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What I've Learnt - Nikki Gemmell · WHAT I'VE LEARNT

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_03: Nikki Gamel is the best-selling author of 13 novels and four works of nonfiction.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_03: They've been translated into 22 languages.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_03: Her distinctive writing has gained her critical acclaim in France, where she's been described as a female Jack Kerouac.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_03: The French literary magazine Lira has included her in a list of what is called the 50 most important writers in the world, those it believes will have a significant influence on the literature of the 21st century.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_03: Her first renowned work is the 2003 novel The Bride Stripped Bear.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_03: An explicit exploration of female sexuality thrust the new author Nikki into the headlights and the limelight.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_03: But more about that later.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_03: As well as publishing her powerful and much anticipated books, Nikki regularly pens a weekly column for the Australian newspaper.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_03: Stirring the pot while raising some of the key issues, particularly affecting women, her column is like a big, beautiful, sometimes scary mirror, reflecting many home truths and female challenges.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_03: Four books by Gamel, Shiver, Cleve, The Bride Strip Bear, and The Book of Rapture, made the long list of favourite Australian novels as chosen by readers of the Australian Book Review.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_03: I'd just like to say I'm very got it.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_03: I'm very excited to have the wonderful Nikki Gemmel on the What I've Lon podcast.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_03: And she was just telling me very informatively and honestly, what would you like to tell me, Nikki?
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_02: Give me a little Well, I just wanted to say that I'm actually doing this podcast sitting on an exercise ball so that every time I move, it sounds like I'm farting.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: So please don't think I'm farting all the way through the podcast.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: You're not having that effect on me.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_02: It's the exercise ball.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_03: Is it is I'm very relieved to hear this and thank you for your rawness.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I'd like to know is this for your core?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_03: Is this what you're doing for your core?
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_03: Why is it?
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, because my lower back is shot.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_02: I've got you know pain everywhere across the top bit because I've just my posture is so bad.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_02: So because I just sit in front of a desk with a uh a laptop and I'm like all hunched over.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um, one of my kids found an exercise ball in the um council clear out the other week and just picked it up and brought it home.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I was like, oh, I'm having that.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, I think are you just as long as you don't roll away.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_03: Are you stern?
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, exactly.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_02: If you don't ask me nice questions, I'm just rolling off.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: You'll be rolling.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: I'll just go, where's Nikki?
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, she's gone.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, at least my listeners are now braced for what's to come.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_03: I'm not.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'll take care of you.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, all roll away.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_03: So Nikki, I would like to give a little, I have given a little intro and a snapshot of you, which is quite extensive, but we'll just cut to the chase because there is so much for you and I to unpack.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_03: There are many chapters of your life that I'd like to touch on.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_03: Sorry about the pun, but had to use that.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um funny, funny, hilarious.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_03: So I would like to start by giving you a little bit of a lead-in, other than your exercise ball.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_03: Um, Nikki's first renowned work, the 2003 novel, The Bride Strip Bear, which, if anybody hasn't read it, go and buy it because it is just, I loved it.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_03: It was quite life-changing for a lot of women, but we would talk about that.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_03: It's an explicit exploration of female sexuality, and it thrust the new author at the time, Nikki, into the headlights and limelight, as well as publishing her powerful and much anticipated books.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_03: Nikki regularly pens a weekly column for the Australian newspaper.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_03: Stirring the pot while raising some of the key issues, particularly affecting women.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_03: Her column is like a big, beautiful, sometimes scary mirror, reflecting many home truths and touching female issues, and certainly not for the faint-hearted, which is why I love listening and reading all of your stuff.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_03: So, Nikki, welcome to the What I've Learnt podcast.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_03: It's great to be you.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, well, actually, it was wonderful to see you last week and wonderful attending your session as part of the love and desire panel at the Byron Writers Festival.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_03: You had a lot of fun because we did too, and it was really powerful, actually.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_03: It was beautiful, but I'm sure it was a very fun festival.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_03: And I actually interviewed you for my column in the Melbourne Age more than a decade ago about your breakout novel, The Bride Strip Bear, which we mentioned before.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_03: And I loved it.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_03: It was a brave, raw, and controversial entry which catapulted you into the literary stratosphere, but there was a betrayal too.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_03: So talk to me about how fact is often stranger than fiction.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_03: Tell me about how that book and experience changed your life and why you wrote it.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_02: Oh God, it changed my life dramatically for years and years and years and years.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, basically, I just had my first baby.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_02: I was in this little bubble of lovely motherhood, this little nesty world of just my husband and my newborn in London, an Aussie expat in London.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_02: And um, I just wanted to write something, and I was also broke.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: I just left full-time work.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: I was like 34, and it was the first time I'd ever been without work.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: I'd gone on maternity leave and decided not to go back.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: So I was like, oh my god, I'm a working woman with no money and no career ahead of me.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: What am I gonna do?
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_02: So I thought I'll write a book.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_02: I'll write a book about sex within marriage, and it would be brutally honest.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: But as I started writing this book, I just found myself censoring myself.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I couldn't be honest.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_02: I was trying to protect too many worlds, my little bubble of lovely newborn loveliness, my partner, myself.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: I just I couldn't make it sing.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_02: And then a couple of months into the writing process, which wasn't working, I read Virginia Wolf, a room of one's own.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: And she says, oh, isn't it?
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_02: And she says, in that, anonymity is a women's woman's refuge.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_02: And as soon as I read that, it was like, oh my god, that's the light bulb that's gone off in my head.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_02: I'll just disappear from the whole process.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_02: There's something about, you know, giving birth.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_02: You feel kind of egoless, and I just thought I didn't need to have my name on a book anymore.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: This was my fourth novel.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't want my name on this book.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_02: So I embarked upon this exhilarating process of writing the bride's strip bear anonymously, and it was completely unlocking.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_02: It felt fantastic.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: I could suddenly say everything that I wanted to say about sex and sex within marriage and marriage and partners, just be brutally honest in a way that I'd never been able to be because I'd always been so careful with the image I presented to the world and all the rest of it.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought this is fantastic.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_02: The book just really worked suddenly.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: I could feel its strength, the way it just kind of radiated, honesty.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_02: And then it went to the Frankfurt Book Fair, and that's the big world kind of fair for books, you know, publishers all go there to buy books to publish.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: And it went there and um uh the newspapers picked up on what is this anonymous book, who's written it.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: As soon as I saw a little article, I was in the Daily Telegraph, it was in the Daily Telegraph in London, and I was reading that paper on the bus coming home, and I just my heart sank.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_02: As soon as I read that, I knew, oh my god, they're gonna find out who it is.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_02: They're gonna find out that it's me.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_02: And lo and behold, it wasn't that long afterwards.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_02: They did.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, look, for me, it was awful.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_02: And then people said, Oh, you did it on purpose for publicity, and it was all a thing to sell books, and it was like actually I'm just devastated to be in the middle of this.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_02: I can remember it was a day or two before Bridesdrip Bear was published in the UK, and we were driving back from Cornwall to London, my husband in the seat next to me.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_02: I had a pillow on my lap, and I was vomiting with the stress of the whole situation into that pillow as we drove up the highway.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_02: And that was my first ever migraine headache, and I've had them ever since.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_02: It's now been almost 20 years since that book was published, and um, I still get migraine headaches.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um incredible though.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_03: Do you think so?
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_03: I also get migraine headaches, so I relate to it, but do you think it comes from that sort of?
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, yes, there was that raw exposure, and it may, and it's obviously triggered something deep within you.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_03: And migraines, I think, are often a symbol symptom of a whole range of things, but from what you're describing, it was a trauma.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_03: It was an absolute trauma.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_02: It it was a trauma.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_02: I think a lot of trauma is about loss of control, and I felt I completely lost control with that book, with where it was in the world, with with me as the author, with um my literary career, because I'd had two, three kind of novels of literary fiction published before then.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I completely shot myself in the foot with that.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_02: I just felt like I couldn't control the narrative around this book.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_02: I couldn't control what happened to it.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_02: I had just wanted to disappear from it, and um, I was very brutally the public face of it.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so it was all about a loss of control.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I guess ever since then, I've seen that stress in my life is to do with uncertainty and not knowing where I stand with something and not being able to control a situation.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and I think that's quite common.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_03: I think a lot of women in particular can relate to that.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, this was a very public outing of sorts, and and it wrenched it out of your out of your very safe hands that you'd carefully protected.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_03: So, so how did that um uh affect your husband, for example, and and how did you navigate that?
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_03: And you and I touched on that briefly in our first interview years ago, and we will move on because there's so many of your incredible books that I just have read all of them, I love them.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but that in particular, I was really interested about the power of literature and words to be so transformative and also for people to be so curious to out you in that way.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, it was before social media had its gone.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_03: Can you imagine?
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my god, you know, you know.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_03: So, so how did it affect your relationship and how did you navigate that?
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_03: What were your tools?
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_03: And were you supported by your publisher in navigating that?
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I I was.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the publishers were very aware that there was this traumatized person at the center of everything, but they also wanted to sell books, and it made me realize brutally that you know, this is a business, this is a business for their product.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, this is a great story to sell books.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I also, because I felt like I'd lost control of the narrative, I wanted to explain myself.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_02: So, but part of the stress of the whole thing was explaining myself over and over again and people not listening, people just making up their own minds, journalists just not accepting my side of the story, thinking they knew the best.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_02: The one rock in the whole thing, ironically, was my husband.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: I think if he had been traumatized by the whole thing, furious, uh, had disowned it, whatever, that would have just, you know, broken me.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: But he was, he was supportive.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_02: I can remember when he read the manuscript for the first time, and I was like, oh God, don't read it, don't read it, you don't have to, oh god, I'm so embarrassed.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's really embarrassing.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, blushing saying it.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_02: He was turned on.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: It was like, oh, I love that.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, I get it.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, oh Nikki, I reckon that is the best line of all that your husband was turned on by the revelatory, you know, it's like a reverse sort of it's really fascinating that that was his response, but that goes to why the fact that you'd shown in the manuscript first was a good thing, but also it shows that that he at the core of what your story is is that that authenticity between the two of you.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you know, from bride onwards, with my relationship with him and with my writing, it made me real, it makes me realize honesty works.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_02: Honesty is powerful.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_02: If you say the truth, if you tell the truth, it's authentic and it doesn't actually push people away, which is what I completely feared about the bride student bear.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_02: It draws people in.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_02: And the main thing about that book was its vulnerability.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_02: It's a book about female vulnerability when it comes down to sexuality, and it kind of was talking about stuff that I had never articulated to my husband before or any of my sexual partners before him.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_02: So I think for him, yeah, it was really good to just uh have the honest conversation that the book kind of exploded between us.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: But I realized as the months and years went on that a lot of partners were having very honest conversations because of that book and what triggered relationships.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's true, and it expressed a lot of what other women couldn't express.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_03: So you actually became a very powerful voice and still are and still do.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_03: And and and moving along to your book, Cleave, which I also loved, um, and and you know, you you talk about, you know, um that you know, you'd like uh book it was one of a trilogy about women in tough places, and you say regarding that, I wanted in a way to subvert the boys' own adventure genre, to write about sensual, sexual, feminine experiences of traditionally masculine environments like the Central Australian Desert and Antarctica.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_03: So you're very much about uh, first of all, the setting is is very powerful.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_03: And you say my novels begin not with character or plot, but with place, which I thought was interesting.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_03: Cleve began with the Central Australian Desert.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_03: It's very interesting.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_03: So talk to me about that and how you gave birth to that one.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_02: I I love desert, I love um landscapes that hum with silence in a way.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I was working out in Alice Springs at the time uh when I was writing Cleve, and I was just like fascinated and entranced and enchanted by this very brutal world out there.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: And I was I was a young journalist for ABC Radio at the time, but I had my novelist notebooks alongside my reporting notebooks.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_02: I never really wanted to be a journalist, a reporter.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_02: I always wanted to write fiction, but I needed, you know, I needed um money.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_02: And I just didn't have any family money behind me.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_02: I had to make a living for myself.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_02: I was raised by a single mum.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_02: She'd always said to me, never rely on a man.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: You have to be financially independent.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_02: I had those lessons drummed into me from early from you know childhood.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_02: And so I was out in Central Australia making a living, but dreaming of being a novelist and writing in my notebooks, you know, what the landscape looked like, conversation scraps, thinking about ideas for a story, a road trip, all the rest of it.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_02: So that's where Cleve came from.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, another great book for my listeners to put on their list if they haven't read it already.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_03: I come to dissolve your book that obviously you were talking about that at the festival, and I I've actually read it and I'm reading it again because it's like another.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I love that book.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_03: Fabulous.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_03: I would not go back unless it was for it was so um I'm actually reading again and I love a rhythm.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_03: And obviously, I'm a journalist, so I love the way you do incorporate that journalistic road trip feel, that genre.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_03: It's entrancing.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_03: What inspired this tale of love and liberty?
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_03: It just somehow, it's well, the word dissolve just in itself makes me want to read something coming up at the time.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, good, good.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_03: But yeah, no, it made me go, dissolve.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_03: What's dissolving?
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_03: Her, him, what, you know.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_03: So so talk to me about dissolve because you know, a lot of people are really interested in this if they haven't read it already.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_02: So dissolve um came from a very dark chapter in my life that I had never written about.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh in my mid-20s, I was going to get married, and um, I had the chapel booked at my old convent school.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I finally felt normal.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_02: This was after years and years of really kind of bleak, lonely one-night stands and never really having a proper boyfriend and thinking, am I unlovable?
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_02: Am I never gonna be able to do this whole relationship thing?
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: What is wrong with me?
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_02: I can't do it.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_02: I'm so envious of all those couples that I see in the park on a Sunday afternoon.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_02: That's never gonna be me.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: You know, years and years of bleak kind of loneliness.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: And then I fell truly madly, deeply in love with someone in my mid-twenties for the first time in my life I had ever felt like this.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_02: It was the coup de foudre, you know, which the French term of literally you are just swept away by someone, and the passion is so extreme and immense.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_02: And we had this, you know, incredibly sexy relationship for a couple of years.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_02: He was a writer, an older writer.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_02: I desperately wanted to be a writer, and by that I mean not a journalist, but a fiction writer, a creative writer.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: So he was everything I held in high esteem.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_02: And um, we were gonna get married, you know, it was all kind of ticking along.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_02: And then one day he took me out to an Indian restaurant and he just said to me, I can't do it.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_02: I just can't go through with this.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I was about 25, 26.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_03: He wrote it two weeks, yeah, two weeks before the wedding, wasn't it?
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_03: It was quite a bit.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_02: I was a little bit more, it was a little bit more than that.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_02: It was about six weeks before the wedding.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_02: Still mortifying, humiliating.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_02: I felt your greatest fear, failure.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_02: My greatest fear, you know, I'd come from a split family or traumatically split family.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_02: I I felt ever since childhood that, you know, maybe I just couldn't do this love thing because I didn't have any role models for it.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't know how to do it, I didn't think I could ever do it.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so when he said, Oh, you know, I can't, I can't go through with this, he completely just affirmed all the self-hatred and the lot lack of self-esteem within me.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, I just I it took me years and years and years to recover and to have any self-worth from that time.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_02: So I'd never written about it.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it was something about me too that kind of galvan out, galvanized me into thinking the me too movement.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_02: I just kind of look back at all the relationships I'd had, um, and just you know, what I'd gone through as a young woman, including on a film set when I was 16, and thinking, you know, in terms of power and older men and the expectations of men, the confidence of men, what they expected me to do as a young woman, how they weren't even interested in me, in seeing who I was, in having a conversation with me.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: They just wanted to perhaps have sex with me, or not even that.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_02: I just I've always kept journals, and so from about 14 onwards, as I became, you know, sexual in my late teens, lost my virginity at 18, you know, I'd go back and I'd write out everything that happened and everything I felt, including the night that I lost my virginity in a room with with with yeah, what was that story?
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: Because I yeah, that was uh wasn't it quite a well that that made me, you know, and I look at young women now, and and you know, for me that night was I was just a hole to him.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I was just a hole.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_02: He was he he was with he took me over to uh a group of his mates, they were all university guys, and they were all ended up in the lounge room, we peeled off into a bedroom, and I can remember as I lost my virginity, it was like, oh is that it?
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, is that is that what this is all about?
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I had so desperately wanted to lose my virginity for years and years, craved this moment.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_02: I think what shocked me most of all was the complete absence of tenderness, and in a way, I've sought tenderness forever onwards, and you know, and and I've just I I just feel like it's crucial to have the courage of your tenderness.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, DH Lawrence talked a lot about it in Lady Chatterley's Lover, that you know that what made Melors, the gamekeeper, stand out was that conviction of his tenderness and you know that kind of generosity in a lover.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_02: You can sense it immediately, and it's transformative for a woman, for anyone on the receiving side.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, the interesting thing is also though, your experience I think is much very universal for a lot of women.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and therefore it resonates a lot and it's really confronting when it was just sort of a lot of people just experienced that, and it was just like, yeah, so what?
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, like it was an invisibility, and that's something that I'm hoping the next generation.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: certainly your kids, my daughters, that there's a sense of I think they're much more educated, empowered, and and and have a voice.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_03: Whereas I think you know you and I in that generation, a lot of women I knew experienced that very almost you know duplicate version of your story.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_03: Like it's it's not exactly it was not uncommon at all.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_02: That's what's so uh yeah I I wrote I wrote dissolve um for those younger generations of women in a way you know to say this is what we went through kind of the bewilderment of feeling wrong and why why aren't I getting tenderness and why am I just treated as a whole you know I can remember afterwards when that bloke who took my virginity he walked back out to the lads in the lounge room and he just kind of raised his finger like that like you know I've done it.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_02: And that's that just reduced me to literally the whole and and you know that feeling of humiliation and mortification and bewilderment that that was all I was to him.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: And you know I look at young women now and I think my God they're so sparky and stubborn and outspoken and articulate and it's fabulous.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_02: But reports tell us that you know we were we are most confident still aged nine what happens to us as we go through puberty as we you know walk through those young teenage years and into early adulthood we question ourselves.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_02: We we say eroded yeah something gets eroded what is that our confidence so I think that's why I wanted to write Dissolve too I wanted to examine all of that and write it for young women as a handbook of you know us as women who've gone ahead of them to say it's okay what you're feeling we understand we've gone through this too here are strategies possibly for climbing out of it.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_02: If you feel like you're wrong and the world doesn't understand you you're not alone because that's how I felt when I was younger.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_02: I I just felt so alone and so odd and weird that I felt like misaligned with the world and what the world was telling me to be.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_02: It's like I don't want to be that I don't want to quieten my voice.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want to be this meek nice little girl you know that accommodating it's that accommodating yeah that that's the only way we can succeed but that's what I was had drummed into me and as so many of us did.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_03: And that also came from often a religious perspective or a school context there was that sort of overlay always that lens be nice and everything will work out but actually it really doesn't or didn't necessarily for a lot of people I think the voice of a lot of the young women that I see and I'm sure you you um see this yourself there is a lot of them many of them are standing up and being much more assertive.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_03: However one could argue that social media white gives them I suppose platforms to express that concern that you just raised it also cultivates an element of compliance you know that is really disturbing.
• 25:03
  SPEAKER_03: So that that's a whole other thing you and I did not have to deal with and I think that's something that we all have to as mothers as women be very mindful of and a lot of the girls are talking about it which is good to hear.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_03: Just coming back to you you've had some really interesting chapters in your life which are actually not book related but actually life related which of course your books are a reflection often of things you have experienced but in particular your mum's tragic suicide was a pretty tough one and you write beautiful I mean you know in an interview you said she would have been the magnificent the most magnificent single childless woman.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_03: She would have seized life all the opportunities came too late.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_03: She had potentially decades to live she had grandchildren to enjoy and a job she loved at the New South Wales Parliament House yet she was found dead in her flat by builders having swallowed pills and with a book by Philip Nietzsche by her side I got goosebumps when I read that because while I know it was a complex relationship and I know it was not straightforward as it never is talk to me about whether you think well first of all how you process that and do you think things are changing where maybe we're a little more nuanced and tuned to older women and older men to some degree but it is it's it's a very powerful story that.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_03: Can you talk to us a little bit about that?
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_02: Oh look I'm I'm still processing it.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_02: For anyone who's had anyone close to them suicide I mean well for me and I think a lot of us in those situations we immediately go to what did I do wrong?
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_02: You know why why wasn't I there for her how was I remiss um or I flay myself over the signs I didn't see and what I didn't do and what I could have done differently to have saved mum in some way she went on a very kind of lonely private journey.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_02: She didn't tell any of her family she gave us tints but we never took them seriously or her friends she never told them either it was just so shocking she uh found a rich world and community within the world of um assisted dying and you know a few times mum had said to me oh do you want to come along to a meeting about it and I was like oh no mum mum what do you what what no no I don't it felt almost cult like to me and I know that was so wrong.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_02: I I was afraid I was afraid she'd go down a rabbit hole of the whole thing and um in the end well she had chronic pain and based she was in her late 70s and she'd had a foot operation like nine months before she killed herself and uh that operation introduced her to oxycontin opioids and she became addicted and doctor shopped and the pain didn't stop and as is being discovered with Oxycontin that um you know the more you take the less effective they become so she was taking more and more not able to get over the pain and you know so I wrote my book after about this whole journey it was a journey that began with bewilderment with two police officers landing on my doorstep saying your mother's died and then I very quickly realized they were trying to work out what my role in the whole thing was it was like my God this is a death investigation that's almost like a murder mystery that they were asking me you know do you know what Oxycontin is and how did she get the pills and blah blah and I was like what I've never heard of this and so in a way my journalist novelist brain was going you know what I want to unravel this mystery just as much as you do so I'm going to do it alongside you.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_02: So I was you know interviewing Philip Nitske I was interviewing Mum's doctor I was interviewing you know friends of hers and and people who she'd met within the Dying with dignity community and I learned so much through just talking to people I should have done that before I died but mum was on a path before she died before your mum died before she died yeah yeah I mean I think that was a very powerful probably Freudian slip what you just said because a part of you you know like that you just you know part of you obviously feels like that went with her the fact you said I mean even though it was it's clearly the fact that you were prepared to really enter that world and understand it, you used your toolkit and that toolkit is your ability to interview and to process and to write.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah well to understand I think with all my books whether it's Brides Trip Bear or Dissolve or after about Mum's suicide I write to understand.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_02: So I I write you know it it begins with a question of like what what went on there?
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like with Dissolve and you know the breakup of that relationship what actually happened there and I was only able to look back at that with the perspective of decades down the track.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_02: So you know I I had to have a daughter and and witness the Me Too movement and all the rest of it before my brain could process that trauma.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_02: And with my mum it was the same.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_02: I I I just had to process what on earth had happened there.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_02: You know some I write a column in the weekend Australian that most often begins with a question too.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_02: Often I don't answer the question through that writing and through those words but I go on the journey as a writer and I talk to people I write to understand not necessarily to come to a conclusion but that's just my process.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah and I think it's I makes a lot of sense it's what I do really a very similar concept it's what have I learned and how can I learn and I want to understand and that's very much what you do which is why I think so many of your books resonate for me because I love your process.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_03: I love the fact that you don't try and solve everything you actually just take us on the journey you know and that requires a lot of courage.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_03: And so just in a nutshell I suppose which is hard to sum up what did you learn from doing that research about what had happened with mum and obviously we now know about the fentanyl crisis all over the world and I mean it's a very you know it's ironic isn't it that it's become so it's in the paper almost every second day this issue.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_02: What I learnt with and my my father passed away a couple of years after her he died from lung cancer very traumatic protracted death during COVID.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_02: What I learned comparing those two deaths was mum's death was a death of control.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_02: She had absolute control over the way she left and that was a solace actually to me and my family that she did it her way.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_02: She was empowered with what she wanted to do and then subsequently you know one by one all the states have kind of fallen in terms of allowing a sister dying yet sharing to the rafters that that has happened.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_02: Unfortunately for her though those laws would not have embraced her in any of the states because her chronic pain condition wasn't terminal it wasn't killing her it was just making her life unbearable.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_02: So she still she even in this day and age she still would have had to have taken matters into her own hands.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_02: And what I also understood because I was so bewildered and bereft that she had left me out of the story and hadn't told me what she was going to do.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_02: But through my process of researching the whole thing with the book after was I discovered that what she did that out of love.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_02: She was protecting me and my brothers because she knew if we had known legally we could have been charged as accessories after the fact in terms of her death that there were all kinds of legal entanglements if we had known and assisted her in any way.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_02: So mum's thinking was we assume just keep the kids out of it to keep them safe but I don't think she would ever have realized the way it broke not only her children but her grandchildren too that was that was the really sad thing that my my eldest was 16 and he adored his nonna his his his grandma and um he he was just devastated and broken because he felt abandoned you know why why has she done this?
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_03: Why has she left us when she loved me didn't she and it was just there was so much to go through I mean it's a really yeah it's I mean I've got goosebumps listening to you you know because it is a very powerful and emotional story to be honest that we can all resonate many of us can resonate the notion though also of she was still the parent trying to protect you but actually that complexity around protection and abandonment and people getting older and wanting to look after them but at the same time allowing them to have their own journey and be independent and not micromanage them which is probably what I'm assuming you were trying to do which is like she obviously was an extremely intelligent independent woman who had sort of fallen through the cracks in a way and found herself stuck.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_03: So you know I I thought it was very powerful listening to you talk on that and I'm I'm hoping that that healing is it's always a work in progress isn't it it's it's it's a tough one.
• 34:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah but the book the the book helped writing that that that was a healing process for me.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_03: Writing is always writing's my anchor it always helps me through yeah yeah I I I can see that because you you write with and you're also very very courageous.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_03: You don't shy away from things where do you think that came from I mean you know I I know that you're also if we go right back to your history of when and I'll never forget interviewing you and you said you know it was quite extraordinary my we were in the family court and the judge just literally carved my family down the middle and my mother is a family court she's in the family law and I remember saying to her is that normal what do you mean they just divide a family down the middle what happened that really was the beginning it way back when I can't remember how old you were exactly but I was 10.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah you were young yeah and I mean do you think that's where you had to learn about courage and strength and not being and and having a voice or what part did that play?
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_02: No, no I mean you know my so my parents took up when I was 10 and back in those days you know it went to the family court I remember having to go to the family court and testifying and the judge decided that my two older brothers would go with my father and that me as the girl would go with my mother.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_02: So it just imploded our family completely and the reverberations are still felt decades later.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_02: I still feel stained by that whole situation I know my middle brother does too.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_02: But from that I I just learned to kind of internalise everything I I I didn't become outspoken and honest.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_02: It wasn't until I became a writer that I found my voice and that wasn't until my mid to late twenties really I had my first novel Shiver published when I was 30 which I also loved that book and that was so honest yeah and I I there was just something so empowering and affirming about finally finally after all these years of feeling submerged and dissolved as a woman as a female finally being able to say my truth and to talk honestly and really what I've learned through decades now of writing is that honesty connects you know Ian Foster the English novelist his little refrain was only connect and I I so subscribe to that because I think that's the way we speak to a reader.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_03: It's like holding out our hand to them and saying you know you're not alone you're not alone yeah and I think that's right it is a very powerful medium and you have mastered it but you've also carved your very own style that is you know over all these years what is it 13 novels have you written I think you know that's look I've lost power you know my bride's made she gets some singer tomorrow she'll get cranky at me again she says gamble how many is it all Adam I'm gonna go to one of your books I'm gonna add them up.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_03: So you know you're in the front of a book so the latest book she got and just add it up how many it was I've forgotten again it's like when you think it's about 13 or 15 oh yeah because you had the nonfiction and the fiction and nonfiction and you've got all of it you've got to blend um yeah you've done all the kids' books I mean you've done so many.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_03: So as a columnist at The Weekend Australian your work is often tapping the zeitgeist and it's very brave brazen and authentic very similar to a lot of your published work is it challenging and you've mentioned you've had threats from some of the readers too which I found interesting also great support from readers as well.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_02: Tell me about the highs and lows and how you choose your issue or your column for the week which is actually quite hard because you have to actually discern what is the issue is it my issue their issue your issue how do you make that it is hard and you as a you know a newspaper journo from way back will know in terms of well I'm in the weekend magazine which means it's not the deadline is quite so yeah yeah so I actually have to file my column about three weeks before that magazine hits the newsstands.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_02: So whatever I write I have to think about is this still current in three weeks' time in fact just before we jumped on this podcast I'm doing I want to do a column on the female response the women's network going crazy to the Lynette Dawson um guilty verdict last week but I'm thinking will it feel stale in in three weeks how can I write it that it still feels fresh and current years ago I wrote about Julia Gillard and I can remember my lovely editor Christine Midap saying to me at the time you know I don't think we better call her Prime Minister because within three weeks she might not be Prime Minister.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_02: So I remember there was the conscious decision of calling her Mrs.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_02: Gillard through or Gillard or something through throughout the whole thing and lo and behold within those three weeks she was toppled.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_02: So she wasn't our Prime Minister anymore.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_02: The column still stood because I was writing in a way that either if she was there or not it would still stand looking at her legacy.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_02: But I've always got that question in my head.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_02: So it's very hard coming up with I think very challenging and and not to repeat myself I have you know I feel like I've written about kids and screens a few too many times.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_02: So I have to kind of just control myself with that one.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_03: That Lynette Dawson which is really really I mean I'm sure you've read everything on it as have I because you just sit there going well yeah like it was just so exactly and it's like yeah exactly my column it's so obvious yes it's like it's just like it took millions of dollars millions of people like I mean thousands of piece of paperwork to get to that so in your without preempting your column although we can if you want just what um what what is your reflection briefly on that and and and how can you use your column or what do you what do you aim to do with your column in terms of your because it's it is a very well read and very very well followed what I suppose is your mission there if you have well I I want to be positive about the whole thing.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_02: My mission is that it's such a positive that women are believed and listened to now.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I actually I I want to bring in um Blaze the new new film from Catherine Delbarton too.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_02: So that is a wonderfully creative ferocious powerful film about a young girl who witnesses a traumatic incident of sexual violence and murder and is kind of repressed by the whole thing but then finally tells her story and feels released and is listened to so I think my column I'm still formulating my column but I think my Chris Dawson Blaise column is about just that affirmation of what when we are listened to that our truth is listened to because I was going back to the Lynette Dawson stuff and I think it was the boss of the childcare center where she was working at the time said you know at the time of her disappearance Chris her husband was a celebrity you know mini celebrity he was a football player he was good looking he was you know a school teacher people just believed what he said and so you know they were willing to cast aspersions on Lynn's character that yes well Chris says that she's walked out on him and the two kids so we will just believe him.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_02: And I think what I loved about the Dawson judgment was that her reputation was restored in a way that we as women always knew she had a good heart and she was a good woman.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_02: We knew her reputation was intact but you know why did it take the world 40 years to see this?
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_02: But again and again we see it you know female reputations are blackened and besmirched and all the rest of it it was ever thus but I do feel like you know things are changing slowly.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_03: Well that's really good yeah that's really oh no I think I can't wait to read the column um no I actually I I I totally agree with you and I think there is a lot of change and I think there's a lot of awareness and I think this sort of judgment does really change as you know I mean the law's always the slowest to catch up with everything but it really does change the way people and it's the same with the R.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_03: Kelly and you know that that he's been finally caught up with and I mean there's just so many examples yes where that sort of celebrity not just celebrity like R.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_03: Kelly but anybody who has a role in the community it's like oh my god I'm reading his text today have you seen all this dialogue you know today and yesterday this incredible dialogue that he is putting up and it is it is mind blowing millions and millions and millions of these people are supporting this behavior.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah this damaged man uh it's it's really sad.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_02: But yes we we're so blinded in a way by celebrity which you can just feel must have happened back in the Dawson days too you know and and and you know even now I mean the Queensland police force there are there are a lot of stories about you know Problems within that force.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure across the board nationally there are problems, but there's a focus on the Queensland police force.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_02: You know, that men believe other men.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_02: They don't see the female side of thing and the female perspective.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_02: So you can completely understand why cops back in the early 80s would have just taken Chris at his word when women are going, no, listen to us.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, listen to her.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_02: Can't you see her perspective?
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_02: But, you know, they they just couldn't or wouldn't.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_03: And you know what?
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_03: Even the Britney Spears Conservatorship, another example.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I could literally think of so many examples, but I think what your column does, what I'm interested in too, is just briefly tell me you have had some tough, you know, you've had some threats and you've had some people who have given you a hard time.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_03: Now, what's that over and why?
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_03: Why?
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, look, I can never choose, I can never pick it.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_02: I could never know what column is going to go off in terms of the hatred and the death threats.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_02: One of them, you know, one year I just said, look, I'm over the Melbourne Cup, never want to watch it again.
• 45:09
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's really cruel.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_02: Horses dying at the end of it, you know, not for me.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_02: I had abusive emails from the horse racing industry for months afterwards, death threats, including a torrent of abuse that came through because I have my email address published under the column.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_02: It was a torrent of abuse that came through around lunchtime on Christmas Day, you know, of several months after the Melbourne Cup that year.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_02: And it was like, who would be so furious over something I've written that they would feel compelled on Christmas Day at lunchtime at lunchtime to send off a diatribe to me?
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, someone who's very sad and very lonely.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that happens again and again with the abuse I receive.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_02: You know, columns, oh God, another one that I said, you know, another one was golf courses.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_02: I had no idea that there was such feeling over golf courses.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_02: That was like, why can't we turn over some of these spaces, inner city golf courses in particular, to um kids on bikes and you know, families, picnicking and all the rest of it.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that was another one, the golf lobby that went off.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_02: And what so there's there this problem, oh, another one was male gynec uh uh gynecologists and obstetricians.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_02: I I again it was just a thing of why aren't there writing to understand why aren't there more female gynecologists?
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I'd love to see more female gynecologists.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_02: It was just my musings, my thoughts.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_02: That one went global.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_02: I had uh, you know, six months, probably a year later, abuse, threats, people, obstetricians trying to get me sacked.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it just went on and on.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_02: But what I've realized is that it was the golfing lobby, the horse racing industry, obstetricians.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_02: It's always when money is involved.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_02: So it's always when, you know, someone's livelihood is threatened, I think, that that's when the abuse comes, the death threats, the bots, you know, a lot of it with the obstetricians and with the horse racing stuff.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_02: It was like I remember something my editor or someone saying to me, you know, they're they're Russian bots, they're they're repeating themselves.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um so I just think when big money is involved, that's why when people get very, very angry and try and crush a woman's voice, a woman who is asking perhaps uncomfortable questions.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I also get the feeling a lot that people just want to silence me.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, stop me asking those questions, uh, particularly with the column, with various things that I write, they just want me to go away.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_02: To counter that, I have wonderful, wonderful readers who just keep me going.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_02: And look, thank you to everyone out there who's ever sent me something or just said something to me at a writers' festival or in the street or whatever it is.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my god, you guys keep me going because sometimes it feels really, really hard.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_02: But I don't want to stop because there are many fabulous women writers.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_02: I feel like we have lost their voices over the years, particularly in the UK over the last couple of years.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_02: There's writers who I've always loved reading and they've disappeared from the scene, they've gone underground a bit to Substack or whatever.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_02: But it's like, oh gosh, I loved your voice.
• 48:26
  SPEAKER_02: I loved your honesty, I loved your bluntness, your courage, the bravery to be honest.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_02: And I just we need more women like that in the writing space.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_03: So I agree a hundred percent.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_03: And I am so grateful that you have persisted because actually I can only imagine, and you know, to some degree, what I'm doing with the podcast, it's that same, you just persist with your lens, with your perspective.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_03: You hope it resonates, and you have enormous supporters.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_03: You have a lot of support, but also followers and people who absolutely adore what you do, and those people that are trying to bully you, which it is, it's pure unadulterated bullying.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_03: We've all had it, we've all seen it.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_03: And at the end of the day, your courage is also a great example to your children, to their friends, to all of the women and young men as well, who need to know that the female voices are being listened to, and yours certainly is.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_03: So I am so grateful for you coming onto the What I've Learnt podcast and chatting because I love talking to you and I could talk forever because you know, we'll have to get you back on because there's just so much to talk about.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_02: Mama Dev, thank you so much.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_02: I adored talking with you, and my exercise ball didn't start once.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'm so relieved.
• 49:45
  SPEAKER_01: And you're still here, you haven't rolled away backwards or sideways.
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_01: So your question, thank you.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: Will you have a wonderful and also you've worked your call for the whole hour?
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, exactly.
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_01: I've worked your call when you say thank you.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: Will you have a wonderful day?
• 50:03
  SPEAKER_03: And uh I look forward to seeing you at the next festival.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_03: You were brilliant at the Byron Riders Festival, it was wonderful, and I'll be there next year.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_03: Um lovely!
• 50:12
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, take care.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: You too.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_01: Bye.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_03: Thanks so much for listening.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_03: The What I've Learned podcast will now be coming to you weekly with new episodes released every Tuesday.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_03: I'm blessed to have so many wonderful guests coming on the show.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_03: So check out my What I've Learned Instagram for updates.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_03: Meanwhile, stay tuned, kind, and curious.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_03: Love Deb.