MALCOLM AND LUCY TURNBULL: loss, love and what family means to us
He’s a Prime Minister constantly under siege, but Malcolm Turnbull knows his family always has his back. In an intimate interview, Juliet Rieden talks to Malcolm and his wife, Lucy, about childhood trauma, falling in love and why being a grandparent is “a
It’s early January, at the end of the summer holidays when The Weekly manages to gather Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull together with their grandchildren for a very special shoot. We’ve been warned that persuading Jack, four, Isla, two, and Alice, one, to sit still together is no easy feat, so we’ve hired the gardens of a Sydney mansion where we’ve set up a picnic blanket bedecked with toys under a sturdy swing slung from a tree.
The children throw themselves into it, jumping onto the swing and sifting through the toys, watched over intently by their grandparents. So far, so good. But then the heavens open and a drenching summer storm threatens to ruin everything. This is when Lucy and Malcolm spring into action, sweeping up the now rather boisterous and antsy children for a family reading session under the portico; and then when the rain stops as abruptly as it started, Malcolm persuades Jack into a game of impromptu cricket. It’s a touching and no doubt familiar scene.
Being a grandparent is “fantastic. I highly recommend it to anyone,” Lucy says a few weeks later when we sit down to chat in the Lodge in Canberra. “These little people make you feel young again. It’s wonderful to have that close relationship; and to see your own children as parents is a beautiful thing.”
Jack, the eldest son of the Turnbulls’ daughter Daisy and her husband James Brown, is the undisputed leader of the grandchildren pack, with bundles of energy. His sister Alice, born just over 18 months ago, can only watch with wonder.
Isla is the daughter of their son, Alex, and his wife, Yvonne, who live in Singapore. “Yvonne is Chinese and so Isla speaks fluent Chinese and English,” Lucy explains. “She very cleverly observed that we don’t speak Chinese so she’s speaks English to us.”
Isla is certainly a bright spark, shooting off words in Chinese to her parents and gleeful English quips for the rest of us. “Alex and Yvonne have a genuinely bilingual household, but little Isla, or Ming Ming as she is known, is very, very astute,” says Malcolm. “I was cuddling her the other day and she pointed to a picture of a fish on the wall and said, Yu, which is Chinese for fish, and then she looked at me and she said, Fish, Yeye!” says Malcolm laughing. “Isla calls me Yeye, but Jack and Alice call me Baba,” he adds. “Yeye is Chinese for the father’s father.”
In a month when traditional family values have been whipped up into a political tornado in Canberra, resulting in the resignation of the Deputy Prime Minister and Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, the cynics out there may detect a whiff of spin doctoring about The Weekly’s scene of family harmony.
But here’s the thing... Our shoot and interviews are in fact the result of months of organisation and both took place well before the Barnaby Joyce story hit the headlines, and, according to the Prime Minister, before he had any sense of his Deputy’s ill-advised extramarital relationship.
Since we talked, Malcolm Turnbull has declared the Nationals leader’s affair with a former staffer resulting in her pregnancy as “a shocking error in judgement” and announced a “captain’s call” ban on sexual relations between ministers and their staff. He also said that parliament needs to take a long hard look at itself. But how can he and his ministry fix the problem? “Simply by ensuring our workplaces are respectful places and that, particularly, in this environment here in parliament where most of the
members are men, that women are respected,” he responds. And whether you think his change to the ministerial code of conduct is dignified and principled or patronising and nannystate, there’s no question that Malcolm, who converted to Catholicism in
1999, is serious about the sanctity of marriage and the damaging effects of separated parents on the family unit.
When mum left
Indeed, it’s something the Prime Minister has experienced first-hand. As an eight-year-old, Malcolm was devastated when his mother Coral walked out of the family home, leaving his father to raise him on his own. Malcolm was Coral’s only child and I suspect that feeling of brutal abandonment has never left him.
“As a little boy, I remember before she left we used to run around the Hills Hoist in the backyard and chase each other around. I remember her reading to me; in fact, after she died in 1991 [in the US] I brought all of her books back to Australia and I have the three volumes of Lord of the Rings which she used to read to me,” he says. “She was a fantastic mother until she left, absolutely great in every respect, but then she left and she wasn’t there.”
Coral Lansbury (a distant cousin of veteran British Murder She Wrote actress Angela Lansbury) was the daughter of stage actors. She followed their lead and became a child actress, then a playwright, radio actress and, later, an academic. Coral was glamorous and vivacious and gave birth to Malcolm in October 1954, following a whirlwind affair with his father, handsome electrician and travelling salesman Bruce Turnbull who later became a hotel broker, buying and selling pubs.
Malcolm told biographer Paddy Manning that his father caught Coral’s eye by swimming up and down in Sydney harbour at Point Piper’s Lady Martin’s Beach, which was in front of her apartment, pretending to be a porpoise. Being pregnant out of wedlock must have caused quite a stir and his parents married a year after Malcolm’s birth. Then, in 1963, Coral took a position as a history lecturer at the University of NSW and here fell in love with the man who was to become her third husband and would take her to New Zealand. Malcolm was sent to boarding school while his parents worked through the fall-out.
“As a little boy, you don’t really know what’s going on always. But the reason I went to boarding school was obviously because they were splitting up,” he tells me. “I was eight, at the beginning of 1963, and Coral had moved to New Zealand permanently, I would say, about a year after that, by the time I was at the end of fourth class or the beginning of fifth class she was living over there. She’d obviously begun a relationship with someone else and wasn’t at home so much. Dad as a hotel broker travelled a lot round NSW, so it made sense for me to be at boarding school.
“I missed her incredibly, but there were two things that made that divorce less bad for me,” Malcolm explains. “Firstly, my father quite remarkably never spoke ill of my mother. He praised her to the highest, to me; he told me that he loved me more than anything else in the world; he did everything he could to make sure that we stayed in touch; and in those days she was living in New Zealand and then in America, telephone calls were impossibly expensive and obviously emails didn’t exist, so we used to send audio tapes to each other. He made sure that happened, even when he was legitimately really resentful, because when she left, the flat we were living in was sold and so we didn’t have anywhere to live. She took basically all the furniture. Apart from my bed, I can’t think of one stick of furniture that we had left.
“We moved into a smaller place, a rented flat, and Dad had every reason to be resentful, but he never, ever manifested it to me. He was so disciplined. And that was good. So the two things that were different was, one, we stayed in touch, even though she was away, and she came back occasionally, but also he was determined to reinforce that relationship. In that sense the divorce was more civilised than many.”
While he tries to rationalise his situation, it’s clear the memories are still painful and the loss deep. I ask Malcolm why his mother didn’t take him with her instead of sending him to boarding school. “I don’t really know, to be honest,” he replies wistfully.
“I actually asked her once,” Lucy chips in. “She said [it was] because she thought that the school he was at was very good and she didn’t want to take him away from school.”
The upside of the split was the tight bond Malcolm developed with his dad, who never remarried. “I had a very special relationship with him. It was really like a big brother-little brother relationship more than a father.” Together father and son learned to face everything life threw at them. “That’s why I’m reasonably domesticated. I can cook and clean and I was taught to iron by my father,” Malcolm proudly admits, saying he last ironed only the other day when his shirt was crushed in his suitcase and he need it pristine for a speech. “He’s a fantastic ironer,” Lucy concurs.
Boarding school, however, was another tricky hurdle for young Malcolm. “I was quite unhappy there,” he confesses. “I was missing my mother and it was a difficult. I didn’t think that the boarding school at [Sydney] Grammar, either at the prep school or at the senior school, was particularly well run. There was probably too much bullying.”
Did Malcolm get bullied? “I did. I always stood up for myself, but
I’ve got a keen appreciation of the problem of bullying and the importance of imbuing in your own children – and of course, if you’re a teacher, all the children – the importance of treating people with respect, treating other kids with respect, particularly younger kids. My observation as a man and as a father is that both boys and girls can be very cruel to each other. But boys tend to be more physical than girls. I was pushed and thumped, and the difference between a boy who is eight and a boy who is 12 is enormous.”
In the school holidays, Malcolm was relieved to be able to join his dad on the road travelling around the country.
“I helped him do the stocktake in pubs. I remember particularly one, a pub in Batlow, I remember counting up all the drip trays and glasses.”
Despite the difficulties Malcolm was clearly very smart. He thrived academically, graduated from Sydney University and went on win a prestigious Rhodes scholarship to complete his law degree at Oxford University in the UK. Before heading for Oxford, Malcolm worked as a journalist for The Bulletin magazine and that is how he met Lucy.
Love at first sight
“I was earning my board and lodging after my first year at uni, in my dad’s chambers, answering the phone for him and doing all that sort of thing,” explains Lucy, whose father was QC Tom Hughes. “It was the beginning of 1978 and Malcolm was interviewing Dad for an article in The Bulletin.”
“He was the top QC at the time,” Malcolm says, “and the great man kept this young journalist waiting ... which was fantastic, because I used my time very fruitfully and Lucy and I had a good chat. I was smitten. Totally.”
Was it love at first sight?
“It was. Yes.”
And for Lucy? “Well, I thought he was very attractive and dashing and handsome and very funny, so I liked him, too,” she confesses.
Lucy was 19 and Malcolm 23 and, when a bunch of flowers arrived at the office from Malcolm, Lucy says it was terribly funny because her father assumed they were for him!
Malcolm followed up the flowers with a dinner invitation and romance was sparked. Lucy was now definitely smitten, she says, but didn’t think the union would go anywhere. “Malcolm was about to go off to Oxford for two years that September and I knew we’d keep in touch and always be friends, but I thought it was going to be a challenge keeping a relationship alive.” Malcolm, however, knew he’d found the one. “I asked Lucy to marry me very shortly after we met and Lucy used to say, ‘Let’s wait until we grow up.’” With Malcolm in Oxford, they would catch up in the holidays and he recalls when Lucy first flew over to see him: “Lucy was so excited she was jumping up and down, bouncing.”
“I was extremely young,” Lucy quickly adds, slightly embarrassed. “I wouldn’t do that now. That would be silly,” she laughs.
“We were so excited,” Malcolm reminisces. “We had a Christmas holiday in Europe. I’d bought a second-hand Fiat 126, which we called Luigi, and, somehow or other, we managed to drive it to Naples.”
“There was this incredible blizzard over the Alps and we drove under Mont Blanc and I thought, if we make it out of here alive it will be extraordinary,” continues Lucy. “But we kept on going south and we finally got to Naples and the weather improved.”
“Lucy composed a song in Italian, because she spoke Italian very well in those days, to encourage Luigi the car up the hills,” adds Malcolm.
That trip secured it for Malcolm. “Luce [as he often calls her] came over in the Australian Christmas holidays at the end of 1979 and I persuaded her to stay until 1980, and we got married in March 1980.”
They lived in a “roses-round-thedoor” cottage in chocolate-box
Oxford village and planned to marry in the sweet local church. The story of how Malcolm persuaded the Anglican vicar to marry them in church has become something of a party piece for Malcolm, who has recited it many times over the years, underlining his acute debating skills and powers of persuasion, and for those who haven’t heard it, here’s one more rendition.
“We went along to see the vicar, a nice man called Noel Durand. He said, ‘You’re a Catholic, Lucy, Malcolm, you’re Presbyterian, there’s no reason for me to marry you. Couldn’t you just go and find a registry office?’ So I said to him rather cheekily, I suppose, ‘The Church of England is an established church in the United Kingdom, isn’t it?’ And he said, ‘Yes’. ‘So, in some ways you’re like a public servant...’ He said, ‘Yes’. And I said,
“I asked Lucy to marry me very shortly after we met.”
‘Well, you have a duty to prevent fornication in this parish; and Lucy and I are not making any admissions to you, Vicar, but we are young and in good health and sorely tempted, and you have the opportunity to marry us.’ He thought this was so funny he said, ‘Right, done, I’ll marry you’.”
Malcolm says the whole wedding cost 95 pounds sterling, “including lunch at the pub”, and they wanted a very small affair and told friends and family not to come because they’d have a party when they got home.
But there was one family member who refused to stay away. “There was literally a knock on the door the day before the wedding and it was my dad. He was there with his suitcase and he said, ‘Well, I’m here, I’ve only got one son and I’m not going to miss your wedding.’ It was really sweet.”
Lucy wore a beautiful lilac dress she had purchased in London and Malcolm still carries a photo of her in it on his phone which he pulls out to show me and as they woke up there was an inch of snow on the ground.
“There was about a dozen people. Geoffrey Robertson – the barrister – he stood in for Lucy’s dad and gave you away,” remembers Malcolm. Having a family was something they both wanted and son Alex was born in 1982. Lucy says their life from hereon in “changed a lot. Children tend to do that. It makes it very busy and it was fantastic.”
But joy turned to sadness when just three months after Alex was born Malcolm’s father was killed in a light plane crash. He was just 55. “It’s terribly sad, a devastating event, always to lose a family member like that but in Malcolm’s case, because of the intensity and the closeness of the relationship it was even worse,” says Lucy, looking at Malcolm, who is still overcome when he tries to talk about it. “We were very, very close, so it was a big loss,” he adds.
Moving into politics and public life was a natural course for the couple. “It’s all about public service, it’s love of country, it’s doing my bit to make Australia an even better place to grow up in, to realise your dreams. Lucy and I both have a strong sense of public service. Luce has devoted much of her life to public service and our interests, our passions overlap to support each other. It is the motivation – it sounds a bit corny, I appreciate that, but that’s what drives me,” says Malcolm.
When he first stood for Liberal Party pre-selection in 1981, the couple had yet to start their family and, looking back, Lucy says she’s pleased Malcolm didn’t launch his political career then and they didn’t have to raise Alex and Daisy (who was born in 1985) in the spotlight. “He almost won the pre-selection, which was like ‘oh my goodness’,” she recalls. “I think I was slightly concerned about him going into politics when our kids were very little, so I was very happy when he decided to leave it [after that] till they were much older, till they were grown up. Daisy was at uni and Malcolm was 50 when he went into politics.”
With Malcolm, 63, now Prime Minister their lives are consumed with politics and the slings and arrows that brings. For Malcolm, Lucy, who turns 60 on March 30, plays a crucial role. “I’m a sounding board to support him and to discuss things,” she says.
But it’s more than that, I feel, their relationship is key to who Malcolm is. Most days they put by time to go for walks together to talk things through, and, adds Malcolm, looking straight into Lucy’s eyes, “We are each other’s best friends.”
Soon there will be a new addition to the Turnbull clan – Yvonne is expecting their fourth grandchild in April, ironically around the same time as Barnaby Joyce’s baby is due.
I ask Lucy what their grandchildren make of Grandpa’s job. “Jack does know that Baba is ‘the Prime Minister’, but I don’t really think he understands exactly what that entails, other than that he’s the boss and is on TV a lot. When Malcolm was on TV after the marriage equality result, Alice kept saying, ‘Baba, Baba, Baba...’ and Isla is always very interested in the nice policemen who seem to follow her ‘Yeye’ everywhere! They see Malcolm as their grandfather – ‘Baba’ or ‘Yeye’ – not as the PM,” she explains.
“For Jack, he is the guy who is good at building Lego ships and castles and Magna-Tile towers and spaceships.” And at The Weekly’s shoot Grandpa was certainly on top form.
“For Jack, he (Malcolm) is the guy who’s good at building Lego ships and castles.”