Speaker 1: Hi, there, It's Daniel James here with the first read.
Speaker 1: This episode of twenty twenty five, Schwartz Media's Books Podcast
Speaker 1: is hosted by editor of The Monthly Michael Williams, and
Speaker 1: it's a show about the books we love and the
Speaker 1: stories behind them. In the first episode for the year,
Speaker 1: Michael's chatting with Noney Hazelhurst. Nonany has just released her
Speaker 1: first memoir called Dropping the Mask, which traces her career
Speaker 1: not only as an actor, but as a director, writer, teacher,
Speaker 1: and public speaker. Coming up in just a moment, Noney
Speaker 1: Hazelhurst is being herself.
Speaker 2: All right, So I accept that amongst our read this listeners,
Speaker 2: there may be many who aren't of my exact vintage
Speaker 2: and experience, people for whom Noney Hazelhurst is something other
Speaker 2: than the patron saint of early childhood nostalgia. She's had
Speaker 2: a long and storied career on stage screen in Australia.
Speaker 2: Maybe you're picturing her on Better Homes and Gardens or
Speaker 2: in Little Fish opposite Kate Blanchett. As I read this listener,
Speaker 2: there's a better than average chance you're remembering her starring
Speaker 2: role in the film adaptation of Hell Ganner's Monkey grip.
Speaker 2: But our excuse for having her on today is her
Speaker 2: new memoir. It's called Dropping the Mask, where she reclaims
Speaker 2: a lifetime in the public eye and shares it back
Speaker 2: on the page. This dedicated interpreter of other people's words
Speaker 2: has now shared her own, and it's a memoir very
Speaker 2: much concerned with performance in all its forms, NONI. I
Speaker 2: wanted to start with your mum because she is the
Speaker 2: force around which so much of this book circles, and
Speaker 2: so much of this story circles, not least in the
Speaker 2: quote that you offer from her very early on, in
Speaker 2: the piece that gives the book its name, where she says,
Speaker 2: don't let anyone know what you're really like.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, that was a doozy. It's interesting that people
Speaker 3: have seen that my mother was sort of the driving
Speaker 3: force when now I wasn't aware of that when I
Speaker 3: was writing it, obviously, but yeah, So from a very
Speaker 3: early age, I was taught that I had to act,
Speaker 3: and I was not really encouraged to just be other
Speaker 3: than the version of this nice, little, slightly English girl
Speaker 3: that my mother hoped I would be, and indeed groomed
Speaker 3: me as such. My parents were both in vaudeville before
Speaker 3: the Second World War they met when they're on the
Speaker 3: same bill. I'm a fourth generation performer, so I was
Speaker 3: sort of doomed from the start. But they made it
Speaker 3: very clear that I had to be able to do
Speaker 3: all these different things if I wanted to succeed in
Speaker 3: my career, So comedy, accents, piano, singing, dancing, ballet, blah
Speaker 3: blah blah. But I was never encouraged to just reach
Speaker 3: in and find out who NONI was. And so it
Speaker 3: took me a really long time to break free of
Speaker 3: the conditioning not only that they provided in this kind
Speaker 3: of don't be yourself, be someone else when you're out,
Speaker 3: but also then to hit the seventies as a seventeen
Speaker 3: year old university in feminism and whitlam and politics for
Speaker 3: the first time, and alcohol and drugs and all those
Speaker 3: things that the seventies kind of laid on in spades,
Speaker 3: and then to go into the kind of late seventies
Speaker 3: television world, which was very much your young blonde ergo,
Speaker 3: we know you, know how to cast you. And so
Speaker 3: it took me a really long time to sort of
Speaker 3: be recognized as having serious aspirations. It was only the
Speaker 3: Sullivans when I could cry on cue that they kind
Speaker 3: of went, oh, she's not going to be a blond bimbo.
Speaker 3: She wants to be a serious actress. That was sort
Speaker 3: of a turning point. I mean, no one ever said
Speaker 3: to me reality is a personal construct, and I really
Speaker 3: wish they had a lot earlier.
Speaker 2: That generational divide between you your mum, you know, being
Speaker 2: a fourth generation performer. On the one hand, as you say,
Speaker 2: there's a kind of expectation and an influence. But one
Speaker 2: of the things that struck me again and again reading
Speaker 2: this book is that the idea of dropping the mask.
Speaker 2: The thing that makes you such an indelible figure in
Speaker 2: our culture is that you have done this extraordinary job
Speaker 2: of making people feel close to you in your different incarnations.
Speaker 2: I can't think of many storytellers in our culture, many
Speaker 2: performers in our culture who are so giving of themselves
Speaker 2: in the way that they the way that they move
Speaker 2: through the world. Is that largely construct? Is that just
Speaker 2: a wonderful performance?
Speaker 3: Well, I think every time most of us leave the house,
Speaker 3: we have constructed the role that we want to play
Speaker 3: in our minds, whether we do it consciously or unconsciously.
Speaker 3: So you know, it's not just about me dropping my mask.
Speaker 3: It's about recognizing that you know, underneath we are all
Speaker 3: authentic human beings and unique human beings, not necessarily special,
Speaker 3: but unique. And so it's recognizing that authenticity that allows
Speaker 3: you to acknowledge that you're ordinary and you're vulnerable. And
Speaker 3: as my acting mentor Larry Moss, who I describe at
Speaker 3: length in the book and who changed my life at
Speaker 3: the age of sixty, said, they don't come to see you,
Speaker 3: they come to see themselves. And so that was really
Speaker 3: revelatory because it stopped being about me and it began
Speaker 3: to be all I have to do is tell the
Speaker 3: story to the best of my ability, using my only tool,
Speaker 3: which is myself and my experiences, to bring what I
Speaker 3: think are appropriate choices for this character. It was really
Speaker 3: play school, Michael. That was the turning point in teaching
Speaker 3: me to choose the version of myself that I wanted
Speaker 3: to put out there as me. You know, obviously, I'm
Speaker 3: not knownly from play school, nor am I knownly the
Speaker 3: serious actress, nor am I knownly the single mother. I'm
Speaker 3: all of these things, as are we all. But the
Speaker 3: real key for me was play school had to treat
Speaker 3: the camera as though, it were one pair of eyes,
Speaker 3: and that is the key to all great communicators. If
Speaker 3: you can make a person listening or watching feel like
Speaker 3: you're talking just to them, then you have connected.
Speaker 2: Also, as you outline in the book, episodes particularly then
Speaker 2: were shot as live as well, so it wasn't a
Speaker 2: packaged thing. It was about an organic kind of relationship
Speaker 2: between you and your co host, and a relationship between
Speaker 2: two of you and the audience who are watching. I mean,
Speaker 2: I am of the generation who grew up watching you.
Speaker 2: You and John Hamblin were my absolute favorites. It was
Speaker 2: the John A. Nony episode. Everything else had to stop,
Speaker 2: and that was essential. But the thing that I remember
Speaker 2: about that I was thinking about this coming into the
Speaker 2: interview today was the sense of cheekiness with the two
Speaker 2: of you, and the sense of barely contained chaos and
Speaker 2: mayhem felt deeply authentic. As a kid, even I understood,
Speaker 2: these grown ups are having fun, They're making jokes with
Speaker 2: each other, and I'm aware of that, and as a kid,
Speaker 2: feeling like a grown up is on the level with
Speaker 2: you is the thing that you want more than anything.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, you know that was our aim to make
Speaker 3: it appear like we were doing it for the first time,
Speaker 3: even though we had rehearsed at five times. And as
Speaker 3: you say, John taught me the key, which was to
Speaker 3: not perform, but to be. And so occasionally he would
Speaker 3: get things wrong, and initially I thought that was him,
Speaker 3: you know, being a bit slack, and I tried to
Speaker 3: overcompensate by being like a schoolmistress. And then I watched
Speaker 3: us back on an episode and I couldn't take my
Speaker 3: eyes off him because he was thoroughly engaging. Even in rehearsal.
Speaker 3: We had an immense amount of fun because he just played.
Speaker 3: And so a lot of my experiences up to that
Speaker 3: point had not been about playing. They'd been about being
Speaker 3: frightened or being judged or whatever. But John didn't care.
Speaker 3: But he had this wonderful relationship with that child because
Speaker 3: he was alive to the child in himself. And so
Speaker 3: that's what I had to bring to the four was
Speaker 3: my child who had been edited so severely in real life.
Speaker 3: So I had to remember how confusing the world was
Speaker 3: to a three or four year old. We forget all
Speaker 3: that stuff about the things that traumatized us at an
Speaker 3: early age, like oh I'm lost, or oh why are
Speaker 3: they shouting? At me, you know, those things that were
Speaker 3: huge when we were little. So I was very aware
Speaker 3: of that responsibility that the world. And there's a section
Speaker 3: in the book where I put in an excerpt of
Speaker 3: speech I gave in nineteen ninety about my fears that
Speaker 3: children were being left behind with the ubiquity of screens.
Speaker 3: Well that was before the Internet, that was before any
Speaker 3: of the screens that are available to us all now,
Speaker 3: and so even then I could see that the world
Speaker 3: was incredibly confusing to very young children, and that if
Speaker 3: we didn't, you know, really take responsibility for contextualizing and
Speaker 3: protecting little children to some extent, then we were really
Speaker 3: doing them at a service. And it taught me that
Speaker 3: we're all responsible for all children.
Speaker 2: The legacy of that can be seen in the work
Speaker 2: that you've done, you know, through your entire career since then.
Speaker 2: But I want to ask you about a particular lesson
Speaker 2: from play School and how it applies to the writing
Speaker 2: of this book and the work that you continue to do,
Speaker 2: which is around the telling of stories. What were the
Speaker 2: articles of faith when it came to story time on
Speaker 2: play School in terms of reading a book to kids,
Speaker 2: sharing stories with kids, What are the disciplines of the
Speaker 2: storyteller that you got specifically from that context.
Speaker 3: Oh, good question. I think it was the pacing how
Speaker 3: we would rehearse. It was that the book would be
Speaker 3: carefully timed, and the page turns were camera timed to
Speaker 3: the close ups and all that, and so it was
Speaker 3: paced at a deliberate in a deliberate way, and occasionally
Speaker 3: you'd break out and ask a question or see what
Speaker 3: the response might be, or let's turn the pace. So
Speaker 3: it was very interactive. It was very I'm doing this
Speaker 3: with you. So I guess inadvertently I absorbed that pacing,
Speaker 3: and that was It was also important for me to
Speaker 3: reflect how people know me in terms of how I communicate.
Speaker 3: So when I went to read the audio book, which
Speaker 3: was tortureous listening to myself for five days in a row,
Speaker 3: I was pleased that it read like I was saying it,
Speaker 3: and I sort of wanted that because people know me
Speaker 3: as a talker.
Speaker 2: Your mum to return to her for a sec. She
Speaker 2: read to you a lot. She's a big storyteller, and
Speaker 2: she was your introduction to reading.
Speaker 3: Yeah. She taught me to read before I went to school,
Speaker 3: and fed me a steady diet of books, largely of
Speaker 3: the Enid Blyton variety, and indeed, you know, she never
Speaker 3: really felt at home in the Australian bush or it
Speaker 3: was always very much the forest. She would make stories
Speaker 3: up about Missus Brown, the old lady who lived in
Speaker 3: the forest with all the squirrels and you know, whatever
Speaker 3: you get in the forest in England. So yeah, she
Speaker 3: read to me a lot, and my favorite Christmas present
Speaker 3: was a box of books. I had my own library
Speaker 3: card at the age of four, so I'm so grateful
Speaker 3: to her for that because it really did you know,
Speaker 3: I'm a really good site reader, whether it's music or
Speaker 3: a script, so she really did give me a huge
Speaker 3: advantage there. The editing of the available literature was probably
Speaker 3: a little bit sus but you know, as was the
Speaker 3: kinds of things that were presented to me, as drama
Speaker 3: productions of things. I was in more plays than i'd seen.
Speaker 3: I'd only ever seen a couple of really ordinary, you know,
Speaker 3: Shakespeare matinees through school, so you know, I was very
Speaker 3: much limited in what I could absorb. But I think
Speaker 3: that was a distinct advantage being taught to read at
Speaker 3: an early age.
Speaker 2: When we returned and only discusses the influence of Australian
Speaker 2: literary legend, poet and playwright Dorothy Hewitt, and no only
Speaker 2: reveals what she plans to write about next. We'll be
Speaker 2: right back. I want to jump ahead a tiny bit
Speaker 2: to a particular writer who had an influence on your
Speaker 2: work more through theater than through her work on the page,
Speaker 2: and that's Dorothy Hewitt. Yeah, tell us a bit about
Speaker 2: your encounter with her.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I first met Dorothy. I was cast in the
Speaker 3: first production of The Man from muckin Uppen, which was
Speaker 3: commissioned in Wa to celebrate their s Sque centennial. And
Speaker 3: Dorothy had sort of been banished from Perth because she
Speaker 3: was a Communist, She'd had an affair with a married man.
Speaker 3: She was a woman, God forbid, and you know, a
Speaker 3: general all round person who didn't fit in with the
Speaker 3: Perth glitterati. And she had written this sixth straordinary play
Speaker 3: about the dark side and the light side of all
Speaker 3: of our natures. And we all went trooping off to Perth.
Speaker 3: Dorothy came with us and explored this beautiful, beautiful play,
Speaker 3: and so I got to know her a little bit.
Speaker 3: She was still a little bit mobile, but I just
Speaker 3: found her such a lot of contradictions in one person.
Speaker 3: You know, you would think she'd be this eiry, fairy, arty, farty,
Speaker 3: beautifully spoken person, but she had this high pitched voice
Speaker 3: that was kind of raucous, and she'd cackle like a maniac.
Speaker 3: And just to see her delight as her words came
Speaker 3: to life, I think it's her best play. And so
Speaker 3: we stayed in contact a little bit. I met the
Speaker 3: family and she was welcome back into Perth with I
Speaker 3: don't think she particularly cared, but you know, it was
Speaker 3: a bit of an up beauty that the play was
Speaker 3: so successful. And then we did it again in Sydney
Speaker 3: with the Sydney Theater Company. And when I came to
Speaker 3: to do the play Mother, when it was written for
Speaker 3: me by the wonderful Day Keene, we had a meeting
Speaker 3: to talk about themes that he might touch on that
Speaker 3: interested us, the main one of which I guess was judgment.
Speaker 3: But also we both talked about our reverence and admiration
Speaker 3: for Dorothy. And so the nod to Dorothy and Mother
Speaker 3: is that I wear a little blue bobby pin bluebird
Speaker 3: bobby pin in my hair and have my Dorothy hair.
Speaker 3: But it's very much about people who fall, women who
Speaker 3: fall through the cracks particularly, and the vulnerability of people.
Speaker 3: And I think Dorothy and Daniel both have the ability
Speaker 3: to focus our attention on walking a mile in someone
Speaker 3: else's shoes, and you know, doing what I think the
Speaker 3: arts are meant to do, which is connect us and
Speaker 3: recognize that they're but by the grace of God go
Speaker 3: all of us. And I think Dorothy really had that
Speaker 3: grasp of anarchy, if you like, and how theater can
Speaker 3: be political but also subtle to a very magical, special person.
Speaker 2: And I think underread and under remembered at the moment,
Speaker 2: which made me so pleased to read the affection with
Speaker 2: which you wrote about her hair. But it's also emblematic
Speaker 2: of something that has characterized your career, which is a
Speaker 2: relationship with writers and the writing behind the roles. And
Speaker 2: you know, Mother's an amazing production. Your performance is extraordinary.
Speaker 2: But one of the things I love about it is
Speaker 2: that Daniel wanted to write for you. You're an actor
Speaker 2: for whom writers you know, they want to fill that
Speaker 2: imaginative space and work with you on stuff. I'd love
Speaker 2: it if you could reflect on the role of writers
Speaker 2: through your career.
Speaker 3: Well, without the writers, I would have no career. So,
Speaker 3: you know, Larry Moss said, our job is to serve
Speaker 3: the great writers, and the great writers right to serve humanity.
Speaker 3: So as such, where is it the word supplicant? Were
Speaker 3: their servants? I mean, it's been really interesting to me
Speaker 3: to see how the increased participation of women in my
Speaker 3: industry has led to richer female roles, not just for
Speaker 3: young women, but for actual older women to have a
Speaker 3: role other than old nag or off your pop to
Speaker 3: pop your clogs. And I realized through Larry because he
Speaker 3: assigned when he did his masterclass, which turned me around.
Speaker 3: He put us in pairs and assigned us a scene
Speaker 3: from the great plays each and the scene I did
Speaker 3: with Mandy maclehenny was from George Bernard Shaw's Missus Warren's Profession.
Speaker 3: And I'd never read any short and indeed I had
Speaker 3: not read really any of the plays Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter.
Speaker 3: I'd seen productions of them, and arrogantly I had made
Speaker 3: a judgment that that particular writer doesn't particularly interesting. Hadn't
Speaker 3: really gone into these works because I didn't like the
Speaker 3: productions that I saw. So he forced me to go
Speaker 3: and look at you know who the playwright was, when
Speaker 3: they lived, where they lived, what their personal life was like,
Speaker 3: what the political situation was, you know, the forenzy. Even
Speaker 3: though I'd been a university that wasn't part of it
Speaker 3: in the early seventies. Whereas Larry just said, every pause,
Speaker 3: every word, every comma has been thought about, and who
Speaker 3: are you to mess with that? Who are you to
Speaker 3: think that you can trail off the last three words
Speaker 3: of that sentence. If he hadn't wanted those three words,
Speaker 3: he wouldn't have fucking written them. So, you know, he
Speaker 3: was absolutely insistent that we slavishly devote ourselves to what
Speaker 3: the writer gave us. You know, when I first got Mother,
Speaker 3: I was petrofron because I thought, what if I don't
Speaker 3: like it? Yeah, you know, I'd never been in that
Speaker 3: situation before. And there's no punctuation in it, there's no
Speaker 3: stage directions. At the start of each section he might
Speaker 3: say something thing like smell of priest, you know. So,
Speaker 3: so it was quite daunting to start with. But then
Speaker 3: if I just said the words, said the words, said
Speaker 3: the words said the words, it eventually found its own
Speaker 3: music and its own rhythm, and it gave me such
Speaker 3: a framework to work from, and I wanted to get
Speaker 3: every single word right and to honor that writing, because
Speaker 3: every word had an image, you know, every phrase conjured
Speaker 3: up images for me and hopefully for the audience that
Speaker 3: you couldn't not see them. And that was so strong
Speaker 3: for me.
Speaker 2: Did I read somewhere that when you can't get to sleep,
Speaker 2: you recite the scriptive mother in your own head?
Speaker 3: Yes, yes I do. She's been in me for nine
Speaker 3: years now and she ain't going nowhere. But it's good
Speaker 3: to just say those words. But I don't usually get
Speaker 3: very far.
Speaker 2: That's a good thing, so give them that respect. For writers,
Speaker 2: Anxious was the process of telling your story on a
Speaker 2: page rather than through performance.
Speaker 3: Horrible. The inner critic had to be punched down, yep,
Speaker 3: all the time. But I got to the point where
Speaker 3: I thought, look, it's like a stage show. If one
Speaker 3: person sees this character or reads this book and avoids
Speaker 3: some of the mistakes I made, then fantastic. But it
Speaker 3: was a very drawn out process. It was meant to
Speaker 3: be a very different exercise. I bought a tiny cottage
Speaker 3: in France in late twenty nineteen, and the pitch for
Speaker 3: the book was that I write a memoir interspersed with
Speaker 3: my adventures in France, and of course I couldn't go
Speaker 3: back there for three years, so it just and I
Speaker 3: couldn't access any of my records or photos or diaries
Speaker 3: because my house was flooded twice during COVID and I
Speaker 3: couldn't live in eighteen months. Everyone's got a COVID horror
Speaker 3: story that was my Yeah, I couldn't access anything. So
Speaker 3: eventually I just thought, well, I've just got to do it.
Speaker 3: What kept me going on one level was that I
Speaker 3: think I want to read more women's stories, you know,
Speaker 3: when I finally escaped university and started having you know,
Speaker 3: feminist influence or not also at university, but reading books
Speaker 3: by women was incredible. For the first time, I actually
Speaker 3: resonated with what I was reading in a visceral way.
Speaker 3: Helen Ghana was one of the early influencers there, you know,
Speaker 3: writing about her her inner thoughts and the minutie of
Speaker 3: daily life. One of the ways she was criticized by
Speaker 3: some male critics early on in her career. But as
Speaker 3: a woman, I find her writing incredibly resonant, and so
Speaker 3: exposure to more and more women's stories I think can
Speaker 3: only be of interest to other women particularly, and hopefully
Speaker 3: to some men too, because you know, the truth is
Speaker 3: there are no two actors alike. There are no two
Speaker 3: women are like, there are no two men are like.
Speaker 3: But we all share more similar pilarities and differences underneath those,
Speaker 3: you know, those influences of environment and family.
Speaker 2: How much has been at the center of one of
Speaker 2: the great literary adaptations of Australian cinema informed your reading sense.
Speaker 2: Youre so indelible in Monkey Grip, and it's a film
Speaker 2: I returned to in a book I returned to a
Speaker 2: lot like it's extraordinary. Did you take on board that
Speaker 2: sensibility that came out of that book, that modern Australian voice, Well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, certainly. It was one of the first films of
Speaker 3: that period of the industry renaissance that didn't feature corsets
Speaker 3: and sheep and men on horses. To me, it's all
Speaker 3: bound up together, you know, the fact that it is
Speaker 3: about everyday life, and it is by a woman and
Speaker 3: contemporary I think there was a hunger for that. I
Speaker 3: think we were getting some of that coming from the
Speaker 3: States and a little bit from the UK, but it
Speaker 3: was time for I think a greater recognition of who
Speaker 3: we were, and that coincided with whitlam. It coincided with
Speaker 3: as I said that the film industry is starting to
Speaker 3: be more interesting in terms of content and a bit
Speaker 3: more daring.
Speaker 2: I do know that you're keen to do more writing
Speaker 2: after this book, and in particular writing for children. What
Speaker 2: kind of things do you want to write for kids
Speaker 2: and what kind of age are you interested in trying
Speaker 2: to talk to them.
Speaker 3: I'm particularly interested in this sort of mid to late
Speaker 3: primary school age, when you are very vulnerable, you know
Speaker 3: you're about to hit adolescence, and when you're feeling very
Speaker 3: insecure about how you look and how you whether you
Speaker 3: feel the right things, to try and alert them to
Speaker 3: their own power, I guess, to their own self confidence,
Speaker 3: to a core, to develop a solid core about who
Speaker 3: they are and how there is no one else like
Speaker 3: them and so they can make a unique contribution. And
Speaker 3: so that kind of affirmation done in a subtle way.
Speaker 3: I think that that age can be powerful because that's
Speaker 3: the age when you're going to get bullied. That's the
Speaker 3: age when you're going to form tribes and camps. You know,
Speaker 3: every school says they have a bullying policy, but how
Speaker 3: many of them see it through. Yeah, that age group
Speaker 3: I think would be the one. And they're a fun
Speaker 3: age group. You know, they're playing with words, they're playing
Speaker 3: with rude words, they're playing with subverting ideas, and so
Speaker 3: that kind of playfulness appeals to me too. I think
Speaker 3: you can get great messages across with humor and with fun. Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, that relationship between kind of starting to understand the
Speaker 2: serious things of life and also starting to embrace nonsense
Speaker 2: and that age playing with that can only be a
Speaker 2: good thing. I think before I let you go, coming
Speaker 2: back again to your mum's idea about not letting anyone
Speaker 2: know what you're really like telling the story of a
Speaker 2: life in the public eye, that seems to me the
Speaker 2: purpose of this book is to reclaim that story for yourself.
Speaker 2: People feel like they own none because you've been in
Speaker 2: people's lives for so long, and so the book, in part,
Speaker 2: it seems to me, is an exercise of not rebuffing
Speaker 2: their ideas, but at least getting the chance to tell
Speaker 2: that story yourself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was really important to me to focus on
Speaker 3: what it's been like to be a woman over the
Speaker 3: last seventy one years, what it's been like to be
Speaker 3: an actor over the last seventy one years and what
Speaker 3: it's like to be an Australian for that period of time.
Speaker 3: Because I've spent so many years listening to people's misconceptions
Speaker 3: about what actors are like, or misconceptions about what women
Speaker 3: are like, or misconceptions about Australians, and I wanted to
Speaker 3: point out that there are no two actors the same,
Speaker 3: There are no two anything's the same. So don't judge,
Speaker 3: because judgment is the most toxic thing in our culture
Speaker 3: right now, self judgment and judgment of others. It's been
Speaker 3: really interesting touring to promote the book. The number of
Speaker 3: women who've come to see me and who've nodded and
Speaker 3: you know, go oh, and you know that have shared
Speaker 3: these experiences of being molded and groomed. But the immense
Speaker 3: power that women have. You know, we have very good
Speaker 3: bulld us detect us too. We've been taught to read
Speaker 3: the room for our survival from an early age. And
Speaker 3: so what I'm really heartened by now is, despite what
Speaker 3: Scott Morrison said, we want to see women rise, but
Speaker 3: not at the expense of others. Despite that, I think
Speaker 3: women are going you know what, you guys haven't made
Speaker 3: a real good go of this, so maybe it's time
Speaker 3: for us to actually reclaim our power.
Speaker 2: Noney Hazelhurst is an absolute thrill.
Speaker 3: Thanks Michael.
Speaker 2: Noney. Hazelhurst's memoile Dropping the Mask is available at all
Speaker 2: Good bookstores now.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening to this first episode of
Speaker 1: Read This for twenty twenty five. The show's back every Thursday,
Speaker 1: and you'll be able to catch it each Sunday here
Speaker 1: on seven am. As always, if you want to dive
Speaker 1: further into Read This, you can search for it wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to podcasts. There are more than seventy episodes
Speaker 1: in the archive for you to enjoy. See you next week.