Casting her mind back six years, Julie Goodwin wouldn’t have believed she’d be where she is today – getting ready to embark on her first nationwide live tour!
“No way! When I was at my lowest, I wasn’t able to take on anything positive,” the MasterChef Australia alum tells Woman’s Day of her horrific 2020 breakdown that was so bad it led to her hospitalisation.
“I needed to be hauled out of that hole with a crane. I had no foothold. I had no fingerhold. I couldn’t scrabble myself out of there at all.”
HITTING THE ROAD
And yet now here she is, nearly six years later, feeling energised and looking absolutely fabulous as she gears up to travel around the country in a swanky new RV.
“I’m so excited. I’m a little nervous, a bit jittery. But I’m really just looking forward to getting out there,” she adds.
The tour – named Julie Goodwin: Your Time Starts Now – comes off the back of the re-release of her 2023 memoir and is billed as a two-hour theatre experience that’s part cooking demonstration, part heart-to-heart. Julie, 55, will regale everything from her favourite recipes to anecdotes from her storied career to her challenges with mental health.
She hopes the audience will feel as if they’re at an intimate dinner with friends where no subject is off the table.
“There’ll be some tough subject matter in there… that’s life isn’t it?” she says. “And the whole reason for the tour is to try and normalise some of those conversations so that we can have them without feeling uncomfortable.
“But it’s not a sad, dark, terrible story. It’s a story about love and it’s a story about hope and coming back from the tough times and rediscovering how to live life to the fullest.
“We all go through things and I just think sometimes it’s nice to feel supported through that and also to know that no matter how tough things get, you can come out the other side of it. I’m just going to get out there and do what I do.”
The first leg will see Julie hit up nine regional towns including Coffs Harbour, Grafton, Port Macquarie, Bathurst, Dubbo and her hometown of the Central Coast, which she chose for two reasons.
“Well, it’s home! It’s where I’m from, it’s where I raised my boys,” she says.
“But I think I also understand these communities, I understand the kinds of challenges that we face that aren’t necessarily faced in some of the big cities.”
ROAD RITUALS
Acknowledging the strain a tour of this magnitude can take on not only her physical but mental health, Julie says it was something she had to think very carefully about before she signed on.
“It was something that had to be workshopped before we ever set the idea in motion. I workshopped it with my psychologist and with my family. It’s like everything I have to do now, I have to make sure that the things I need to do all stay in place and I need to make sure that there are boundaries built around that.
“Those things are not negotiable. And if I manage to stick to all of those things, I should be fine.”
Julie says having a strong support network around her while out on the road will also be a big help, and even reveals that her youngest son Paddy will be driving her around in her RV to each location!
“I only just found that out. So I couldn’t be more thrilled. It’s going to be so much fun,” she enthuses.
SUPPORT NETWORK
Julie credits Paddy, 27, along with her other two sons Joe, 30, and Tom, 29, with helping her through her lowest point, which she says she reached during the pandemic.
“They’re extraordinary people, my sons,” she says. “And they take their cue from their father who is also an extraordinary person. It’s hard to explain why you get as low as you get, but I have been loved back to life by my family and I just loved that none of them gave up on me.
“They’ve just been there by my side, at my back, underneath me holding me up for the whole time.”
STILL GOING STRONG
Last Wednesday marked Julia and her husband Mick’s 31st wedding anniversary, a milestone Julie doesn’t take for granted. “He’s really been there for it all. When we said those vows, for better or worse, richer, poorer, sickness and health. We have left no stone unturned on that list,” she giggles.
“We have tested every single one of our wedding vows.
“But you know what, if you’re standing shoulder to shoulder with someone and looking in the same direction, then you’re doing a lot better than if you’re standing head to head and pushing against each other.”
As she prepares to hit the road through regional NSW in her RV next month, Julie recognises that her own journey with her mental health will be just as twisty and bendy as her tour route, but if she’s learned anything in the past six years, it’s all about the journey and not so much about the destination.
“If I went back [to 2020] and could tell myself something I’d learned now, it’d be to drop the expectation that this is going to be a quick and easy fix,” she says.
“When I got really sick, I was just like, ‘OK, I’ll do whatever you say. I’ll go to the hospital, I’ll get fixed and I’ll get on with my life.’ But it ain’t that linear – and I’ve understood that. It would have been far less frustrating had I just been able to accept that back then, but it’s a circuitous route. It goes up and down and sideways. Mental health is a lifelong journey, it’s not like a broken leg that you plaster up and it gets better. It’s more like a car that you constantly have to service.
“And this beat up old jalopy still needs serving,” she laughs.
Your Time Starts Now – The Julie Goodwin Tour kicks off February 6. Visit juliegoodwin.com.au/tour for tickets.
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