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