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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Justin Hazelwood grew up in Burnie, on the northwest coast of Tasmania. For years, he imagined Burnie as somewhere he had to leave, especially if he was going to be any kind of artist. And there were other, more personal reasons that made staying in Burnie complicated. Justin's mum has schizophrenia and growing up he was her carer, something he did his best to hide from teachers and friends.
So after school, Justin headed to the mainland and did the tough work of building a career in comedy and music.
Chapter 2: What challenges did Justin face growing up in Burnie?
But life can take unexpected turns and Justin's path took him back to Burnie. He now has a new book, Dream Bernie, which celebrates the creative humans like him who are making art far away from the big cities. It's also a book about going back to your hometown and writing an entirely new story there. Hi, Justin.
Oh, hi.
When you were growing up in Burnie, where was the best place to get takeaway?
Takeaway? Gee, you'd have to go to the chicken. I suppose on a Sunday night, it was very common for mum and I to drive home from Nan and Pop's in Wynyard via Kui, where the chicken was, and, you know, did the quality barbecue chicken and chips. Mum got the Hawaiian pack. I had these sort of traditions of...
Looking out for the blue cross on the right end, there was a neon blue Christian cross up a hill, and from a distance you'd just see this blue dot. And I had these sort of childhood rituals driving in at night. I just loved the glow of the neon of the 80s. Even the Kmart sign was sort of exciting somehow.
Yeah.
So this was home for you with all of its special symbols and rituals. How would other Tasmanians have described Burnie back then? What kind of reputation did it have?
I bought a backpacker guide from 1991 and I was looking through it and the backpacker guide was really struggling to find angles to sell Verdi. It actually said not a whole lot of interest to tourists and I had to laugh. I was like, this book's entire purpose is to encourage tourists to come to town. Look, it was an industrial town. It made its choices.
The powers that be made their choices and I feel like they... They made a choice where we're going to serve the industrial overlords first and we'll serve the citizens of Burnie second. And the payoff will be we'll employ very large volumes of the citizens of Burnie. And so the pulp mill was a huge employer of about 4,000 people.
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Chapter 3: What led Justin to leave Burnie for a career in comedy and music?
And being a conservative sort of place, a lot of Christianity, a lot of sport, probably a lot of low-level homophobia. It was just the time and the place. It all felt a bit, what are you looking at, mate? I wasn't dead comfortable in that environment. I was a little nerd. I was smart, wisecracking, thoughtful, had very geeky glasses and a little bowl cut.
I was running the school newspaper and things like that. And there were a lot of terrifying older men around in their hotted up Commodores.
Take me inside your house. Who lived at home with you?
I just lived in a red brick government housing unit, really a nice little unit with a nice garden and in a court with some other little old ladies. And it was just me and mum and the cat.
Was your dad on the scene at all, Justin?
I don't know my dad. I've never met him. So long story short, he abandoned my mum and I when I was a baby and very successfully went on to have his own separate family. And we just had no contact with him whatsoever. And at a very early age, my mum sort of gave me the talk where she showed me a black and white photo from the Advocate newspaper. And she's like, see this man, that's your father.
And this is his name. And this is sort of roughly where he is. It's a pretty amazing story in itself. He lived 20 minutes away from me my entire life. And I've never met him. Pretty nuts.
So it was just you and your mum. And as I said, your mum has schizophrenia. How young do you remember your mum not being well? Was that always a part of the story or is it something that changed as you got older?
Yeah. When I was prepping for this interview, I just, I wasn't thinking of a lot of things, but I was like, make sure you tell everyone what a great mum mum was and what a great person she is. Cause, uh, The thing about mum and why I got so sad that her mental illness took her away from me was because that's someone I love. I was just in love with my mum.
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Chapter 4: How did Justin's family dynamics influence his life and career?
And one way of looking at it is they, especially my nan, had really pumped me up my whole life to, like, you've got to have a dream, Justin. You've got to follow it. The strong survive, the weak they fall. And they'd been pumping me up my whole life to be this outstanding person.
leadership material a grade student which I'd essentially met all of those requirements they couldn't very well turn around and go hey you know what just hang about here for a while just settle because I was just all guns blazing going oh I'm gonna do I'm gonna be really ambitious and take risks and go over to Canberra and chase my dream to be a writer so I don't know they just had to let me go
You talk about the isolation of Burnie, particularly in that era. You know, isolation has all kinds of consequences for places and it can create different kinds of humour, I think. What kind of humour flourished in Burnie when you were growing up there and what was unique about the way people made each other laugh in Burnie?
I met up with a friend from primary school and he reminded me of something I had no memory of. It was me and Paul and Nick. We got Nick's boombox and we brought it to school and at Nick's house I'd recorded a tape of me going, help, let me out, I'm stuck in the cupboard. But what I'd done is built in 30 minutes of silence on the tape and then the voice started kicking in.
And on April Fool's Day, we would have come to class really early, put the boom box in a cupboard in the classroom and pressed play. They'd all sat down at our seats. And class would have just gone on as phenomenal. And then, like, I had to beg the teacher this day. This voice was like, help, help, I'm stuck in the cupboard.
Would have started up out of one of the cupboards half an hour into class. And I was just pissing myself hearing this story again, going, that's just classic us. I think there's probably a great case of... having almost nothing to compare yourself to and not really any blueprints for how something should be done.
So if you want to put on a gig at school or if you want to make a funny play up in your bedroom and record it on tape and bring it to school, you could just make all that up in a way that suited you at the time. I like to think that there's this sort of theme of
The smaller the town the artists grew up in and the more cut off from everything else, just the more interesting stuff they came up with. I've always thought Tasmania has a unique sense of humour. I think the northwest coast of Tasmania, you know, some of the people I was getting around with at school, Josh Earl, who's gone on to lots of big things in comedy.
You've got people like Hannah Gadsby coming from Smithton. There's definitely been a vibe of, like, we're just a little bit different to our mainland counterparts, a little bit more of a wacky, inventive edge.
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Chapter 5: What experiences shaped Justin's perspective on mental health?
I would just turn on my laptop and my audience would be like coming at you through social media. But back in 2002, they were still a bit abstract, this sense of an audience. They weren't really there. So... I would listen to my songs on the radio and the hairs would prickle on my arms and I'd be recording them on tape and it was like electric.
It was like taking a little electricity pill of excitement knowing that I was sort of wired in to the country. I just had this sense of being plugged in and that all of Australia was kind of listening to my three minutes of airtime and I don't know. After that, I was sort of done. Like, I didn't need lots of emails or lots of validation.
I didn't even really need to know what people thought that much.
What about, you know, you described as a kid feeling so lonely. Did having an audience change that feeling?
Yeah. I mean, I worked at the Canberra Labour Club and there was the day someone I didn't know said, ''Hey, I heard you on the radio.'' And that was sort of ground zero for fame, if you like, which was I sort of began apologising almost immediately and was really awkward and sheepish and like, oh, yeah.
Because being some sort of self-loathing Tasmanian, I don't know, the fame thing was... It's kind of awkward from the start because... people are coming at you to heap praise on you and put you up on a little pedestal and you're almost wary in advance of where all this is going and you're like, oh, yeah, okay, thanks, just did this thing, not a big deal.
Is that because at home that would be considered big noting yourself or something or what's that voice in your head about?
Well, yeah, it was a pretty huge, pretty strong voice My whole life had been designed to put someone else ahead of my own. Like, I sort of think the syndrome of that manifested itself in different ways. I think I had a hard time having things for myself.
Everything was sort of about looking after mum and I would be sort of more worried about what my friends thought than what I thought about things. And It was sort of two forces fighting with each other because I had a real sense of pressure on myself to perform and be this amazing person everyone wanted me to be.
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Chapter 6: How did Justin's return to Burnie impact his creative journey?
And so Melbourne is just growing while I, as a person, seem to be becoming more sensitive. I was just like... can't really do this anymore. So I just went back to Bernie. Mum seemed to need all this help, you know, to write Get Up Mum. I had to sort of have all this space from my mum and not really go home for two years, which was a pretty big deal.
And I'd never really done anything like that before. So by the time I went back, mum had developed rheumatoid arthritis and was sort of looking all crippled and unwell and hobbling about. And honestly, it turned my hair grey. The events of 2019, seeing mum like that, I was like, holy shit, God. Got to get mum some medical attention.
So go back home to deal with the third act of mum and I's relationship, which has essentially been a five-year journey of getting her the NDIS, getting her a lot of medical care and re-establishing networks in a town with a notoriously...
compromised health system so my mum's carer but I as I say to her in my lower moments or my more exhausted moments mum you know I'm not that well myself but I've got to do this job like because it's my mum loved me so much as a kid as a baby I had so much love around me that I want to I want to help my mum It's this, you know, powerful force field that exists.
So it was partly out of this responsibility to your mum and partly out of having had enough of Melbourne that brought you back to this town. You know, I began by asking you how it looked to your eyes as a kid. How do you look at this place now?
Like I don't do drugs. I don't need to. My life is so wacky. Like just living it is a trip. Being back in Burnie, the last place I thought I'd ever move back to, and walking around going, oh, it's like day 305. Like you're still here in Burnie. What are you thinking and feeling? I guess I'm on a mission of...
like connecting with the place as a grown-up and it does get exhausting walking around being nostalgic all the time. So once I realised they'd taken the neon blue cross down from the house on View Road, I thought I'm going to draw a line there and there's going to be old Bernie of my childhood and there's new Bernie now. I was quite determined to work out what I thought of the place now.
I lean very hard on the nature side of things. It's got some lovely parks and reserves. I really like ducks. I like being around ducks, I realised. I just think ducks are the best. And seeing ducks go about their business. Even picking up rocks off the beach that have cool stripes on them. Burnie beaches have real funky kind of mod rocks.
I should tell you the little tale of finding a wedge-tailed eagle feather on a little bushwalk I did by myself in 2019. And that felt so incredibly profound and meaningful. And I know the Wedge-Tailed Eagle is an incredibly important figure in Indigenous Dreamtime stories.
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of Justin's book 'Dream Burnie'?
honouring some of the artistic alumni of Burnie, of which they had this long list of 100. And I was just in Burnie trying to work out how the heck to make myself useful as an artist, sort of cooking up this ambitious project of, well, I could interview 20 of the artistic alumni and could really get into what they think of Burnie. And so it sort of grew from there.
And I was sort of trying to tap into some of the beautiful bits of Bernie and the nostalgia and the quirky things. And I thought, what if we made this incredibly awesome, colourful book, which is just all about Bernie, not even about the Northwest Coast or about Tasmania, just Bernie. Just go full Bernie, the most Bernie book of all time.
Just double down, triple down on how niche it is and just be unapologetically niche. It occurred to me in that moment that that was absolutely the right direction to go down. Just celebrate your village.
When you say that, it sounds like one big difference between the Justin of Bernie Mark 1 and the Justin of Bernie Mark 2 is you're in the village. You're not trapped in a unit with your mum thinking, how the hell do I get through this? But you're really in that village. You've got a community of people around you.
I'm on some sort of mission to feel... It's like a... I need to plant my flag in Burnie. Somehow, mum and I were so invisible. in my childhood, but then I announced that through my book Get Up Mum and I sort of came out of the closet of being a child carer and lifted the rug of schizophrenia where everything gets swept under.
It's like I presented myself and my mum to the town and said, hey, by the way, this is what two people living with the disability of mental illness looks like. In the same way you would do it for MS or for cancer or for any of other life's ailments. Well, schizophrenia is just another medical condition and it's normal for some people and this is exactly what it looks like.
And I want to be able to walk around the streets feeling with my head held high and like I belong there and that I'm not some weird hipster blow-in from Melbourne who thinks he's good or whatever baggage I might have going on in my head. I just wanted there to be a positive narrative with my hometown that I could manifest and create this positive sort of gold card for networking.
And I thought, if I do this book, everyone who's remotely awesome or cool or smart or into the arts will gravitate towards me and I need more people to go out for hot chocolates with.
LAUGHTER
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