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August 2, 2026 — 5:00am
Last week, I found myself sitting between two groups of French people who didn’t know each other. Their melodic dialect swayed as if we were sitting on the banks of the Seine. In reality, we were at Abbotsford Convent.
They didn’t know I was eavesdropping, and were no doubt a little more unfiltered in expecting that the people around them wouldn’t understand French. And they were right, I didn’t understand a word of it. But I felt transported. Despite being 10 minutes from home, I was back in the arrondissements, with a natural craving for red wine, cigarettes and cheese at 12 o’clock in the afternoon.
There’s something about hearing a language you don’t understand that makes people a little more open and unfiltered. When that’s the case, it’s easy to think no one is listening.
Every week since 2007, cartoonist Oslo Davis has been contributing to The Sunday Age as part of his Overheard series. I love these cartoons, but until recently, had not considered how often I found myself doing the same thing: overhearing. I’m always on the lookout. A line, a moment, a snapshot of a life lived.
There’s something voyeuristic about eavesdropping. Not in the Alfred Hitchcock sense – no binoculars, intense music or Grace Kelly – but in the way we listen, watch and build entire lives from conversations that were never meant for us.
As children, we’re told not to snoop. But, how many conversations and arguments did we hear that we probably shouldn’t have? I recall hearing about my year 7 teacher’s divorce. What 11-year-old even wants to hear about this? And yet, due to the gossipy nature of it, I soaked it up.
It makes me wonder how many of my private moments have been shared with people I never intended to reach. If anyone has overheard me, I do hope that what I said was at least humorous.
I recently overheard a conversation between two best friends at a deli on Brunswick Street. I didn’t mean to listen, but due to their animated and energetic delivery, it was difficult not to.
GIRL 1: We’re at the tram stop for a few minutes, and he’s just… Staring at me.
GIRL 2: Staring?
GIRL 1: Worse than that. Smiling. Under the lights. You know the look.
GIRL 2: The kiss me look? God, I hate when people do that.
GIRL 1: It made me think: where are all the normal people?
GIRL 2: They’re not taking the 86, love.
I don’t know these women, and I’ll never see them again. We live in a big city. Yet there’s something a little uncomfortable about how easily an intimate moment between friends can become someone else’s, and potentially, the world’s.
We’re drawn to sharing information in a public space. We love having deep and meaningful conversations at bars, coffee shops, parks or the foyers of Cinema Nova on a Monday night. We might say we don’t like strangers listening in to our conversations, but there’s also a part of us that invites and revels in the audience.
But why do people break up in public? To me, it’s a cruel decision, but there’s a view that it keeps the person being broken up with behaving at a socially acceptable level. That in a crowd at a cafe you won’t have to deal with hostility or emotional turmoil.
A few months ago, I was on a date with a girl in Adelaide. Our night was sideswiped by a couple breaking up directly opposite us. The experience felt cinematic, like the opening of Before Sunrise, when the two lovers watch an older German couple argue. The person being broken up with was distraught. Clearly it was a surprise.
Instead of this very public argument being a conversation starter, like in Before Sunrise, whatever topic my date or I tried to bring up, whether it be politics, childhood or music, nothing seemed as interesting as the disastrous break-up occurring a table away. We ended up leaving the date knowing literally nothing about each other, but what felt like everything about that (former) couple.
He was James, and she was Julia. While one could argue that they ruined my night – James and Julia sucked the oxygen out of the room – the uncomfortable thing about their kind of enforced eavesdropping is that everyone involved is left feeling icky.
Am I wrong for eavesdropping? Am I a terrible person for writing some of it down? It’s uncomfortable to know that we are taking things from people and giving nothing in return.
It reminds me of the controversy regarding Joan Didion’s first posthumous book, Letters to John. It was filled with over 220 pages of intimate, personal, diary entries. Despite Didion’s own distaste for posthumous releases, it didn’t stop people from buying the edited version of her diary. Are we bad people for reading something that Didion herself never wanted public?
But, writers have been doing this for centuries. Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, one of my favourite novels, is a symphony of eavesdropping.
With eavesdropping, you hear just enough of a life to feel something akin to knowing. Whether that be relatability, humour, or even sadness, but never enough to be directly involved. It’s a little like theatre. There’s no obligation, no consequence. Just this fleeting sense of connection and commonality. No wonder we all do it.
Roby D’Ottavi is a writer and director based in Melbourne.
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