Hello and welcome to a brand-new series
of Julia Zemiro's Home Delivery.
(TYRES SQUEAL) Oh, hello!
Joining me this year is an eclectic bunch of comedians...
This may as well be a Goodies sketch, Bill.
..thinkers, writers, gardeners, chefs and legends
all keen to revisit the places that formed them.
Was it a healthy lifestyle here? Not at all!
And we may even let them show off their secret skills.
I was in the choir. You were in the choir?
You don't want to hear me sing.
For some, the memories come rushing back.
And I raised my children here. Yeah.
For others... This place is perfect.
..it feels just like yesterday.
The most terrifying thing of my childhood.
I can't wait.
You really are taking your life in your hands.
I'm in Croydon North in Melbourne
to meet someone who makes us laugh so hard
we never want it to stop.
It's the thoughtful and most joyful Magda Szubanski.
Magda. Mate.
Julia.
Oh. Hello.
Oh, I'm so thrilled!
Oh! I'm so thrilled.
I'm so weirded out to be here.
Are you? Is it weird?
Because this just didn't exist.
This fancy bit of driveway thing...
What was here before? It was just rough old garden, mate.
It was a bit of Aussie bush. Aussie bush!
Well, sort of. My father would be out here mowing this.
Are you a nostalgic person, do you think?
I'm a deeply nostalgic person.
But, that said, I couldn't wait to get out of here.
When I was 17, I was like... Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, fair enough.
♪ Jump in my car
♪ I wanna take you home
♪ Jump in my car
♪ It's too far to walk on your own... ♪
Right, I'm getting a very strong vibration
from this side of the room.
Straight out of Melbourne Uni,
Magda appeared in The D-Gen on the ABC in the '80s.
Her stellar career has included Big Girl's Blouse,
Kath & Kim as the sports-obsessed Sharon Strzelecki...
Hi, Mrs D. Kim.
Oh, is that your hives flaring up again, Sharon?
Oh, no, Mrs D, it's not my hives.
No, that's not hives. I'll tell you what that is.
That's pash rash.
..and as Esme Hoggett in Babe.
In 2016, she published her award-winning memoir, Reckoning.
And her advocacy during the same-sex marriage postal vote
was seen as crucial to its outcome.
It's amazing. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you, Australia.
Very happy!
Whoo!
Shall we walk a couple of metres up my drive?
Oh, it's as steep as it used to be.
What's happened here?
I mean, what happened to Mum's pig's face?
Mum put pigface all along there.
Dad constructed a border wall.
Is that a flower? There's no respect.
Pigface?
Um, well, pigface is a kind of succulent.
Oh, my God, this is still here.
What is? These tiles.
They're the same tiles. Oh, my God.
Oh, my God, that's the same bloody door.
This is my brother's room.
Oh, they've fancied this up a bit, haven't they?
Guess what? We're allowed to go in.
You don't even have to peer from the outside.
Really? Yeah!
I prefer peering from the outside.
I spend a lot of time, not just in my own home, either.
So, that's the same.
That's the same. I reckon those switches are exactly the same.
That glass.
Oh, OK, and we had double sliding doors.
Oh, right.
That was Mum and Dad's bedroom through...
That just feels a bit wrong to be eating your tea
where my mother and father would conjugally, um...
Sleep? Yes.
So was this the lounge room. Yes. This felt enormous.
They are the same windows.
It's all aluminium.
Oh, my God. Yeah.
Oh, mate, it's just weird.
Oh, hang on. What does this remind you of?
Wait a minute.
(DOOR SQUEAKS) Oh, that squeak before.
Hi, Mrs D.
(LAUGHS)
This is where it comes from. Oh, my God.
This is where it comes from. Hi, Mrs D.
Hi, Mrs D. (MAKES SQUEAKING SOUND)
Sharon.
I just love that she's here, that Sharon can pop up.
Sharon's totally here. Yeah.
(DOOR SQUEAKS)
Hi, Mrs D.
Oh, hi, Sharon love.
Hi, Mrs D.
(LAUGHS)
We used to play a lot of shuttlecock.
Just shuttlecock championships,
the whole family would play shuttlecock in the lounge room
and have championships.
And the other thing we would do...
Gotta try and get you to do this.
My father started this and I don't know why.
Sit down. Sit down. Get a cushion. Please.
But he used to also bring this stuff home
from... from the laboratory, all this stuffing,
and my mother would make it into cushions.
And then my father started - I don't know why -
this thing of putting it on your head.
And we would sit there... No!
..with cushions on our heads watching television.
It's actually extremely restful. And calming.
Are you getting it? I am getting it.
Yeah.
Let's keep touring around the house.
What about the kitchen? Does that look the same?
Nuh. No.
God, we were squishy, 'cause this was the kitchen.
The kitchen table was here.
5am every morning I'd get up with my father. We'd have breakfast.
So we would have that sort of tranquil time
and to this day I get up at, like, 5:00.
I love it. Love it.
That's your special time. Yes. It's quiet time.
Nice and quiet. No-one's up.
Oh!
All that work that my father did with the igneous rock,
building a rock wall.
Oh, no...
And they've just gone and gotten rid...
Oh, the nerve! The cursing...
And I just remember the sound, 'cause my bedroom was there,
the sound of him, "Bloody shite,"
as he would...'cause he was always dropping them on his thumb.
Yeah, he said it was the black thumb.
Was your dad good at building, though?
No, he was the most unhandy handyman.
He wanted to be Polish intellectual.
He had no... flair for handyman at all.
But he did it.
And in the kitchen, when you would eat together,
were you eating Polish food or Scottish food?
Scottish, really.
'Cause Mum was Scottish so... you know.
But this is... here was where the stove was
and that's where she burnt her hand.
There was... she had a...
Oh, she had a pan full of hot oil and it caught fire
and she threw it out and it burned all up her hand
and I remember the smell of that so vividly
because I always wanted to be a doctor
and I insisted on watching as my father unwrapped.
And what fascinated you about the idea of medicine
and wanting to see...
I don't know. I don't know where...
From the age of three,
I was obsessed with the idea of being a doctor
and I didn't actually know at that time
that my father had studied medicine at Edinburgh University.
It's... Oh, who knows? Did you help Mum?
Were you helpful at all as a nurse? No. No. Because...
I wanted... I'd say, "Show me, show me."
And then when I saw it and smelt it, I went, "That's really scary."
Bit much. Bit much. Bit much. But full-on.
So, house proud. They were quite house proud.
No. OK.
Well, no, not... Ish, you know.
Ish? Ish. But they would do things.
I don't know what they were thinking.
They were just trying to fit in.
Oh! Now I do feel a bit emotional.
That's the laundry where my father used to go to play his harmonica
and he would... he'd taught himself.
He was a big fan of Larry Adler, and he was really good
and he used to play all these old Polish songs.
Oh! And he'd been here.
That was his little corner of Polishness,
'cause he was actually very much
a sort of a... an assimilated migrant.
It was that sort of era.
But this is his little Polish corner where it would just all come out,
and you'd hear his harmonica, you know,
and you'd come and visit him here.
God...
And can you paint me a word picture of little Magda living here?
Look, to be honest, mostly lonely,
because there was such an age gap.
Mum and Dad were working, a lot of time on my own.
Mm. So, you know...
And because your siblings were much older than you...
Yeah, my brother's 8 years older than me, my sister's 10 years older,
so a lot of time on my own, you know, a lot of time on my own.
So that was originally my bedroom here.
That was a wall there with all cupboards with mirrors
and so I had lots of pictures of David Bowie stuck on all...
Now, we always ask, yeah, so that's who you had on your wall.
It's made me sound really straight, isn't it, actually?
But it was probably... Oh, David.
I think he's for anyone. No, but it was also Robert Redford.
Of course there were no pictures of women
because I wouldn't have done that.
It was... it didn't feel safe to put any pictures of women
that I had crushes on.
Mm. I don't think it was even conscious.
You know, I just knew I felt really uncomfortable
about the idea of any actresses or anything.
Shall we have a bit of a sit down? Yeah.
What was your parents' parenting style like?
Um, pretty much set and forget.
You know, my parents had heavy baggage, you know,
from various wars and, you know, they were dealing with stuff
and, um... so it was a sort of a...
..a sort of a benign neglect, in a way.
I was just left to my own devices a lot.
And as my mum said, "You were never any trouble," you know.
So they knew I would be fine.
So your mum was Scottish.
Can you describe her? What was she like?
Oh, well, she was...
(LAUGHS) ..one of the funniest people I've ever met, bar none.
But she wasn't afraid to be cruel with it.
Yeah, right. Which is a very Scottish thing.
She wouldn't, you know, glance the bone, she would just...
(MAKES WHINING SOUND) ..buzz-saw through it.
But she also had the kind of healing hands,
she had this incredible compassion in her as well,
this... you know, if ever you were sick,
and she was fiercely loyal.
But I think she really struggled here.
I mean, like, just being in this...
This was Mum and Dad's bedroom and...
She used to sleep in here a lot
because she was very depressed, you know.
And I remember that. Mm.
And, um...
Yeah, thanks.
You know, she didn't know exactly what it was
but it was... it was depression, you know.
And, um... and I just remember her in here,
when she wasn't working there was just a lot of sleeping.
So the thing of the war hangs over, you know,
even this house, you know, thousands of miles away from Europe.
People might be familiar with your dad's story
and certainly the book Reckoning tells it so beautifully,
his whole story.
But in a nutshell, just for the moment, you know,
your father, he's 15 when Hitler invades Poland.
And by 19 he finds himself in the Resistance
but with a very specific role.
Yeah, so he was recruited by my uncle
to be in a top-secret counterintelligence unit,
and they were basically assassins
who were on the orders coming from the Polish government in exile.
There would be a court, you know, an in absentia trial
of people who were giving information to the Gestapo.
And also some of the crimes
that these people, these collaborators, were committing
was that they were telling the Gestapo where Jews were hiding.
And my whole family hid Jews all through the war.
My grandparents...
My grandfather smuggled... and my uncle smuggled guns into the ghetto.
And, you know, my father, when I asked him why he did what he did,
he said...
'Cause his best friend was Jewish.
He wouldn't talk about it much and he was really emotional,
but he said, "When I saw what they were doing to the Jews,
"especially when I saw what they were doing to the little kids,"
he said, "I couldn't stand it."
Mm.
And he did what he thought was the right thing to... to fight.
And look at this - we've found your family car, the Kingswood.
The Kingswood.
This... Ours was a station wagon
but this is... our original car was an EH Holden,
then it was this car... a station wagon,
so it's like a mash-up of the two.
Oh, the handles, all of that.
The heavy door. And the bench seat.
Get out. Mate. Made for making out on.
What did driving represent to you in the long run? Was it freedom?
For a lot of kids it is. Driving was freedom.
Driving was absolutely freedom.
You know, we were stuck at the top of that hill
three miles from Croydon,
and to get to see your friends, it was a real schlep.
You know, 'cause a lot of my friends lived closer in.
Mm.
Oh, that same gate coming into the park.
Oh, I just got a real physical... eurgh -
I don't quite know what it was -
coming into Croydon Tennis Club.
Croydon Tennis Club. Croydon Tennis Club.
Oh, my God, it was the centre of my universe,
up until the time when I never touched a tennis racquet again.
Oh, yeah. Oh!
So, how often did you come here? Like, were you here a lot?
I was here...
Um, so nearly all weekend
because you'd have the matches, you'd be playing comp,
you'd have your lessons
and then you'd come and practise about... at least two times a week
during... at night.
But that wall... I spent so much time...
My father just practised against the wall.
I can't believe they've still got it, that practice wall.
Why tennis?
Because it was my father's obsession.
No. What a surprise! What a surpri...
Yes, but the sport of killer instinct,
of which I had none, he informed me, when I was about nine.
Let's just say at the onset, I adored my father,
but he did used to ritually humiliate me
on this court all the time
and run me ragged,
and especially when I start to put on a bit of weight.
He'd do a drop spin and then a lob over my head and I would...
So, it's a lot of rage, you know, I associate with here.
Sport was really the way he dealt with his demons.
I mean, I just didn't even hit it.
Ooh.
(LAUGHS) It's stuck there.
I like playing tennis without a ball.
See, I'm very good. Yeah.
But topspin backhand was my best shot.
And who are we playing against? No-one.
That's always... that's better too.
Yeah, mine, mine, mine.
Oh, yep, yours.
Yeah.
There's only so much you can do. Yeah.
Well, this is lovely.
Was education important for your family?
Oh, my God, paramount. Tantamount to paramount.
And what was little Magda like here in Year 7?
Oh, no, Year 7 I was very nerdy.
I was sort of like one of the top of the class,
I was the SRC rep, I was good at sport.
Then everything went to hell in form two.
Did you like Siena?
Towards the end I did.
It was a bit Lord of the Flies-y in the early years.
And I was really realising that I was gay
in those first few years I was here,
which was pretty terrible and frightening.
But, you know, it was a good group of girls
and the nuns were actually really quite extraordinary.
That was our winter beret.
Used to love those bags full of books.
When you came to Siena,
what kind of ethics and moral guidance was sort of taught here?
Look, honestly I think quite a bit of my conscience was formed
at this school.
I mean, very much a sense of social justice,
about caring for people who were less well-off.
The nuns were really big on that and they exemplified that.
You know, they were really...
You know, had a lot of admiration for the nuns, actually,
the way they were this community of women who worked together
and they were educated and very socially aware.
Shall we keep going? Yeah, alright.
This is very beautiful. It's really pretty, isn't it?
And this is beautiful, the...
Wow! Beautiful tiles.
But what would you come in here for, exactly?
Just little special occasions.
But it's very pretty, isn't it?
It's actually really quite lovely.
You've mentioned a few times that in Year 8 you lost your way.
What happened?
I fell in love with a friend
and I realised... I started to really realise then
that I was gay, you know.
But it was a terrifying realisation
because it was 1974,
and then it was considered to be a psychiatric illness,
it was illegal.
And really, you were going to hell.
Could you talk to anyone about it,
about being gay and suspecting that?
Oh... Nuh. No-one.
I mean, that's... that's the most incredibly difficult thing, isn't it,
to know that there's no-one there that you can talk to and indeed...
And this is the difference, as I've said before.
With LGBTQI people, you're a minority of one within your family
and that's a completely terrifying feeling 'cause that's primal.
You know, that's your unit of safety.
Mm. And to know that...
..you know, you carry this secret that eats away at you
and everything around you is telling you that it's sinful,
you're a sinner, you're going to hell, you're...
It's... it's... it plunged me into frankly a nervous breakdown.
When you say nervous breakdown... Yeah.
..how do you quantify that? Like what...
I mean, I completely lost my confidence.
I was crying all the time.
My grades...
I mean, I'd been one of the top of the class,
they just absolutely went to hell.
Did anyone stand up for you and kind of go, "What's going on?" or...
Yeah, but what could I say?
I couldn't tell anyone. Of course.
You know, because you would be... it was like being a pariah.
It's so different now, you know.
It was... it was guaranteed that no-one would talk to you, no-one...
You would be absolutely socially isolated,
and I didn't even really quite understand what was going on.
Of course. You know?
What about if I say Di Fromholtz to you?
Oh! The beautiful Di.
Di Fromholtz. She was a tennis player.
Yeah. And I had a massive crush on her.
And I... when I came back from the tennis one day,
Mum was looking through the photos
and she said, "There's an awful lot of Di Fromholtz."
And did you have a little panic? Oh...
I was like, "Oh, yeah, she's got a really good backhand like I have."
And did your mum respect the decision in the end?
When you told your parents, did they sort of...
Oh, they were gorgeous.
But Mum was really gold, you know.
And I remember her saying, you know,
"I can't understand people who turn on their own.
"I just don't understand it," you know.
God, she was amazing. Amazing.
And they both hugged me and said, "We love you,"
and I'm very, very fortunate that when I did come out
I got that reception.
Shall we move on to the hall? Yeah, yeah.
Let's.
Oh, I love a hall. Yes.
See, now I feel a little more comfortable here than in the chapel
because that was the whole thing, growing up, you know,
realising I was gay and around, you know, second form
and... which basically led pretty much to a nervous breakdown.
So whenever I'm in a chapel,
there's always this terribly conflicted feeling
that it's part of my history, part of my tradition
and, you know, Jesus is meant to be about salvation
but not for someone like me.
For someone like me, the Prince of Peace...
His message is apparently about going to hell, so...
But this stage here was actually...
That was my salvation, was, um...
..being in the school play.
Uh...
And having my first taste on the stage,
um, and, you know, finding my creative self
and then going... moving into that life as a performer.
And, you know, the funny thing is, over 40 years later
when I have those classic actor nightmares of
I'm on the stage and I not only haven't learned my lines,
I haven't even read the play, and it's Shakespeare,
it's... the dream is always set on this stage.
Terrifying. Terrifying.
So really, in a way, performance was transformative in that way.
It really was because it was something...
It was... I was really flailing, you know.
I was really flailing. I didn't know what I wanted to do.
I'd completely lost my confidence.
So this was...
..some way to claw that confidence back and a sense of self back.
What's your relationship with the church now?
I'm a very spiritual person.
There is no place for me to fully belong in any religion.
I'm sort of there on the good graces, you know,
so it's, like, tolerate the sinner, not the sin.
But I think I feel like a lot of people.
Religion increasingly doesn't have a place for me.
I completely respect religious beliefs.
Doesn't mean I won't disagree with them, you know.
Increasingly... I really feel for people
who are in the Catholic church
and feel very, very let down by their leadership.
Well, I know, for me, I really found myself at university.
What about you?
It started on that stage
but really uni was absolutely it.
Shall we go to Melbourne Uni? Yeah, let's do it.
It is so beautiful. It is a beautiful uni.
What did you come here to study?
Girls, girls, girls.
You came here to study girls!
How did you go? Did you get honours in that?
I did, mate, I did. Honours in girls.
Honours in girls, yeah.
And did you fit in straightaway?
No, I was terribly lonely for the first year.
I pretty much sat on a vinyl chair in that foyer there...
Yes. ..eating Smarties.
This looks like it hasn't changed. No, it hasn't changed since 1979.
Still got the... the women's...
Yeah, but I like that for the toilet.
Well, this is a theatre.
No, this is not the theatre you performed in.
No. No.
Because this is very small theatre. Yeah.
I was in the big one. The big Union Theatre.
We'll proceed as if it were.
Lots of clubs, of course, at uni that you can join.
Which one did you join? Feminist club.
Now, can you paint me a picture of what that looked like?
So funny, the Feminist Club. I know, it's great!
How did you find it? Was there a sign on the door?
It is a club. It is a club!
It's also a board game and a video game, Feminism.
But I found a place where I didn't feel like a freak,
and there were other lesbians there,
and that was... that... honestly, that saved my life, you know.
It was finally like, "Oh, my God, I'm not alone," you know.
But from that I also wanted to do something really practical,
and that was when I volunteered to go and work
at Women's Liberation's Switchboard.
They had Refuge Referral, which was taking calls from women
who were escaping from violent situations
and trying to place them in either women's refuges
or temporary accommodation,
which was harrowing because...
I was 19, you know,
and there just weren't enough places, as they still aren't.
You would have these women on the phone pleading with you.
And you just...
You know, this was so early on
when people didn't really even take domestic violence against women
seriously.
It's really funny. I've...
It's sort of being back here is taking me back.
I haven't really... I've thought about this stuff
but I just remember that...
..absolutely horrible feeling,
uh, when you had a woman on the line pleading for her life
and the life of her kids
and then just sometimes...
Sometimes there wasn't anywhere that they could go.
But there really was...
I really could have gone down that path of social work.
But what happened, which is what happens so often
with people who work in that field,
after two years again, you know, I burnt out,
which is a euphemism for a form of a breakdown.
For my temperament, I needed... and because of a lot of issues,
I needed not to be in dark areas for quite a while.
And comedy was a... was a great thing to go and do.
And it just kept going.
I just kept getting work.
So, fame's a funny concept with all of that.
Did you like being famous at all?
Did it get to a point where it was too much?
Because it can be useful, you can channel it.
Oh, totally. It totally is...
Like everything, it has a... plus and a minus.
I mean, the thing with marriage equality,
I felt I had...
..the capacity and the authenticity
to be able to speak about that issue
and that I had this platform.
And I had this position of people knowing me, being familiar with me,
Sharon Strzelecki, all of that,
to be able to engage with a broader audience
and go, I'm... this is... this is part of the, you know,
people who are like me
and we're not a threat,
we're just, you know, family for most of you, actually.
Mmm.
So I just felt like, um...
..I couldn't not be involved in it.
Do you find that for the next battle that you fight
you'll just... you'll be able to kind of give less
or you feel you have to give less
or, look, "It's everything for a time and then I have to retreat?"
'Cause you have to look after yourself as well.
Yeah, I mean, that really took a toll
because, you know, my mum was dying and it was...
That was a hell of a... There was a whole lot of other stuff as well.
Look, I always think about my grandmother Jadwiga,
who was in her late 40s when Hitler invaded Poland.
And the thing is that when things happen,
it's never at a convenient time,
you know, it's always when your mother's dying,
it's always at a terrible time.
And I think the world at the moment really needs,
um, for all of us to... who are moderate, who are able to get along,
to be vocal about that.
You know, to really create that kind of harmonious society.
You know, I would... I would very happily down tools at the moment.
But in all good conscience, I don't feel I can
and I honestly... I think about my grandmother,
first winter of the war in Warsaw,
minus 32 and you're invaded by Hitler.
And I'm like...
OK, so I've got a bit of a migraine but, you know, really?
You know, it's a very important time at the moment.
I think we all feel that. Mm.
And... for those of us who believe
that we want to create a peaceful, stable, tolerant society,
we need to make sure that happens.
It won't just happen of its own accord.
It's by us engaging in that way.
So what would you say to your 14-year-old Magda self?
I would say...
..the world is going to change in ways
that you would never have imagined
and that there will be a time when gay people
will be able to be married
and that you will actually be one of the people
that help for that to happen.
Stop.
You're the best.
Mm. Don't!
I'm gonna start to now.
Don't! Don't.
You are. You are.
Hey, thanks, Magda. Hey, thanks.
Thanks for making me tear up.
You're a crier! Shut up!
Come to, my darling.