MAGDA SZUBANSKI:
The comedienne extraordinaire, award-winning memoirist, equality activist and now children’s book author, Magda Szubanski, never stops evolving, and as she contemplates 60, she couldn’t be happier, she tells Juliet Rieden.
why nearly 60 is a happy age
Magda Szubanski is funny. She just has to roll her eyes, strike a pose or – of course – open her mouth and everyone is laughing. Indeed, from the moment she walked into the studio for our exclusive photo shoot, Magda had The Australian Women’s Weekly team in stitches. It’s a gift the instinctive comedienne has recently used to brilliant effect in an inspired run of Uber Eats adverts. But Magda is also hilarious in print, as I have just discovered from her new project, the first of a series of laugh-out-loud – I kid you not – children’s books called Timmy the Ticked-Off Pony.
At the heart of the Timmy stories is a study of fame and what it can do to you – which is something Magda knows all about. “They say, write what you know, and really I’ve spent most of my life being various degrees of famous,” she explains. “Timmy is about the perils of shallow fame and being addicted to ‘likes’. I don’t want to sound preachy, but I worry for young people and the intense scrutiny and judgement they are exposed to – including from themselves. I’ve been around
fame long enough to know that it cannot fix what’s broken – it can often make it worse. But when fame is built on a solid bedrock of sound values, you can use it to do some great stuff.”
The star of the books – Magda has two more in the works and hopes the series will run and run – who turns into a bit of an anti-star, is self-obsessed, cranky, overconfident, diminutive pony Timmy. And the inspiration for the character is a joke on Magda herself. “A friend of mine who knows me very well – she’s actually the one who came up with that Kath & Kim classic ‘foxymoron’ – said to me: ‘You know you’re very cute but you’re like a little ticked-off Shetland pony in certain moods.’ And it’s just stuck. I’m usually pretty good natured, but I’ve got a bit of the Irish temper in me [from her grandfather on her mother’s side]. Then another friend had a pony called Timmy and so it became Timmy the ticked-off Shetland pony as my nickname. When I’m in a ‘certain’ mood, they say, ‘Oh, Timmy’s here!’”
In a break between shots, Magda settles on the sofa and proffers a reading from her book. She immediately hops into character with a toothy, salivating voice, perfect for the pocket pony… perhaps she should be recording an audio book too!
It was publisher Scholastic who felt Magda would make an inspirational children’s writer, not just for her humour but also for her honed sense of empathy. “They asked me eight years ago,” she notes, raising her eyebrows skywards. “It took me eight years to write Reckoning [Magda’s award-winning memoir in which she discovered her father was an assassin with the Polish resistance] and eight years to write this. “What’s so funny with my life now is it feels like it’s going full circle,” she ruminates. “When I was 19 and I worked in a women’s refuge, I didn’t have many practical skills to offer but I used to spend time with the kids. We’d go away on camps and I ended up being the one who would improvise and tell them stories.
“I remember really vividly one time we were on camp and of course every time I’d say ‘poo’ or ‘fart’, they’d scream and roll around with laughter. I ended up with this story where the kids all had to go to Canberra to make an appeal to the Prime Minister, but they couldn’t get the plane off the ground so they had to fart in unison so they could get updraft. That was when I realised that kids love that sort of silly potty humour. I think many adults do, too.”
Calling on those early years, Timmy’s first tale is dubbed Timmy the TickedOff Pony and the Poo of Excitement, and manure features significantly in the plot. The publisher has tested the book on children and received an immediate thumbs up. Magda has also tried it on two of her great-nephews, 13-year-old Jacob and nine-year-old Max, who loved it. Her third great-nephew Nathan, three, is too young. Magda is also godmother to Betty, one of TV host David Campbell’s twins, and has sent them a book to read, although she thinks they may also be a bit on the young side for Timmy’s capers.
Unsurprisingly, Magda is a hit with kids and loves having them around, and I wonder if she ever considered having her own. “On and off, but I was never really in the right situation,” she confides. “I wouldn’t have been a single mother and there was a point where I thought I might have children but it
“I’d love to have a parcel of kids running around.”
just didn’t pan out that way. Sometimes I think I’d love to have a parcel of kids around but I’m really lucky to have gorgeous great-nephews – and they are gorgeous kids – as well as other kids in my life, but sometimes I think, ‘Oh, I would have loved that.’ What can you do? It goes the way it goes.”
Losing Mum
The last time I interviewed Magda her mother Margaret was still around, albeit in a weak state. She couldn’t make it to our shoot as planned but told me on the phone how proud she was of her daughter. Soon after that, Margaret started suffering from dementia and moved into a nursing home. She was having regular mini-strokes and Magda saw the mum she adored disappear mentally and physically.
“There’s still a lot of work to do, even when your parent is in the nursing home and I was the primary carer for her. I used to go and see her every day and I loved that. But she was ready to go. She was tired of life,” says Magda.
Margaret was frail and tiny, consigned to a wheelchair, and although she knew little of what was going on around her and at times thought Magda was her mother or her sister Mary, she never lost her sense of humour.
“She was hilarious. A few months before she died, on Mother’s Day, we were all gathered and my brother had brought a box of Cadbury Favourites. She grabbed a Crunchie – her favourite – shoved it in and was chewing and of course her dentures couldn’t cope with the honeycomb. I looked across and she was dribbling on herself. She was always so neat, and I went, ‘Oh Mum,’ took her teeth out and washed them. Then I popped her dentures back in and – this is a woman who hardly spoke by this point and drifted in and out of reality – she turned to me and winked and said, ‘Fancy chocolate turning on me like that after all the devotion I’ve shown it.’ Brilliant! That sense of losing her was very painful, but it was so great that it was that one beautiful element of her – her humour – that remained.”
The last days of Margaret’s life were extremely tough. Magda was up to her elbows fighting the marriage equality battle – something her mother wholly endorsed – when she got the call. “It’s really confronting watching your mum die. Old age is full-on, and that last bit can be quite brutal. With Mum, it took seven days and we were there 24 hours a day.”
Margaret died on September 4, 2017, aged 92. “It’s a very weird feeling when you lose your final parent, especially your mum. Suddenly you’re not anyone’s daughter any more. Of course, that also means you’re your own person and something else starts to grow in you. That’s the cycle of life. That’s as it should be. But I think about her and Dad every day. I still have conversations with them in my head and they still drive me crazy, the way parents do. Mum had a real Scottish-Irish temper
“I still have conversations with Mum in my head.”
and she and I used to fight, but it was that ‘have an argy-bargy’, as we’d say, and then it was all gone. No grudge, just mothers and daughters, I suppose.”
After Margaret’s death, Magda was swamped with a mass of feelings that she is still working through. “There’s guilt. I think it’s a real daughter thing: I didn’t do enough to help her. That’s the one that can wake me up at night, thinking about all the things I should have done.” The funeral was at the Sacred Heart Church in Melbourne’s St
Kilda. “It was absolutely beautiful,” Magda sighs. “She was Catholic but took issue with the church on a lot of things and felt terribly betrayed by the whole child sex abuse issues and how that was dealt with, as I think so many people of that generation did and do. She was tough but there was a genuine, deep compassion in her, she understood the suffering of others and the suffering of the underdog. She really got it.”
At the mass, Queenie van de Zandt sang Amazing Grace and a lone piper led the coffin out of the church. “There wasn’t a dry eye in the church,” says Magda. “But then, just as the coffin was disappearing, someone put on the most kitsch version of Scotland the Brave and we were all pissing ourselves laughing, thinking that’s Mum saying, ‘Oh don’t take yourselves so serious!’ As Mum said to me, ‘You’re aye greetin’’ which means you’re always crying. I’m such a crier.”
At that moment Magda felt embraced by her church but the attitude of some parishes towards homosexuality cuts deep. “You’re always there on the good graces. You have one change of pope, who’s more hard line about that stuff, you have one change of archbishop and you’re out on your arse again, so you never feel you can really put down roots in a spiritual community, which is important to me.”
In response Magda is toying with the idea of setting up a new church with friends. “We looked it up on Wikipedia and you actually can start your own church,” she says with a smile, even though she’s pretty serious about the idea. “We just thought it would be great to have a spiritual community that we could belong to where one of the primary beliefs is the acceptance and affirmation of LGBTQI people, for straight people as well, but just not where we can be booted out. That’s all we want.”
Becoming an elder
It’s a shame Margaret didn’t see marriage equality passed in Australia, but she would certainly have been cheering her daughter from above. “It was a terrible time because Mum was dying, but it was one of those absolutely transitional times. I came out of it not the same person at all. I did feel a lot stronger.
“I really believed in marriage equality. I don’t know if I’m capable of marriage myself, but I totally think that those rites of passage, everyone in society needs to be fully included in those. To me it’s really wrong that 10 per cent of the population don’t have the same rights.”
Since then, Magda seems to be speaking out more about issues that concern her – whether it’s the dangerous negativity on social media, climate change, female empowerment or gay rights. She has started a GoFundMe page to raise funds for mental health support for those affected by the bushfires and is full of ideas to offer grassroots help.
So is activism her new calling?
“I think I was on that path when I was 19 working at the women’s refuge, but then the time wasn’t right for who I was. I was so at odds with the way that most of the world was. So instead I was just enjoying being a lightweight entertainer. It was fun.
“But there’s a certain thing that you feel when you’re a bit older, I think you start to become an elder – and
I do it via things like mentoring and helping people.” She’s currently mentoring and working with Will Connolly, better known as “Egg Boy”, the activist who smashed an egg on the head of Senator Fraser Anning in response to the Senator’s controversial comments following the Christchurch mosque attacks. Will and Magda are partners in her bushfire relief funding project. “One thing I know about is fame. It’s a really tough course to navigate and I’m now Twittertoughened. You see a lot of people get so terribly burnt by it. I keep trying to shut up but I think at the moment there are very destructive forces at play in the world and there’s a lot of work to be done. We’ve all seen the writing on the wall in terms of climate change with the fires that have happened, and I think everyone feels a need to contribute and do something.”
“It’s a very weird feeling when you lose your final parent.”
Health scare
But while she’s been using her voice to great effect, a year or so ago she thought she’d lost it – literally. She was feeling “off-colour” and went to the doctor but when she tried to talk nothing came out. “It was like I’d run out of petrol. The doctor ran out of the room, called the ambulance and I burst into tears. I thought I’d had a stroke.”
After a barrage of tests, Magda was diagnosed with post-menopausal
stress-induced migraines – “a result of that hard couple of years with Mum dying and fighting for marriage equality,” she explains. The treatment is 31 Botox injections in her forehead every three months. “It’s full-on but it’s really helped.”
The other thing that helps is a mass of “truly great and loyal” friends. “I don’t have a partner but I am really blessed with friends,” she says. “The other night I was having a bit of a wibble-wobble about something.
I rang a friend and I said, ‘I’m really lucky that I can be this vulnerable and this open.’”
I ask if she would like to find a partner. “I’d love to be in love and my friend jokingly suggested I should do a
Magda Wants a Wife TV show – but no way!” she jokes.
Magda’s latest TV adventure has been those genius Uber Eats ads with Kim Kardashian and Serena Williams. “When my agent called me with the idea I thought this is so funny I have to do it. I couldn’t believe that Kim had agreed and would wear a netball strip and even a pudding bowl haircut. I helped with the writing of it and I improvised some of it as well, just mucking around, which was really fun.” While they filmed at different times, Magda did talk to Kim on the phone and says she was “really lovely”.
She shot the ad with Serena in person and her phone screensaver is the “great hug” she shared with the tennis star. “Dad [who adored tennis] would have loved that,” she sighs.
In April, Magda will be celebrating her 59th birthday, which means next year is the big 6-0.
“It is different from 50 in that things start to happen, like getting the migraines. I’ve started referring to myself saying I’m nearly 60 and, to be honest, I’m kind of amazed that I’m still around doing stuff, being silly and making up stories. I count myself very lucky,” she says.
Does she feel wiser as well as older? “Well, there’s two things. Someone said just when you get your head together your arse falls off. So true! But I am wiser in some ways, in that I see patterns and that helps. As you get older you go, ‘Oh wow, I’ve seen that, that’s come round again.’
“But the best thing is that I’m definitely happier. I have my anxiety issues but I acknowledge those now and I work with them.
I do meditation, I see a therapist and I use medications when necessary, very judiciously, but I’m on to it much more. I feel like the last few years have been really great for me. Ever since coming out, ever since all of that marriage equality, I feel very satisfied. The wheels haven’t dropped off now and it’s a pretty good life.”
“The last few years have been really great for me.”
Timmy the Ticked-Off Pony and the Poo of Excitement by Magda Szubanski, published by Scholastic, is on sale from April 1.