Latest news with #Ansett
Otago Daily Times
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Otago Daily Times
Obituary: Queenstown character a man of letters
He may have run a humble burger joint, and much later an even more humble pie shop, but Mike Burke, who has died aged 78, was one of Queenstown's great characters over the 25 years he lived in town. After winning an Ansett mystery weekend in Queenstown in '92, he and his then-wife Susan shifted here from Wellington and opened Berkels — a corruption of his nickname — the following year. For the following 10 years, Mike was the genial host for a bunch of regulars, in particular, while also entertaining visitors including many celebrities. After Sir Tim Shadbolt lost his Invercargill mayoralty the first time, he was even taken on as the burger bar's Basil Fawlty-style breakfast chef. An avid golfer and former tennis player who'd once even beaten future New Zealand star Onny Parun, Mike instantly recognised one visitor, Boston Globe tennis writer and TV commentator Bud Collins, who was on his way to the Australian Open. Collins was so impressed he wrote a short piece for the Globe which was later displayed in Berkels. One regular, Lionel Williams, recalls Mike used to farewell him each time with the quote misattributed to Winston Churchill, "onward and upward, take no prisoners". He says Mike was once screening an America's Cup yacht race for his regulars when two visitors attempted to come in. "He ran to the door and said, 'sorry, the restaurant's closed, the chef's pissed'." Mike's also fondly remembered as a man of letters, literally. He penned dozens to all and sundry including high-profile politicians like Sir Robert Muldoon, who said he'd drink to his health, sports administrators and other corporates — sometimes applying for jobs, other times complaining about flat beers, for example. His hobby had started in 1986 when he wrote to Augusta National Golf Club asking if his 12-strong group — "when I say 12, 10 know which end of the club to pick up" — could come and play 'two fives' at the famous course. "Could you ensure the carts are well stocked as the Murphy boys take on a vacant look if they're out of reach of a cold sherbet at any one time?" Needless to say, his request was refused. However, as with English satirist William Donaldson's fictional character Henry Root, who also wrote audacious letters to the powers-that-be, it was the many funny replies he received that were almost as fascinating to read. So much so, Mike published a selection of letters, and replies, when he got them, in a book entitled Burger Me Days. After Berkels closed, he took odd jobs before opening Eat Humble Pie in what used to be Berkels' bin cupboard around the corner. He ran that for six years, often making pies for special occasions, till moving to Alexandra in 2017 — he initially worked there for Susan's Eat Humble Pie shop, also endearing himself to the locals. A celebration of Mike's life will be hosted by Queenstown's Thursday Club — which Mike originally hosted at Berkels — at Brazz from 4.30pm next Thursday.
The Advertiser
24-05-2025
- The Advertiser
How a childhood crisscrossing regional Australia has shaped my crime novels
Shelley Burr's crime fiction is steeped in Aussie landscapes and characters. The author of the Lane Holland detective novels Wake (2022), Ripper (2024) and now Vanish explains the countryside that has inspired her. The bio inside my books says that I grew up in Newcastle and Glenrowan, and the road in between. There's always a pause when I tell people I grew up not in one and then the other, but back and forth every few months. My parents, then a remote area nurse from coastal NSW and an air force radio operator from country Victoria, met in Darwin. Their marriage imploded for reasons that had nothing to do with geography, but the result was that getting to spend time with both my parents involved a great deal of it. We didn't always drive-my brother and I sometimes made the journey as unaccompanied minors in a tiny FlyPelican prop plane from Newcastle to Sydney, then a thankfully less bouncy flight to Albury. I think I was the only passenger ever to follow the ongoing plot in the Ansett inflight magazine for children, although their collapse meant I never did find out how it ended. More often, we made the eight-hour drive (more with "driver reviver" breaks). I was a bookish kid, and so the marathon journeys were an opportunity to read. When I ran out of books, or the journey pushed on past sunset, I made up my own stories. Even now, a long drive is one of the best tricks I have for getting unstuck with my writing and I always get home from a regional writers' festival brimming with new notes and ideas. Passing through so many small Australian towns left me with a deep affection for them, and insight into the ways they are similar and yet different. That has had a massive influence on the setting of my books. I don't set my books in real places. I don't like the idea of taking somewhere real people live and layering a dark history over it. But I do draw inspiration from real towns. Geography is not a strength of mine, so it's useful to be able to look at real maps and check how the streets might be laid out, what number and type of shops would be realistic. Would there be a school, would there be a police station, how far would people be willing to drive to get to the nearest regional centre? There's also a freedom in using a fictional place as the setting. I can start from what's real and tweak it in any way the story demands, without worrying about instant messages and emails from readers put out that I've completely misunderstood how their local bus system works. When my debut, Wake, came out I opted not to name the place that inspired the small-town setting of Nannine. I enjoyed how keen readers were to guess, and was reassured that I'd built somewhere that felt real when people asked if I had perhaps based it on the place where they grew up. Most guesses were a little too far to the east, a reflection of just how much of Australia's population is clustered in the green part of the map. Nannine's foundations are firmly in the red dirt. One of the highlights of the promotional tour for Wake was the moment a reader named the actual town, in front of an audience at the Occasional Wine Bar in Boorowa. She first asked if Nannine was Broken Hill, and I explained that it was not, but the larger town the characters visit in a few scenes was. The reader grinned, like she had sprung a planned trap. "Then it's Ivanhoe, NSW." I couldn't have denied it if I'd wanted to, the audience exploded at the look on my face. Later I nervously asked her if I'd done the town justice, and hearing that I had was better than any award. There's an excitement about seeing your own tiny piece of the world represented in fiction - especially for Australians, when most entertainment expects us to relate to lives in New York or Los Angeles. I still remember the frisson of reading a scene in Tobias McCorkell's coming of age novel Everything in its Right Place, when the teenage main character and his father stop to eat in the Nagambie bakery. I'd eaten there many times with my own father. I know those tables! I've had that vanilla slice! I've never been to Ivanhoe - I planned a research trip while drafting Wake, but unnecessary travel amid the restrictions at the time felt unethical. I've drawn closer and closer to home with my later books, and the influence of my earlier travels is obvious. I found the setting for my next book, Ripper, in the midst of a move from Canberra to the Albury-Wodonga region, where we live now. The fictional town of Rainier sits exactly halfway between Sydney and Melbourne. Readers who are particularly good at pub trivia would know that there is already a real town in that spot -Tarcutta. I stopped in Tarcutta to stretch my legs, and was struck by a sign directing drivers to turn one way for Sydney, and another for Melbourne. I was fascinated by the idea of a town defined by being on the way to two other places. One thing that struck me on my family's travels up and down the highways was that every town has something like that. Newcastle has a fort that fired "in anger" on a Japanese submarine during the war. Glenrowan was the site of the last stand of the Kelly Gang. From a child's view the trip ran from The Big Merino in Goulburn to the Dog on the Tuckerbox in Gundagai then the Holbrook submarine. My private investigator character, Lane Holland, starts the books literally and figuratively homeless after a lifetime spent moving about, first with his family who worked the agricultural show circuit and later going wherever there's a case for him. I'm often asked if the remote setting of Wake was inspired by my time in Glenrowan -and it was. But out of all my characters I feel the most affinity for the constant motion of Lane's childhood. Country Victoria ended up feeling like home, and I now live on 10 hectares that we're trying to turn into a productive permaculture farm. That inspired the Karpathy farm that Lane visits in my latest book, Vanish. I'm sure my neighbours will recognise the steep hills and treacherous winding road that leads up to it. I have discovered in the writing that inspiration works both ways. Vanish is soaked in paranoia, and the fear that someone is watching. When I took a break from writing to check the goats or the chickens, I started seeing ghosts. Every humanoid shape out of the corner of my eye became someone watching me. I plan to set my next book far from here, but I think that no matter where I choose, there will be some aspect of the setting that feels like home. Shelley Burr's crime fiction is steeped in Aussie landscapes and characters. The author of the Lane Holland detective novels Wake (2022), Ripper (2024) and now Vanish explains the countryside that has inspired her. The bio inside my books says that I grew up in Newcastle and Glenrowan, and the road in between. There's always a pause when I tell people I grew up not in one and then the other, but back and forth every few months. My parents, then a remote area nurse from coastal NSW and an air force radio operator from country Victoria, met in Darwin. Their marriage imploded for reasons that had nothing to do with geography, but the result was that getting to spend time with both my parents involved a great deal of it. We didn't always drive-my brother and I sometimes made the journey as unaccompanied minors in a tiny FlyPelican prop plane from Newcastle to Sydney, then a thankfully less bouncy flight to Albury. I think I was the only passenger ever to follow the ongoing plot in the Ansett inflight magazine for children, although their collapse meant I never did find out how it ended. More often, we made the eight-hour drive (more with "driver reviver" breaks). I was a bookish kid, and so the marathon journeys were an opportunity to read. When I ran out of books, or the journey pushed on past sunset, I made up my own stories. Even now, a long drive is one of the best tricks I have for getting unstuck with my writing and I always get home from a regional writers' festival brimming with new notes and ideas. Passing through so many small Australian towns left me with a deep affection for them, and insight into the ways they are similar and yet different. That has had a massive influence on the setting of my books. I don't set my books in real places. I don't like the idea of taking somewhere real people live and layering a dark history over it. But I do draw inspiration from real towns. Geography is not a strength of mine, so it's useful to be able to look at real maps and check how the streets might be laid out, what number and type of shops would be realistic. Would there be a school, would there be a police station, how far would people be willing to drive to get to the nearest regional centre? There's also a freedom in using a fictional place as the setting. I can start from what's real and tweak it in any way the story demands, without worrying about instant messages and emails from readers put out that I've completely misunderstood how their local bus system works. When my debut, Wake, came out I opted not to name the place that inspired the small-town setting of Nannine. I enjoyed how keen readers were to guess, and was reassured that I'd built somewhere that felt real when people asked if I had perhaps based it on the place where they grew up. Most guesses were a little too far to the east, a reflection of just how much of Australia's population is clustered in the green part of the map. Nannine's foundations are firmly in the red dirt. One of the highlights of the promotional tour for Wake was the moment a reader named the actual town, in front of an audience at the Occasional Wine Bar in Boorowa. She first asked if Nannine was Broken Hill, and I explained that it was not, but the larger town the characters visit in a few scenes was. The reader grinned, like she had sprung a planned trap. "Then it's Ivanhoe, NSW." I couldn't have denied it if I'd wanted to, the audience exploded at the look on my face. Later I nervously asked her if I'd done the town justice, and hearing that I had was better than any award. There's an excitement about seeing your own tiny piece of the world represented in fiction - especially for Australians, when most entertainment expects us to relate to lives in New York or Los Angeles. I still remember the frisson of reading a scene in Tobias McCorkell's coming of age novel Everything in its Right Place, when the teenage main character and his father stop to eat in the Nagambie bakery. I'd eaten there many times with my own father. I know those tables! I've had that vanilla slice! I've never been to Ivanhoe - I planned a research trip while drafting Wake, but unnecessary travel amid the restrictions at the time felt unethical. I've drawn closer and closer to home with my later books, and the influence of my earlier travels is obvious. I found the setting for my next book, Ripper, in the midst of a move from Canberra to the Albury-Wodonga region, where we live now. The fictional town of Rainier sits exactly halfway between Sydney and Melbourne. Readers who are particularly good at pub trivia would know that there is already a real town in that spot -Tarcutta. I stopped in Tarcutta to stretch my legs, and was struck by a sign directing drivers to turn one way for Sydney, and another for Melbourne. I was fascinated by the idea of a town defined by being on the way to two other places. One thing that struck me on my family's travels up and down the highways was that every town has something like that. Newcastle has a fort that fired "in anger" on a Japanese submarine during the war. Glenrowan was the site of the last stand of the Kelly Gang. From a child's view the trip ran from The Big Merino in Goulburn to the Dog on the Tuckerbox in Gundagai then the Holbrook submarine. My private investigator character, Lane Holland, starts the books literally and figuratively homeless after a lifetime spent moving about, first with his family who worked the agricultural show circuit and later going wherever there's a case for him. I'm often asked if the remote setting of Wake was inspired by my time in Glenrowan -and it was. But out of all my characters I feel the most affinity for the constant motion of Lane's childhood. Country Victoria ended up feeling like home, and I now live on 10 hectares that we're trying to turn into a productive permaculture farm. That inspired the Karpathy farm that Lane visits in my latest book, Vanish. I'm sure my neighbours will recognise the steep hills and treacherous winding road that leads up to it. I have discovered in the writing that inspiration works both ways. Vanish is soaked in paranoia, and the fear that someone is watching. When I took a break from writing to check the goats or the chickens, I started seeing ghosts. Every humanoid shape out of the corner of my eye became someone watching me. I plan to set my next book far from here, but I think that no matter where I choose, there will be some aspect of the setting that feels like home. Shelley Burr's crime fiction is steeped in Aussie landscapes and characters. The author of the Lane Holland detective novels Wake (2022), Ripper (2024) and now Vanish explains the countryside that has inspired her. The bio inside my books says that I grew up in Newcastle and Glenrowan, and the road in between. There's always a pause when I tell people I grew up not in one and then the other, but back and forth every few months. My parents, then a remote area nurse from coastal NSW and an air force radio operator from country Victoria, met in Darwin. Their marriage imploded for reasons that had nothing to do with geography, but the result was that getting to spend time with both my parents involved a great deal of it. We didn't always drive-my brother and I sometimes made the journey as unaccompanied minors in a tiny FlyPelican prop plane from Newcastle to Sydney, then a thankfully less bouncy flight to Albury. I think I was the only passenger ever to follow the ongoing plot in the Ansett inflight magazine for children, although their collapse meant I never did find out how it ended. More often, we made the eight-hour drive (more with "driver reviver" breaks). I was a bookish kid, and so the marathon journeys were an opportunity to read. When I ran out of books, or the journey pushed on past sunset, I made up my own stories. Even now, a long drive is one of the best tricks I have for getting unstuck with my writing and I always get home from a regional writers' festival brimming with new notes and ideas. Passing through so many small Australian towns left me with a deep affection for them, and insight into the ways they are similar and yet different. That has had a massive influence on the setting of my books. I don't set my books in real places. I don't like the idea of taking somewhere real people live and layering a dark history over it. But I do draw inspiration from real towns. Geography is not a strength of mine, so it's useful to be able to look at real maps and check how the streets might be laid out, what number and type of shops would be realistic. Would there be a school, would there be a police station, how far would people be willing to drive to get to the nearest regional centre? There's also a freedom in using a fictional place as the setting. I can start from what's real and tweak it in any way the story demands, without worrying about instant messages and emails from readers put out that I've completely misunderstood how their local bus system works. When my debut, Wake, came out I opted not to name the place that inspired the small-town setting of Nannine. I enjoyed how keen readers were to guess, and was reassured that I'd built somewhere that felt real when people asked if I had perhaps based it on the place where they grew up. Most guesses were a little too far to the east, a reflection of just how much of Australia's population is clustered in the green part of the map. Nannine's foundations are firmly in the red dirt. One of the highlights of the promotional tour for Wake was the moment a reader named the actual town, in front of an audience at the Occasional Wine Bar in Boorowa. She first asked if Nannine was Broken Hill, and I explained that it was not, but the larger town the characters visit in a few scenes was. The reader grinned, like she had sprung a planned trap. "Then it's Ivanhoe, NSW." I couldn't have denied it if I'd wanted to, the audience exploded at the look on my face. Later I nervously asked her if I'd done the town justice, and hearing that I had was better than any award. There's an excitement about seeing your own tiny piece of the world represented in fiction - especially for Australians, when most entertainment expects us to relate to lives in New York or Los Angeles. I still remember the frisson of reading a scene in Tobias McCorkell's coming of age novel Everything in its Right Place, when the teenage main character and his father stop to eat in the Nagambie bakery. I'd eaten there many times with my own father. I know those tables! I've had that vanilla slice! I've never been to Ivanhoe - I planned a research trip while drafting Wake, but unnecessary travel amid the restrictions at the time felt unethical. I've drawn closer and closer to home with my later books, and the influence of my earlier travels is obvious. I found the setting for my next book, Ripper, in the midst of a move from Canberra to the Albury-Wodonga region, where we live now. The fictional town of Rainier sits exactly halfway between Sydney and Melbourne. Readers who are particularly good at pub trivia would know that there is already a real town in that spot -Tarcutta. I stopped in Tarcutta to stretch my legs, and was struck by a sign directing drivers to turn one way for Sydney, and another for Melbourne. I was fascinated by the idea of a town defined by being on the way to two other places. One thing that struck me on my family's travels up and down the highways was that every town has something like that. Newcastle has a fort that fired "in anger" on a Japanese submarine during the war. Glenrowan was the site of the last stand of the Kelly Gang. From a child's view the trip ran from The Big Merino in Goulburn to the Dog on the Tuckerbox in Gundagai then the Holbrook submarine. My private investigator character, Lane Holland, starts the books literally and figuratively homeless after a lifetime spent moving about, first with his family who worked the agricultural show circuit and later going wherever there's a case for him. I'm often asked if the remote setting of Wake was inspired by my time in Glenrowan -and it was. But out of all my characters I feel the most affinity for the constant motion of Lane's childhood. Country Victoria ended up feeling like home, and I now live on 10 hectares that we're trying to turn into a productive permaculture farm. That inspired the Karpathy farm that Lane visits in my latest book, Vanish. I'm sure my neighbours will recognise the steep hills and treacherous winding road that leads up to it. I have discovered in the writing that inspiration works both ways. Vanish is soaked in paranoia, and the fear that someone is watching. When I took a break from writing to check the goats or the chickens, I started seeing ghosts. Every humanoid shape out of the corner of my eye became someone watching me. I plan to set my next book far from here, but I think that no matter where I choose, there will be some aspect of the setting that feels like home. Shelley Burr's crime fiction is steeped in Aussie landscapes and characters. The author of the Lane Holland detective novels Wake (2022), Ripper (2024) and now Vanish explains the countryside that has inspired her. The bio inside my books says that I grew up in Newcastle and Glenrowan, and the road in between. There's always a pause when I tell people I grew up not in one and then the other, but back and forth every few months. My parents, then a remote area nurse from coastal NSW and an air force radio operator from country Victoria, met in Darwin. Their marriage imploded for reasons that had nothing to do with geography, but the result was that getting to spend time with both my parents involved a great deal of it. We didn't always drive-my brother and I sometimes made the journey as unaccompanied minors in a tiny FlyPelican prop plane from Newcastle to Sydney, then a thankfully less bouncy flight to Albury. I think I was the only passenger ever to follow the ongoing plot in the Ansett inflight magazine for children, although their collapse meant I never did find out how it ended. More often, we made the eight-hour drive (more with "driver reviver" breaks). I was a bookish kid, and so the marathon journeys were an opportunity to read. When I ran out of books, or the journey pushed on past sunset, I made up my own stories. Even now, a long drive is one of the best tricks I have for getting unstuck with my writing and I always get home from a regional writers' festival brimming with new notes and ideas. Passing through so many small Australian towns left me with a deep affection for them, and insight into the ways they are similar and yet different. That has had a massive influence on the setting of my books. I don't set my books in real places. I don't like the idea of taking somewhere real people live and layering a dark history over it. But I do draw inspiration from real towns. Geography is not a strength of mine, so it's useful to be able to look at real maps and check how the streets might be laid out, what number and type of shops would be realistic. Would there be a school, would there be a police station, how far would people be willing to drive to get to the nearest regional centre? There's also a freedom in using a fictional place as the setting. I can start from what's real and tweak it in any way the story demands, without worrying about instant messages and emails from readers put out that I've completely misunderstood how their local bus system works. When my debut, Wake, came out I opted not to name the place that inspired the small-town setting of Nannine. I enjoyed how keen readers were to guess, and was reassured that I'd built somewhere that felt real when people asked if I had perhaps based it on the place where they grew up. Most guesses were a little too far to the east, a reflection of just how much of Australia's population is clustered in the green part of the map. Nannine's foundations are firmly in the red dirt. One of the highlights of the promotional tour for Wake was the moment a reader named the actual town, in front of an audience at the Occasional Wine Bar in Boorowa. She first asked if Nannine was Broken Hill, and I explained that it was not, but the larger town the characters visit in a few scenes was. The reader grinned, like she had sprung a planned trap. "Then it's Ivanhoe, NSW." I couldn't have denied it if I'd wanted to, the audience exploded at the look on my face. Later I nervously asked her if I'd done the town justice, and hearing that I had was better than any award. There's an excitement about seeing your own tiny piece of the world represented in fiction - especially for Australians, when most entertainment expects us to relate to lives in New York or Los Angeles. I still remember the frisson of reading a scene in Tobias McCorkell's coming of age novel Everything in its Right Place, when the teenage main character and his father stop to eat in the Nagambie bakery. I'd eaten there many times with my own father. I know those tables! I've had that vanilla slice! I've never been to Ivanhoe - I planned a research trip while drafting Wake, but unnecessary travel amid the restrictions at the time felt unethical. I've drawn closer and closer to home with my later books, and the influence of my earlier travels is obvious. I found the setting for my next book, Ripper, in the midst of a move from Canberra to the Albury-Wodonga region, where we live now. The fictional town of Rainier sits exactly halfway between Sydney and Melbourne. Readers who are particularly good at pub trivia would know that there is already a real town in that spot -Tarcutta. I stopped in Tarcutta to stretch my legs, and was struck by a sign directing drivers to turn one way for Sydney, and another for Melbourne. I was fascinated by the idea of a town defined by being on the way to two other places. One thing that struck me on my family's travels up and down the highways was that every town has something like that. Newcastle has a fort that fired "in anger" on a Japanese submarine during the war. Glenrowan was the site of the last stand of the Kelly Gang. From a child's view the trip ran from The Big Merino in Goulburn to the Dog on the Tuckerbox in Gundagai then the Holbrook submarine. My private investigator character, Lane Holland, starts the books literally and figuratively homeless after a lifetime spent moving about, first with his family who worked the agricultural show circuit and later going wherever there's a case for him. I'm often asked if the remote setting of Wake was inspired by my time in Glenrowan -and it was. But out of all my characters I feel the most affinity for the constant motion of Lane's childhood. Country Victoria ended up feeling like home, and I now live on 10 hectares that we're trying to turn into a productive permaculture farm. That inspired the Karpathy farm that Lane visits in my latest book, Vanish. I'm sure my neighbours will recognise the steep hills and treacherous winding road that leads up to it. I have discovered in the writing that inspiration works both ways. Vanish is soaked in paranoia, and the fear that someone is watching. When I took a break from writing to check the goats or the chickens, I started seeing ghosts. Every humanoid shape out of the corner of my eye became someone watching me. I plan to set my next book far from here, but I think that no matter where I choose, there will be some aspect of the setting that feels like home.
Time Out
16-05-2025
- Business
- Time Out
Sydney Airport's T2 terminal is getting a major $200-million upgrade
Gone on a work trip to Melbourne? Jetted off to Perth for a family wedding? Flew into the heart of Australia's Red Centre? If you've travelled domestically from Sydney, chances are you've been caught in one of those long and winding queues at Sydney airport. But good news is on the horizon. Major improvements are taking off at Sydney's T2 domestic terminal as we speak. Sydney Airport is giving the T2 domestic terminal a much-needed upgrade – its first in over 30 years – and it's all about getting you from your Uber or taxi drop-off to your boarding gate in 15 minutes flat. Yes, really! Built back in the days of Ansett (remember when it was our national carrier?) to handle just eight million passengers a year, Sydney airport was overdue for a revamp. There will be $200 million going into the upgrade that's already under way, and it's no small feat – with crew working round the clock to ensure minimal disruption to the current check-in system or flights. The new-look terminal will feature next-gen security technology including advanced CT scanners. This means no more having to remove your laptops and liquids from your carry-on bags. Sweet. There'll be seven processing lanes handling up to 500 passengers an hour – more than double the current flow – so that passengers can breeze through security. Check-in is also getting a serious makeover. Expect 55 self-serve kiosks and smarter bag drop facilities that boost luggage processing capacity from 1,500 to 1,800 bags per hour by 2026. Family in tow or need a bit of extra help? The new design includes dedicated lanes and two additional lifts to make getting around easier. Plus, the gate lounge and food court areas are getting a refresh, too.
NZ Herald
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
Jack Ansett, James Mustapic and Ray O'Leary talk viral moments, working with family members, and PowerPoint comedy - Billy T' Billy
When it comes to family, all three of them had experienced the awkwardness of their family coming to shows early in their careers, when things weren't going smoothly. 'I think some family members, especially in my family, some of them I think were initially embarrassed or worried it would be bad, and to be fair, in the beginning it was bad,' Ansett said. 'I remember I had one early show. And all the family came, Grandma, everyone, and it was shocking. And then I just think, eight, nine years pass and they... must just think, oh, 'he's still not that good', they don't know that you then moved to Auckland and you hustle with the best in the country and you do get a lot better.' 'I have some aunts and uncles who saw me do that very first Billy T show I did in Auckland,' O'Leary said. 'I was horrible. I remember just bombing in a room of 50 that was almost entirely my extended family. 'And then the worst thing about bombing to your family is you have to hang out with them afterwards. They have to grimace and say how impressive it was you remembered everything, and how brave you are for standing on stage. 'And then some of them have never come back. And I do wonder what they must think. Like we've all done things like been on TV or whatever, and I wonder if they see that and think, what's going on? This guy's no good!' For Mustapic, the only time his grandparents came to see him perform was six years ago, and he doubts they are ever coming back. 'The venue had a rule that it was free venue hire as long as the audience bought $300 of drinks, and then no one was buying drinks. 'I just bought heaps of drinks. 'cause I was like, either way, I'm paying for this. And then I was very drunk and just the crowd hated me. And I had to have a break in the middle of my show, but there was no backstage or green room for me to go to, so I had to sit in the crowd, after bombing, at halftime. 'So I just sit in the crowd with my grandparents, and be like, 'We'll be back in 10′." Listen to the full episode for more stories from the New Zealand comedy scene. Billy T' Billy is a NZ Herald podcast celebrating local comedy, in partnership with the New Zealand International Comedy Festival. New episodes are out every Wednesday. The festival runs from May 2nd to 25th in Auckland and Wellington.
