Justin Heazlewood

And I just thought, if I press record and just leave it and it's sitting here on the bench and Adam pops...

I'm just recording Nan and Pop and Mum chatting away and I'm just going to leave that and I'm just going to capture the next half an hour.

You know, like a kid collecting butterflies out in the backyard.

I developed this...

It's a cross between a kind of party trick and a game for myself and probably a survival mechanism if you want to really read into it.

But it began this childhood hobby of recording my family.

And after a while, I would sort of be the host of the tapes and be like, hey, dudes, Nan's had a few beers.

Let's go see what's happening in the caravan.

And I was like a little Daryl Summers sort of addressing this audience.

Look, I say that because, you know, I've been doing 10 years of therapy and writing about this stuff and goodness knows what else.

And I think...

I think I should point out how outrageously isolated I was at home, essentially living in a unit with a parent who was not present and would sort of disappear for long periods of time for all intents and purposes.

So I needed to exist.

Like, I was at risk of disappearing.

Yeah, it helped having a musician in the family.

Ken was a country music singer, sort of country rock, and he did his own shows in clubs and pubs around the Canberra area or down the south coast of New South Wales.

he'd come home and sort of visit for these short periods of time and bring exciting musical gadgets and albums.

And there was this record in the Nan and Pop's record cupboard, which was Ken Hazelwood's Old Blue single about his car that he'd recorded.

So I was fascinated with that and we'd put it on and

You know, he had his own original thing going on and was writing his own songs, which is a great thing to have a role model doing that so close.