Kylie Klein-Nixon
How this woman ruined the 1980s for me
Astory slid across my desk last week about a woman who wanted to change her 4-year-old daughter’s name: Esmee. Noting the Twilight effect – there’s a character in those books and films with that name – she wanted to spare her daughter the embarrassment she too experienced having had a common name as a kid. Well, boo hoo hoo, mama. Try growing up a Kylie. There are worse names. I went to school with a girl whose folks named her Chloe, but insisted it was pronounced ‘‘Shlow’’. And I once worked with a woman whose surname was Smellie. As for this year’s Love Island Australia winner, Grant Crapp . . . forget about it. Chloe became ‘‘Kloo-ee’’, and while Smellie and Crapp could never open a successful legal practice together, they have ordinary first names. There’s no hiding from ‘‘Kylie’’. I was named, as so many of us were, in the 70s. In primary school I learned that ‘‘nothing can stop an idea – or chi-chi name –whose time has come’’. There were four Kylies, plus me, in one class. Almost every day I would go home and announce to my longsuffering mum that I wanted a new name. I wanted to be Charlotte. I’d spend hours imagining who I might have been if I’d had that romantic, Brontean moniker. It was a helluva lot cooler, thinner and prettier than the nerdy fat kid with the same name as half the school, let me tell you. All due respect to the Western Australian Aboriginal people who came up with it, but the day I discovered ‘‘kylie’’ meant boomerang was a low point. Not only was my name appropriative, it was also the thing people use to smash kangaroos with. Then the 80s happened and things got so much worse. By worse, I mean Kylie frikken Minogue. For roughly 23 years I was ‘‘Kylie? Kylie Minogue’’. And when I moved to the UK they expected me to look like Kylie Minogue, too. The ways I do not look like the petite pop princess are many and varied, and also lumbering ...and, surprisingly for a nation of polite fetishists, they seldom hesitated to point them out. ‘‘You look like you ate a Kylie.’’ How many ‘‘real’’ Kylies can I fit in one trouser leg? Ask a drunk Englishman, he will tell you. ‘‘Fat Kylie’’, was a relief. ‘‘You can’t be Kylie!’’ was, somehow more hurtful. If I wasn’t my own name then who was I? No one was safe. I once had the unexpected honour of meeting Tony Benn, late elder statesman of left-wing British politics. Knowing I was a fan my boss introduced us: ‘‘Tony, this is Kylie, from the bookshop.’’ ‘‘Kylie?’’ asked the man whose writing had so deeply inspired me as a youth. ‘‘Kylie Minogue?!’’ After that, no shame could touch me. When a Brit workmate discovered my name’s proud Aboriginal origins and nicknamed me ‘‘Boomer’’, I felt nothing. By the time Sex and the City blew up and everyone was wearing Carrie-style name necklaces, I was too worried people would think I was some kind of degenerate Australian pop music obsessive to jump on that fashion band wagon. It wasn’t until I started dating an American that things turned around. My Californian sweetheart thought Kylie was cute and exotic. Ironic since we met while I was staying in LA with one of three friends I have named – you guessed it – Kylie. In time we broke up, but I kept my newfound affection for ‘‘Kylie’’. I finally got myself one of those name necklaces. It’s cute and I wear it sometimes when I want to feel cute too. At 4, the kid whose mum wants to change her name is already at name-necklace levels of self-acceptance. She likes Esmee and doesn’t want to be called anything else. I hope her ma listens.
Nadine Higgins is on leave.