A heady smell of sandalwood hits you as soon as Noni Hazlehurst opens the door to her home on Queensland’s Macleay Island. The self confessed “old hippy” regularly burns incense which wafts throughout the airy bungalow.
The next sense to awaken is sight as you take in her open-plan living space. A huge portrait of Noni, heavily pregnant with second son William, takes pride of place in a reading nook. Titled Summer ’94 Waiting Again, it’s by artist Rosemary Valadon and was a finalist for the Archibald Prize.
The packed bookcase contains a well thumbed copy of Monkey Grip, the Helen Garner novel behind the 1982 film, for which Noni won rave reviews internationally for her starring role.
A battered teddy bear, a treasured childhood keepsake, is perched on the sofa – a place she sits to take in the view of the water.
Family photos adorn the vintage furniture, along with treasures accumulated from a life well lived; including a set of antique Chinese theatre masks picked up on her travels.
The significance of these masks is not lost on The Weekly.
As an actor, presenter, storyteller, director, activist and someone we call a national treasure, Noni has worn many masks during her 71 years. And that’s not even counting those she’s worn as daughter, sister, friend, mother and wife.
It’s fitting then that her memoir – the project we are here to talk about today – is titled Dropping The Mask.
In its pages, Noni recounts her life story, the lessons she learned, the breakthroughs she had, and her triumphs as well as some tragedies. It traces her journey from an overly-protected child to an uncertain young adult to someone who would ultimately learn who she was and use that knowledge to advocate for others, dropping her sense of what perfection is supposed to look like in the process.
It’s not a tell-all in the sense of talking about others in her life – so don’t expect intimate details about the men she’s married or her two sons – but it gives an extraordinary insight into what makes Noni tick, as well as plenty of fun anecdotes of her working life.
“In terms of dropping the mask, it took me far too long to realise that I could,” she says now of why the title fits. “I think it’s just giving less of a toss about putting my head above the parapet, even though I know I’ll be shot at. But I feel my arguments are good ones. I believe in unity, call me an idiot.”
At this she gives a mischievous chuckle, her face dimpling with pleasure.
“Every time we go out, we’re acting a role. For example, you’re playing the part now of the interested journalist. I’m acting the role of the confident actor who has plenty to say. If you can consciously choose your mask, you are much more empowered in the situation because you’re protecting yourself consciously.
“Adults are so used to having masks up and thinking, ‘I should behave a certain way’. And it’s such a futile exercise because you never show yourself.”
The idea of wearing a mask was drummed into Noni from a very young age. Born in Melbourne’s Brighton Community Hospital on August 17, 1953, her ‘ten-pound Pom’ parents and older-by-12-years brother Cameron formed Noni’s small, insular family unit who prided themselves on presenting a perfect exterior.
Her mother, Eileen, she would later learn, had developed PTSD during WWII thanks to the relentless bombing in her hometown of Liverpool. Her father, George, was in Army service in India, where he was tasked with troop entertainment.
But George’s letters home were sporadic and when he returned it was to a traumatised wife and a son who didn’t recognise him.
The trio arrived in Australia in 1951, keen to escape the grim post-war conditions. And when Noni arrived, they kept her close, discouraging any activities which could have caused injury, however small.
“It was a well-intentioned desire to keep me protected from the world, given the trauma they’d been through, particularly my mother,” she tells The Weekly of her cloistered upbringing which meant she didn’t learn how to ride a bike or have unsupervised play with other children until well into her school years.
“It made me take way too long to feel confident in making any of my own decisions because I was brought up to be dependent, not independent.”
She was, says Noni, “the odd one out, the weakest lamb in the flock,” when she started school. “I had a really close relationship with my mother and was the sole focus of her attention. The first day of primary school, there were probably 500 kids there just all screaming, and I thought I was going to die,” she recalls.
She was bullied ruthlessly, including physically, by her peers, but at home she was adored.
Her parents came from a long line of entertainers – Noni is a fourth generation talent – and they fostered her dreams of performing.
“I enjoyed acting as a child because I got to play different people and created my own friends, which was good for my imagination,” Noni reflects. “It was good on so many levels, but in terms of preparing me for life, it didn’t really cut it for a long time. It took me way too long to work out that I could create my own reality.”
That journey started when she began university at the age of 17, studying drama. She arrived totally unprepared for life outside the family home. A hopeless romantic, she recalls dreaming of a life where she would marry (while never actually picturing what a groom should or would look like).
University and the years that followed would strip that naivety away. The biggest shock, she says, was learning that “things weren’t cut and dried. It had always been, ‘This is how it is and what we say goes’. I wasn’t prepared for the shades of grey.”
Marrying at 21 to a man who came from a vastly different background – his family were big drinkers; hers were non-imbibers – was also something of a wake-up call.
“I got married the first time, I think, so I didn’t have to move back home,” she muses now of walking down the aisle with 22-year-old director Kevin James Dobson (not that she mentions him by name in the book). “It was a really hasty and ill-conceived match.”
Her career was only beginning, and times were lean. Between them, they could barely cover rent, let alone bills. Her parents, she recalls, were far from thrilled.
“But they didn’t try to dissuade me because they knew that would make me dig my heels in further. It also meant that I couldn’t confide in them because I felt such shame that I’d been so foolish and impetuous.”
When the relationship inevitably broke down, “it made me less trusting,” Noni says. “It also made me determined to look a little beyond the surface.”
In Dropping The Mask, she also opens up for the first time about terminating a pregnancy as the relationship was in its death throes. She shared this, she explains, because it’s a topic still mired in misconception and bias.
“I felt it was important to share because it was horrific and not a thing that anyone does lightly,” she states simply.
“We had no money, we were in a strange place, we had no friends in the city, and we were in a downward spiral. And I think more women have had them than we know. At the time, I didn’t tell anyone. We split up a month later.”
Her personal life may have been in turmoil, but work-wise things were starting to ramp up for Noni.
The Sullivans led to other TV roles – including her long-time stint on Play School, which sparked an ongoing passion for advocating for children and their education. She was treading the boards with fellow rising stars, including Mel Gibson and Geoffrey Rush.
She landed her first film role in 1977’s The Getting of Wisdom, directed by Bruce Beresford, with Noni appearing in two scenes opposite Barry Humphries and Robert Helpmann. In addition, she was expanding her horizons with travel and learning far more about feminism, politics and activism.
By the mid-1980s, she was a go-to leading lady and winning praise from critics and audiences alike.
Sadly, though, during this period, her father was diagnosed with cancer, passing away on Father’s Day in 1985. George was stoic until the end, determined to protect his wife from undue suffering. He’d also – another new revelation in the book – encouraged his daughter to marry for a second time before his passing.
It was a short-lived pairing that she’s not spoken of publicly until now. Again, she does not mention this husband by name.
“When my father died, it was such a chaotic time,” she says today. “He died on the Sunday, was buried on the Tuesday and I was back at work on the Wednesday. I just had to get on with it.
“But my husband was away, uncontactable in a war zone. I just felt completely differently about everything. It was like I went mad. I don’t know what happened, except that my father died. And that was it. The marriage was over.”
Surprisingly, Noni says, her mother coped spectacularly well after losing George.
“I’d underestimated her strength of spirit. She was a plucky thing. And she lived another 17 years after Dad died.”
It’s only recently, Noni adds, that she feels she’s grieving her father’s loss. Writing the memoir has helped her unpack all those memories and finally given her the space to revisit his loss.
“He was a good man, my daddy,” she writes in Dropping The Mask. “I wish I’d had the chance to get to know him better.”
It was around this time that she began seeing John Jarratt, husband number three and father of her two boys. The first, Charlie, arrived in 1987, and while she’d dreamt of becoming a mum, the reality came as a huge shock.
“It was terrifying,” she admits. “I was very unprepared. I read every book ever written on birth, but very little on child rearing. In retrospect I should have gone to one of those sleep centres, because he just wouldn’t go to sleep.
“Because John already had a child, he was quite calm. So, the baby would go to him, and he’d calm down. He’d come to me and be like … [here, Noni mock wails]. I had no idea I wouldn’t be able to make the baby happy. The shock of it was quite profound.”
Eileen was a very present grandmother, arriving with suitcases filled with clothes and toys she’d found in the op shop near her Canberra home. She passed away when the boys were 11 and five respectively.
“I wish I’d been able to get her some help [for her PTSD] and unburden herself from that,” Noni says. “She had constant anxiety that something would happen, something terrible. And that kind of went into me too. It’s taken having two boys to beef that out of me!”
In 1995, the family went through a different kind of stress, with Noni and John taking on the co-hosting roles for Better Homes and Gardens; the show filming their own renovations at home.
While Noni doesn’t go into the ins and outs of the breakdown of the marriage today, or in her memoir, their 1999 break-up was complicated by the fact that it also had to go out with a press release from TV producers.
Living in Sydney’s Blue Mountains helped, she recalls, as the rural environment offered a buffer, with residents sending prying fans and paparazzi away and offering sanctuary.
It allowed Noni to get on with being a single mother, which worried her. Like many women whose relationships break down, Noni felt guilt about not being able to make it work for her boys. She worried they would suffer from not having a male influence in the house, and that she didn’t make enough time for them as she was working.
“Because of the swings and roundabouts of my career, they had to travel a lot and changed schools several times,” she says now.
“I just felt so sad that so many years passed where I was trying to get ahead and survive and feed them, but I didn’t have the time to take them places or do things with them that I wished I had.”
But ultimately, we remind Noni, they’ve turned out just fine.
“They are upstanding young men and they’ve got good relationships,” she admits with a smile.
And so, we note, has she. She’s got a small but mighty group of friends in the area she moved to recently – one of whom pops by during our shoot. Since the boys left home, she’s continued working – her dance card is full, including another upcoming tour of her one-woman play, Mother.
And Noni is clearly loving her new home and excited that her memoir, which she’s been working on since we last chatted in 2021, is finally in the world.
So what, we ask, does she hope people take away from it?
“I think it’s important that more women tell their stories for other women to read,” she says. “I hope it inspires other women to write about theirs. I hope young girls don’t make the same mistakes I made. Some acting students don’t like it when I say you’re not special. But if you’re special, then someone else isn’t. And that doesn’t add up for me. So be yourself and cultivate your uniqueness, because there is only one of you.”
You can order Dropping the Mask by Noni Hazlehurst via Amazon here.
