker 2: very clear that I had to be able to do
Speaker 2: all these different things if I wanted to succeed in
Speaker 2: my career. So comedy, accents, piano, singing, dancing, ballet, blah
Speaker 2: blah blah. But I was never encouraged to just reach
Speaker 2: in and find out who NONI was. To me a
Speaker 2: really long time to break free of the conditioning not
Speaker 2: only that they provided in this kind of don't be yourself,
Speaker 2: be someone else when you're out, but also then to
Speaker 2: hit the seventies as a seventeen year old university and
Speaker 2: feminism and whitlam and politics for the first time, and
Speaker 2: alcohol and drugs and all those things that the seventies
Speaker 2: kind of laid on in spades, and then to go
Speaker 2: into the kind of late seventies television world, which was
Speaker 2: very much your young blonde ergo, we know you, know
Speaker 2: how to cast you. And so it took me a
Speaker 2: really long time to sort of be recognized as having
Speaker 2: serious aspirations. It was only the Sullivans, when I could
Speaker 2: cry on cue that they kind of went, oh, she's
Speaker 2: not going to be a blonde bimbo, she wants to
Speaker 2: be a serious actress. So that was sort of a
Speaker 2: turning point. I mean, no one ever said to me
Speaker 2: reality is a personal construct, and I really wish they
Speaker 2: had a lot earlier.
Speaker 1: That generational divide between you and your mum, you know,
Speaker 1: being a fourth generation performer. On the one hand, as
Speaker 1: you say, there's a kind of expectation and an influence.
Speaker 1: But one of the things that struck me again and
Speaker 1: again reading this book is that the idea of dropping
Speaker 1: the mask. The thing that makes you such an indelible
Speaker 1: figure in our culture is that you have done this
Speaker 1: extraordinary job of making people feel close to you in
Speaker 1: your different incarnations. I can't think of many storytellers in
Speaker 1: our culture, many performers in our culture who are so
Speaker 1: giving of themselves in the way that they the way
Speaker 1: that they move through the world. Is that largely construct?
Speaker 1: Is that just a wonderful performance?
Speaker 2: Well, I think every time most of us leave the house,
Speaker 2: we have constructed the role that we want to play
Speaker 2: in our minds, whether we do it consciously or unconsciously.
Speaker 2: So you know, it's not just about me dropping my mask.
Speaker 2: It's about recognizing that you know, underneath we are all
Speaker 2: authentic human being and unique human beings, not necessarily special,
Speaker 2: but unique. And so it's recognizing that authenticity that allows
Speaker 2: you to acknowledge that you're ordinary and you're vulnerable. And
Speaker 2: as my acting mentor Larry Moss, who I describe at
Speaker 2: length in the book and who changed my life at
Speaker 2: the age of sixty, said, they don't come to see you,
Speaker 2: they come to see themselves. And so that was really
Speaker 2: revelatory because it stopped being about me and it began
Speaker 2: to be all I have to do is tell the
Speaker 2: story to the best of my ability, using my only tool,
Speaker 2: which is myself and my experiences, to bring what I
Speaker 2: think are appropriate choices for this character. It was really
Speaker 2: play school, Michael. It was the turning point in teaching
Speaker 2: me to choose the version of myself that I wanted
Speaker 2: to put out there as me. You know, obviously, I'm
Speaker 2: not knownly from play school, nor am I knownly the
Speaker 2: serious actress, nor am I knownly the single mother. I'm
Speaker 2: all of these things, as are we all. But the
Speaker 2: real key for me was place called had to treat
Speaker 2: the camera as though it were one pair of eyes.
Speaker 2: And that is the key to all great communicators. If
Speaker 2: you can make a person listening or watching feel like
Speaker 2: you're talking just to them, then you have connected.
Speaker 1: Also, as you outline in the book, episodes particularly then
Speaker 1: were shot as live as well, so it wasn't a
Speaker 1: packaged thing. It was about an organic kind of relationship
Speaker 1: between you and your co host, and a relationship between
Speaker 1: two of you and the audience who are watching. I mean,
Speaker 1: I am of the generation who grew up watching you.
Speaker 1: You and John Hamblin were my absolute favorites for the
Speaker 1: jhon A. Nony episode. Everything else had to stop and
Speaker 1: that was essential. But the thing that I remember about
Speaker 1: that I was thinking about this coming into the interview
Speaker 1: today was the sense of cheekiness with the two of you,
Speaker 1: and the sense of barely contained chaos and mayhem felt
Speaker 1: deeply authentic. As a kid, even I understood, these grown
Speaker 1: ups are having fun, They're making jokes with each other,
Speaker 1: and I'm aware of that, and as a kid, feeling
Speaker 1: like a grown up is on the level with you
Speaker 1: is the thing that you want more than anything.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, you know that was our aim to make
Speaker 2: it appear like we were doing it for the first time,
Speaker 2: even though we had rehearsed at five times and as
Speaker 2: you say, John taught me the key, which was to
Speaker 2: not perform, but to be. And so occasionally he would
Speaker 2: get things wrong, and initially I thought that was him,
Speaker 2: you know, being a bit slack, and I tried to
Speaker 2: overcompensate by being like a schoolmistress. And then I watched
Speaker 2: us back on an episode and I couldn't take my
Speaker 2: eyes off him because he was thoroughly engaging. Even in rehearsal.
Speaker 2: We had an immense amount of fun because he just played.
Speaker 2: And so a lot of my experiences up to that
Speaker 2: point had not been about playing. They'd been about being
Speaker 2: frightened or being judged or whatever. But John didn't care.
Speaker 2: But he had this wonderful relationship with that child because
Speaker 2: he was alive to the child in himself. And so
Speaker 2: that's what I had to bring to the four was
Speaker 2: my child who had been edited so severely in real life.
Speaker 2: So I had to remember how confusing the world was
Speaker 2: to a three or four year old. We forget all
Speaker 2: that stuff about the things that traumatized us at an
Speaker 2: early age, like oh I'm lost, or oh why are
Speaker 2: they shouting at me? You know, those things that were
Speaker 2: huge when we were little. So I was very aware
Speaker 2: of that responsibility that the world. And there's a section
Speaker 2: in the book where I put in an excerpt of
Speaker 2: speech I gave in nineteen ninety about my fears that
Speaker 2: children were being left behind with the ubiquity of screens. Well,
Speaker 2: that was before the Internet, that was before any of
Speaker 2: the screens that are available to us all now, and
Speaker 2: so even then I could see that the world was
Speaker 2: incredibly confusing to very young children, and that if we didn't,
Speaker 2: you know, really take responsibility for contextualizing and protecting little
Speaker 2: children to some extent, then we were really doing them
Speaker 2: at a service. And it taught me that we're all
Speaker 2: responsible for all children.
Speaker 1: The legacy of that can be seen in the work
Speaker 1: that you've done you through your entire career since then.
Speaker 1: But I want to ask you about a particular lesson
Speaker 1: from play School and how it applies to the writing
Speaker 1: of this book and the work that you continue to do,
Speaker 1: which is around the telling of stories. What were the
Speaker 1: articles of faith when it came to story time on
Speaker 1: play School in terms of reading a book to kids,
Speaker 1: sharing stories with kids. What are the disciplines of the
Speaker 1: storyteller that you got specifically from that context?
Speaker 2: Oh, good question. I think it was the pacing how
Speaker 2: we would rehearse. It was that the book would be
Speaker 2: carefully timed, and the page turns were camera timed to
Speaker 2: the close ups and all that, and so it was
Speaker 2: paced at a deliberate in a deliberate way, and occasionally
Speaker 2: you'd break out and ask a question or see what
Speaker 2: the response might be, or let's turn the page. So
Speaker 2: it was very interactive. It was very I'm doing this
Speaker 2: with you. So I guess inadvertently I absorbed that pacing,
Speaker 2: and that was it was also important for me to
Speaker 2: reflect how people know me in terms of how I communicate.
Speaker 2: So when I went to read the audio book, which
Speaker 2: was tortuous listing to myself for five days in a row,
Speaker 2: I was pleased that it read like I was saying it,
Speaker 2: and I sort of wanted that because people know me
Speaker 2: as a talker.
Speaker 1: Your mum to return to her for a second. She
Speaker 1: read to you a lot. She was a big storyteller,
Speaker 1: and she was your introduction to reading.
Speaker 2: Yeah. She taught me to read before I went to school,
Speaker 2: and fed me a steady diet of books, largely of
Speaker 2: the Enid Blyton variety. And indeed, you know, she never
Speaker 2: really felt at home in the Australian bush or it
Speaker 2: was always very much the forest. She would make stories
Speaker 2: up about Missus Brown, the old lady who lived in
Speaker 2: the forest with the squirrels and you know, whatever you
Speaker 2: get in the forest in England. So yeah, she read
Speaker 2: to me a lot, and my favorite Christmas present was
Speaker 2: a box of books. I had my own library card
Speaker 2: at the age of four, so I'm so grateful to
Speaker 2: her for that because it really did you know, I'm
Speaker 2: a really good site reader, whether it's music or a script,
Speaker 2: so she really did give me a huge advantage there.
Speaker 2: The editing of the available literature was probably a little
Speaker 2: bit sus but you know, as was the kinds of
Speaker 2: things that were presented to me, as drama productions of things.
Speaker 2: I was in more players than I'd seen. I'd only
Speaker 2: ever seen a couple of really ordinary, you know, Shakespeare
Speaker 2: maginees through school, so you know, I was very much
Speaker 2: limited in what I could absorb. But I think that
Speaker 2: was a distinct advantage being taught to read at an
Speaker 2: early age.
Speaker 1: When we returned Only discusses the influence of Australian literary legend,
Speaker 1: poet and playwright Dorothy Hewitt and manly reveals what she
Speaker 1: plans to write about next. We'll be right back. I
Speaker 1: want to jump ahead a tiny bit to a particular
Speaker 1: writer who had an influence on your work more through
Speaker 1: theater than through her work on the page. And that's
Speaker 1: Dorothy Hewitt. Yeah, tell us a bit about your encounter
Speaker 1: with her.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I first met Dorothy. I was cast in the
Speaker 2: first production of The Man from muckin Uppen, which was
Speaker 2: commissioned in wa to celebrate their Sesque centennial. And Dorothy
Speaker 2: had sort of been banished from Perth because she was
Speaker 2: a Communist, She'd had an affair with a married man.
Speaker 2: She was a woman God forbid, and you know, a
Speaker 2: general all round person who didn't fit in with the
Speaker 2: Perth glitterati. And she had written this extraordinary play about
Speaker 2: the dark side and the light side of all of
Speaker 2: our natures. And we all went trooping off to Perth.
Speaker 2: Dorothy came with us and explored this beautiful, beautiful play,
Speaker 2: and so I got to know her a little bit.
Speaker 2: She was still a little bit mobile, but I just
Speaker 2: found her such a lot of contradictions in one person.
Speaker 2: You know, you think she'd be this eery fairriarty farty
Speaker 2: beautifully spoken person, but she had this high pitched voice
Speaker 2: that was kind of raucous, and she'd cackle like a maniac,
Speaker 2: and just to see her delight as her words came
Speaker 2: to life. I think it's her best play. And so
Speaker 2: we stayed in contact a little bit. I met the
Speaker 2: family and she was welcome back into Perth with I
Speaker 2: don't think she particularly cared, but you know, it was
Speaker 2: a bit of an up beauty that the play was
Speaker 2: so successful. And then we did it again in Sydney
Speaker 2: with the Sydney Theater Company. And when I came to
Speaker 2: do the play Mother, when it was written for me
Speaker 2: by the wonderful Daniel Keane, we had a meeting to
Speaker 2: talk about themes that he might touch on that interested us,
Speaker 2: the main one of which I guess was judgment. But
Speaker 2: also we both talked about our reverence and admiration for Dorothy.
Speaker 2: And so the nod to Dorothy and Mother is that
Speaker 2: I wear a little blue bobby pin bluebird bobby pin
Speaker 2: in my hair and have my Dorothy hair. But it's
Speaker 2: very much about people who fall, women who fall through
Speaker 2: the cracks particularly, and the vulnerability of people. And I
Speaker 2: think Dorothy and Daniel both have the ability to focus
Speaker 2: our attention on walking a mile in someone else's shoes,
Speaker 2: and you know, doing what I think the arts are
Speaker 2: meant to do, which is connect us and recognize that
Speaker 2: they're but by the grace of God go all of us.
Speaker 2: And I think Dorothy really had that grasp of anarchy,
Speaker 2: if you like, and how theater can be political but
Speaker 2: also subtle. A very magical, special person.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think underread and under remembered at the moment,
Speaker 1: which made me so pleased to read the affection with
Speaker 1: which you wrote about her heir. But it's also emblematic
Speaker 1: of something that has characterized your career, which is a
Speaker 1: relationship with writers and the writing behind the roles. And
Speaker 1: you know, Mother's an amazing production. Your performance is extraordinary.
Speaker 1: But one of the things I love about it is
Speaker 1: that Daniel wanted to write for you. You're an actor
Speaker 1: for whom writers you know, they want to fill that
Speaker 1: imaginative space and work with you on stuff. I'd love
Speaker 1: it if you could reflect on the role of writers
Speaker 1: through your career.
Speaker 2: Well, without the writers, I would have no career. So
Speaker 2: you know, Larry Moss said, our job is to serve
Speaker 2: the great writers and the great writers right to serve humanity.
Speaker 2: So as such, where is it the word supplicant? Where
Speaker 2: they're servants. I mean, it's been really interesting to me
Speaker 2: to see how the increased participation of women in my
Speaker 2: industry has led to richer female roles, not just for
Speaker 2: young women, but for actual older women, to have a
Speaker 2: role other than old nag or off your pop, to
Speaker 2: pop your clogs. And I realized through Larry because he
Speaker 2: assigned when he did his masterclass, which turned me around.
Speaker 2: He put us in pairs and assigned us a scene
Speaker 2: from the great plays each and the scene I did
Speaker 2: with Mandy Mackleenny was from George Bernard Shaw's Missus Warren's Profession.
Speaker 2: And I'd never read any short and indeed I had
Speaker 2: not read really any of the plays Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter.
Speaker 2: I'd seen productions of them, and arrogantly I had made
Speaker 2: a judgment that, oh, that particular writer doesn't particularly interesting.
Speaker 2: Hadn't really gone into these works because I didn't like
Speaker 2: the productions that I saw, And so he forced me
Speaker 2: to go and look at you know, who the playwright was,
Speaker 2: when they lived, where they lived, what their personal life
Speaker 2: was like, what the political situation was, you know, the forenzy,
Speaker 2: even though I'd been a university that wasn't part of
Speaker 2: it in the early seventies, Whereas Larry just said, every pause,
Speaker 2: every word, every comma has been thought about, and who
Speaker 2: are you to mess with that? Who are you to
Speaker 2: think that you can trail off the last three words
Speaker 2: of that sentence. If he hadn't wanted those three words,
Speaker 2: he wouldn't have fucking written them. So, you know, he
Speaker 2: was absolutely insistent that we slavishly devote ourselves to what
Speaker 2: the writer gave us. You know, when I first got Mother,
Speaker 2: I was petrofron because I thought, what if I don't
Speaker 2: like it? Yeah, you know, I'd never been in that
Speaker 2: situation before, and there's no punctuation in it, there's no
Speaker 2: stage directions. At the start of each section, he might
Speaker 2: say something like smell of priest, you know, so, so
Speaker 2: it was quite daunting to start with. But then if
Speaker 2: I just said the words, said the words, said the
Speaker 2: words said the words, it eventually found its own music
Speaker 2: and its own rhythm, and it gave me such a
Speaker 2: framework to work from, and I wanted to get every
Speaker 2: single word right and to honor that writing, because every
Speaker 2: word had an image. You know, every phrase conjured up
Speaker 2: images for me and hopefully for the audience that you
Speaker 2: couldn't not see them. That was so strong for me.
Speaker 1: Did I read somewhere that when you can't get to sleep,
Speaker 1: you recite the scriptive mother in your own head?
Speaker 2: Yes, yes I do. She's been in me for nine
Speaker 2: years now and she ain't going nowhere. But it's good
Speaker 2: to just say those words. But I don't usually get
Speaker 2: very far.
Speaker 1: That's a good thing. So given that respect for writers,
Speaker 1: how anxious was the process of telling your story on
Speaker 1: a page rather than through performance horrible?
Speaker 2: The inner critic had to be punched down yep all
Speaker 2: the time. But I got to the point where I thought, look,
Speaker 2: it's like a stage show. If one person sees this
Speaker 2: character or reads this book and avoids some of the
Speaker 2: mistakes I made, then fantastic. But it was a very
Speaker 2: drawn out process. It was meant to be a very
Speaker 2: different exercise. I bought a tiny cottage in France in
Speaker 2: late twenty nineteen, and the pitch for the book was
Speaker 2: that I write a memoir interspersed with my adventures in France,
Speaker 2: and of course I couldn't go back there for three
Speaker 2: years so it just and I couldn't access any of
Speaker 2: my records or photos or diaries because my house was
Speaker 2: flooded twice during COVID and I couldn't live in eighteen months.
Speaker 2: Everyone's got a COVID horror story that was mine. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I couldn't access anything. So eventually I just thought, well,
Speaker 2: I've just got to do it. What kept me going
Speaker 2: on one level was that I think I want to
Speaker 2: read more women's stories. You know, when I finally escaped
Speaker 2: university and started having you know, feminist influence or not
Speaker 2: also at university, but reading books by women was incredible.
Speaker 2: For the first time, I actually resonated with what I
Speaker 2: was reading in a visceral way. Helen Ghana was one
Speaker 2: of the early influencers there, you know, writing about her
Speaker 2: her inner thoughts and the minutie of daily life. One
Speaker 2: of the ways she was criticized by some male critics
Speaker 2: early on in her career. But as a woman, I
Speaker 2: find her writing incredibly resonant, and so exposure to more
Speaker 2: and more women's stories I think can only be of
Speaker 2: interest to other women particularly and hopefully to some men too,
Speaker 2: because you know, the truth is, there are no two
Speaker 2: actors alike there are no two women are like. There
Speaker 2: are no two men are like, but we all share
Speaker 2: more similar pilarities and differences underneath those, you know, those
Speaker 2: influences of environment and family.
Speaker 1: How much has been at the center of one of
Speaker 1: the great literary adaptations of Australian cinema informed your reading,
Speaker 1: since youre so indelible in Monkey Grip, and it's a
Speaker 1: film I returned to in a book I returned to
Speaker 1: a lot like it's extraordinary. Did you take on board
Speaker 1: that sensibility that came out of that book, that modern
Speaker 1: Australian voice.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, certainly. It was one of the first films
Speaker 2: of that period of the industry renaissance that didn't feature
Speaker 2: corsets and sheep and men on horses. To me, it's
Speaker 2: all bound up together, you know, the fact that it
Speaker 2: is about everyday life, and it is by a woman
Speaker 2: and contemporary. I think there was a hunger for that.
Speaker 2: I think we were getting some of that coming from
Speaker 2: the States and a little bit from the UK, but
Speaker 2: it was time for I think a greater recognition of
Speaker 2: who we were, and that coincided with Whitlam. It coincided
Speaker 2: with as I said that the film industry is starting
Speaker 2: to be more interesting in terms of content and a
Speaker 2: bit more daring.
Speaker 1: I do know that you're keen to do more writing
Speaker 1: after this book, and in particular writing for children. What
Speaker 1: kind of things do you want to write for kids
Speaker 1: and what kind of age are you interested in trying
Speaker 1: to talk to them.
Speaker 2: I'm particularly interested in this sort of mid to late
Speaker 2: primary school age, when you are very vulnerable, you know
Speaker 2: you're about to hit adolescence, and when you're feeling very
Speaker 2: insecure about how you look and how you whether you
Speaker 2: feel the right things, to try and alert them to
Speaker 2: their own power, I guess, to their own self confidence,
Speaker 2: to a core, to develop a solid core about who
Speaker 2: they are and how there is no one else like
Speaker 2: them and so they can make a unique contribution. And
Speaker 2: so that kind of affirmation done in a subtle way.
Speaker 2: I think that that age can be powerful because that's
Speaker 2: the age when you're going to get bullied. That's the
Speaker 2: age when you're going to form tribes and camps. You know,
Speaker 2: every school says they have a bullying policy, but how
Speaker 2: many of them see it through. Yeah, that age group
Speaker 2: I think would be the one. And they're a fun
Speaker 2: age group. You know they're playing with words. They're playing
Speaker 2: with rude words, they're playing with subverting ideas, and so
Speaker 2: that kind of playfulness appeals to me too. I think
Speaker 2: you can get great messages across with humor and with fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah. No, that relationship between kind of starting to understand
Speaker 1: the serious things of life and also starting to embrace
Speaker 1: nonsense and that age playing with that can only be
Speaker 1: a good thing. I think before I let you go,
Speaker 1: coming back again to your mum's idea about not letting
Speaker 1: anyone know what you're really like telling the story of
Speaker 1: a life in the public eye, it seems to me
Speaker 1: the purpose of this book is to reclaim that story
Speaker 1: for yourself. People feel like they own Noni because you've
Speaker 1: been in people's lives for so long, and so the book,
Speaker 1: in part, it seems to me, is an exercise of
Speaker 1: not rebuffing their ideas, but at least getting the chance
Speaker 1: to tell that story yourself.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was really important to me to focus on
Speaker 2: what it's been like to be a woman over the
Speaker 2: last seventy one years, what it's been like to be
Speaker 2: an actor over the last seventy one years, and what
Speaker 2: it's like to be an Australian for that period. Of
Speaker 2: time because I've spent so many years listening to people's
Speaker 2: misconceptions about what actors are like, or misconceptions about what
Speaker 2: women are like, or misconceptions about Australians, and I wanted
Speaker 2: to point out that there are no two actors the same,
Speaker 2: There are no two anything's the same. So don't judge,
Speaker 2: because judgment is the most toxic thing in our culture
Speaker 2: right now, self judgment and judgment of others. It's been
Speaker 2: really interesting touring to promote the book. The number of
Speaker 2: women who've come to see me and who've nodded and
Speaker 2: you know, going oh, and you know that have shared
Speaker 2: these experiences of being molded and groomed. But the immense
Speaker 2: power that women have, you know, we have very good
Speaker 2: billd Us detect us too. We've been taught to read
Speaker 2: the room for our survival from an early age. And
Speaker 2: so what I'm really heartened by now is, despite what
Speaker 2: Scott Morrison said, we want to see women rise, but
Speaker 2: not at the expense of others. Despite that, I think
Speaker 2: women are going you know what, you guys haven't made
Speaker 2: a real good go of this, So maybe it's time
Speaker 2: for us to actually reclaim our power.
Speaker 1: Noney Hazelhurst is an absolute thrill.
Speaker 2: Thanks Michael.
Speaker 1: Noney. Hazelhurst's memoir The Mask is available at all good bookstores.
Speaker 1: Now before we go, I wanted to tell you what
Speaker 1: I've been reading this week, and a book I still
Speaker 1: mention again and again on people's best of lists for
Speaker 1: last year was a book called Marta with a very
Speaker 1: eye catching exclamation mark at the end of the title.
Speaker 1: It's a first time novel by an author called Covert Akba,
Speaker 1: and it's a terrific story about making art, about identity,
Speaker 1: about parents, about sobriety, all kinds of things. It's dark
Speaker 1: and funny and a lot of fun. I recommend it enormously.
Speaker 1: You can find Marta and all the other books we've
Speaker 1: mentioned in this episode at your favorite independent bookstore. That's
Speaker 1: it for this week's show. If you enjoyed, please tell
Speaker 1: your friends and rate and review us. It helps a lot.
Speaker 1: Next week I'm read this. We're bringing you journalist Lec Blaine.
Speaker 1: His new book is called Australian Gospel Emily Saga, and
Speaker 1: it's quite the story. Read This is a Schwartz Media
Speaker 1: production made possible by the generous support of our group.
Speaker 1: The show is produced and edited by Clara Ames, with
Speaker 1: mixing by Travis Evans and original compositions by Zalton Fetcher.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, See you next week.