Liz Hicklin is sitting in her retirement village on Victoria\u2019s Mornington peninsula when she answers the phone, the sea visible through the window behind her. She is dressed impeccably in a pink jacket with pearl buttons and magenta-framed glasses, her white hair swept into a neat bob.<\/p>\n
\u201cDo you want to see my Harry Styles cardigan?\u201d she asks.<\/p>\n
Before I can answer, she\u2019s off in her walker, returning moments later with an explosion of colourful knitted wool. Inspired by the patchwork cardigan worn by Harry Styles, she spotted a similar one exhibited at London\u2019s Victoria and Albert Museum. When a cousin sent her the pattern, she knitted her own version. Her granddaughters were meant to wear it to a Styles concert, but it was 40C that day.<\/p>\n
Their loss. Liz wore hers on stage instead.<\/p>\n
The idea of performing in front of a live audience had been sitting on her bucket list for years, alongside a dream of dancing a foxtrot with an Englishman. At 92, worried that her life was suddenly slowing down, she entered the poetry slam at the 2023 Clunes Booktown festival, the only nonagenarian in the competition. Believing strong language was a requirement of the form, she was also the only contestant who swore on stage.<\/p>\n
She won.<\/p>\n
The 95-year-old\u2019s first gig was a poetry slam at Clunes Booktown festival in 2023. Photograph: Ellen Smith\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
The experience gave her the confidence to take the next step. Since then, she has been performing standup comedy \u2013 or \u201csit-down standup comedy\u201d, as she prefers to call it \u2013 at festivals and comedy clubs across Victoria. Her current show is called 95 and Still Alive, and she\u2019s already working on the follow-up: Sylvia Plath Stole My Boyfriend.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve always enjoyed writing funny poems and entertaining people,\u201d Hicklin says. \u201cEver since I was a little girl, I liked to make a bit of a noise.\u201d<\/p>\n
On stage, she often jokes about ageing, death, grief and sex, with the authority of someone who has experienced all of them in abundance. Few comedians can draw on nine decades of lived experience.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve had lots of lives,\u201d Hicklin says.<\/p>\n
Before becoming a comedian, she had been a nurse, a pet shop and lottery agency owner, a porcelain doll-maker, a poet, a memoirist and a novelist. Born in England, young Hicklin was sent to elocution lessons by her strict Methodist father and regularly instructed to perform poems for guests at family gatherings.<\/p>\n
As a nine-year-old wartime evacuee, she had to learn early how to adapt: it would become one of her defining skills. She has raised three children, buried two, migrated from England to Australia and, as a young woman in Cambridge, dated the future British poet laureate Ted Hughes, later the husband of Sylvia Plath.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe led me into literature: birds, wind, countryside. An electric shock went straight to my heart when I first saw him.\u201d<\/p>\n
He called her Bunny, the same nickname he would use for Plath. When their relationship ended after 18 months, Hicklin kept his letters. Years later, she sold them to the British Library for \u00a310,000. She once went to see them in a vault, white gloves on. There they were, filed alongside Mozart\u2019s notes and Shakespeare\u2019s manuscripts. Hicklin was moved.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwo women he loved took their own lives,\u201d she says matter-of-factly. \u201cYet I still have mine.\u201d<\/p>\n
For all its reinventions, Hicklin\u2019s life has also been marked by profound loss. Both of her daughters died by suicide, seven years apart. Looking back, she still struggles to find words for the helplessness of watching mental illness take hold of her children.<\/p>\n
At Hicklin\u2019s younger daughter\u2019s funeral, where her paintings were displayed around the room, she noticed something she had never seen before: a tiny parachutist drifting through work after work. She came to see it as a symbol of people unable to find their way through mental illness, and later wrote a children\u2019s book, Peter the Parachute, inspired by the image.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy life\u2019s not been cushy,\u201d she says. \u201cBut it didn\u2019t do me any harm. It did me good. It\u2019s turned me into the person I am today.\u201d<\/p>\n
Liz is clear on one thing: her life began again at 90. Before that, it was relentless work, very little money, grief. \u201cNow, I am free,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
Yet asked whether she has ever thought of herself as extraordinary and brave, she pauses. \u201cI\u2019m beginning to think I am.\u201d<\/p>\n
Only just at 95.<\/p>\n
Hicklin is quick to acknowledge the role good health has played in making her second bloom possible.<\/p>\n