Denise Scott admits she was hesitant to travel to Germany to appear on former breakfast radio co-host Shaun Micallef’s TV show.
For one, she had only finished her traumatic breast cancer treatment about a year earlier and “still wasn’t feeling that great”.
And she had barely left long-term partner John Lane’s side since her diagnosis in January 2023.
The 71-year-old comedian was also convinced she didn’t have “anything to offer” to the show – Shaun Micallef’s Origin Odyssey – in which prominent Australians journey to the places their ancestors once called home and delve deep into their family history.
“The free trip was pretty appealing,” she jokes. “But I kept saying, ‘There’s no story to be told there. I don’t know anything about my history there, and it’s a long time ago that my mother’s side of the family lived there.’”
Scott says the extent of her knowledge was that her great-grandfather, Albert Bock, was German. But he lived in Australia and, for all she knew, was born here too. His parents had migrated from Germany to South Australia.
That was it, Scott says, because her late mother, Margaret, never talked about her background.
At the beginning of her Origin Odyssey episode – which will air on SBS on August 25 – Scott tells Micallef that Margaret was a closed book until one day, she dropped a bombshell while sitting “on a plastic banana lounge (smoking) a cigarette” in their suburban backyard.
“I was 21,” Scott recalls. “Out of nowhere she said, ‘May’s not my sister … she’s my mother’.”
The beloved stand-up comic, actor, and TV and radio presenter elaborates while speaking
to VWeekend from her Melbourne home: “(Mum’s) story was very traumatic for her. May was 14 when she had Mum, and Mum was brought up as her little sister.”
Micallef goes on to reveal to Scott that her great, great, great-grandfather, Carl Bock, was a miner who toiled away in the Harz Mountains region, midway between Berlin and Frankfurt in central Germany, before risking everything in search of a better life in Australia.
Carl travelled South Australia in 1846 – a boat voyage that Scott learns would have taken anywhere between 85 and 170 days – with wife Sophia and his five children. One of them, an infant, tragically died on the way.
Scott discovers that the Bocks were pioneers who paved the way for more than 1000 other miners and their families to follow them to the other side of the world.
She does so while visiting the mine where he and the generations before him worked, the church where he baptised and married, and the site of the village where he was born.
After enduring 18 months of gruelling cancer treatment – including a lumpectomy, chemotherapy and radiation that left her with horror burns – Scott says the experience was “a gift”.
“I was anxious about doing the job because it was so intense – the long travel time, the fact that they start filming as soon as you get off that plane in Frankfurt (and it was) five days of all-day filming, and then you’re on a plane back to Melbourne,” she says.
“I was still very much recovering and I hadn’t been away since treatment had started in January 2023. This was three years later, and I’d spent a lot of that time either having treatment or recovering from it.
“I had also become quite dependent on my partner, John. He was full-on caring for me, and suddenly I’m going off to Germany on my own. I mean, I had the crew and Shaun – it’s making me laugh, thinking of Shaun being my carer.
“But yeah, from the moment I arrived … I loved it. I had a business class flight, I slept (the whole way there). And then, I just loved all the places we went to. I loved riffing with Shaun.
“It was full-on positive.”
The trip was also eye opening for Scott.
She says she was confronted by the poverty experienced by her miner ancestors, and the plight they faced when “the arse fell out of their industry”.
“That was generations of, ‘Life was going to be like this – the boys were going to work in the mine, and the women were going to look after the family’,” she says. “And then it all changed. That affected me.”
As did finding out the village where Carl was born is now submerged beneath a dam.
Being serenaded by the Oberharzer Bergsänger, also known as the Mountain Miners Choir, in a church that had been seminal in her great, great, great-grandfather’s life was also deeply emotional, she says – until she became engulfed in a coughing fit while yodelling.
“That was an unfortunate twist and turn in the tale,” she laughs.
Scott says her cancer treatment was so all consuming that while in the thick of it, she could have never imagined travelling across the world to film alongside the man she co-hosted an FM breakfast radio show with in the 2000s.
Also tracing their roots in Origin Odyssey season two are Pia Miranda (Italy), Matt Okine (Ghana), Luke McGregor (Scotland), Kate Langbroek (Jamaica) and Tony Armstrong (Ireland).
Scott, a stand-up legend, is back on stage too – another thing she thought was behind her. She is touring Tickety Boo, her first solo show in a decade and her most personal one yet, about navigating cancer.
“I had a granddaughter arrive during that time (of having treatment) and even then, all I had the energy for was to focus on going through cancer,” she says.
“It’s a very hard slog and certainly, I didn’t think about working at all. I didn’t care, I just wanted to feel well again. I couldn’t imagine feeling well.”
Thankfully, Scott has more energy for grandkids Lenny, 4, and Angelina, 2, these days – a little more, anyway.
“Lenny loves setting up different role-playing games,” she says.
“He organises them all – you get no say. And he casts everyone.
“Because I’m often lying on the bed, he’ll go, ‘Grandma, you’re Captain Resting (because) your favourite thing to do is rest’.
“He’ll say, ‘What are your instructions, Captain Resting?’ And I’ll go, ‘You’ve got to go outside and look for aliens in our yard’. And he goes off and explores the yard for ages, while I stay lying in bed, and then comes back and reports. That’s the kind of grandma I am,” she laughs.
Grandpa John is a bit more lively. “We have a back shed that’s full of stuff (including) drums but also empty olive oil cans and wooden boxes,” Scott says. “Grandpa and the two grandkids go out there and bash the shit out of them. I feel really sorry for the neighbours over the back fence, but it’s pretty adorable.”
John has been an “incredible” support throughout her cancer ordeal, Scott says. They got through it together by shelving their “healthy egos”.
“He became so humble,” she says of her partner of 44 years, whom she met while they were both in a clown troupe in the early ’80s.
“John’s a person – like lots of men – who would never just go and bring the clothes in off the line. It would be like, ‘Look at me, I’ve brought the clothes in off the line, blow the trumpets, get a parade going’.
“And then, it was really just him and me a lot of the time. He’d be, like, trying to work out something I could eat, and I really couldn’t eat, but he’d do his best. He was so quiet about it and didn’t draw any attention to himself.
“And we didn’t really talk about it that much with other people, we couldn’t.
“He’s still doing everything – the cooking and walking the dogs and I’m like, ‘Oh I’m sick John’, and then I dress myself up and go out to work and have a great time.
“He’s very protective. And of course, I abuse him for it, of course I do. It’s like, ‘Oh, is he going to stop treating me like I’m some sick person?’
“But yeah, he’s been remarkable. He’s a remarkable person.”
And what would Scott’s mother have made of her discovering their German roots on national television? “She would have, I think, been embarrassed,” Scott says honestly. “She was not a fan of talking about anything in public – and of course, I talked about everything. I was my mother’s worst nightmare, really.”
The funnywoman pauses, reconsidering her mother’s reaction. “Although, I think because there was a lot of positivity in this story, because … it’s really celebrating a beautiful place (where) my great, great, great-grandfather came from (she may have appreciated it).
“I was gasping in wonder – ‘Oh my God, there is snow! Oh my God, there are cottages like Hansel and Gretel, there are cobblestones! Oh my God, there are things that are thousands of years old, just hanging about in the town square!’
“I learned a lot. I also learnt that I really like Germany – I’d love to go back and explore more.”
Read related topics:Wellness