At 92, Liz Hicklin embarked on a standup career: ‘I didn’t think about ageing until I was over 90’

By Alex Reszelska • June 7, 2026 • Culture

Ninety-five-year-old Liz Hicklin may be the oldest ‘sit-down standup’ comedian in Australia. But that’s only part of her extraordinary life story

Liz Hicklin is sitting in her retirement village on Victoria’s 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. “Do you want to see my Harry Styles cardigan?” she asks. Before I can answer, she’s 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’s 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. Their loss. Liz wore hers on stage instead. 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. She won. The experience gave her the confidence to take the next step. Since then, she has been performing standup comedy – or “sit-down standup comedy”, as she prefers to call it – at festivals and comedy clubs across Victoria. Her current show is called 95 and Still Alive, and she’s already working on the follow-up: Sylvia Plath Stole My Boyfriend. “I’ve always enjoyed writing funny poems and entertaining people,” Hicklin says. “Ever since I was a little girl, I liked to make a bit of a noise.” Sign up for a weekly email featuring our best reads 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. “I’ve had lots of lives,” says Hicklin. 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. 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. “He led me into literature: birds, wind, countryside. An electric shock went straight to my heart when I first saw him.” 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 £10,000. She once went to see them in a vault, white gloves on. There they were, filed alongside Mozart’s notes and Shakespeare’s manuscripts. Hicklin was moved. “Two women he loved took their own lives,” she says matter-of-factly. “Yet I still have mine.” For all its reinventions, Hicklin’s 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. At Hicklin’s younger daughter’s 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’s book, Peter the Parachute, inspired by the image. “My life’s not been cushy,” she says. “But it didn’t do me any harm. It did me good. It’s turned me into the person I am today.” Liz is clear on one thing: her life began again at 90. Before that, it was relentless work, very little money, grief. “Now, I am free,” she says. Yet asked whether she has ever thought of herself as extraordinary and brave, she pauses. “I’m beginning to think I am.” Only just at 95. Hicklin is quick to acknowledge the role good health has played in making her second bloom possible. Researchers have also found that positive attitudes towards ageing may help people age better. Hicklin says she never spent much time worrying about getting older. “I didn’t think about ageing until I was over 90.” She still does aqua aerobics. She eats light. She attends a local writers’ group whose members are mostly half her age. She recently spent $1,300 on a lightweight pink walking frame and has already turned it into part of her act. “How do you like my walker?” she asks audiences. “Sexy, isn’t it?” For Hicklin, comedy gives her a reason to keep moving. “I’ve got to have a project,” she says. When she recently performed at the Generation Women storytelling event, the response caught her by surprise. “The applause was so overwhelming, I thought, ‘Oh, perhaps I am a bit unusual’.” Hicklin is unwilling to behave the way people expect a 95-year-old woman to behave. On a flight to Sydney recently, an attendant addressed her friend and agent, Jacinta Parsons, as though she were accompanying someone in need of assistance. “Is she your daughter?” he asked Hicklin. “Oh no,” she corrected him. “She’s my lover.” Now that she has fulfilled her dream of becoming a standup comedian, Hicklin has had to rewrite her bucket list. At the top is an appearance on The Graham Norton Show. “But will they have the budget to fly me over?” she wonders. Liz Hicklin’s show 95 & Still Alive will appear as part of the Glen Eira Storytelling festival on 27 June 2026.

Source: The Guardian