In one of Richard Glover’s last big public events, he hosted a special edition of Thank God It’s Friday at the Blue Mountains Writers Festival this week.
Glover, with comedians Tommy Dean, Jean Kitson and James Colley filled the Grand Ballrooom of the Carrington Hotel at Katoomba for the live comedy show. Listen to the broadcast here.
Glover also interviewed Midnight Oil’s guitarist Jim Moginie who has written a memoir called The Silver River.
Moginie told Glover, “I was adopted, after I found out my school work tanked… I took refuge in music, it filled the hole…
“I was playing music with a couple of guys from school, we were introverted kids from the north shore of Sydney, then Ross joined us as our drummer, he was an extrovert. A friend organised a summer tour down the south coast, but we decided we needed a lead singer for the tour. We put an ad in the paper and along came Pete Garrett… When he got up to sing I thought ‘that’s not what I was expecting’ …we had chemistry, they became my other brothers.
“We didn’t care about other sounds, we wanted to be an Australian band. We wanted to write about our country, where we came from, we didn’t want to sound like American or English bands, we were inspired by Skyhooks and Daddy Cool.
“Radio ignored us, the music gatekeepers didn’t know what we were all about… so we just started touring, building up a following, lots of people in local venues, there were no limits to how many people were in the room, there were fights, there was no OH&S back then. Sometimes the safest place to be was on the stage… We learnt on the go.”
702 ABC Sydney was well represented at the writers festival with other station personalities also featuring in the program.
On Saturday, morning presenter Sarah Macdonald interviewed Noni Haslehurst about her new book Dropping the Mask.
Asked by Macdonald why she wrote the book, Hazlehurst explained:
“It was to change some misconceptions about female actors. In the 1970s there were mostly men writers and they only wanted shallow female characters. Now there are more women writers and things have changed… I’ve been part of a movement that has started to tell complex women’s stories.”
Noni Hazlehurst came from a showbiz family and so was drawn to acting. From Playschool, through The Sullivans, then to the ground breaking movie Monkey Grip, now she chooses “roles that matter,” that fit with her current aim of showcasing strong female roles. She is currently in a powerful play called ‘Mother.’
“It’s an example of the power of the Arts to take people on a journey and help them not to be so judgemental… At first the audience laughs at the character, but by the end they empathise with her.
“One of the joys of acting is the ability to pull out something from my own character and to put it into the character of the role I am playing.”
Hazlehurst believes that the Arts connect people and remind us that we are not alone.
“In a theatre we are all connected for that moment, then the play ends and we go back to the world…
“Some government policies put the Arts to one side, but the Arts do have value and do have worth in our society. We connect people and we remind them of history, life lessons, so many things.”
Hazlehurst told Sarah Macdonald it was “scary” to put so much of herself into the book, but “when you get older you realise you spent all that time worrying about what people think, eventually you get to a stage where you don’t care what they think any more… then we can acknowledge our authenticity.”
Afternoon presenter James Valentine hosted a session on crime writing. Valentine, an author of six books himself, admitted that he once tried to write a crime novel, but his wife talked him out of it. “She was right!” he joked, as he brought his trademark satirical humour to the session.
He interviewed Jack Heath, who has written 45 novels and reporter Louise Milligan, who has just written her first novel.
Heath, who started writing when he was a teenager, was drawn to “a life of crime” to “give his readers what they deserve,” allowing them to experience something that they would not be likely to experience in real life. “When I write for adults I step on every landmine, I rattle every cage,” he said.
Louise Milligan, an investigative reporter with the ABC’s Four Corners program, previously wrote two non-fiction books about investigations she worked on, and has now ventured into fiction with a crime novel called Pheasants Nest, published by Allen & Unwin.
The plot was influenced by the rape and murder of an ABC producer Jill Meagher, and in it she also explores the trauma felt by others who have to deal with crime, such as the families of victims and the police. Writing the novel helped pull Milligan out of a “dark place,” when she was being “bullied” by rival media outlets about her investigations.
While Heath likes to plan the plot of his books, Milligan prefers to “allow the story to propel itself… I didn’t know how it would end,” she said. Valentine compared the two different styles of writing to music, equating the planned method to a well constructed symphony and the unplanned method to the controlled improvisations in jazz music. Valentine is a jazz musician.
Part of Milligan’s motivation in her work is to be able to make change for the better. She does that in her investigative reporting and has now taken that attitude into her fiction writing. One of the aims in her novel is for readers to discover “who are the people impacted by crime,” as her main character, Kate Delaney, a journalist, is kidnapped and police race to find her. As a journalist who is haunted by the crimes she’s had to report during her career, Kate is terrifyingly familiar with the statistics about women who go missing—and the fear and trauma behind the headlines. She knows only too well how those stories usually end.
The Blue Mountains Writers’ Festival takes place each year at The Carrington Hotel in Katoomba, and is presented by Varuna the National Writers’ House. The program, featuring big names in the Australian literary world, brings hundreds of visitors to Katoomba for the festival weekend. 702 ABC Radio Sydney, known for its support of many arts events, is one of the media partners of the festival.
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Please don’t call the talkback line to correct my grammar: Richard Glover