WOW: Wise Older Women
“Wisdom That Grows Louder with Time.”
Welcome to WOW: Wise Older Women a podcast dedicated to raising the status of ageing women and dismantling the narratives that silence them.
Here, older women speak with authority, beauty, depth, and fire. Their stories challenge, inspire, and illuminate.
In a world that too often ignores, isolates, or diminishes older women, we choose to listen. To revere and celebrate the brilliance, courage, humour and tenderness they bring along with plenty of high‑vibration wisdom carried in their words.
These conversations aren’t just stories, each one of them is a teaching. A personal map from the past, forging the way ahead, full of magic, medicine and momentum.
This storytelling series presents ageing not as decline, but as ascent. It’s a platform where older women don’t need to hide. This is where they are honoured, uplifted, heard and held; with reverence, respect, and wonder.
Their voices are powerful, their wisdom is vibrant, and their stories are a gift to us all.
Welcome to the podcast. Settle in. Let their voices guide you.
WOW: Wise Older Women
S2 Ep6 Simone O'Brien (Pt.1)
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
You know the sorts of people who carry a spark, the ones who walk into a room and before you know they’ve lit it up? Well today’s guest is one of those people.
Simone O’Brien is a physical theatre performer, a feminist, a firecracker of a woman and a bloody great storyteller.
She grew up on the edge of a National Park with five brothers, and learned toughness the hard way, discovering early on in life that the world wasn’t going to hand her anything, so she built her own world instead.
She’s done so much in the 60 odd years she's been on this earthly plane. Much of it flying high above it over audiences on a trapeze! She's toured the globe with a queer aerial troupe, survived a damaging fall, battled illness, confronted her father in a moment of radical forgiveness, and rebuilt herself, body and soul, to emerge as the person you’re about to meet.
Simone lived inside the wild beating heart of Sydney’s 90s arts scene, has marched through waves of feminism, explored sexuality with honesty and now, in her sixties, she’s navigating menopause, hormone therapy, and the politics of women’s health with the same fierce intelligence she brings to everything, including her post-menopausal post punk cabaret band Mutton, alongside fellow band mate and WOW Ep.4 guest Gabrielle Griffin.
Simone is a brilliant storyteller, a woman who won’t be silenced, who continues to be seen, and who invites us to see ourselves more clearly in the process.
We’re taking a deep dive into Simone’s life: complete with triumphs, trauma, art, politics, the body, the healing, and the burning fire that never went out.
This is a story about feminism brought about by family dynamics, and the power of performance, something Simone was born to do.
FYI: Due to Simone's gift of storytelling, our original interview went for 2 hours and 45 minutes.
In lieu of this, and the fact I simply refuse to edit out any more of its rich context and descriptive depths, you'll hear her whole story over two podcasts.
This is Part 1.
Find out more about Simone and her work here - Mutton the Duo
Series 1 & 2 were made possible with assistance from the Community Broadcasting Foundation. cbf.com.au.
Support future episodes of WOW: Wise Older Women - here
Contact Host & Executive Producer Rasela Torise - aloha@plantationstudios.com
Music generously provided by Purple Planet Music
Part 2 with Simone O'Brien - AVAILBLE NOW.
Welcome to Wow, Wise Older Women, wisdom that grows louder with time. It's a podcast dedicated to raising the status of aging women and dismantling the narratives that silence them. Here, older women speak with authority, beauty, depth, and fire. Their stories challenge, inspire, and illuminate. In a world that too often ignores, isolates, or diminishes older women, we choose to listen, to revere and celebrate their brilliance, courage, humor, and tenderness. They bring along plenty of high vibrational wisdom carried in their words. These conversations aren't just stories. Each one of them is a teaching, a personal map from the past, forging the way ahead, full of magic, medicine, and momentum. This storytelling series presents aging not as a decline, but as a scent. It's a platform where older women don't need to hide. This is where they're honored, uplifted, heard, and held with reverence, respect, and wonder. Their voices are powerful, their wisdom is vibrant, and their stories are a gift to us all. Welcome to the podcast. Settle in. Let their voices guide you. You know the sorts of people who carry a spark. The ones who walk into a room, and before you know it, they've lit it up. Well, today's guest is one of those people. Simone O'Brien is a physical theatre performer, a feminist, a firecracker of a woman, and a bloody great storyteller. She grew up on the edge of a national park with five brothers and learned toughness the hard way, discovering early on in life that the world wasn't going to hand her anything. So she built her own world instead. She's done so much in the 60-odd years that she's been on this earthly plane. A lot of it flying high above it over audiences on a trapeze. Yep, she's toured the globe with a queer aerial troop, survived damaging falls, battled illness, confronted her father in a moment of radical forgiveness, and she's rebuilt herself body and soul to emerge as the person you're about to meet. Simone lived inside the wild beating heart of Sydney's 90s art scene. She's marched through waves of feminism, explored sexuality, and now in her 60s, she's navigating menopause, hormone therapy, and the politics of women's health with the same fierce intelligence she brings to everything, including her post-menopausal post-punk cabaret band, Mutton, alongside fellow bandmate and wow episode 4 guest Gabrielle Griffin. Simone is a brilliant storyteller. She's a woman who will not be silenced, who continues to be seen, and who invites us to see ourselves more clearly in that process. We're taking a deep dive into Simone's life, complete with triumphs and trauma, art, politics, the body, the healing, and the burning fire that never went out. This is a story about feminism brought about by family dynamics and the power of performance, something Simone was born to do. You'll hear the whole story over two podcasts. This is part one. It's my great honor and joy to welcome Simone O'Brien to the CBF Grant-funded Wow series, Wisdom That Grows Louder with Time. Thanks, Rosella. Lovely to be here. Simone, for listeners meeting you for the first time, how would you describe the force of personality that you bring not only into a room but into the world? The performer, the feminist, the person?
SPEAKER_01I would say a lot of it is a combination of genetics. People always talked about my beautiful mother who passed, who died in 2012 at the age of 73. People talked about her as when she walked into the room, she changed the vibration of the room. So I like to think I've got a little bit of that. She was also very inspired by her mother. And I loved her mother. So I think of it as this intergenerational DNA of strong Irish women. And so that's part of my makeup. And then you respond to your environment. You know, feminists aren't born, they're made. Bitches aren't born, they're made. And there's a certain amount of resilience in there. Is that genetic? I don't know, because people can respond differently to the same set of circumstances. But I guess growing up with five brothers, I had developed a high pain threshold, and you just kind of get on with it. And that's also a generational thing because I don't see a lot of that happening in the younger generations, or maybe I recognize it differently. I definitely think they're breeding it out of people.
SPEAKER_00So, how do you view through your feminist lens the historical events that shape our society today? What do you think drew you into that part of history?
SPEAKER_01I'm interested in how we got here. Obviously, from a self-interest point of view, how was my upbringing shaped by external and internal forces? So there's my own responses to it. You know, I remember mum always used to say, you know, you have the teetotaler and the alcoholic from the same family, and you ask them, How did you get here? And they both answer the same question, well, because my parents were alcoholics. Growing up in my family, the way that we did, the way that dad exercised psychological abuse and coercive control over mum, the effect of that toxic masculinity on us six kids, why did that happen? So I guess being curious, always being curious about well, why did that happen? What's the bigger context? What happened to dad personally? How does the male privilege sit in Australia in a broader context? How does the particular brand of sexism in Australia where did that come from? And so you keep tracing it back and you go, ah, the colonial heritage is, you know, a white male supremacist, genocidal, ecoscidal system. So how does that, those waves affect me now? What is the particular brand of Australian misogyny? How did that get to be here? Oh, 250 years ago, you know, it was a penal colony that was nearly starving, that tried to commit genocide against the indigenous people here. There was a ratio of eight men to one woman, the second fleet came, the women hopped off the boat, it was a rape fest. How does that make itself felt today? And we look at the rates of femicide today, one in every four women. It's like that doesn't exist in a vacuum that has historical antecedents that we need to be reminded of and the history is present. And then when we look at the rates of femicide for black women and indigenous women and their particular experiences, feminism has a long way to go because it needs to broaden. It's good that it's becoming more intersectional and looking at the experiences of women outside the white middle class cohort to include all women in that, trans women, women of colour. And so, you know, when they say, Oh, Australia was one of the second countries to give women the vote, or what do you think the 1967 referendum was about? Like black women couldn't vote until 1967, 1968. So that's not actually true. So I think we need to be mindful. I am curious about my experience and how I got here, and then that makes me curious about history and keeping that conversation alive. So there's so much a historical conversation going on, and who writes the history?
SPEAKER_00How did wartime loss accelerate feminism? What do you think people m misunderstand about that era?
SPEAKER_01It was social engineering. So I am fascinated by other women who don't take no for an answer. A couple of my heroes or heroines are Larez Bonney and Nancy Byrd Walton, women who took to the skies in the 30s. They were aviators. Larese Bonnie, in particular, she was married to a rich industrialist in Brisbane, and her husband wouldn't let her drive, so cars were just coming online. And so she was like, Buggy, you'll learn how to fly. So she learned how to fly, and so she was just glamorous, first person to fly, I think, from Australia to London. And so women were flying in the skies in the 30s because they could, and then World War II came along, and all the blokes from the RAF were like, Oh, no, no, no, we can't have women in the sky. No, you've got to stay at home. Actually, you have to feel the factories because all the men are at war. And so women had a taste of earning income, having jobs, and then World War II ended, and uh the blokes came back home or not, or came home, you know, shell shock, another word for PTSD, and then this massive social engineering program to make, you know, the 50s, the happy housewife with, you know, with the pinched waist and the pointy boobs and the A-skirt and all the happy mod cons, playing the happy housewife at home and not having any role or agency. I mean, that was just engineering. That was just social engineering. There's nothing natural about it at all. So, again, I guess looking at my mother's experience of growing up on a cheap farm south of Canberra, going to boarding school, not expected to have a career, having a career until she got married, and then getting married, being a virgin on her wedding night, knowing nothing about that, and through her mistreatment by my father, having to educate herself about feminism. Her response to that situation was that she became educated, empowered, got herself a job because he wouldn't give her any money, and so she became a feminist because of her circumstances, not because one day she decided that she'd tried on like a new coat.
SPEAKER_00In that 20th century wave of feminism, was there a real conscious effort to make this change, or did it start as a type of rebellion towards how women were being treated?
SPEAKER_01I think it started out as a type of rebellion. I remember when Mum and I travelled in 1989, 1990, and we hired a car and we drove around the UK and Britain and the Republic of Ireland, particularly in Ireland, and this is like the 90s. Ireland was dirt poor. Like I had come from travelling in India and Asia for about 16 months. And so I was used to seeing abject poverty, but then going to Ireland, I think it shocked me more. People begging in the streets and the telephone boxes, remember them, weren't working. And and we would go into these pubs in Ireland and everyone would stop and be full of just men and they'd stop and look at us. And Mum hated it. She goes, This reminds me of growing up in 50s Canberra, arch conservative, misogynist attitudes. And I mean, Ireland did a massive turnaround when you think about it now, and everything's come to light about what happened with, you know, single mothers and the babies being stolen and taken away, and and you know, the stranglehold that the Catholic Church had on Ireland. So I think it was a progress of education and action, and the next action taken, opening up more doors. Mum did a a welfare certificate at TAFE, and through going to TAFE and higher education and meeting uh a new set of people who opened up her mind but also opportunities and networks, and she never looked back. She had a great time. But you know, that first wave of feminism was the suffragettes in the 20th century. There's that fantastic movie, I think it's got Meryl Streep in it called Pankhurst, where they look at the actions that those women took to get the vote in Britain. They were militant, they were organized, and they were pillaried, they were vilified. They were putting bricks through the windows of shops. You know, they weren't polite. They were determined, and they they didn't get the vote in the UK till I think I'll have to fact check this, but it's like 1914, 15, 16, 17, even 20. Like at the end of the movie, they look at the different years that the European countries came on board with universal suffrage, and it was surprisingly late, particularly for the UK. Australia gave white women the vote early on. I think New Zealand was the first. So the first wave of feminism had their own banks in the twenties. And then the second wave of feminism was the 70s. Poster girls like Jermaine Greer and the burning of the bras. Incredible. Those fierce feminists of the 70s that squatted houses in Glebe to start the first women's refuges. And the squats, the the houses were owned by the Anglican Church. So that they saw that there was a need, they saw a resource sitting there rotting, and so they broke in, they did it up, not to any great degree, and they painted on the outside, you know, women's refuge, and sat there and through their networks, remember pre-internet and pre-mobile phone, pretty soon they had women and their kids coming and they were literally sleeping on mattresses on the floor, and then they had to start protecting themselves because husbands would turn up with shotguns. Think of the historical context, like this is early 70s, so I'm not sure exactly when, but it you know, as my mum said, when I said to her, Why did you stay for so long? And she said, It was the 70s until Gough Whitlam got in, where was I going to go? There was nowhere to go. That was one of the great changes that the Whitlam government brought in, is that welfare and then the no fault divorce, so that women could divorce their husbands. And she said, and also I chose to stay because I didn't want to end up in Housing Commission in Balmain, which at the time was hardcore and she would have had to have give up a lot. Either way, it was a sacrifice. She weighed up her options, so she chose to have a parallel life in the same house with Dad. And so, you know, I would look at how he withheld resources from her and from us and inflicted psychological and verbal abuse on her and us. And I would joke with my friends and say, Oh, you know, Dad had this pathological fear of spending money. And it's only just now, like even now, like recently, thank goodness, that the words and it's now law, coercive control, have come into the vernacular. And I look back and it's like, oh, of course it was coercive control. But then it's just like, oh, it's dad's just being an arsehole. Having it as a thing, and that thing, you know, like as a concept, as an action that has a name that is in law that can be identified is really affirming. The stats aren't, but that slow push for change is affirming and is like that's a win. The suffragettes would be proud. Yeah. You know, there's small acts of microfeminism, sorry, pardon the tautology, and there's also big acts but nothing is ever changed by being polite.
SPEAKER_00How do you think those feminist movements shaped the social constructs that we live inside these days, but more to the point in your own life?
SPEAKER_01That I live an entirely different life to my mother, married the first man she had sex with, went on to have six children to him, and had no tertiary education, and was at the mercy of all those forces, so her choices were limited. So she was determined that I receive a good education. She made sure that I was going to go to and I went to a single sex Catholic girl's school and received a good education. And I'm gonna put that good in inverted commas because it was problematic. But nevertheless, um I acknowledged my privilege and it was a good education, and then I went on to university, and then I could make the choices, my the career choices that I made. Somehow I ended up in circus and physical theatre and the arts, which I'd always wanted to do anyway. And I had this career that I was allowed to follow my heart. And so there was no great plan, but I followed my heart and I want to do that, I'm gonna do that. I like that person, I'm gonna hang out with that person. Well, how how how did they do that? I'm gonna do that. I have no children, I've had a fantastic career in the arts, I've pretty much done everything I've wanted to do. Mum didn't have those choices. So when I reflect back on all the work that the feminists have done so that I could leave a life of choice and privilege, that's no accident that there's laws and legislation and movements and a lot of women and men advocating really hard for women to have choice.
SPEAKER_00You've said in the past older people are walking libraries, not liabilities. What do you mean by that?
SPEAKER_01Well, I would have to pay respect to our First Nations peoples, that indigenous lens and indigenous approach that A acknowledge that elders are really important and acknowledge them as walking libraries, particularly in those cultures that have oral tradition as opposed to a written tradition. So the stories that the elders tell us are really important. So that's me borrowing from that approach and that lens. And so it's a great reframe to look at ourselves. I wouldn't call myself an elder, but I I'm in my 60s, I'm getting there. And you you know you're getting there when you look at young people in their 30s and go, Oh, look at those lovely young people. Oh, look at them, aren't they dears? Aren't they lovely?
SPEAKER_00What do you love about being older?
SPEAKER_01Th you know, not having to give a flying F. And in that invisibility of the aging woman, you know, you kind of pass your prime. On that note, Ursula LeGrun has a great essay called The Space Crone that she wrote in 1973. Well, you can listen to it on a streaming platform. And what I like about being older is inhabiting that super crone, defying the expectations of youth-obsessed culture and the patriarchy and the capitalism that would put you past your prime. And in fact, there's a lot of lived experience and wisdom and knowledge to enjoy and to pass on. And I know not every woman is able to do this because the fastest growing rate of homeless people is single women over 55. Again, tossed out by the patriarchy, again, tossed out by capitalism. But women who leave domestic violence and family violence situations are s it's such an economic disadvantage. I just find it outrageous, outrageous that the woman has to leave her home. When are we going to remove them, the perpetrators, from the family home? When the economic and psychological disadvantage of the woman having to flee and that the whole system is set up to allow that to happen is r I I find really frustrating, really infuriating. So one of the things I like about ageing is voicing those opinions and perhaps bringing them up in a less I'm less interested in confrontation. The subject matter remains the same. Justice is really important to me. But being able to have those conversations around justice and equity but without the desire for confrontation or to shout someone down. There's still the anger in there, but the desire to have the conversation is informed by that curiosity of like how they came to to understand or to believe that set of beliefs. And I did a course and a shout out to the people that run the Yoga for Humankind courses. I think I did it during COVID, and that was an online course that really got me as a middle class white person to understand my privilege, to understand. The white supremacist system that we live in, how that is in our bodies, and that one may like to think one's not racist, but we actually we are, because we can't help it because that's the system that we're in. And it is a constant process of peeling back the layers and going, oh yes, well, actually I didn't realize or I've come to the realisation that I have this belief or that little attitude there is part of this bigger system that I that I live in that I've been indoctrinated into. And so understanding my role and my privilege is part of that.
SPEAKER_00Do you think that as you're getting older you're looking less for confrontation but more for solutions?
SPEAKER_01Yes. And so what I learnt, one of the great things, one of the great tools that I learnt in this Yoga for Humankind course is you know, someone has an opposing or a view that's different to yours. So rather than calling them sexist or racist, the tool that I learned was to say, that sounds sexist. Oh, that sounds racist. Where did you hear that from? And that was a big turning point for me. And I was like, oh, I apply that to myself. How do I get to the beliefs that I have? And how does this person get to the beliefs that they have? And also a lot of that self-development work, I find nonviolent communication really helpful. I mean, don't get me wrong, I escalate at the drop of a hat. But being aware that I do, and then also keeping on coming back to the would you be willing to have a conversation with me and the I statements? I find that as an older person more available.
SPEAKER_00Do you escalate perhaps a little bit more through these years with menopause? I know that you're currently actually on a hormone therapy. So what's that journey been like for you, particularly with the HRT, just physically, emotionally, even politically, because HRT's had a pretty bad rap in the past, but you've done your own research. What's the conclusion? The current conclusion.
SPEAKER_01Yes, I went back on it after listening to a podcast that a friend recommended, and she's a psych nurse, so she's recommended a podcast where a urologist is interviewed by another doctor, and this urologist went back and had a look at the research that came out about HRT and looked at it from a different lens and kind of looked at how the stats were interpreted, particularly around breast cancer, and realized that there'd been a skewing in interpretation. And she gives a good explanation, I can't give it to you now, but it's about relative risk and risk. And so, because of that, and I think because of the whole mystery around, you know, it's only 50% or 51% of the population, but you know, the whole mystery around women's and women's sexual health, that it was very easy to go, ooh, that's bad. And so there's a whole generation of doctors that have not been trained in how to understand it, how to deliver it. And so in this podcast they talk about that menopause affects everyone in society because the woman going through menopause is someone's sister, someone's mother, someone's wife or ex-wife, someone's aunt, someone's cousin. And so it is, as Ursula LeGwin says in the Space Crone essay, only women have two physiological rites of passage. The first when she comes into her period, and the second when she goes out of her period. And in that way, when we get to menopause, it is our opportunity to rebirth ourselves and we give birth to ourselves. Unfortunately, men don't get to do that, and in this patriarchy, they also don't get to honour that. So that in giving birth to ourselves we have more choice. Not everyone, I get the sandwich generation, women that have to raise kids and look after their aging parents. All respect to you, shout out. So that there is this opportunity to then make the most of the pharmaceuticals, the research, the opportunity to have the best of both worlds. I was on HR or M H T as I call it now, menopausal hormone therapy. I was on it for a bit during COVID, and then, you know, the rebel in me was like, I don't want to be tied to these pharmaceuticals and I'm gonna go off. I couldn't be bothered renewing my prescription. But I didn't have that information that I had now, so I just dealt with it in that resilient as you did.
SPEAKER_00And how did it change when you came off it?
SPEAKER_01The anxiety, sleeplessness, the hot flushes, and also as an old boss of mine, Deb Batten, said, I was working for her, she was the artistic director of Legs on the Wall, a physical theatre company. She said, in this patriarchy, it often takes women to their late 40s to be the head of something. You know, you're not given the responsibility because God knows we can't trust the girls, and then you're usually given some kind of, you know, marginal role with youth or education or something, because only white men can make art, right? Real art. And so she was the artistic director of Legs on the Walls, and it was like she was in her late 40s, and so you finally get to this leadership position. This the same thing happened to me. I was in this leadership position, creative director of the spaghetti circus, and then sideswiped by menopause. So, in this fantastic job, but it's a steep learning curve, it's already anxiety, you know, it's like it's the art, so it's under-resourced. So there's already a lot to do, and then there's the sleeplessness, and then the anxiety, and then this cumulative snowball effect. So I went on the HRT. But also the highest rates of divorce for men are in their 50s and 60s, where the woman's going through menopause, and then she's like, sod this. A, I've got no libido, and B, you're a tool. I'm out of here. And so it's in men's interest to be interested in menopause. And then there's a loneliness epidemic, you know, or there's the incel, you know, like these involuntary celibate men. It's like, no, there's nothing involuntary about it. It's because your behavior is terrible, and women have woken up to the fact that it's not good enough. And so if you want a girlfriend, do the work. Go to therapy, do your version of the we've been telling you for years. And it's so great to see this cumulative effect of women setting boundaries, and menopause helps you do that.
SPEAKER_00Is there anything that you wish that people would understand more about menopause or even sexuality or even pleasure later in life?
SPEAKER_01My relationship was, you know, having issues anyway. And my libido was going downhill, and I remember saying to the endocrinologist, you know, will the MHT give me back my libido? And she's like, Well, it may, probably. And I said, But what if I still don't feel like having sex with my partner? And she's like, he doesn't need to know that you're on the HRT. What you choose to do with your body is your business. I was like, thank you. Everyone, go see a feminist endocrinologist. I can thoroughly recommend it. And so I kept that choice to myself because I didn't want to be kind of be the lipness test. You know, it's like, is it working? Is it working? Will you, you know, can we? You know, there was a bigger picture where, you know, the relationship was in its sunset phase anyway. Then I went off it because the relationship finished, like, oh well, I'm too tired, I don't want to have sex with anyone, and so I'll just live with that. And so I just kind of got used to that, and that was kind of liberating as well. It's just like being able to go out somewhere. I was like, well, I know what the answer is. I'm quite happy with myself. If something happens, great, but I don't have to kind of wonder or have this question or curiosity around, will I pick up, will I be picked up? And so that was okay, but I did one course pathways to pleasure, and I just wasn't motivated, I just wasn't interested. And then recently, since coming across a podcast and understanding that pleasure and sexuality is like a normal, well, it's a breathing part of your life, it's like any other sense. And so I bought one of those um little pelvic floor, it's called Parafit, looks like a vibrator, and it's a pelvic floor exercise machine. So you put it in your vagina, it's Bluetooth to an app on your phone, and then you can play different games on the phone. Like, for example, you're a bird that has to fly down and pick up seeds from the ground and you have to squeeze. It's developed by the French, it's amazing. It also gives you a readout of your pelvic floor and also lets you know if you're using the correct muscles to work on your pelvic floor fitness because you don't want to use your abdominals, you want to use your pelvic floor. So I did that for a while. That was great, and then I went back on the MHT, did the bone density thing, and discovered I had osteoporosis because I have a history of inflammatory bowel disease and ulcerative colitis, and so I was really surprised to get an osteoporosis diagnosis, having been a circus person and being very active. So I worked with my doctor to look at what I could do to reverse it. And I went on the prolia injections, which you have to stay on six monthly, but also going on the testosterone alongside the estrogel and the progesterone peel the testosterone to increase muscle mass and also to um help my clitoris grow to six feet long. No.
SPEAKER_00That's going very well, thanks for asking. I thought you were sitting in a strange position.
SPEAKER_01She uh wandered in like a cowboy. Put my bubbles aside. And so just a little pea size ointment, you know, nightly, and you rub it on the outer thigh on near your bum. And that definitely helped my libido thoroughly. And I'd heard from other women who were on tea. I have trans friends who are on it, obviously, you know, bigger amounts to help with the gender fluidity, the gender transition from female to male or non-binary, and other friends who had done it, and it does help with the vaginal atrophy. Can I swear on this? So I have a friend and they transitioned from being a she to a they and they were like, Oh, yeah, I went on the tea and finally got my cunt back. Yeah, I did notice a change in my in my genitalia. Like my labia majora got juicier again, and I had my libido returned. Lubrication helped. I also started using the vaginal pesseries, so you can get oestrogen pesseries that you insert into the vagina. Help with the vaginal atrophy because the walls thin. That's why sex can become painful because all your tissues, all your ligaments, all your tendons thin out in menopause, and that's the other thing. Like this podcast that we'll put a link to looks at the physiological effects of it. So I hurt my knee the other day coming off a stepladder. I couldn't believe it happened because I've had so many spectacular accidents falling off trapeze and stuff. I was like, really? Domestically, I didn't put my foot properly on the stepladder, and the inside of my knee went robber. And I'm sure if pre-menopausal, it wouldn't have happened. You know, the doctor's like you're seven times more likely to have a fracture. So yeah, you get to a certain age where it's like you've had so many experiences, you have a lived experience of what can happen. You can't use the ignorance as bliss because you're not ignorant anymore, you're actually well aware of what can happen, and you've lived the risk assessment and you've done the mitigation with your body, and it's like, yeah, no, I'm not doing that. It hurts too much.
SPEAKER_00You've spoken about sexuality. Where do you sit? Are you in the queer world? Are you in the straight world? Is there any definition between the two in your world?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think it's a spectrum. You know, it's a sliding spectrum, and people's sexuality changes. I was very much for a long time and probably still am in the asexual world, and then I'll venture off into my libido comes online, it's like, oh, okay, I'll have some fun with this person. So I was recently seeing a trans person, and that was fun for a while. You know, like before that was two years in between going to visit a lover in Brisbane, and you know, he's an older guy, but I've got a dating profile on her, a dating profile on Bumble, and I enjoy what's a quote from The Shits Creek, I enjoy the wine, not the label. So I would definitely say queer, in that uh what I love about the term queer is that it's an inclusive term for how anyone wants to express themselves. So maybe you only, you know, have sex with men, but you you fantasize about women and maybe for whatever reason don't have the courage to go there or the opportunity to go there. There's a queerness in that. But then I know a hundred percenters, either side, people who are hundred percent gay or lesbian or asexual, and a hundred percent hetero. And those hundred percenters have more in common with each other than, you know, the soup, the alphabet soup in between. So I think they call it the golden gaze, people who have never had sex with someone from the opposite sex. That's why they call the golden gaze. So women who have only ever had sex with women and men who've known from the moment that they're born that that's all they want. I think living inside me is a a gay man because I just love gay men. I'm, you know, a fag hag. And I get really turned on by gay men. But also I think that's because having grown up in, you know, a very heterosexual family and homophobic family and very straight, that the particular masculinity that is often experienced or explored with gay men is such a beautiful relief or contrast to my experience of growing up. And so I I like that. I mean it sounds like a cliche, but I like that softness, I like the sense of humour. Also, I remember r once reading gay men also experience what it's like to be vilified by straight men. And so I think it's that commonality, like they get it. But also that often gay men, the dinks, double income, no kids, are very clear about what they like. So they've got all the benefits of the patriarchy because they're white, privileged men who have a lot of money who can pursue their pleasure with that income. And so, you know, money and taste and being clear about what you want is a really heady mix.
SPEAKER_00What do you make of the younger generations? And really, I think what's coming up is their refusal to tolerate any kind of shame. Like the moment at Tropical Fruits when you're on stage and we'll get to your whole performance part of life when a fan said, no kink shaming. Can you take us there and describe that incident? That was hilarious.
SPEAKER_01We were performing as mutton, our post-menopausal post-post-punk duo. Gigi was on the drums, and I'm on the bass, and we're singing away, and Gigi has a particular rapport. We both have a great rapport with the audience, but Gigi was ha had this particular connection with this beautiful young man down the front. And it was New Year's Eve and it was tropical fruit, so I assume he was munted because he was very vocal and very amorous towards her, and they were riffing off each other, and you know, we the stage was small, so you know the proximity to the audience was close. And I did some quip like, Oh, Gigi, you've got a fan there and it looks like he's got a mummy complex, and quip smart, quick as a flash. He yelled out, no kink shaming. And I was like, Okay, I had been told, point taken, and I just loved that there was a that conversation, we were able to have that conversation, and that I had to do an about face, take it on board, but that I I'd been told by someone who has been able to benefit from the hard work that generations of activists have done to increase gay rights, increase gay visibility, increase the level of the conversation. And I think sometimes that can be forgotten, and that's come on the back of committed, passionate activists, many of whom who have died, you know, like the HIV and AIDS crisis in the 80s. We lost a generation of men in particular, but men and women, who had to fight hard for their basic human rights. I have a friend, she is HIV positive, she is 73. There was a point there in the 90s before the retrovirals came in where she was becoming more increasingly unwell from HIV. She has a son, he is not HIV positive, and it was a young son at the time, and she was a theatre person and then decided that she would become a vocal advocate in the HIV space and did her PhD on the power of an HIV-positive person speaking to people as a way to educate and bring awareness around the issues as opposed to handing out flyers. She ended up working for the United Nations. She did incredible work for positive people living in the Asia Pacific. She trained women in Indonesia, in China, across Asia. Amazing, a theatre person, so she was really good at performing in front of people. Shout out to Susan Paxton if you're listening. She's been to over a hundred funerals because she worked in the HIV positive space, you know, injecting drug users, lesbians, gay people, lots of people who weren't as fortunate as her who contracted the disease earlier. And she said, I've been to over a hundred funerals. That's an anomaly, that's unusual. The only other community I can think of that has so many funerals, unfortunately, is our First Nations brothers and sisters and everyone in between. Again, traumatized, marginalized communities who should have greater access to health care and basic human rights.
SPEAKER_00What was that world like for you? Fabulous.
SPEAKER_01Particularly on the edge of, you know, the Karingai Chase National Park in the north shore of Sydney. We just mucked around in the bush all day, jumping off big rocks and playing in the creek and hooning around the neighbourhood and climbing trees and jumping over fences and swinging around on hills hoists and you know, so I I would say a tomboy. All the kids in the street, we just played together, you know, we got home. Maybe it was a a balance between getting home, making yourself a peanut butter and honey sandwich on white bread and having three hours of TV from, you know, Gilligan's Island, Bewitched Um I Dream of Jeannie, and then maybe a mum going, get outside, and going outside and just running around and on our bikes, and you know, going down Dewan Avenue, no hands, the steep hills. I loved it. Climbing up street poles to the top of the street pole and kind of, ooh, that feeling good and having to freeze for a little bit, you know, as you get to the top of the pole because, you know, your body is suddenly flooded with this nice feeling of the pole between your legs. And it was what it was. And I look back now and think of some of the behaviors that my brothers and other boys in the street that were behaviors that went on unchecked that these days wouldn't fly.
SPEAKER_00What kind of behaviors?
SPEAKER_01Oh, you know, like y you're in the bush, you know, you have walls, you've got teams, and you know, like they start throwing stones at you.
SPEAKER_00How did that shape your outlook on life? Your brothers throwing stones literally and metaphorically?
SPEAKER_01It makes you tough or it makes you resilient or made me. As I said before, you just get on with it. But I know that other people have had different responses to it. So vulnerability isn't valued. So you learn to hide your vulnerability. Looking back now, when I think of learning to play the game brandings, the brother standing in front of you with a tennis ball, pointing at you, going, Do you want to play branding? Like, how do you play? And he points at you, looks at you, and has the tennis ball in his hand and goes, Run. And so you run. And then the ball gets thrown at you anyway. These days I would say to that eight-year-old self, don't run. Stare him down. Then he's got no target. I remember that's what mum used to say if someone's following you down an alleyway, get your car keys in your hands, but then turn around and walk up to them because that's the last thing they expect, and they want you to play victim. I'm not necessarily advocating that as advice, but I think that psychological thing of like, how can I take my power back in this moment? But also the myth of the boogeyman is not a myth. Yes, it exists, but the stats speak louder than this myth. You know, it's like, oh, don't go outside, stay at home. Well, one in four women are murdered by someone that they know or an intimate partner. Violence against children, the home is far more unsafe than playing out on the street. A friend of mine, Lanine Burke, did a a show called 10,000 Hours and they looked at statistically how long a child would have to be out on a street, and you know, like respect and acknowledging that that has happened, you know, like some kids have experienced terrible things being kidnapped in public, but statistically it would take 10,000 hours of kids standing on a street corner for something bad to happen to them. I remember mum being far more scared about what would happen to me from a perpetrator outside the home, the boogeyman, she didn't call it that. But when I think about the violence that we grew up with and that she experienced it's ironic. But we weren't taught to see that. That was just normal. We just grew up with it thinking, oh, that's how all dads are. Wasn't until you went over to someone else's house and you know their dad was being nice to their mum that you're like, Does your dad like your mum?
SPEAKER_00You did describe your mum as a feminist by necessity, but when your mum died, that matriarchal core of the family died with her. How did that shift the family dynamic?
SPEAKER_01What it did and I learned this from a friend, Victoria Spence from Life Rights Funerals, who is an incredible celebrant and also applies the principles of community cultural development to the community around the dying person. And when it all started to fall apart after Mum died, I'm went to her and said, Can you help me understand what's going on? Like I've just had an argument with my youngest brother, my baby brother. You know, he's one of my favourites. I treated him like a sister because mum didn't come home from hospital with a sister, another brother, so I'm just gonna treat him like a sister. And so we were arguing, and I was like, I never argue with him. And she said, What happens when the matriarch dies? The matriarch's the glue. So once the glue goes, all the unresolved schisms and riffs and dynamics appear. And so that division between the three older ones and the three younger ones became apparent. So all the old dynamics where it's just like, oh yes, there are my three older brothers, there are two of them ganging up against me, there's the oldest one, a conflict avoidant off somewhere else. And that happened because women are trained to do the emotional labour, but men aren't trained, aren't encouraged to understand their emotions and feelings. So when they get hit by grief and the grief of their mother, and mum was such a an incredible figure in our lives, uh, they shut down. Case closed, I want to put this behind me, empty the house, get rid of it. And so that difference in how we deal with our grief, particularly when the power structures come into play around how the will is executed, then the old childhood dynamics come into play because as my friend said, we go into traumatized child mode, and this is really interesting. So when you see one of your parents die, or you see them dead, on a physiological level, the cells in your body see the cells in their body that made you die. So it is an existential threat. So it is an actual existential threat to you because they're half of you. So then you go into flight, fright, or freeze mode, and in that all the blood goes to your organs, not your brain. So she said to me, Don't make any major decisions for 18 months because you're in shock. So I was like, Okay, great, I'm gonna do that, and then some of the brothers were like, Nope, we're gonna go, case closed, we're gonna do it, we're gonna move everything out, da da da So you get the differences of behaviour.
SPEAKER_00One other close member of your family was a cousin that you grew up with. You were quite inseparable until about the age of 18, and then you took quite different paths. What pulled you towards the more radical path in life? I blame mum. Or thank her.
SPEAKER_01I thank my mum. My cousin, she has four brothers, I have five, and we're born six months apart. Um, we didn't grow up with a lot of money, so we would go down to the farm near Canberra for school holidays where she lived. And that was the best access to horses, sheep, cows, mucking around in the paddock. And interestingly enough, we're one of the last generations to have that connection to the land through family. My nieces and nephews who went to Bali for holidays when they were, you know, little. I'm not resentful.
SPEAKER_00Maybe just a little bit.
SPEAKER_01We were like each other's best friends. But her mum was, you know, an arch conservative country woman, member of the Catholic Family Association, very different to my mum. So you get influenced, being the only daughter in particular, you have a strong bond with your mum. And so I remember I was a bridesmaid at um my cousin's wedding and her mum's no longer with us, and I'd come back from India and I had the pierced nose, and I remember my aunt saying to me, Well, if you're going to be a bridesmaid, you're going to take that thing out of your nose. And I was like, Okay, wanted to keep the peace, so I did. And looking back, you know, I should have come with an extra big one on the day. Anyway, I guess it was when we, you know, we left school and then we started to have independent lives, and I went to Macquarie Uni, which was a radical left-wing uni in Sydney at the time, and my cousin went to a more traditional university that had a lot of agricultural courses, and so then you are again, you know, influenced by your environment, and yeah, she made the choices that she made, and I just kind of again I just followed my heart.
SPEAKER_00And you wanted to go to NIDA as well, but your mum wanted you to get a degree first. How did that land with you and shape your early adulthood? So was there any tension around that decision?
SPEAKER_01Not really. I mean, I I could see that it made sense. So I got the logic, and I also having experienced her lack of economic agency again through the coercive control, watching the pain that she went through with the verbal and psychological abuse from my dad. So watching her struggle and her determination that I get the opportunities that she never had, and I wanted to give her that. And then it made sense. It's like, yes, you can get your degree, and then you can go and be an unemployed actor.
SPEAKER_00Is that right? Can you just set the scene um with as much detail as possible of what that Felton looked like?
SPEAKER_01Yes, so I wanted to go to NIDA, but also I wouldn't have got in. It was straight out of school. I went straight from school to uni because I didn't really know what I wanted to do. And so I thought I'll go to uni along with some of my mates, but I'll just do every drama course that I can. And at that stage, you know, being the product of a Catholic girl school was hanging out with young men from a Catholic private school. So that was my oeuvres. They were nice enough men, but they were pretty straight, like their football and rowing and all that, which was fine for about first year. And then I remember seeing the people with weird clothes and the coloured hair, and thinking, oh God, they're a bit weird and strange, and I wonder what they talk about. And then slowly second year came in, and I was less interested in study and more interested in the extracurricular activities, and then joined Dramac Drama Group and participated in creating a feminist anthology called In the Pink, bringing different poems to life, and I had the penis and be poem, and I loved doing that one. I loved performing that poem, and seeing the looks on the faces of my then boyfriend and those, you know, those private school boys, kind of the horror and them not getting it, I realized that, you know, I had started to drift in a different direction, and then slowly got to know the weirdos with the because it was the eighties, right? So they had the pointy shoes and the big coloured hair and the katie pie rag dresses and you know, like recession dressing, and started to get to know them and realized that they were far more interesting and opened my mind, as well as the courses that I was doing, opened my mind, and I became less and less interested in the in the people that I was originally hanging out with and more and more interested into these new worlds and new ways of thinking. So then I was like, okay, I'll do all the drama courses that I can find, and then I was doing a communications degree, so then it's like, okay, I won't go to NIDA, but I'll be like Jana Vent, get on TV, and I'll be great at interviewing people. Funny that I end up in radio eventually, like, you know, 40 years later. Then the more I learnt about that industry, the less interested that I was in that. So it became more and more developed my critical skills around ideology, politics, and you know, having a bigger lens to look at the systems at play, and became less and less interested in conventional media and more and more interested in forms that were visceral, real, grassroots, had a message. So I joined the Feature Femes, which was a narco-cyndicalist feminist street theatre group. There was a show called Media Maid, so we performed that such fantastic feminist plays as Trafford Tansy about a woman's life through the boxing ring. And I got to play Trafford Tansy and all the battles that she has to face, and it uses the wrestling ring as a fantastic metaphor for all the challenges.
SPEAKER_00Tell us what that moment was like, realizing that you'd sort of found a purpose through dance.
SPEAKER_01Uh I would say more physical theatre than dance because I've tried to do dance and I loved it, but for me, free movement and circus was more my style. Uh I did ballet for about a month when I was eight and hated the culture, the buns and the leotards. I was a tomboy. And um, you know, like there were already teachers' pets there, and I'm quite competitive, so I hated the fact that there was already someone at the top, you know, that felt unfair. Again, with gymnastics, the culture, the expectation. And the difference between circus and gymnastics, a young person once pointed out to me, they said, Well, in gymnastics they tell you everything you do wrong, and in circus they tell you everything that you do right. So circus is a far more inclusive, broad church, and also has a number of activities that come under its umbrella term. So you can be a juggler, you can be a hula hooper, you can be an aerialist, you can be an acrobat, you can be a musician, and you can be loud and you can be sitting on a trapeze up there above everyone, a show-off with performance skills and a high paying threshold. So I was a perfect candidate and discovered trapeze when I was 24. But at uni, I legs on the wall would come by, so they're a physical theatre company, and they would come by and they would do performances where they re-imagined circus performance. So it was all about being casual, it was all about talking to each other, juggling, doing balances, but it wasn't daggy clowns, it was like sexy people in their jeans, or you know, having some kind of great outfit, but that wasn't infantilized. And I was like, my body was like, I want to do that, because I'd always been sporty, always been fit, always been coordinated, strong, not necessarily flexible, so that the high pain threshold, the desire to be noticed, you know, which is a classic coming from a large Catholic family, the desire to be noticed and the desire to communicate something, to connect with people, all of those things came together. And so I just pursued these extracurricular activities, went to a festival of Australasian student theatre that was at the University of New England. We were doing, I think we were performing our feminist anthology. My good friend was like, There's a really cute guy giving a fire eating workshop. Okay, okay, all right. So I went along and he taught us how to eat fire, and you know, you had to have a little bit of chutzpah, but it was about your pain threshold, it was about taking risks, managing the risks, understanding the risks about learning technique, all of those things appealed to me, and then you know, it's gonna give me an edge. So I guess I'm always looking for the edge. And in permaculture, they talk about the edge of something, that's where you get the most growth. And so I think I've always pursued the edge in maybe I'm only formulating this now as I speak, but in the desire for growth, or again driven by that curiosity. What happens if I do this? Anyway, that cute guy turned out to be Derek Ives, RIP Derek Ives, one of Australia's geniuses, and he was in a group called Rock and Roll Circus from Brisbane, who was his band of circus artists and community artists that were making work, and they were real punks. You know, like Brisbane had that great, still does, has a great punk scene, particularly in response to Bjorcki Peterson's fascist regime in Queensland. So he were artists who were resisting that through art, and I was like, ooh, yeah, that looks great. And so there was a community theatre conference at the then Queensland Institute of Technology, but must have been about 88. Went to that, saw Rock and Roll Circus as this community theatre group, and it looked like there was like 30 people in this human pyramid, you know, like all kneeling on each other, and then maybe like 10 people down the bottom, and then eight people, and then it felt like a wall. It was probably only three layers high, and then they all collapsed at the end. And I'm like, I want to do that. You know, and Derek was there doing his beautiful juggler, he was such a gorgeous juggler, such an amazing circus artist. He was a black-nosed clown. He was it had a very dark sense of humour that also appealed to me. He was also cute. And in that cabaret at the Queensland Institute of Technology community theatre conference, there was a cabaret. And this young woman appeared on stage and did this skit where you heard this sound of a car crash, and then you heard this guy going, Oh, I'm about to swear, language warning, oh, what happened to my tyres? I don't know, some fucking cunt stolen my tyres. And this woman appears in a big vagina outfit with a tyre running across the stage, and it's Mandy Nolan. And she's 19, and we are 20 something, and we end up staying at Mandy Nolan's place because she was doing community theatre then. And Mandy and I always joke, I guess when I first met you, you were a big vagina, you're still a big vagina. And so I pursued that. Um, that would have been late 80s, and then in 1990 went to my first trapeze class.
SPEAKER_00Painter a pictura of Sydney's performing art scene in the early 90s, particularly the queer influence, the warehouse parties, all that wild creativity.
SPEAKER_01Yes, I um went travelling and then returned to Sydney in 1990 and was a bit at a loss, and someone said, Oh, they're doing trapeze classes down in Marrickville. If anyone knows Marrickville, there's the Addison Road Community Centre. So it's an ex-army barrack. So there's all these different huts. And even then it was filled with all different community groups. Anything from, you know, an Islander church to sidetrack theatre, and there was a big hut called Hut 24, and legs on the wall were there, so they were physical theatre company, Stalker was there, they're a stilt theatre company, and you could hire the hall to run classes. And so this couple, Gay and Clive, they'd just come back out from England, they'd been to the circus school in Bristol called Full Time. They were running trapeze classes, aerial classes, and I went down there and I got on the trapeze, and I was like sold. I was hooked. So I was like, this is what I'm going to do, I'm going to pursue this. That was a certain time and place. So it was early 90s. So as an artist, you could live on the dole. Rents were relatively cheap. I lived in co-op housing in Darlinghurst or warehouses in Surrey Hills. Everyone, you know, chucked in money. We weren't just only on the dole, but to be an artist, you needed to have that regular income and then do gigs on the side. And it was this really vibrant scene fed by venues like the performance space when it was in Cleveland Street. So venues that you were able to test and experiment, and the performance space is still like that. They're now at Carriage Works, but it was a different venue where I could cut a hole in the ceiling of the theatre, tape it back up again, smash through it for the performance, drop a trapeze down, calm down, sit on the trapeze, wee into a glass or the floor, splash people and have not much on and do those experimental kind of performances, very much informed and driven by the queer scene. So there were opportunities like Club Bent where people really pushed the boundaries and where that was kind of expected of you. So I think about artists like Azaria Universe, Sex Intense, Glitter Supernova, artists that went on to run specifically Queer Spaces Girlesque, where, you know, the body was taken through its limits, kind of also centred around the Sydney front, who really explored the nature of performance and really avant-garde. And when I was in second year at uni doing Australian drama, our tutor made us, he said, it is compulsory that you go and see this work. And I was interested in making work, but it was pretty traditional. And then I went and saw the Sydney front. And you know, you have those moments where you see something, you see a film or a show or a concert, and you come out slightly changed, you come out altered because the art has like expanded your brain. That for me is what happened. But I tried to make sense of it and I couldn't work out these things that I was seeing, these images and experiences and what they were doing to each other, and you know, like, for example, there's a body inside this black tube and it's got holes in it, and you can stick your hand into the tube and you can feel the body. And so it was as much about the voyeurism of the performer and the voyeurism of the audience, kind of looking at that exchange. And so I I saw that, and that intellectual rigour and that conceptual and artistic framework that was around and it still exists within the performance spaces Ouvre really made the performances and and the workshops and opportunities they put on were high level. And you're in this milieu of other people who were doing it.
SPEAKER_00How did it compare to other major cities in Australia, particularly Melbourne? Because that's got a huge arts culture.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Went to Melbourne. A lot, lived in Melbourne a lot. Once I started training in aerials, Sydney had very little circus. Yes, there was physical theatre and there was harness and rope work and stalker doing stilts, but in terms of circus and in terms of opportunity, Melbourne was the place. And so I lived in Melbourne for quite a while and found that the Melbourne scene, they had big gay and queer parties run by the Also Foundation. So there were other girls, other women doing queer aerials as well. And really fantastic. Warehouse parties in the Docklands before it the Docklands was a thing, you know. So really fantastic, rich underground scene. But I didn't find that connection between the kind of intellectual rigor of the avant-garde performance scene, so live art and durational performance, I found more pronounced in Sydney because it had the performance space which specifically dealt with that. Whereas Melbourne was more diverse, but also had a much greater and much longer fringe festival because you could afford to get a warehouse in Melbourne and put up a mini flying trapeze. You could afford to rent a garage to make theatre. I couldn't believe that I I went down to Melbourne in the mid-90s. They'd been having a funded fringe festival for 25 years. Sydney didn't even have a fringe festival. So there were real differences that I really appreciated both cities. I really appreciated being able to take that Sydney ethos and also working with feminist theatre performers such as Gail Kelly, who was one of Australia's unsung theatre directors. We were turning feminist theory into performance through a group called The Party Line. Celia White, also another intellectual stalwart, you know, these were women who they were lesbians, they were informed, they were educated, you know, working with theorists like Judith Butler, who in the 90s was in that milieu, was one of the first cultural theorists to say gender is a performance. And the reason that we like drag queens is could because they perform femininity to a hyper level with tongue in cheek. They perform women better than women can perform women. We made a number of works, so I was really appreciative of that. Not that Melbourne didn't have that intellectual rigour, but there was a space in Sydney to do that, and you could explore where theatre and performance and theory and practice method. Yeah, that was a pretty wild ride, and it's interesting that we're talking about it now because in '96, so 30 years ago to the very day, Club Swing was a four-girl aerial, four-woman aerial troupe directed by Gail Kelly and Robin Laurie. And Gail, as I'm saying, he was his visionary director. She had a really clear idea of what she wanted and had really strong image-based work. And so we had this great show about food, sex, and trapeze. And we were invited to It's Queer Up North in Manchester. And so we performed there at the festival. And just the other day, one of the women who helped us get there, Tanya Farman, contacted me and went, Oh, we're doing the archives from It's Queer Up North. Can we use footage of the show? And I said, Absolutely, we can. And so she showed me the video, which was actually our promo video, but we'd forgotten about. So then I had to get in contact with all my other club swingers and go, Are you happy? And everyone's like, Oh yes, chuff to be asked. And then watch the video of us, as Annie Davy pointed out, 30 years ago to the day. And so then watched my 30-year-old self up in the air, writhing around on table with food and cake and coffee and potatoes. Because it was called appetites. It's about women, sexuality, and desire using food as a metaphor. And Gail was great. She's like, I know how the show is going to open. You and Catherine are going to be back to back. You're blindfolded and you're feeding each other strawberries. And Annie, she was very buxome, incredible. She was our base, you know, like our porteur, as they call it in Flying Trapeze. So she was our catcher. Big robust woman who had broken her neck and survived. So she'd made this incredible resurgence after breaking her neck with circus oils in Edinburgh, not damaging her spinal, because she's such a big woman, it was just the vertebrae. So they fused. So she walks through the audience with this like fabulous like white satin lace bodice and this massive hat and tray of strawberries and gets the strawberry from the tray, puts it between her very handsome and generous cleavage, and leans in towards the person with consent and then gets them to eat the strawberry out from between her. I mean, that's a way to start the show, right? And so it was about food, sex and champese. And Gail was like, yes, and of course we're going to have apples because Eve and the apples, so all that symbolism around women, you know what the strawberry means. So then we had to make the show. Gail was like, I want you to come in with stories of food. And I said, Oh, I've got a great one. My friend Marlena Subasa, when we were all living in a share house together in Sydney back in the 80s, for one of her birthdays, she's like, I don't want present, I just want someone to come up and shove a chocolate cake in my face. And so I told that story, and Gail was like, right, well, that's what you're gonna do for the show. Gail was also inspired by Peter Greenaway, the film director, famous film if he was the cook, the thief, his wife, and her lover. So Gail was like, I want lush, I want decadent. We're going to have this table laden with fruit and flowers and food, and action either happens at the table or in the air above. And so there were these great worlds that sometimes run parallel and sometimes interconnected. And she used opera, you know, way before there were other people deciding to put circus to opera. I wanted to use this Karen Finley track, Pastor Bitch, motherfucker. You know, being hardcore, and she was like, Thank you, we're going to use opera. And of course, opera with its drama and climax and emotion and you know, was a perfect music to one of the acts. So we it was time and place. You know that triangle of right people, right time, right place? It was that.
SPEAKER_00What a story so far. That of a woman who's lived her life following her heart. It's shaped by patriarchy and art, illness, survival, by her own body through all its seasons. We've touched on her life inside the queer political, electric heart of Sydney's 90s art scene. And in part two, you'll hear how Simone crashed to the ground, rebuilt herself and her body, confronted her father in the depths of illness, and you'll also hear more about how she fought through that chronic illness and eventually burnout to come out the other side, still creating and performing, still pushing the creative boundaries and sound limits in her post-punk cabaret band, Mutton the Duo. The world holds so much historical influence, but art, real art, comes from the places we're told to hide. Here's a woman who never shies away from the light. I hope it inspires you to do the same. If you'd like to find out more about Simone and her work, you can find contact details in the episode description. Part two of Simone O'Brien's epic story is available now, where you found this one, or on any major podcast platform. Series one and two were made possible with the assistance from the Community Broadcasting Foundation. If you'd like to support future episodes, you can do so via the links in the episode description. I'm your host and executive producer, Rasella Toris. Alofa'atu, much love, and Fatfa Tailava, thanks for taking the time to listen.