‘As a toddler, people at the shops would ask my mum if she permed my hair’

I longed for straight hair. I’d slick my hair down with gel – it was the late ’80s so the only gel that was available was that goopy, thick stuff that dried rock hard. Your hair went from being hair to being closer to a surfboard type consistency that older people would knock on with their fingers calling you slick or The Fonz.

I was obsessed with straight hair; sure, back then I did have Nicole Kidman as a strong curly hair role model, but I wanted a sleek bob like the woman on the AAMI ad.

I used to wash my hair, then go to bed with it tied back tightly, hoping to wake up with straight hair. I didn’t, I woke up with a headache and a wet pillow, which would make my mum irate. She’d say in a tone I’m sure you can imagine: “Now it’ll rot, that was expensive Melinda, put that on the balcony to dry it out please.”

When I say I have curly hair, I mean it. I don’t mean a slight wave, I mean as a kid, I was living in ringlet city. As a toddler, people at the shops would ask my mum if she permed my hair. She didn’t, I was just lucky. Not how I saw it.

My mum permed her hair of course, she’d say that to these toddler perm conspiracy theorists: “I have to perm mine, wish I had her curls, but I’ve got to pay for this.”

I was gifted more than my fair share of body, volume and other words for way too much thick hair that makes me look like a cocker spaniel.

The kids in primary school didn’t think I looked like a cocker spaniel though, they thought I looked like something way less flattering. Ronald McDonald. “Hey Ronald!” would be shouted out across the playground; it was very hard not to turn and look. I had to keep my head in my Robin Klein book and keep walking.

You can’t come back from being called Ronald McDonald, no amount of, “my hair isn’t even that red, it’s actually strawberry blonde!” can revive your social standing.

The Ronald nickname spread throughout the school, kids I’d never even met would call me Ronald. I reckon even some teachers were close to blurting it out too.

Look, I get it, I had red hair cut into the same round shape as you know who, it was cut short on the top so the curls would stand up like springs.

My hair was the antithesis of what was cool, the cool girls seemed to have heaps going on in their hair, scrunchies, shiny clips and a series of ponytails all joined together at the back with school coloured hair ties. I didn’t have a thing in my hair, my hair would act like a slingshot for any kind of restraint, bobby pins and clips wouldn’t last, they’d be flung out by the power of the curl.

“You could do anything with your hair,” mum would say to me when I was little. She was, of course, categorically wrong. To this day I have one liveable hair option, tied up.

Well, two to be honest, I can also wear it out, as long as I’m not in Queensland in summer, it’s got no less than three hair products in it, and a professional has spent 1½ hours taming it down from the rat’s nest it is, to something a ’90s newsreader might sport.

These memories came to me this week, because I tried out a new hairdresser. As soon as I sat down in her chair she said, “you’ve actually got a really nice curl in your hair”. It’s taken 40 years, but I’ve now learned to respond to that with “thank you”.