I talked to him about what is the cost of going against the church. There was this silence and he started crying. He said, you just become incredibly isolated and lonely. You're so interested in American history, you know, like you think that's our history. It's not. This is our history. This is what happened in an Australian side street.
Hello, and welcome to separate bathrooms. We would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the e Or nation, the traditional custodians of this land, and pay our respects to the elders, both past and present. I'm cam Dado, Maley daddo. It's great to have you with us today. Who me or just now you listener? And we are us.
And it's and we are many. That's a song.
It is a song I sing that I am, you are We.
Are Australia or the rest of the world, as we were saying.
Before, because we do go worldwide. It's a flat world now that we have the wonderful intraweb.
Are you a flat EARTHERA No?
Okay, I'm speaking metaphoric. Yeah, since the Internet's happened, because you can access stuff all.
Over the world. Well, we listened to American podcasts and.
You know, on an overseas trip, I can watch a live AFL NRL football game. That was cool, It's fantastic.
Yeah.
How's your jet lag? Yeah?
Yeah, I'm all right.
We've just come back from an overseas jaunt catching up with our daughter. Yeah, he's been gone for nine months, so it was great to see her and her boyfriend Miles and hang out. So but I'll tell you, the jet lag is very strange. Like I said, I said to Ali this morning, I'm thinking that I'm going to do some vim Hoff ice bathing to reset my body.
Because I think that's a good idea.
That's that's the feeling I got when I was standing under the cold shower this morning. Game do a nice but see how that goes.
Yeah, I'm going to sit by the heater.
Very good. Yeah, we all have different ways. Hey, Today, with the help of a wonderful author and playwright, we're going to be talking about an Ossie icon, King's Bloody Cross, Yes, and what happens in King's Cross, King's Cross, Sydney. Yeah, of course, the Waystside Chapel. Yeah, it's located in the Cross and it's turning sixty. This has relevance I think for Australia white absolutely.
You know, Ted Knoff's founded The Wayside in nineteen sixty four and look, it's been a controversial beacon of social justice and inclusivity. And it's a place where people have been welcomed for decades despite social taboos around race, class, religion, and sexuality. And this is what we're going to be talking about. Yeah.
Alana Valentine has written a book published by the Amazing Folks of Pantera called Wed by the Wayside, into the stories of couples married at Waistside Chapel, many of which were turned away elsewhere, including political refugees, interracial and interfaith marriages, same sex couples. Now this is fifty years right, fifty years before same sex marriage was legalized, divorces, unwed mothers, bikey sex workers, and more.
I can't wait to hear she's got some incredible stories to share. So let's welcome Alana into the bathroom.
Welcome a lot of Valentine to the bathroom. How are you very well?
Thank you?
First question, where'd you get your suit from?
Look?
I made it. I sewed it with my own hands.
It's so good.
It's so cool. I mean, number one, how cool is her name, Alana Valentine? It sounds like something from a movie. And then she rocks up in like this incredible Tartan suit. Is that like a family Tartan?
No, not that I know of. It is it is just most interesting looking tartan on the shelf.
Yeah, it was purposefully red white and blue? Is it? Because you got the stripes right? So it's kind of American? It gives that stars and stripes feel.
No, No, it was just a color combination. I was taken with that day.
So I didn't pick up on stars and stripes American when.
I say stripes red white and blue and tartan, and it's kind of like a homage to Scottish American roots. Maybe I don't know. It could be. Oh, mickey, you're so pretty, you know thing. It's really just a basle.
Moment, the most attention grabbing.
Happened. Well, it's great. Okay, So you're one of Australia's most acclaimed playwrights. Letters to Lindy Barbara and the Camp Dog Waystside Brides. It's described as verbatim theater. Yeah, okay, i'd never heard of verbatim theater, but I ran it by body last night and I said, do you know about verbatim? Think, oh, yeah, you know? She said, can you just explain verbatim theater?
So verbatim theater it's on the HS see syllabus, which is why body would you go getting them young? You're inculcating. But basically it's theater that's drawn from life. So usually most verbatim theater will have a community or a group of people that the playwright will actually interview as part of their process of making a play. And it's sort of on a spectrum. You get like what's called pure
of abatim, where it's absolutely based on the transcripts. So there was a play recently here about Matthew Shepherd who was merdered in America, very famous play, the Laramie Project, that's verbatim. So all the theater makers went to Laramie and interviewed people and typed it up put it in a play. So here we have pure of verbatim like that, or will have plays that what I call massage verbatim. So you go and you speak to people, but you you sort of collapse characters. You might make up a
few scenes things like that. So it is actually a wonderful kind of document tree theater, but sivved through the brain of a dramatist.
Okay, And I imagine people are really more complex than often fiction.
You're so right, You're so right. I mean, you know, people are contradictory. They have, you know, things that you think, well, how can you be that both at once or three things? And you know you deal with that all the time, meeting people, real people every day. Marriage very true.
And we've actually said that like some of the stories of how couples meet each other, you go, you put that in a movie and people would go, that's a lot of crap, but it really happened, Like some of them have been incredible the stories, haven't they.
So yeah, yeah, yeah, So was this process of your researching in interviewing? Is that? Is that what inspired your book? Were by Wayside? Yes?
It was. The additional kicker was that my mother was married remarried at Wayside in ninety sixty nine herself, and she's been for many, many years, and so I suppose I developed this real passion to speak to her about why she'd chosen Wayside and why it was so popular then, you know, Ted Nooffs did maybe thirty thousand weddings while
he was at the chapels. Yeah, and so I guess the answer is that I was interested in it as social history, but I was also just wanting to have, frankly, a vicarious experience of interviewing these women of that generation and age as a substitute for not being able to speak to my own mum.
Yeah, and what did you find out more about your mum through the research of this book?
I did? I did, Ali, I found this generation of women who particularly they are on the pivot of kind of like in the early days, like in ninety oh two, ninety seven percent of marriages happened in a religious ceremony. Now today in twenty twenty one, eighty one percent done by celebrants. So there's been this and you know the graph that where that change is over the sixties is just that kind of full crum where people were going, well, my parents want a religious seami, but I don't really
you know, what will I do? And they are looking for alternatives and Ted Knoff's was sort of one. I was told the only show in town if you were a divorcee, no one would marry you. So I did find out things about Look, it's that thing of just the way women of that age can be quite you know. My mother used to say, oh, it was just convenient up the corner, and they wouldn't tell you, you know where storytellers. So we want but why and don't was the problem.
So I found that in a lot of these women, they're very sort of matter of fact some of them, but then they're also amazingly emotional about why, what the cost of those choices were, because often they had to go against and it was men as well, had to go against their parents who sometimes disowned them, if they were Atholics marrying Protestants, if there were Baptists marrying Jews. You know, that's what was happening up at the Chapel.
It was this amazing place where Ted Knoff's, who founded with his wife Margaret Knovs in nineteen sixty four, said if you are in love, I will marry you, and you know nothing else.
That is the most beautiful thing. I just and the fact that obviously same sex marriage was not legal then, but he was still doing that in Obviously they weren't able to go out in the real world and call themselves husbands and husbands, but under his eyes. And I guess and that made them feel under the eyes of God in a way, being a reverend that they were married.
Yes, I had this wonderful contact with a man called Kumar Ponisami and his parents. One was a Hindu, his father was Hindu, his mother was a Christian. And they got married at the Wayside Chapel and they were big in the fashion industry in Sydney. They worked for Joseph Brenda, who was a very famous Jewish entrepreneur. He set up sort of Katie's and all of these other sort of fashion brands. And so when they went to the chapel,
it was this amazing sort of social thing. They had all the you know in Hindu weddings, you have all those amazing flowers that they put around. Well, they had them all over the car, they had them all over themselves. She was married in this amazing sari. They had a dyed pink poodle as their excessory six this man. They had a poodle. Yeah, it was it was just an
extraordinary wedding. And then they told me that one of the truck drivers for Katie's was a woman called Maria and she married her partner Vicki in ninety sixty nine. And as you say, they didn't the state would recognize it.
But there's this beautiful photo of Vicky Maria with this very traditional wedding cake and they're in the real like they're in a real you know, ones in a suit and ones in a beautiful dress, and you can see that they want to do that thing I'm talking about, which is genuflect to their tradition but also be bold. But the Kumar's parents were the witnesses for that wedding.
Beautiful.
Yeah, so it was great, and I have actual evidence, like I've got photographic evidence that Ted was doing these amazing weddings. Yeah.
And so your connection really comes through your mom, is that's right?
That's right?
And so and you said your mom passed away a long time ago and you didn't have these answers. Yeah, what took you to the wayside? How did you find it? With that connection to your mum and wanting to know more about your mom?
So what happened was so I found this photo and people who have been married there, I mean, what's interesting came is that they that when I said I was writing this play about everyone, I'm not talking just a couple of people. Everyone would say, Oh, my sister's brother's husband, my mother, my grandfather, my next door neighbor. Everyone I met had a story about way Side. So I went
up there. As you say, I kind of saw this photo of my mum and there's this famous wire sign that says the Wayside Chapel, so she was photographed outside it. So I went up there and I met Graham Long. He was the pastor at the time of the Wayside Chapel and he had presided over quite a huge renovation of the chapel, so it was a little bit different to what it was in ninety sixty four when it
was set up. But he told me this amazing story about how they still conducting weddings, like because people know now that Wayside has amazing outreached a street people and the homeless and all of that. So I spoke to a couple of people who've been married there recently whose friends said to them and why are you getting married in a homeless shelter, And it's like, no, there's actually all these other things that Wayside do. But he told me this beautiful story had a bride. They dressed her
from a dress in the op shop. She was ready to go down the aisle and she started crying and Graham said to a why you Oh, I always thought my dad would give me away, So he said, can you hang on a minute, And he literally went out into the street in Hughes Street, waited for the next man, who was about sixty to walk past, and said, would you come in and give away this bride? And he luckily chose a very dap a gay man who immediately came in and said to this woman, stop that crying.
I'm going to it. You've got luck your best today and walked her down the aisle as if he'd known her all his life. And you know, to be honest, that became a metaphor for me of what Wayside is for people who, you know, maybe their families rejected them, maybe culturally they don't want to go to the traditional
sort of place. They find a family at Wayside. And so, to answer your question, Hamor, and it's that thing of well, I was kind of seeking an interest in that as well, because obviously my mother was dead, so I sort of was looking for those stories. But I was also looking for a way to connect with not just the past, but with the present.
Did that story that you just told, was that something that's happening recently or had that happen back way back there that's happened recently?
So that was like Graham long was as you know, John Owen is the pastor there now he's been there for several years. Yes, Graham, I started this research in twenty sixteen, so it happened twenty fifteen, twenty fourteen.
Yeah, yeah, because I do have a connection with Wayside as well. Yes, so John who's now Yeah, I met him, but I did that TV show Filthy, Rich and Homeless, and I ended up at Bondi and was basically living behind the pavilion for I was there for four nights, four or five nights there. The Wayside was where the guy that was sleeping beside me in a one man tent. He was involved in a court case because he had
a boat. He was living in far North Queensland and his boat was run over by a runaway tug bow that was unmanned and he was sleeping in it in his boat and the tugboat went over the top of him, and so he lost everything terrible. So he was now living in the back of the pavilion, sleeping next to me and going up to the Wayside Chapel with his computer to speak with his lawyer and they would meet. And he said to me one night he goes, come up to the Cross, We'll go to Wayside, We'll get
a free feed. And it was just to me and seeing the why sign. The people up there were so kind and it was just, I know what you're saying, that feeling of inclusiveness and yeah, we'll take you in and you're okay.
Yeah, I think I mean in the book, I say that I think Margaret and Ted opened a magic portal to people's better sense of themselves. Like when you walk into that place, you go, I can be something more than society tells me I can be. And all of the people since have kept that portal sort of open. But yeah, it's interesting too, Like what you're talking about is that mix of middle class and street But it's not just a place where street people go. There's a
lot of very wealthy patrons for Wayside. There's a lot of people who go there to get married who are, like I said, sort of they want it for a society kind of wedding. Jane Powell got married there. Ida Butchers got married there, she did, Yeah, and Andy Gibb got married there. You know, so there's quite a lot of people who sort of like you, probably wanted to identify with the work that Wayside's doing. Yeah.
Absolutely, the part of it too though, as you said before, where people will go, oh, isn't it like a homeless thing for you to be bringing this back around to relationship and love and weddings and communion in that way, I think it's really it's really beautiful. As you know, we are a relationship podcast. Yes, so can you you go through your in your book where by the way, so some of the relationships and some of the stories incredible stories you're able to share a couple of your favorites.
I will first of all, I will tell you that it is interesting to me how many of the people who I spoke to were still married after fifty years, and almost all of them had had, you know, from mild sort of disapproval to uta cutting off from their family and never seen again all along that spectrum they But I wanted to I always wanted to do a sort of survey of what would be the percentage of people married at wayside who are still married compared to
the general population. Now that's not to say that people should stay in marriages that don't work, of course not. But it is just really interesting to me that people who married for love in that way, you know, are still together fifty years ago. So the first couple I'll talk about is a man called Sean Smith and his
wife Joan. And Joan was an English Protestant and he was an Irish Catholic, and he was adopted in Australia, and he told me this great story about it was so hard at that time to cross that divide that he went to pick up a date. It wasn't Joan, was someone else, and the father came out with a shotgun and said, if you're a Catholic, you can get off my land and don't come back. So I'm sure some of your listeners might remember how vituperative that Catholic Protestant divide.
Sort of was.
So there's quite a lot of stories in there about that. Sean, like any Irish Catholic, was a great raconteur. I've got to say I just literally had to push record and he just told me this fantastic story. He was actually his mother was in one of those Magdalen laundries in Ireland. If you were an unmarried mother, you would be put into these Catholics sort of. They're called laundries, but they're
actually like homes. So he was adopted out of that, given away by his mother, and he told me the whole story of going back to Ireland and finding his mother. But the story of their marriage was that he'd I think he'd been in jail for breaking and entering, and he had befriended the deaf people in jail, and when he got out Joan, who's not deaf but was friends
with other deaf people. She and he had gone on a date and then decided that they were going to get married after many months of dating, and they lived in their car. He said to me during the interview, Oh yeah, we graduated up to a tent after a while, which I thought was kind of hilarious. The other story I'll tell you about as a woman called Ursula Zufo who married what she called a serial bigamist, so he had married when she found out eventually that she'd married him.
Because some of your listeners may remember group certificates you used to get posted them for your tax So she opened this envelope with his group certificate in it had a different name, and he said, oh, well, you found me out. And the police told her later that he was a serial bigamist. He'd married like four or five people in Canada, then come out to Australia and married
four or five more. She had to then, when she wanted to get married again at Wayside to her bo, who was an Italian man, she had to prove that she wasn't really married. So they had to find the very first wife, who happened to live in Redford and so I know, it was fantastic. So she said he was an Italian so he knew some people, which I didn't ask any further about. But they found the first wife and she had to go to court and say, yes, I'm the only wife. The rest of you are just
mugs basically, So yeah, that was a wonderful story. She ended up getting married to Sergio, and she refused to get married in a Catholic church, and as an Italian Catholic, that was very hard. But they proved that she wasn't really ever legally married and they got married by ted Noff's. One of the ones that really affected me was a woman called Isabella Tran who married a Vietnamese man in the nineteen seventies when there were no Vietnamese in Australia.
She said, bank accounts didn't even know how to have three names in the filling in form, you know. And she said he was a certain number of students. He was there at the University of Canberra studying and he asked her out and they eventually got married. And she talked with real pain that her grandmother, who was from Queensland, said that it was the thing that would kill her that she decided to marry a Vietnamese.
Thing to hold on to it.
Heavy thing to hold onto.
Yeah.
There's a woman called Sally Dolman who was a Quantus flight attendant and she married her partner, Jeff, and then told a really harrowing story about her baby who who was burned. They had to be in a sort of a facility for six months with the the child, and he lived and he's now one of Australia's best visual artists. I guess the thing to say is about these marriages is that people often talk not just about the happiness but about the hardship. And you'll know that from being
at Wayside. People don't kind of divide their lives into this was good and this was bad. They sort of almost took about it all as a continuum and when you interview people you get both. You know, they don't just stop at the wedding. But yeah, amazing resilience in the couples. I've met and learned a lot about my mother because of that.
Yeah, beautiful. From listening to these stories and hearing the experiences, what more did you learn about this amazing Ted Knoff because he sounds incredible what he was doing. And do you know more about his history where he came from as well?
Yes, So they set the Waisa Chapel up in nineteen
sixty four. He had been in America and working with in Chicago, working with street people there, so that notion of a Chris outreach to the poor was sort of he'd brought that back to Australia and to be honest, he came into and way such chapel still has some contention about the amount of social justice work that they do and what is the line the book talks about how Ted was charged with heresy three times, so two times officially, and what heresy is is it means that
you it was actually technically called unfaithfulness to the doctrines of the faith, meaning that you're not keeping to the exact letter of some of the most important tenets of the faith. And what was amazing for this was that there was a man called John Hall, a reverend who had just graduated from the seminary, and he asked the Methodist Church it was then, to charge Ted with this because he said that Ted's theology was not what the
Methodist Church believed. And I realized that no one had ever found John Hall and talk to him, because I was going through all the newspaper articles and I rang the Westside Chapel and I asked John, I said, do you know how I get in contact with John Hall? Is he even alive? And a friend of a friend of a friend. Next day I was speaking to John Hall and I was yeah, and I was expecting this, you know, kind of fire and brimstone, having to hold the phone out from my ear, and he wasn't. He
just he was just fantastic. I said, did you ever meet Ted? And he said, oh, yeah, yeah, Ted and I got on. Well, we just I just completely disagreed with his theology and didn't think he should be part of the church. And I was like, it would be better for my story if you were a real you know, sort of like ever worship. But no, he was an extremely exciting man. He said, Oh, nobody's ever really rung
me before. Yeah, it's interesting Ted. I mean I also spoke to Matt Knopf's whose Ted's grandson, and Matt Noffs you will know, is still doing amazing work with the homeless and you know, youth, particular young people who have drug problems. He's written a book about addiction, and he and his brother Rupert have been very supportive of my investigations of Ted, And yeah, it's it's been amazing kind of connecting with what Ted was trying to do. I
he died very early of a stroke. Ted and at fifty eight, I think he was he wasn't very old, but he you know, I think it broke him the attacks from the church. I mean, Ted knew how to get his mates and his friends, and he had a lot of sectarian as it were, or secular supporters. But I think it broke his heart. The church turned on him because they basically were saying, this is not in line with our theology, and he used it to gain
a lot of publicity and support. But in his heart of hearts and Matt said this, he thinks that it broke him. Yeah. But what's been amazing for me, if I can just say, is that young people who came to the play and who I hope will read the book sort of would grab my arm and say, we didn't know that there was somebody in the past who was trying to do this stuff and who was marrying people. We just thought the past is like this, you know, sort of like this horror show of tree and discrimination.
And it's just really exciting for people to be engaging with the fact that those kind of changes come from somewhere, and to be honest, people sacrifice their lives in a way to make those changes happen.
Yeah, the church could use a ted nofs today, right, I mean, the church would probably really want a ted nos based on the fact that that congregations are getting smaller and smaller.
Yeah, forty four percent of Australian's Christians now or identify on the Census I think fifty five percent identifies some religion in Australia.
So, yeah, do you know what it used to be.
Oh, it used to be much used to be much much higher. Yeah, I don't know the exact figures, but I do know that that twenty four percent is I think it's one of the first times it's dropped below sort of the fifty percent.
I mean.
I did interview Bill Cruz, who runs the Exodus Foundation, and he was Ted's sort of two ic or second in command. He did a lot of work up at the Wayside Chapel and he there was a really painful moment where I interviewed him and I talked to him about what is the cost of going against the church because he also had a statue of Korean comfort women that they said to him, you got to take it down. You know, he's got a church in Ashfield. There was
this silence and he started crying. He said, you just become incredibly isolated and lonely, and so you're getting it from inside the church and from outside. So I think Bill Cruz is kind of yeah, my contemporary Ted Knoff's. But look, there are people in all religious organizations trying to liberalize and kind of make more just. It's just
that they don't sort of get the airtime. And especially I think there's always this useful polarity between the right wing religious and the LGBTQI community that is kind of played up. There's a lot more people in the center and across the margins, you know, than sort of I don't know. Sometimes the media give credit for.
What has researching the book, Has it taught you anything about love or marriage?
It's taught me that, yes, that things that start off rocky the only way can be up. Sometimes. You know, a lot of these people met in difficult or really circumstances that had a lot of hurdles. It's taught me about the fact that we are more than our individual love, you know, if I can put it that way. What I mean by that is that how we get married and how we think about our relationships is also about
the times. And one of the things the book does is that it says, well, okay, compare this to your first meeting and your planning for your wedding and what you prioritized. There's a story right at the end of two people who got married in twenty eighteen, Claire Kahalen and Peter Owen, and they deliberately got married at Wayside because they wanted a connection to their local community. And they were saying, like, we don't want to put all our money and all our planning into these big, sort
of glamorous weddings. We want, actually, we want to be connected into the place where we live. So that was really interesting to me. It was like they were much more aware of the sort of symbolism of getting married at wayside. Yeah, I really liked that. But I guess the thing I've learned most is that we are individuals and we make individual choices, but we are also people
of our time. And you know how you got married, why you got married, and whether it lasts or not, and what are the is shoes around It are as much about what's going on around you as it is about what's inside the relationship. I've listened to the podcast and know you sometimes talk about that, like what the culture of the wedding is and what the expectations of the couples are, and I think sometimes you know, it
was really exciting. There's there's a moment in the book I say I was heading into a field of flower children, which is what it was, you know, in the sixties, they were very hopeful about the ability to change the world through love. Yeah, and there's a moment in the book where I talk about in Australia, are our revolutions kind of more quiet like that, Like people don't of course they go out on the streets sometimes, but maybe
they don't always do that. They just they vote with their you know, their feet, They go to Wayside to get married instead of you know, having a big different to America. Is what I was trying to see. How does religious change happen in this country in a different way than it happens in America, you know, where it's more sort of in public and there's a lot more
legal things involved. But yeah, here people just kind of quietly went to Wayside in their thousands, because it wasn't until July ninety seventy three that there were celebrants in the country. So that's why it's been this big change.
Yeah, it makes so much sense to me that so many of the marriages have lasted, as you were saying earlier, because it feels like there's so much more consciousness about coupling with your partner when you're doing it at Wayside because yeah, you fought the extremes of the outside world, whether you're same sex or different religions or different nationalities or whatever, and the fact that you've still chosen for
the pure essence of love. And I mean, I know that's what we should all be choosing when we get married. But I feel like in that dynamic and in that little place in the world, it's really conscious. So I think it's just it's sprinkled with so much magic. I'm ready to get married again.
At the Wayside we did, so we've been we've been married two times. We got the first time, we got married in the church and at another Sydney institution, the Garrison Church, and that's that's where we wonder why we why we ended up getting married there.
It was just really pretty.
There.
There was not much else about it. Really. We were young.
Because I was I was born in Melbourne. I grew up in Melbourne.
So no, why we I really don't know why we got married, which is interesting because also again going back to the Wayside, you chose the Wayside for a very specific reason where we just got married because it was a nice church and it was the oldest church in Sydney.
That was cool, beautiful. It's a gorgeous church. And looking back at those pictures and you go, okay, we're going to do a traditional wedding. That was That was a great place to do it still is. I mean, it's a stunning place. But then we got married. We renewed our vows in a circle of stones with a celebrant and in the shadow of a TP everyone's standing around in a circle. We were in a meeting.
It's very flower Child. Apparently absolutely everyone had flower Lason And yeah, so maybe it.
Is a chance to renew it and get conscious again. Hey, what do you hope and who do you hope? Of course you want everyone to read the book. Who are you writing this for?
Look, when I had the play on, I really thought it would be Ted's cohorts, like you know, people sort of in their sixties and seventies Belvoir sort of main audience that would come. And like I mentioned before, what gave me the most joy was the as the weeks went on, because on for like nearly six weeks, it was like younger people coming and saying, why don't we
know this about our history? Why aren't we told? And you know, I might make some schorelous statement about well, you're so interested in American history, you know, like you think that's our history. It's not. This is our history. This is what happened in an Australian side street. So look to answer your question, I would really love a
young audience for this. I've done a few kind of really interesting interviews like Hani Sir, and you know, young people who want to find out where the radicals were in our past, and where the visionaries were, and who were the leaders who were saying to politicians this is
not good enough anymore. You know, people maybe thinking about getting married and maybe thinking about why you do that, why you make that commitment, and why you choose to use your money and your time at particular places rather than others.
It'd be a great subtle gift to to give to, like, you know, parents that were very strict one who they want their child to marry, and you just kind of slip that in and go just just read this book, you know, and then they can maybe get some ideas and be inspired by love is love and be a bit more accommodating to their child and who they choose to marry.
Is that sort of like the message that you want.
Yeah, I mean, look, certainly there are people who made that choice and it was not only a difficult choice, but in some cases a fatal choice, you know, Like there were people who told me about violence that was put on people because of like Bill Cruise told me, he's had people come to the wedding and try and disrupt it. He's had to have security at the weddings.
You know, all of that. So it's not like I'm telling the gorgeous stories, but there's also can be a cost to kind of not having anything more to do with your family ever. So I want to celebrate that you can make that choice and still find an alternative family or people who are your tribe. You don't have to stick to those old ways, that there are people who will support a new vision.
Do you hope that the play will come back again now that the book is coming out?
May you be a prophet of future possibilities?
But it makes so much sense, you know, to have that in combination I think would be really beautiful. So thank you, Aliet.
It's also that thing you probably noticed that and you're from Melbourne Camp, so you know, it's that thing of stories from Sydney don't necessarily travel to Melbourne or to Brisbane whereas they should. You know, we do stories from Ireland, the stories from America.
Have you ever thought about that? Why it's so bordered? You know what it cloistered in you Sydney people. It's like wait a second. But you know when something happens nationally or we all band together.
We do.
It's just this, it's just this parochial state. I mean, you're so prolific, is there? Are you always working on the next when you if you've got a pipe that you're plugging, you know you've got something new going into the pipe, something finishing at the end of the pipe, and purple something, you know, something actually happening in the pipe.
Yes, I mean that's the life of a person working in the arts. You've got things going on because not everything happens at the same time. But I'm very excited. There's actually like a lot of plays are now being made into books and that's because people are interested in those the recess search that playwrights do. I have been commissioned by a company in Woollongong to write about the Linked Cafe Siege, and I've interviewed Thomas Sinn who's the partner of Tory Johnson who died in that siege, and
also his mother. So that's actually they're singing in that. It's just very exciting to deal with these sorts of social issues in it's creative nonfiction, I guess.
Yeah, what an interesting tale to tell and how I mean visual it is also because there it is like you said when you said the side street in Sydney. Yeah, yeah, you know, it's a side street in Sydney that's on one of the most colorful streets in the in the world, you know. And then to have it at that time with all the all the like the Flower Child, the sixties and the seventies and the music. I can see it see it all on screen.
Well, there's lots of stories too about like you know, sometimes the Americans would get married at waystside on their R and.
R and of course to come in the sailors would come in, it's right.
And there's one there's a photo of one African American man in a sort of floppy white hat marrying his partner in a floppy white hat. But yeah, there were lots of those Vietnam veterans were married at wayside, so you've got the whole. There was lots of bikeies. There's a guy called Skull Wiggans who got married at wayside and you know then they zoomed off on the bike. So yeah, I think people will be amazed by the tapestry of that.
Yeah. Is there photos to go.
With their shores? Yeah?
I know, because I'm like visualizing at all. I like to actually get to see the people that you're reading about.
Yeah, amazing. The book is wed by the wayside Alana Valentine, thank you so much for joining us today.
Thank you.
Yeah, best of luck with it all. I just think it sounds like there's so many layers to the book clearly, and I think it's going to be a huge hit. I know I'm going to be talking about it for a while. It sounds awesome.
Lovely meeting you, Thank you.
Thank you.
I cannot wait to read that book. That just absolutely lights me up. The idea of what she's written about, Yeah.
And so many stories in there, and the time that it happens, and how relevant it is today in what we're looking for and people are looking for something for substance, you know, and heart. She's such a smart lady. Some of the words she used it, I'm like, I'm going to have to look up what pejorative means. She's great, she's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. And the Waistside Chapel is such a beacon. It is for so many and as I probably used too many words, but in my experience of
the Waistside Chapel, but they do. They also have another part down at Bondi as well, which is where I found a lot of great humans down there, such great stories and full of hope.
I was going to ask, I don't think. I don't. I think this is the case. But Ted Noffs should have like the Order of Australia for the work he was doing with the waste.
He doesn't already.
Yeah, I don't know if he does or not. But as you say, like to be that kind of a beacon, to be that kind of to go against the church in so many ways, he's brave, very brave, and to be ostracized the way he was. But to continue to marry people because they were in love, that's there is no greater reason than that.
Yeah, yeah, I agree. We will see, let's go find it out.
We'll go and research, we will, we'll research ted.
We'll do a verbatim play about that. I think it's already done. Alana Valentine's written it in her book wed By the Wayside, which crosses state boundaries. So wherever you're listening, wherever you're listening around the world, certainly inside of Australia, it's a separate bathrooms. Web By the Wayside is going to be relevant to you because it's about Lam from correct.
All right, thanks so much for listening everyone, Sus