Something doesn't seem quite right.
Welcome to Not quite Right.
My name's Ed and I'm Amanda.
We are here at Words on the Waves 2026, and we spoke to Rosalie Ham.
So Rosalie's probably best known for her debut novel The Dressmaker,
which was turned into a film with Kate Winslet.
But Rosalie was here to promote her new book which carries the very intriguing
title Look after Your feet.
Bit of a memoir, look at ageing, ageing gracefully, I suppose,
the good and the bad, the good and the bad and a little insight
into maybe what we have to look forward to.
So here's our chat with Rosalie Ham.
We are here at Words on the Waves with author Rosalie Ham.
Very nice to meet you, Rosalie, you too good to be here.
So tell us about what brings you here to Words on the Waves.
An invitation which I'm very grateful for.
It's just to publicise basically my latest book,
which is called Look After Your Feet.
But I was very keen to come because I've never been up this way before.
Really.
Whereabouts are you from?
I'm from Melbourne, OK.
And I didn't even know where the Central Coast was.
And so when I the invitation arrived, yes, of course I'll be in that.
So I'm very happy to be here.
It's very lovely.
And I saw a little keep on Facebook or one of those things,
and the festival looked very vibrant and very jumpy a couple of days ago.
So I think it's all going very well.
Well, yeah.
You've come on with some good weather, definitely this weekend.
It hasn't been too great lately.
So tell us about your your new book, Look After Your Feet.
Is it a memoir?
It is.
It's AI.
Don't know what genre you'd put it in, but it's a memoir.
But it also is my observations and my take on the procedure of life.
And it's basically about how you accumulate all this information as you
travel through life and as you've accumulated,
you try to tell people nobody's interested because they're just trying to
get their kids to school and get over the hump in the week and all that sort of
stuff.
And I've worked out that that's just the way it is and that's the way it's always
going to be.
But also there was a lot of information out there about ageing and how many of us
older people there are and are going to be.
And it was all a bit grim.
And I don't think it's grim.
I think it's a bit of a hoot actually.
It's quite who's saying that that's a problem.
The just the general information is there's statistics on, yeah,
dementia and ageing.
And if you listen to the health report on Radio National,
you it's all sounds a bit grim.
And the, the books on the wisdom of ageing and how
to cope with it.
But you don't have to.
It's just the way it is, it's meant to be.
So you just adjust to it.
And I found that my family adjusted with me whether they liked it or not,
whether they like it or not.
But they say things like they talk about you in,
in the third person as if you're not there.
And they'll say, will you sit there and you sit there
because grandma's going to sit in the front.
And I go Ripper.
I love sitting in the front, you know, so there's, you know,
it's stuff like that.
And so I've flipped the whole negative and decided to go joyously forth.
Do you think that that stems from your own personality or has the process of
writing the book also cemented that feeling for you And that perspective?
It comes from my personality, but I was also,
I worked in aged care for 20 plus years and that kept me alive on a few
continents and while I was trying to be a writer.
And so you understand humanity a lot more.
You know, I just kind of think that people should
spend 6 months in a nursing home working as compulsory education because it makes
you more empathetic and more tolerant, more patient and more understanding of
the process.
And also elderly people have a very good attitude about the whole thing.
So when you were working in aged care, did you listen to anything anyone told
you who, who was living in the facility or did you
also ignore their advice and have to learn on your own?
Look, I, I ignored their advice in my early 20s,
but the longer I stayed, the more I came to understand because
that's what life does.
And I really started to appreciate the life that they've had because some people
had just had a very normal, ordinary life.
If you call raising children, you know, normal and ordinary, I don't think it is.
And others had done amazing things extraordinary.
So you, I kind of learned the value of the
individual and what a life meant.
And it's entirely personal.
It's all got to do with you and how you've conducted your life.
And so you may as well do it happily.
I mean, your book's called Look After Your Feet.
What is it about feet in particular that you wanted to draw people's attention to?
And that's just a big metaphor for just look after yourself.
And the thing about your feet is that they transport you,
take you wherever you want to go.
And when you sit up in the morning and swing your legs over the bed and put them
down, and once your blood's adjusted in your
body and you stand up, you stand on your feet,
you kind of know what sort of day you're going to have.
And then you really find out on the journey to the en suite.
And so it all kind of starts from there.
And so I, it was just something I said one day and,
and the publisher said that's a good title for the book.
It's very intriguing.
So instead of getting out on the wrong side of the bed,
you just get out on the wrong set of feet sometimes.
And sometimes the idea, because they get worn out,
they've been walking, we've been walking around on them for a
long time.
And often people don't really look after their feet.
And if you can't walk from the international terminal to the domestic
terminal and carry 7 kilos of luggage, then life's not worth living as far as
I'm concerned.
So.
So you're talking about advice that people give and don't listen to,
Is that your core piece of advice is to look after yourself?
Yeah, all you do.
And if you do, you can kind of adjust as to what's
coming.
And if you engage your body in your mind and Sally forth happily,
happy things will happen.
That's my philosophy anyway.
So how does that work from a writing perspective?
Like you're writing practise?
Are you one of those people who writes every day?
Yeah, I am.
Sometimes I only write 4 words, but other times I won't.
But I've learned that it's best to get up in the morning, get a cup of tea,
and go and sit down and write.
And I write and until I don't feel guilty anymore.
And then I write until I know what's going to happen next.
I don't leave till I know what's going to happen next and then I can get on with my
day.
But if you're a good girl and do the hard work,
then then you get a lovely afternoon.
We've spoken to a lot of writers as well at this event who have challenged
themselves to go in different directions with each book,
and it sounds like you've moved into a different direction with a memoir.
Are you still finding motivation to work on novels as well?
I am.
While I've been doing my little book tour, people have been asking me about my other
novels and it's made me miss, you know, creating a scene and making a metaphor or
a similarly or painting an horizon with words and it's made me miss the drama.
It was lovely to write non fiction.
I really enjoyed it.
I'll probably go back and write something else,
but I'm longing now to go back and create a whole world for somebody else.
So my understanding is that the book you're best known for, The Dressmaker,
was your debut novel.
Is that correct?
It was.
I wrote that to pass a course.
Oh, well, OK.
Yeah, tick.
I did pass.
So that experience of it being turned into a film and all of that must have
been like a real whirlwind for you as well.
Were you involved much in that or was it very much the rights are sold and you
step back?
It was a bit of both.
OK.
The the person who made the film was a childhood friend, Sue Maslin,
who came from Geraldry, as did I.
And it took 15 years.
It didn't come out for 15 years after a publication in 2000.
And it took that long for her to raise the money.
And there was a few producers, but she was the one that came along and
got $20 million and Kate Winslet on board.
And she did that all because I said she could.
And I said, you can only do that if all my friends
and family can be extras.
She said sure.
So in that regard, we were all pretty much involved.
But we were also not involved because there's a hierarchy, Yeah, in filmmaking.
And us extras were down at the bottom of that hierarchy, having a lovely time,
I have to say.
Did you do the screen writing for that one or was?
No, I know nothing about screen writing.
And you're happy to keep it that way?
Yeah, I am actually.
Yeah.
Because, you know, I found myself, I gave it a couple of goes for a couple
of producers, but I found myself describing too much.
Like there's a quite an art to what's implied in the description and the
miniscule amount of dialogue that has to be conveyed.
That's the actors do it all with their body and their mind and the set and the
weather and all that kind of stuff.
Whereas I have to write all that and you miss it to you if it's,
if you're not able to do it, well, then I think that they're not going to
know what to do.
But of course they do.
They're actors, you know, And I learned that just by watching them
on set and understood that best left writing fiction.
Always good to know that about yourself.
Yeah.
So as you think about your next book that you're working on,
is there any time period or any setting that is drawing you in?
I tend to.
Something comes out of me every five years or so.
I mean, you know, goes to the publisher every five years or
so.
And that's.
I'm happy with that.
Yeah, I am.
And the next book, I hope, will be a fictionalised interpretation of
a friendship over from the age of 9 clear through to 70.
So that's what I've got in my mind.
And that's what I intend to start tomorrow morning, Monday at 9:00.
OK.
So is this a contemporary novel then or?
Yeah, it will be.
It'll.
It'll probably start in the 50s.
This is all pure speculations.
It may never happen.
So don't wait for it.
And it'll come.
Yeah.
It'll go all the way through to now.
It's very refreshing actually, to hear you say it takes you five years,
you know, between because I think there's a lot of
pressure or certainly a lot of authors we speak to feel pressure to just be
churning out this work.
And and I feel like that would be very draining and very difficult to maintain.
I mean, some some authors can do it, but for others,
like you need to fill that bucket again, right?
And you do get passionate about a new idea enough to see it through all the way
to complete this work.
Agree completely.
Well, thank you so much for speaking with us,
Rosalie.
That's a lovely way to start the day.
And best of luck on your panel.
Thank you very much.
This has been a special presentation of the Not Quite Right podcast in
collaboration with Words on the Ways Riders Festival.
Check the show notes For more information about Words on the Waves and the books
mentioned in this episode.
If you're new to the podcast, please join us again for our regular
episodes where we talk about media, culture, and the art of writing.
Something doesn't seem quite right.