Get Up Mum on ABC’s Life Matters

Get Up Mum is an intimate portrait of what it’s like being a young carer.

Get Up Mum is based on the childhood memoir of author and Satellite Ambassador Justin Heazlewood and charts one year in the life of a 12-year-old growing up in Tasmania in the early ’90s.

As a child, Justin had a hobby — obsessively capturing the voices of his family and friends on tape, including his Mum who lives with schizophrenia.

The series is an intimate portrait of what it is like to be both a kid and a carer, and a time capsule of one family’s life trying to come to grips with mental illness in the best way they can.

Listen to Justin’s story on ABC, as he switches between love and loneliness, cuddles and chaos, and his quiet lament: “of all the voices Mum hears, I wish one of them could be mine.”

“Justin Heazlewood has written something so bloody important and special with this book. One of the most big-hearted – and heart-bruising – books you’ll read.”
BENJAMIN LAW, author of ‘The Family Law’ and ‘Gaysia’

“Heazlewood’s writing has extraordinary power and captures the world of a twelve-year-old living through an extremely alienating and difficult time.”
PAULA KEOGH, author of ‘The Green Bell’

“A warm, humorous memoir about coming of age, and the deep love between two individuals who need each other equally. Littered throughout the novel are lines of poetry that almost startle, asking to be read and re-read.”
CAITLIN CASSIDY, Readings