Gardening Australia’s Costa Georgiadis: Exactly how old is that beard?

Each week, Benjamin Law asks public figures to discuss the subjects we’re told to keep private by getting them to roll a die. The numbers they land on are the topics they’re given. This week, he talks to Costa Georgiadis. The TV presenter, 59, is also a landscape architect, environmental educator and author. He has presented ABC TV’s Gardening Australia for 12 years and co-hosted SBS’s The Hospital: In the Deep End. His beard is 33 years old.

Costa Georgiadis: “If sex is an entire immersion that gives us release, gardening – therapeutically – is the ultimate release.”Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

SEX

What was sex ed like for you in the ’70s?
Some graphics: “This is a penis; this is a vagina.” There weren’t any words around enjoyment; it was just biology. And now I’m still single in a world that’s another planet compared to what was going on when we were first dating and exploring that side of ourselves.

Do you embrace singledom or does it set you apart from everyone else?
It’s more of an embrace; I have freedom. But growing up with an ethnic [Greek] background, I was constantly asked, “When are you going to get married?” I’d be invited to events and the whole dinner table would disappear [to leave me talking to someone]. And I could pick it: “[Costa’s] a good boy and Sophia’s a good girl, so let’s bring them together.”

So marriages weren’t arranged, but families would try to engineer partnerships?
Yep, and you’d go, “OK, here we go.” But they got to the point where they just gave up and said, “He’s just a rogue doing his thing.” People don’t know how to badge me. They go, “So are you gay?” If you haven’t got married, you must be something. And I’m like, “Well, I’m actually really in love with my life and I’m happy.” Just because I haven’t trodden a conventional path or hit the same markers as everyone else doesn’t mean I’m unhappy. Just because I don’t have a partner doesn’t mean I’m unhappy. I have a partnership with so much of life: family, friends, the people I engage with.

How is gardening sexy?
Gardening is sexy because it’s connected. It’s beautiful, it’s sumptuous, it’s voluptuous. It embraces all the senses. There’s beauty in every element of it. If sex is an entire immersion that gives us release, gardening – therapeutically – is the ultimate release.

When is gardening unsexy?
Gardening becomes unsexy when people make it about pushing a lawnmower, holding a blower and getting out their shears. There’s an unsexiness to making it a chore.

BODIES

Are you comfortable in your body?
I’m comfortable in my body now. But school – being olive-skinned and ethnic – was a challenge. Also, being small, and then hairy. But you realise, “Hang on a second. This is what I’ve been given. This is my vehicle.” And I can’t drive this vehicle if I don’t know it and love it. So getting to appreciate it was how I came to be comfortable. Being able to go to Greece on an exchange students program was a turning point, too.

When you’re a minority, going to where “your people” are changes your self-perception, doesn’t it? It did. I also came back and I realised how lucky I am that my parents made me learn Greek. I had the skills to communicate with a totally different world, when others couldn’t. When I came home [to Australia], the same bullying was there, but I was like, “Is that all you’ve got? That’s fine if that’s all you’ve got because I’ve just been here, done that. Seen the whole world. Have you ever been outside your beachside suburb?”

That’s so great. You’re 59 now. How old’s the beard?
Thirty-three.

I love that you know the date to the year.
I was in Egypt and got ill and I didn’t feel like shaving. Then we travelled to Europe; it was winter and I couldn’t be bothered shaving.

Is it true that you haven’t properly shaved it in over a decade?
No. Three decades.

Wow. Do you trim it?
No. It’s generally tucked up when we’re filming … [untucks even more beard].

Whoa!
I just tuck it under. And I’ve got these …

You use bobby pins!
… big bobby pins.

How do you keep it so voluminous and beautiful?
Worm juice, compost and then wrapping a warm towel around it.

Its own ecosystem, then.
[Laughs] No, I just wash it normally.

MONEY

Would you consider yourself rich?
I reckon I’m one of the richest people on the planet. I’ve got family, friends and I do what I love. I engage and interact with kids to encourage them to go out, move around and explore. That’s one of the biggest privileges and I don’t take it for granted. Money and extravagance just don’t do it for me. I don’t want to go and luxuriate in some 15-star resort that has cleared wetlands.

You’ve been hosting Gardening Australia for 12 years. What do you love about it?
I love that it’s getting better and better in my eyes. I’m working with a team and, collectively, we’re driving it into new spaces. People say, “Oh, how do you find all these ideas? Aren’t you just saying the same thing?” But it’s how people are using science to engage, inform and build new pathways of connection to nature. I could be connecting people to nature – and will be – ’til the day I’m in the compost.

When people approach to ask, “How much to shave your beard?” what do you say?
I say, “It’s a million dollars for every year.”

So what, $33 million?
Yeah! And that’s going up each year.

[e-mail]

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.