A Life's Work: Hazel Edwards OAM's Extraordinary Writing Journey

Nigel Rawlins: Hazel, welcome to the Wisepreneurs podcast. Can you tell our listeners something about yourself and where you're from?

Hazel Edwards: Well, that's always the challenge to describe your occupation when you do lots of different things. I tend to call myself an educator-author-speaker these days, and then I changed to calling myself an authorpreneur. Because in the sense of an author coming up with original ideas, but actually having to place them in, and sell them in the most appropriate places.

So I had that put on my, business card, which flummoxed. a few people when I went to China as writer in residence because authorpreneur wasn't really translatable. But I've left it there and it's been a good talking point and I do have a reissue of a book coming out on Authorpreneurship and the issues haven't changed really.

When I first started, I have a teaching background. I did primary teacher training at Toorak Teachers College, which was actually a fabulous course for me. It opened up all sorts of areas and I really liked the teaching aspect of teaching, and I see that as very closely allied with being an author because we're in the ideas business of shaping ideas and sharing ideas and encouraging people to learn in interesting ways with fun and humour, not bureaucracy.

So you can understand I didn't last too long in the bureaucratic world of education, but I've always been on the fringes. And so I always wanted to be an author. As a teenager I lived in country town in a general store, which was the reason for my first book called General Store, which I actually wouldn't let a book go out with a title like that now, but at the time I was so thrilled to have it accepted it went straight through because people think it's a military title, a general store, you know.

So I'm very conscious that people may interpret words in different ways, so I try to write very simply, and often, people are a little derogatory when you call yourself a children's author, and I say, well, actually, it's much, much harder to write simply about complex ideas than the other way around.

Uh, I tend Hippopotamus Lady because of the, um, Hippopotamus on the Roof Eating Cake Book, which is actually, uh, I think it's 44, 45 44, 45 years old this year, which is very, uh, a long living for a book. But that book which was a result of something going wrong, which is where the best ideas come from. We had a new house, the roof leaked, my four year old thought that the men crashing around on the roof were the hippo eating cake.

And so from that, It became, eventually, a very series of picture books. It's in braille, it's in Auslan signing, it's been a film, it's been a touring musical. It's been a great joy to be involved in, but I tend to think that a book belongs to the reader or to the audience. It's sort of not mine anymore.

It's out on its own, you know, like a teenager leaving home. So I was lucky to have that early on. But in subsequent years I branched into a range of areas of writing. I write for adults, mysteries and how to's. Quite a number of how to writing ones. I wanted to be in charge of my own working life.

I was married, my husband passed away a couple of years ago. We were married for a long time. And, uh, so I had two young children and I, I was doing some teaching, and some writing and I wanted to break into the writing world and I wanted to choose projects that I thought were worth doing. So I've always had a very mixed portfolio of the types of writing that I do and there's two reasons for that.

One is I don't like getting bored. I like learning something new, uh, but also that money wasn't my first aim. Across the years I've probably earned the equivalent of what a teacher would have earned. But I've worked pretty hard for that too. I think I've got about 220 published books now.

They're not all in print still. So the idea appealed to me of being able to continue to learn, not be bored and perhaps understand how people from other cultures or in other situations or in other jobs what they did. So it was a license to be a sticky beak and find out about a lot of things.

And that's why I found myself as a writer and Antarctic Expeditioner a few years ago. I did a lot of what I call participant observation, which means going and doing stuff In order to write about it authentically afterwards. I have a fairly adventurous family and they are, they had always been very supportive.

My husband was far more risk taking than I was, but he was also my accountant. My son has written a couple of books on cycling solo from Ireland to Istanbul or walking the Appalachian Trail. And my daughter will travel anywhere and is the most marvellous person for keeping me up to date in the technological world.

She's really my marketing, she's a marketing director in a real job, but she's got a little bit of time for me too. So I have tried to balance, and this is one of the things I think that's important to balance, a happy domestic family life with challenges in writing about things that I think are significant with humour and in different formats.

I don't know that that's a particularly enormous rundown. I don't quite know which aspect. Why don't you ask me some specific questions? I love the title of your Wisepreneur. That's what enticed me to talk to you. I think that's a wonderful title.

Nigel Rawlins: Cause it is for, whatever we call ourselves when we're older, cause that's the issue. One of the things you mentioned there was Toorak Teachers College, because that's where I first went.

Hazel Edwards: Yeh.

Nigel Rawlins: in 1974, I started there. I think you were there in the 60s,

Hazel Edwards: Yeah, I always have trouble when people ask me which date I was where and I have to calculate it, but yes, it was, I think it was around 63, round about then. I was there for two years.

Nigel Rawlins: Yeah, ours was three years and we didn't have to do a lot. But the problem they had in those days is they didn't have enough primary school teachers. And they were bringing them in from Canada and America. So whichever school you ended up in, there was always a Canadian or an American teaching there.

And so they were paying students to go to teacher's college. And if you didn't have a lot of money in those days, it was a way to get yourself an education.

Hazel Edwards: Quite right. I came from a background where I couldn't have gone to university. It just was not on the radar financially. It just wasn't possible. My father had gone broke in a general store and I had to work. So I worked when I left school. And then I managed to get into teacher's college and you're quite right.

That studentship made the difference. It was enough to live on for a couple of years and then in return you had to teach for three years wherever it was they sent you. I thought that was fair enough. I think that was actually a really good way of getting a diverse group of teachers. And I think it's a very good system, much better than, for example, the current system. My grandson's just done a degree and the amount of debt they're carrying is frightening. When they're not even sure what they want to do. I knew I wanted to have a combination of teaching and writing. But I've never undervalued the teaching. And I actually felt that the course I did there, for me, not for everybody because some of them had come from much more varied backgrounds that had a lot more opportunities.

But for me, I just loved learning in those two years and I learned a lot.

Nigel Rawlins: Now, it's done you well. And that's an interesting thing for a lot of us who are older, who we consider ourselves professionals or been working in some form of professional career, may have gone to university or some sort of college many, many years ago, but everything in between is where our education has formed us.

But it obviously stimulated your love of learning, which was already there, I'd say.

Hazel Edwards: Oh, I had an unusual father who encouraged me to learn. He regarded maths puzzles as fun and he would read things like Marcus Aurelius at the breakfast table. This was not a typical upbringing for a country town, and he also did not think that a girl should be treated differently from a boy so he was very encouraging of physical challenges, i wasn't so good on it, I like sport but i wasn't so good on the physical challenges but mental challenges or matters of principle sticking your neck out basically and so he was always very encouraging and in the same way i pay a compliment to my husband because we married on the understanding of equal roles at a time when that was not common.

It was thought to be very, very unusual. And as a result, with a son and a daughter, our children were treated equally also. And that I think at the time I was growing up it was unusual for a girl in a country town. You were expected to work in Coles or Woolworths, maybe do nursing training at the local hospital or teacher's college in town.

That was it. There was nothing outside those possibilities that was acceptable. And so to have a family that mightn't have had the financial resources, but had the attitude that it was fine for a girl to go on. So I subsequently, I mean, I've got postgraduate qualifications now, but I got them at night.

And as a result, I had the privilege of being with a lot of mature age students who really wanted to learn in the night classes and I did too and that's why I ended up teaching Council of Adult Education classes for women returning to study and that was some of the most satisfying teaching I've ever done and now I'm involved with quite a number of males predominantly but who are on the cusp of retirement who want to write their memoirs and they've got extraordinary stories to tell of quiet heroes doing interesting things that they're quite modest about and they're the real heroes in our society and I find that satisfying to help with the crafting of that so I've always been interested when you brought up the issue of age, I honestly don't think the age matters so much.

I think it's actually the energy. And the health. I think that the ones who go on further, when they're chronologically older, are the ones who've got something they're actually interested in. And, and I'm eternally grateful that I am able to write in fields now, I'm 78, that other people, save up, um, to write something after their retirements.

Well I didn't do that. I did it all the way through. I think I've been privileged in that. That's one of the reasons why authors don't actually retire. They keep going and, perhaps at slightly less pace and in different fields. But they are very privileged in that way. Whereas in the beginning, when I first started, it was definitely artistic poverty was straight ahead because it was impossible when you first start.

I gave it five years and I managed to crack it, but it's, it's very difficult to get started. Circumstances have changed now in publishing. I was lucky I had a traditional publisher that was international. It was Hodder and Stoughton and later Penguin. But I had a lot of other publishers too, smaller ones, because I came up with projects that didn't fit the list of the major publishers.

Now, With AI, this is the most significant change for all artists and all creators. It is comparable to the Industrial Revolution in the sense that if you are not able to change now, and learn new ways of doing things. For example, a couple of months ago, almost all my works were skimmed into the AI database.

Now that's a worry. Why would I then spend time writing something new if it's going to be skimmed? And that's a dilemma that we all have to look at, particularly if you've written in areas that are fairly selective. I've written quite a lot on Antarctica for students and for adults and for children, Antarctic Dad, etc.

They're more likely to be picked up by AI because there's not much else around. And AI is not verified closely enough at the moment. It is a worry educationally, but it's in a transition stage. The real worry is no recompense for the original creators, whether they're graphic designers, illustrators, inventors, because they will be put into a database for which they get no credit.

So that means the next generation coming up do not have the experience of creating and being recompensed for their creativity. Most authors have known, they're never going to make a fortune. People see the one or two who are at the top of the tree, who get millions, but the rest of the writers really, don't.

But I didn't see that as my major goal. I saw a modest income would be enough, but that you treat yourself as a professional and you expect to be paid for work that's well done. And I think that's one very important aspect of considering yourself a professional, as a creator, even though maybe only three in ten projects get up.

That's important.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, that's a whole lot to process there, but you've said everything that's important, because we, we talked about Teachers College, because, I became a primary school teacher. You went into secondary teaching fairly quickly, Immediately. We weren't allowed to do that.

I think we were allowed to teach up to year seven, but, but like you, we had to do the three years. And it was guaranteed work, which was pretty amazing in those days. Plus they let you shift schools at the drop of a hat. They'd give you a year off, which I took and traveled overseas when I got married. Now an interesting thing about being a primary school teacher for me, I noticed, because I taught a lot in the country, which I loved, and some of them were one teacher schools, I noticed when we have a working bee, the trades guys, they were all men, tradesmen would come along.

They'd work all day, work really hard, they were happy. And I thought, this is very different to being a stressed out teacher. I encouraged both my boys to become a tradesperson, because we spoke about your grandson having a Hecs debt. So this is the difference today, is if you want to go and get an education, you're virtually going to be in debt, and the Americans are in incredible debt for some of theirs.

But both my boys became tradies. They could have gone to uni if they wanted to, but I thought, not too sure if that's such a good move anymore. Both of them own houses, they've got money, they can travel. One lives overseas. Whereas my daughter has a Hecs debt still, and still works in hospitality, which she really enjoys, but she's in a management position now.

So that gave you that opportunity. And then you got to a school, then you went to Monash Uni.

Hazel Edwards: Yeah. I did an arts degree where I chose the subjects on what was available after 4. 30 to be quite honest. So I had a very strange mixture. I really wanted the English. I did a Bachelor of Education, later I did a Masters on women returning to study because there was nothing on women returning.

So there was one book, as a reference, and I'd actually written it, so that was a bit incestuous. I'd written it before, you know. So, yeah, it was a different I think the ideal is for a young person to work when they leave school at something, whatever, but to study part time. And to have a job that gets you a skill that is a portable skill.

Now you may be a tradie or you may be a locksmith or you may be, I don't know, in the medical field that's a very portable skill. but you balance it with the other things. When I went to the Antarctic, I had the greatest of respect for the tradies, who were, about half the staff there and the other half were the bios or the scientists. All of them were fantastic problem solvers and I had a really great respect for all and several of them have helped me since on research and that they crossed over from one field to another. So I think the ideal and for young people is some sort of physical component with a portable skill that enables you to travel but that you study, part time at night or time breaks or whatever, in an area that you think is relevant.

And the trouble is when you're 18 and you're just out of school, you haven't got a clue what's relevant, and your parents are saying to you, well get a degree or get a whatever it is. And in the past, university was seen as very prestigious for, a family who perhaps never had anyone, my family had never had anyone been to university before.

But, it doesn't suit everybody, and some of the uni courses are fill in courses now that are really not relevant to particularly some of the teaching courses. I think they need the hands on stuff. So, an idea, when I was at The Toorak Teachers College, seeing we have that in common, in the art room in the stables where he worked was a guy called Ted Greenwood.

I don't know if you ever came across him. He, he was officially an art lecturer there. He was a bit of a, I don't know what you call a larrikin, interesting man and good artist. He was really an illustrator of children's books and very good ones. And in later life, and he retired early into this.

He would design the books and work on his physical artwork in the morning and then he said in the afternoon he does the nursery. I thought he meant a child nursery. No, it was a plant nursery. So he had the balance of his hands in the dirt and, and, and I thought, now that's interesting. Then, when I got to Frankston Teachers College and I was lecturing there by the skin of my teeth, I didn't know what I was doing half the time, in the end I thought, right, let's just go with what's useful.

And I, I met one of the best educators I ever had the privilege of meeting was a guy called George Pappas. Now, officially he was lecturing there. He'd had a primary school background. He was Greek. He was a single man. He was, I think, in his middle forties then. What interested me was he had produced all sorts of plays.

He'd written books and textbooks. And he was a working creative with a partner who went on internationally to do all sorts of things. He wrote scripts for homicide, with cars racing down the hill and all the rest of it. But he was the only person I'd come across that had a combination of teaching and writing with equal value to both and, appreciating what was needed in both.

And he did not keep a nine to five day. He would work like mad. He'd also have a number of young people whom he mentored. They learned more from him in action. He didn't drive. And I don't know whether he couldn't drive or he just liked having a conversation with whoever was driving. But he had the greatest impact on me.

We did do a script together at one stage later on, that it was possible to live a creative life. The downside for him was periodically he'd crash and you wouldn't see him for a few days and you have to fit around that because the rest of the time he did such a fabulous job teaching and as a role model.

And I was recently asked for a collection of books on educators who's influenced you and I put George in there. We shared an office, the office was a sort of cupboard, and I learnt more from him about teaching and writing in that time than anybody else. He used to offer me chocolate gingers, I hate ginger, but I used to eat them as a peace offering too.

I think he used them for energy. And so I think we need more people like that who are practitioners. It's not only about teaching, it's about other fields too, whether they're builders of houses or whether they're designers of boats or whatever else they're doing.

They need the combination of the practical, with the learning and that's, I think carried over into what I'm doing now with helping people with complete your book in a year. I help them with the technical stuff, but they have to bring to that, what they've learnt in their lifetime, or what it is they want to write about, and most of these have come from other cultures.

They've come out as migrants, perhaps with no English, from war torn areas. They've made a successful life in one way or another, and they want to record it. They're decent people who want to record it for their families because their children have had a better life than they've had. An example would be George Kyriakou, who has a Macedonian Greek background.

He's just finished a book with me called If the Shoe Fits, because he moved into the shoe business, retail business, and made a great success of it. In later life he went back to his original village and donated all sorts of improvements there. A compassionate life, a rich life in that sense.

And so I think that is the satisfying aspect where the teaching skills or the writing skills in my case, the crafting ones can help. I also have a bunch of doctors who were born in various places in Cairo, in Budapest, etc. And they now have written their stories across the year on, online with me.

And it's for their families and they're all doing compassionate surgery for various communities. One of them's an eye doctor who's worked with red hollows etc. So you know they're the ways in which you can use your skills in a worthwhile way in your vintage years. And so I'm actually using the same writing skills whether it is with adult people in the literacy area early on, or currently the ones that I've been helping.

The skills are the same, but the content and the people are different. Does that answer your question?

Nigel Rawlins: Oh yeah, well I was just thinking the whole time, your father encouraged you, didn't he?

Hazel Edwards: Oh, definitely. And my husband.

Nigel Rawlins: So you've had very supportive men in your life.

Hazel Edwards: Yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: But had your father not encouraged you to go to Teachers College, where you taught at Westall, then go to university, then end up down at Frankston Teachers College, which I actually lived nearby, because I taught in Frankston for a little while as well.

So I lived very close to the college there. But you met this chap who I guess in many ways was a role model and a mentor.

Hazel Edwards: George Pappas.

Nigel Rawlins: George Pappas, so it sounds like you were just rolling along

Hazel Edwards: Oh no it wasn't that it wasn't that easy Nigel. It wasn't that easy. I was married at 21. My husband was 11 years older, had an interesting background, he'd been a Inspector in the Northern Rhodesian Police and the Colonial Service to the British Government.

He rescued the body of Dag Hammarskjöld when it crashed, he'd done all sorts of very interesting things. He was not your typical type at all. But he came to Australia, he met me, and he had to start again, at the bottom. And so we studied together and we decided not to have children for a few years.

So my daughter was born when I was, 27. And so the first book was born, published when I was 27 too. So that's how I can remember. I had a book and a baby in the same year, and then three years later I had a son. That was the peak time where mothers were expected to stay home and do the conventional things.

I didn't do that. But it was only possible with my husband's help too. And we genuinely did share things. He became a manager of a major hospital in Melbourne. And we, we fitted in together. And so yes, you're quite right. I think the reason that early on these role models were male, was that there weren't so many women doing it.

In my later life, there've been some significant female role models, Judith Rodriguezz is one who was associated with Deakin University, also a poet. It was due to her that I have connections with a Chennai and Tamil translations of one of my books, and there may be others.

And I'm starting next t month to mentor one of the young teachers there to help them with writing in English and Tamil and translating and so on. So quite often it has been a significant individual. And as you say in early life was male, later life female. Another one would be Aileen Hall, who was ambassador for Nanji.

She was a principal of a primary school in Melbourne, one of the early ones to start Mandarin. And as a result they sent all the official Chinese visitors to her and she built up connections with schools in Nanjing and she's done more to promote Australian children's literature in China than anybody else.

And I pay her credit for that. There are others, I like Meredith Fuller, the psychologist, who's made it possible to record, she was very encouraging on our controversial book called F2M, The Boy Within, about transitioning gender, which was the first book, co written by someone who transitioned from female to male, and we were getting flack on it, and she arranged to have a documentary made that would be used by a psychologist.

And she's done things like that for many, many people and encouraged significant social issues to, to be brought into mainstream. And so women like her, I mean there are quite a number of others who I would pay credit to too. But I think you're quite right. Early on it was mainly males because they were the only ones in those different roles.

To countermand it, I have to say, I'm an absolutely lousy cook and I'm rotten at housework, because there's only just so much time and energy, that's possible. So in our family, all the males cook. My grandson, he was here last night for his birthday, and yeah, his 25th birthday, my eldest grandson, he's like, gee, your cooking's improved, grandma, because my husband used to do the cooking and after he passed away, I was not cooking all that well.

I'm, I'm learning. The 13 year old's giving me lessons. So it's not possible to do everything. It's time and energy management and I think you have to look at what you think is important long term. And I always thought the writing was, for me, the family came first, the writing came second, probably the teaching third.

The reason is writing stays around longer than teaching does. It can have a life in translations, in performance. It's got lots of other possibilities, but there's just only one way to do it. Just so much it can do really. So I've now got a group of people called Hazelnuts. Now I didn't give them that name.

They gave it to themselves. And they are the people who've done writing courses with me and, uh, who published their books in form or another or performed them or whatever it is. And they, they qualify as Hazelnuts. I've got a shelf of them over here. And in the Australian, there's a feature on Jane Cafarella, whose book "Cleaved" is just out, she's one of my hazelnuts, and there's a big feature on her in that. The hazelnuts all help each other now, independently of me, so that is, I think that's a really good legacy. I think my family have become skilled.

I think an artist's family have got to get skilled. They've got to be able to answer the phone politely, even when they're young. For example, my daughter's a very good photographer and she's done docos and things for me when necessary, and my website and things like that, and I wouldn't have survived in updating my technology without her.

I ask her how to do this, she shows me and then I have a go, muck it up, and she comes back and sorts it out, then I have another go, or I ask the 13 year old who's been teaching me coding, which is not my first interest, but we do talk about that. So I think that looking at ways in which you can help each other.

I've always written a story , I have four grandsons, each grandchild, for their birthday. Twenty-five year old, he's written a hundred and twenty thousand words science fantasy manuscript at the moment, which definitely needs editing. He's got his own. The 13 year old writes his own.

He's written a cookbook. The two little ones, the five year old and three year old, are in Darwin, and I've written a story on the "Gecko in the Mailbox" for them. Those stories are not written for mass circulation. I write it for the child, but sometimes they've gone on and had a life of their own.

And so the gecko story is for the five year old. His father is the one, Trevenian, who, who started the hippo. So I recently did a online reading to his school. We had a bit of a technological blackout on the camera, but we moved on really regardless. So I think that's the other thing, the need to be open to learn new technology.

The COVID impact, meant that for a writer like me, immediately a major source of income went in that speaking and festivals and so on, unless it was online. And if it was online, you still didn't sell books because it wasn't physically possible. So it was a really major change to a writer's way of working.

So we all had to learn how to style stuff behind your head on Zoom and leave it up there. I alternate the book according to who I'm talking to. That sort of thing, how to press buttons and, not swear on camera when things go wrong. I don't swear normally, so I think it's being open to change, but it has been exponential change since COVID, I think.

I wrote a major novel during that time called "Wasted", a young adult one, which is related to Asylum seekers and initiatives there, that will come out in a couple of months time, but I think that I probably won't write another one of that type now, it's just not feasible for the amount of time, and the likelihood of it being skimmed. So big changes, technological changes related to COVID. But I think your major interest was on the age of the artist and I'd have to say personally, your energy goes down a bit as you get older, of course, and I do go to exercises, and I go to belly dancing on Monday nights, amongst other things, that came about because of research that was needed for a script, but I think that I will keep writing, but in different ways, and I think I am incredibly lucky to have an interest that makes it feasible.

And what has been very helpful to me is a new publisher, Alicia Cohen of Amba Press, who's been involved with gifted programs before, has found some of my back books that she wishes to reissue. And it's been such a compliment to me to find that some of the scripts hadn't dated, and the reason they hadn't dated was they were about issues.

But the characters were abstractions, like fire, or they dealt with issues like grief and loss, which was very difficult to write about. But it was written in such a way that it endured. So, material that hasn't dated. Many of our stories have technologically dated. You cannot have a story with a Walkman in it anymore, and that sort of thing. So you've got to look at whether you're going to update those. Is it worth it? No. Some stories don't survive and some do. The Hippopotamus has, what I would like to see is a few more going on screen.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, you just covered so many areas there, and I want to come back to a couple of those, but I still want to follow the little thing about the men who encouraged you. Now one of our other guests, very early guests, was a lady called Anthea, who went on to become the Sydney Women's hospital general manager, she found through her early career there were men who encouraged her in her career, which you did.

The thing I wanted to point out about that is you've now come around and you're mentoring men in writing their memoirs. So you're giving back in many ways.

Hazel Edwards: I am. That's interesting, Nigel, now because I hadn't thought of it quite in that way. I do mentor females as well but I think that just suddenly there've been a number of males on the edge of retirement who've been reconsidering their lives and so it was particularly applicable to them.

That's a very interesting observation. I hadn't thought, thank you, I hadn't thought of it in that way. I do have female ones, but yeah, probably less than a third would be female. I'm more interested in the stories they have to tell and their circumstances. For example, I was beset in the polar ice during the Antarctic expedition for a number of weeks, with all these guys, and we got along fine, and I had great admiration for their, their strength, but what they wanted to do was to write about what they were there for their kids and everything else.

So I'd written a few stories so they were able to send them on to their kids or their families. So we worked in together. So I've never had a problem with that. I'm more interested in the person's experiences, but yeah, I'll have to think about that. Thank you.

Nigel Rawlins: the reason I say that is you're very comfortable working with men professionally.

And see, that's the same with me. Having worked with women in teaching, because the majority were women, I feel very comfortable working with professional women. Um, the other thing is, they tend to do things. They tend to do the work. And you know, from a young time, you, you had family, you had teaching, you had your writing. Okay, your, your cooking and housekeeping

Hazel Edwards: Oh well I think we might leave that to the side. Yes, yes, yes. It's a common joke here. Yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: But the interesting thing is you've got a 13 year old boy who's interested in cooking. My youngest son went on to do chefing for three years, but unfortunately, chef apprenticeships, they tend to burn the kids out, so he left that.

He became a cabinetmaker, and then he decided he wasn't getting paid enough, so he became a carpenter. Which he's finished, and now he's going to travel. But he can go cook, and he does cook really well, but doesn't cook for me. He can build kitchens, and cabinets, and furniture, and he can build houses now.

So off he goes. In terms of learning, he chooses what he wants to learn online and watches YouTube or he listens to a podcast and then he talks to me about stuff, and I'm going, wow, and he wants me to look at stuff and I'm thinking, how do I fit that in?

And that's the interesting thing about learning. And I think that's the thing about your courses.

Hazel Edwards: Well I did the Complete Your Book in a Year for seven years at the public records office. They asked me to do that because I'd done a talk there and they said, oh people want longer because they need a year to finish it. So that went for about seven years. Prior to that I had had a night class at Holmes Glen Tafe for a number of years.

Same sort of setup. I wasn't interested in going into academia or the schools and so on. I wanted to do the writing but I think probably I've experimented in different areas of writing. Then I've written about the process, which is the educational part, and then I've shared it with other people.

That's basically what it is. Which is why I wrote the memoir, Not Just a Piece of Cake, being an author, because there's not that many women with families who've written in so many diverse genres. I'm known as a children's author but I actually write quite a lot of other stuff. I've written on difficult personalities and psych and stuff as well.

And, so I didn't quite know how to cover both those areas for two different readers, so I thought it would just crash, but I hadn't been well, and I thought, I've got to get this down now, and so, suddenly, not just a piece of cake being an author, it got picked up by the Untapped Project of Melbourne Uni I think it's 200 historically significant books.

They picked up General Store too. It's gone into audio, it's gone into various other things and suddenly it's become one of my more significant books because it goes behind the writing and it talks about what worked and didn't work and getting banned. And things like that, so all those experiences have been part of it.

So I think probably the teacher part of me has always shared the things that went wrong too, not just the things that went right. And that's been a good balance. So I think I'm incredibly lucky in that I've had a rich life. And I think, frankly, my family have benefited from it. Not financially. But they've met a very interesting array of people.

And they've gone on to do all sorts of different things, and they contribute to society, and happily partnered with families, and I see that as a constructive contribution, I'm very grateful for that. And it's not all my doing. A lot of that was my husband's doing because we worked together.

And, I think that's important too. But, yeah. Next question.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, there's a couple of things that I wanted to talk about there. Roald Dahl's books. Did you ever read any of those? I used to read them to the kids when I was a teacher and we'd sit them down on the mat. These are the older kids. They used to love it. Roald Dahl's stories were very mischievous, very naughty and very, very funny. The kids would just roll over the floor from the way he described things. But I'm hearing now that it needs to be rewritten because it's not seen correct anymore. What do you think about that part of things?

Hazel Edwards: Well, I thought Roald Dahl was a master storyteller, both for adults and for children. He knew exactly how to pace a story, to structure it, to use humour. Now he used sex in the adult books but in the children's books he used something a bit, not quite acceptable but it worked out in the end. I think he was a master storyteller.

What you're really asking me is about things being banned as, they go out of favour and condition change and certainly I've faced that. As a long term author you inevitably have that. Couple of Significant issues were when I moved the Hippo books to penguin there was a lot of kerfuffle about the fact that the father had a smack, and that wasn't heroin, right? In the, in the book. And it was to be changed. Now, that only came about at the time because there was an issue before, I think it was the UK Parliament about censorship and various things. And, it's a lot to do with the media timing of attention.

But the smack issue, I'd spoken to Penguin about it and said, look, I would prefer it to stay as it is because you've got to see things in the context. Enid Blyton had the same trouble. Anyway they changed it to growled and I sort of accepted it. But suddenly there was this enormous furore.

We were besieged by TV cameras and all sorts of things here. We fled to Norfolk Island in the end, my husband and I. enormous amount of flack on changing the wording because so many children were familiar with it. What was the heartwarming aspect of it was the number of dads, who wrote and said, look, leave it as it is.

We'll talk around it. It's an interesting issue to talk about. Not a problem. Blah, blah. We love the books. So what happened was sort of 95 percent were in favour. They didn't mind either way, really. But you know, it was the book that mattered. But on social media, it took off in some of the parental mothers groups because everybody considers they're an expert because they've been a child.

And, some people have never read whatever the original was and they all had an opinion and it escalated and unfortunately that is what is happening now on many of the issues of, say, gender, racial, cultural issues. They have been politicized in, in the books and unfortunately many of the commentators have not actually read whatever the original was.

It's also a form of censorship because the authors are very wary about writing in particular fields. And so the Hippo smack was one example. I've had a few others since then. It is a difficult issue because I think the test of a story is if it survives. And for the Hippo, it has survived, it was well structured and it came out of my teacher training of reading things aloud and so on. But now writers are very constrained because whoever puts out the awards or who decides what's going to be published is so aware of any flack from the public which may be founded or not founded that they're not willing to go into those risky areas.

In later years, I've been picking, I've always had social issues, things I've had. strong females and sensitive males, I've had strong males, oh, I've covered the gamut all of them. My children went to a Jewish school and we weren't Jewish. So I did a story about a girl who was not Jewish in a Jewish school, years and years ago.

More recently I've done one, The Hijabi Girl.. So, you know, I'd always written about issues such as that. Probably the major one would have been the transitioning gender, which I wrote with Ryan Kennedy, who was a family friend of the age of my children, my adult children, and he asked me to do it. He is now doing a comic graphic novel with another trans guy, but they're using the subtitle of the book, The Boy Within, because F2M has dated as a term.

It's now a derogatory term, and I've made over everything to him, for them to go ahead and do it, because they're the appropriate ones. So I have only moved into areas where I've collaborated on controversial topics, where the co writer has expertise, because you do respectful research, but again, If you can write only from your own culture, you're going to write one book, an autobiography, and nothing else.

And for saying that aloud in an article in The Age last year, that created a furore too. I do not regret that article. I think I said what many people felt. But the commentary and the hate mail was off the scale. And that is an issue now of what you write about. In my wasted story, the young adult one, I've had quite a bit to do with refugees and quite a number of innovative asylum seekers who were doing very positive things.

I expect to get flack on that because I'm not a refugee, so that is a form of hidden censorship.

Hazel Edwards: But writers always have to take risks because they have to pose situations which cause people to think. But you can only write something if you've researched it properly first, and with respect for that culture.

I think that's very important.

Nigel Rawlins: So Hazel, tell me, what would Hazel Edwards, who first entered Toorak Teachers College, think about now?

Hazel Edwards: No, I haven't thought of it. I think I was 19, because I'd worked for a year in a bank when I went in there. I always knew I wanted to be an author. My father said, get a real job first, because you won't be able to feed yourself as an author. And teaching genuinely attracted me. It wasn't a stop gap.

I was interested in that, and I thought those two were together. I thought I would probably be writing. I didn't think I would have covered as many fields nor have been privileged enough to be invited to so many interesting places like Balikpapan in Indonesia or Nanjing or Chennaii I just didn't think that far.

I was just interested, as a reader holic, I was interested in the writing, but I didn't really think beyond that. I also didn't want to get married because it seemed to me every writer, all the female writers I read about, the sort of lives they contemplated just wasn't like suburbia. In fact, a French puppeteer visited me here.

I live in suburban Melbourne. I can't do the accents, but he said, you live in suburbia and you are a writer? I thought that was really, really funny. I think I really didn't contemplate a lot of the stuff. I wasn't looking for awards. I was looking for satisfaction and understanding why other people did things.

Perhaps also an excuse to go and stick my nose in a whole lot of things, and understand how people thought differently from me. And because I was an only child. I think early on that might have been the reason why I was influenced by some of the male role models because I wanted to broaden my knowledge of how males thought as well and I realised that males are equally as diverse as females are diverse and it didn't really matter as long as you listened to the person intently.

Nigel Rawlins: Mmm, that's wonderful, because you've obviously had an amazing life when you think about it. And that doesn't mean that you didn't have any ups and downs, of course.

Hazel Edwards: Well, perhaps I should throw in a couple of the anecdotes that make it, make it possible. The funny ones, like, the publisher's made a large hippopotamus, stuffed hippopotamus, which is the size of a person, and I had a little car, and I had it alongside me with a seatbelt around it, and the seat, back. So here am I trundling on the freeway and I got waved down by the police breathalyser squad. Now, I don't actually drink, not for any moral reasons I just don't drink anyway. I said I haven't had anything to drink. Your passenger. Oh, I said, it's just a hippopotamus. Drive on, madam. I always thought that was hilarious. So I've had some very interesting experiences with the hippo. But I've had some poignant experiences too. And I was in a country town talking to some parents one night, a long time ago. And these were parents of little ones who'd just started school prep.

Which is called something else now. Community of Learners, in some places. And, at the end a mother of one of the preppies came up to me and said, Hazel, my daughter's learning to read from your Hippopotamus book, and I'm learning to read too. I've never read a book, another book before. Would you be able to tell me some other books like that, so I could learn to read better?

And she was surrounded by other parents. Now what a brave woman. There was an absolutely marvellous librarian there that I beckoned over and it was all handled, now that is courage. The degree of illiteracy is quite high in some areas and amongst some males too. I'm always delighted to hear when there are some of what I call the beaut blokes, who read regularly to children.

I call them bute blokes because they might be the dad or they might be the mum's partner or the grandparent or the older, brother or whatever. And they read regularly to children and that role model makes a colossal difference. When my husband passed away, he used to read, and he was not technologically good, but he used to read on Skype to our little ones, our little grandsons in Darwin, who at that stage were two or three. When he passed away, my now 13 year old took on that job. So he was the big cousin. So he still does it. He still reads to them on Skype. And his father had read to him, his father was really good at, at funny voices of characters and Dr. Seuss the whole bit. I think those male role models for reading are incredibly important.

And the reassurance of stories that show somebody who's a bit like you with maybe the problem you've got. with some sort of solution, very important therapeutic reading too. And I do it with the subtext of some of mine underneath. So stories like the picture book Fey Mouse is one of the ones illustrated by Kilmeny Niland who was the twin of Deborah Nyland who did the Hippos.

And Fey Mouse is about a large and clumsy cat born into a family of highly talented mice and how they get on. The concept in that one I think is important and that's the subtext of that story. Is it okay to be different? You can still get along and I'd say that coping successfully with being different would probably be the common theme of most of my work.

Nigel Rawlins: That's really important. Okay. What do you think about some of the children's literature found in the bookshops now? Have you been into bookshops lately and had a look?

Hazel Edwards: Hmm. I'm a bit worried about the lot that I call the sort of Farting dog football books that, uh, uh, are written to a formula with not really recognisable artwork. I think that's the lowest common denominator. There's no reason why you can't have an easily readable but well illustrated story that's got some substance to it that's not, not based purely on farting jokes.

I'm not keen on at all.

Nigel Rawlins: My wife has a grandchild, who's four years old, who has been reading since three. She can read anything. Self taught. She just sees any word. Went to kindergarten. Dad told the kindergarten teachers she can read. Oh no, that's impossible. She read everything on the board and they weregobsmacked. Gobsmacked.

So, I go out, and I haven't taught for more than 20 years, but I loved books, and the library, and I was always bringing books into the classroom for the kids, surrounding them with books. So I go out and I have a look for interesting children's books that have got story and good illustrations as well.

But I'm seeing a whole lot of political ones in there as well, and I'm thinking, I don't know if you've watched, this is going to be probably politically incorrect, Bluey. Have you read any of the stories? It's just, it's been written by adults, but the kids seem to love it. I think the writing is awful in the books. Absolutely awful.

Hazel Edwards: Yeah, there's some interesting characterization there. I am familiar with it because I've got some in that age group, Bluey. I think Bluey's achieved mainstream coverage. I think it's got some quite good stuff in it. But your earlier point about the politicization is quite right. And I think that's what I call propaganda.

They're not stories, they're propaganda for a particular point of view, whether it's a racial or a cultural point of view or whatever. And those stories don't last because they're just hammering a point of view. At the moment, it worries me, and I'm sure we're going to eventually have a black and white striped character with one leg who's trans, and that would worry me.

But, I mean, years ago, I wrote Mum on Wheels about a mum who came home in a wheelchair, and how the kid came up with this idea of her dealing with plants at a higher level so she could do it in the wheelchair. Now that came out of experience because I had a cousin who was in a wheelchair. That fits the disability theme but it wasn't written with disability in mind.

It was written with showing the relationship between the grandfather who built the ramps so the wheelchair would go up and down and the family dynamics and that was the subtext. The fact she was in a wheelchair wasn't to fit a disability label. So they're looking at labels to fit. And those stories are propaganda and they tend not to last.

I'm a bit worried at the moment about the unappreciated illustrators, particularly for picture books, illustrators are so, so important. And the quality illustrators need to spend a bit of time to get it right, to get the central character right. And if AI is going to shove stock characters in for those things, and they're all cartoony, It's not going to work and I think that's most unfortunate.

I think children of the age that you were talking about, your four year old and so on, are like wet cement. You can, you can cast all sorts of shapes into them. Why not give them the best quality of what is around? And what marks out a good story from a run of the mill one. Firstly, it's got compassion in it, right?

It's got acceptance of various things. Secondly, it's got humour and the humour is not necessarily related to farting. It's related to an unexpected turn of events or something they can really relate to that they find funny. So it's child centred. It's not adult political centred. And they're the stories that last.

I've got one called Sticky Beak which was written about the same time as the original Hippo. It's still going, it's in Japanese and various languages and so on. But that's about a pet, a pet duck, that comes home from school, you know, on the rotation and how the family cope with that or don't cope.

Well, that was based on something my kids, you know, but there are pets that come home in various other families too, but there's a bit more to it than that. And the illustrations by Rosemary Wilson in that were extremely well done and that, that book's still around, and so it will survive. With the turnover of publishing houses, they're not keeping so much of their backlists anymore, so there needs to be an advocate for a particular book or it won't have a life beyond a year.

So that's again one of the aspects that the traditional publishing schedules and ways of doing things have changed enormously. They're short of staff, there isn't the continuity of somebody who knew about that earlier. So you might have a 20 year old choosing things who's never heard of some books from earlier generations, unless they've been privileged enough to have parents and others who read to them when they're younger.

So again, the corporate knowledge is lost of some of the earlier literary. I think the loss of many school librarians is, is significant also because you need someone who's got the breadth of reading to be able to put a relevant book in front of the particular kid at the particular time, and then they're off and they're reading.

Now there might be some child who's only interested in trains. Well, a school librarian will find plenty to do with that. So, I think the loss of the school librarians is most unfortunate. The importance of, of mothers reading to kids too, but particularly the men. I think the beaut blokes really matter. But it is no good expecting them to read Beatrix Potter if they can't stand Beatrix Potter. But if they want to read about bikes or whatever it happens to be, go for it. Because it will be the enthusiasm that conveys itself and that transmits into other subjects for the receptive child.

Nigel Rawlins: My father used to read me Wind in the Willows, which I absolutely adored.

Hazel Edwards: That's right, because he read it to you.

as well. Was it? Yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: Toad Hall. And every time I see anything to do with that I just love it. We're probably coming close to the end here, but what I want to talk to you about is you're 78, you're still working, what does a working day look like for you?

Hazel Edwards: Well, in recent years I've tended to save the creative work for the morning because I'm better then. So I would probably start some writing related thing about eight, and I'd probably finish one, maybe go on to two.

I schedule the more social aspects of writing, like, somebody interviewing me, usually I would put in the afternoon, not in the morning.

Or quite a lot of people come to see me for various reasons. So, I tend to invite them to come here, rather than me go to them as a time factor. But also, there's a few people I mentor as well, and it enables me to grab examples of things if I'm on the location. So I've made a conscious effort to invite people here rather than go elsewhere.

So I tend to do that in the afternoon. I also do what I call administrivia, which is when you have quite a large backlist, there's a lot of stuff with rights and bits of paper and finances and things, and my husband was a very good accountant amongst other things.

And, the writing, accounting world, writers don't make a lot of money, but they get it from all sorts of weird places, and it's in weird currencies, and it has all that sort of stuff. Things like filling in forms for PLR and ELR, that's really important. So a lot of that stuff, increasingly now, in the past I would say that my writing day was predominantly 80 percent original writing and 20 percent administrivia.

Now I would say it's totally the other way around and I'm not really happy with that. The last week I spent all the time filling a box, which was the archive of all my literary papers and books since 2013 to go to the National Center for Children's Literature, which in Canberra University, they have my stuff up to 2013.

They wanted it up to the current one. That took me ages. Now it's that sort of stuff. which is important to do because I do not want to leave a mess for my children. I have a number of co writers who have passed away and their families haven't got a clue what to do about their books and I've tried to be helpful in covering that sort of stuff for them but I don't want to leave that sort of mess for my family. My daughter is my literary executor and my daughter in law would probably help her because she's good too but I don't want to leave a lot of stuff for her to do so I'm trying to tidy up those things.

Partly because my weakness has always been to be seduced by a new project and to go on to it without doing all the proper paperwork. And what is happening now is because you need, as a writer, to have a reasonable legal knowledge also of rights and things like that. And so I I was a little bit remiss in making sure that every folder was right, about rights, and, and I know I own that book, but I've got to find the bits and pieces.

Writers have to keep two of every book. And that is vital because you need the ISBN numbers and now as books are going into new formats, whether they be e formats, audio formats, anything else, you've got to have all that data together. I don't have a secretary.

I don't have an agent, so it's just me. So I put those rotten jobs to the afternoon to be honest. I try to make sure that I do some exercise every day. I go to a couple of exercise classes twice a week. And aqua aerobics. And I go to belly dancing on Monday nights. So I try to balance the physical. I don't go to as many social organizations to do with literature anymore.

I tend to go if I'm speaking or it's one of my hazelnuts and I'm launching it for somebody. I only launch things for my hazelnuts. That sort of thing, and I try to make that later in the day. I usually try to be learning one new subject somewhere along the lines each year. I did forensic science a couple of years ago to fit with the, Wed, Then Dead On The Ghan series, with my celebrant sleuth.

So I knew that the scientific background. So I tried to do one thing like that. Yeah, that's probably, I would say that whereas in the past I probably did a 60 hour week, I don't do a 60 hour week anymore, I would probably do about 4 hours writing type stuff, and about 3 hours, admin stuff.

But I don't work, I don't take weekends. I work straight through. But if there's something special, and I just go to it. So I don't think in terms of weekends. I also do have a social life with my family as well. I had my grandson here last night for his 25th birthday tea. And we had, we caught up a lot.

Now he's a reader. He started to book club for his flatmates, so that's interesting. So, they're an important part of my life,

Well, you are 78 and you're doing about 35 to 40 hours a week.

Hazel Edwards: probably. Yeah, probably closer to 35.

Nigel Rawlins: This is a Saturday morning, so you are working with me.

Hazel Edwards: And this afternoon I've got a publisher coming to see me, and the publicist. It's just that it suited you and it suited them. I don't, I don't mind about weekends.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, this is the thing about being older, I'll be honest, my wife gets a bit angry with me because I could have, I guess, retired more than two years ago, cause being older now, but doing this podcast, it takes me a week to edit it and then put a number of articles together and then get it out.

Plus I still run my little marketing services company. I look after 18 websites. One of them's Meredith's and Brian's.

Hazel Edwards: Oh, right.

Nigel Rawlins: them. So I'm busy all the time, but, like you, I've had to watch my health. already this morning I went out for a walk at 6. 30 because I thought, well, I, I thought I was going to do nothing today, but I went out and I did some strength training as well.

Hazel Edwards: Yeah, actually, you do have to do that because you're sitting on your bottom on the screen a lot of the time. Your bottom will broaden, your mind might, but you know, you've got to keep moving.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, that's the issue with professionals is, if you could see behind me, I've got two big screens. I've got the laptop in front of me. I've got lots of technology in here. But if I sit on my bottom for too long, my back aches. So I'm finding I've got to move a lot more. And this is, I guess, because we're older.

Hazel Edwards: I think you're quite right and it really is a significant aspect. I've been very conscious since my husband passed away that I, I am a workaholic and whereas before we would do more things together. So I had enforced breaks. Plus he liked to cook dinner and have a long conversation, have some music going, you know.

So I had enforced breaks before, which, which was fine. I played a lot of scrabble during COVID with him. but now my life is much more, I suppose it is more sort of work oriented. But on the other hand, I'm very grateful that I have a social life that has come as a result of some of the writing so, over COVID, because my husband died right in the middle of COVID so you can imagine how difficult that was, that I'm very grateful that I have these interesting people that have in a sense become my social life as well.

So I think trying to balance it is a challenge, yeah.

Nigel Rawlins: Well, at this point, we're probably coming to the end. How would you like people to reach out to you? On LinkedIn or your website.

Hazel Edwards: My website is kept up to date if they want information or where I'm talking and that sort of thing and resources. I'm on Facebook which I use for the bits and pieces and the photos and things, the easy stuff. LinkedIn I think is the most efficient. I'm on Instagram as well. One of the most useful aspects of Instagram that my daughter and my webmaster have set up for me is that the Instagram feed goes straight into my website.

Now I hadn't had that before and that is really useful time saver for me. It's also made me realize I've got to make sure I've got decent photos going up rather than casual things. But, Yeah, my contact details are on my website and for those who want me to speak or conferences and things, all the details are there and there's, under media resources, there's a high res author photos that they can use plus bios.

There's a couple of different types of bios. One's a corporate one and the other one is more for kids if they've got to introduce me at something or doing projects and things.

Nigel Rawlins: That's lovely. Well, that's fantastic. thank you very much Hazel, for being, a part of the podcast and I'm hoping that we can inspire some other older professionals to keep going. Thank you very much.

Hazel Edwards: Can I put in my little quote I was going to add ?

Authopreneurship book. Open with anticipation and close with satisfaction and profit. Your book. It's been an absolute pleasure. I've relaxed so much. I haven't used all the points I've written down to talk to you about. So that is a credit to your interviewing

Nigel Rawlins: thank you.