Noni talks candidly about new season of A Place to Call Home and that Logies speech
<p>Australian television legend Noni Hazlehurst has been a fixture on our screens for over 40 years, and she’s set to return with season four of Foxtel’s popular period drama <em>A Place to Call Home</em>. Over60 spoke to Noni about what’s next for her character, Elizabeth Bligh, her future career plans, and that <a href="/news/news/2016/05/noni-hazlehurst-joins-logies-hall-of-fame/" target="_blank"><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline;">incredible speech</span></strong></a> at this year’s Logie Awards.</p>
<p><strong>Can you tell us a bit about what’s in store for Elizabeth Bligh in the new season of <em>A Place to Call Home</em>? She’s certainly changed a lot from the woman we met back in season one.</strong></p>
<p>I think it’s been a really interesting evolution for Elizabeth Bligh. When [the show] first started people said “Oh, she’s such a bitch,” but I never thought that about her, I always felt she had a lot of secrets that she would do anything to maintain the family’s respectability, the status quo and all the things she was brought up to believe were important.</p>
<p>I think as she’s gotten older and she’s realised that she’s on borrowed time, to an extent, and that the family are all up and running, that they’re all going to make their own way and that the world is changing – American influence is starting to come in after the Second World War, the advent of television in 1956 and we started to get a much wider cultural reference – and so she realises that she has to evolve, she wants the family to be happy as themselves.</p>
<p><strong>The show has been such a hit not only here but all over the world, what do you think it is about it that resonates with so many people?</strong></p>
<p>I think there’s a multiplicity of reasons. I think one of them is that it’s incredibly beautifully done. It’s a world-class standard behind the cameras and in front of the cameras and I think if you pull together a group of people who are that experienced and that talented, then the product is going to be good. And you have people behind it who are willing to put up a decent budget.</p>
<p>I think people also like what they perceive to be the respite of it from the crazy world that we live in now, that it does represent a simpler, more respectful, possibly kinder time.</p>
<p>But then you also realise that if you scratch the surface, underneath there’s all these racist, homophobic attitudes that were always there but not spoken about so overtly as they are now.</p>
<p>Also I think we tend not to know very much about our own history because people are just accessing the information that they want rather than the information that might be useful. And so I think people are genuinely interested to see how far we have or haven’t come on some of these issues.</p>
<p>We know from the fans there’s a lot of grandparents and grandchildren who watch the show together and, you know, those conversations are really valuable now, probably because often it can be very difficult to get children to look up and say anything more than “hello”.</p>
<p><strong>We’d love to hear about your approach to ageing and how it affects your roles, particularly in <em>A Place to Call Home</em> where you play a matriarch who finds herself face-to-face with all these unprecedented social changes that she’s never had to deal with before.</strong></p>
<p>Well it’s better than the alternative! You know, being able to get older [laughs]. Look, I think I’ve never been anyone who’s entertained any thoughts of trying to hold back the years, I can’t see the point – I think you get to the point where you can only play people who’ve had work done.</p>
<p>I’m very interested to be one of the few women who’s never lied about their age or never tried to pretend that they’re unbelievably glamourous or better than everybody else. I think that’s one of the joys of ageing, that you do tend to feel a lot more free, not so constrained by what other people might think. Particularly for women, I think that’s an important thing and I would love to help more young women get that knowledge earlier. It’s still very real for a lot of young women, I think, that they feel they have to act and be a certain way to be acceptable.</p>
<p>I do think as a society we don’t look after older people very well, certainly they’re not represented on our screens in any great number, but then neither are a lot of other ethnic groups other than white Anglo-Saxons. I think it’s interesting that in most people’s lives there is an older person and it’s up to us to learn their stories.</p>
<p>I remember a really sad thing I saw once when one of the original ANZAC soldiers was still alive. He was 104 and a journalist asked him, “what’s the best thing about ANZAC Day, Jack?” and he said, “well, for a couple of weeks every year people don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot.” And I just thought, wow, isn’t that telling that we only think people are worth listening to when they’ve got what we specifically want to know about, otherwise we treat them like idiots. I do think that’s a shame. I think things are changing very slowly. There are some older women now in positions of power which weren’t there before in all kinds of walks of life.</p>
<p><strong>You gave a very powerful speech at this year’s Logie Awards, and it’s quite sad that you’re only the second woman to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. In your speech you called it a “reflection of the prevailing zeitgeist.” How do you think that zeitgeist is changing in terms of gender equality, cultural diversity?</strong></p>
<p>Oh, I just don’t think it should even be a thing. Marriage equality, any kind of equality, it’s just like, why is it not there? And I think the backlash now of people digging their heels in and saying “no, we don’t want change, it’s going to ruin everything,” I just think, what are you so afraid of? What are we afraid of that we think somehow our lives are going to be compromised if other people have equality? I just don’t get that.</p>
<p>I’m very much in favour of putting out the message that, as human beings, we share more similarities than differences. We’re just people, struggling with our day-to-day existence on some level or other. It doesn’t matter if you’re female, black, white, brindle, old, young, you know. We need to look after each other a bit better.</p>
<p><strong>What inspired you to use your platform at the Logie Awards to address issues like that?</strong></p>
<p>I knew I wouldn’t get a platform like that very often, particularly being an older female in the industry. I didn’t write [the speech] until the morning of the awards, I’d just been trying to think about what to say for weeks and it just came spilling out.</p>
<p>I’ve been talking about this sort of stuff for a long time, it was just a plea, really, for looking after kids and giving them some balance. I just thought, I’m so sick and tired of hearing about kids being made to feel anxious and worried about the horrible things going on in the world. You know, the world’s always been a horrible place, if that was your focus, but we didn’t always have the horribleness thrown in our faces 24/7. I think [the speech] had a bit of an impact because people aren’t used to hearing that sort of stuff on TV – real stuff.</p>
<p><strong>You’ve had such a long, incredible career. Looking back, what would you say you’re proudest of?</strong></p>
<p>Playschool, definitely. It taught me so much, it really did. It taught me not only how to communicate but also how important it is to look after our little kids, and if you get it wrong, beyond that it’s Band-Aids, you know. It gets harder and harder to give good input into children’s lives. Once they hit school, they’re sort of out of your control, really, listening to everyone else but you. So it’s really important that we give them some peace and some gentleness and stuff they can actually cope with.</p>
<p><strong>You’ve not only had success in the world of television but also film, theatre and radio. What would you like to do more of in the future, and do you have any upcoming projects you’d like to share with us?</strong></p>
<p>I love doing theatre, obviously, because there’s nothing like that live relationship. And I’m actually about to embark on a regional tour of New South Wales and Queensland with a play I did in Victoria and Tassie last year called <em>Mother</em>, which is a one-woman play written for me by Daniel Keene.</p>
<p>I’d love to direct more, I directed before my kids were born and realised it’s something you can’t do when you have young kids, so I’d love to do that again. I just want to keep doing work that interests me with people who challenge me and finding stories to tell that are worth telling.</p>
<p><em>Season four of </em>A Place to Call Home<em> premieres Sunday, 11th September at 8.30pm on <a href="https://www.foxtel.com.au/watch/a-place-to-call-home.html" target="_blank"><span style="text-decoration: underline;"><strong>showcase</strong></span></a>.</em></p>
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