Malcolm Turnbull - A Bigger Picture

To Lucy

Contents

What are my first memories of my parents? The earliest are almost all of Mum. Tall, dramatic and eloquent, Coral Magnolia Lansbury was a writer of radio serials, of plays, of poetry and, in her later years, of novels. When I was small, her writing was confined to radio serials each episode 15 minutes long and all involving lengthy and complex romances. The longest running one was Portia Faces Life, and then there was The Reverend Matthew, among others. I didnt listen to them on the radio but often heard them as they were being written. Mum usually banged them out on an old Remington typewriter, sitting at her desk in the living room of our flat at 119 New South Head Road, Vaucluse. But when she was selling more serials than usual, an old lady (who was probably in her 40s!) would be enlisted to type at Mums dictation. Some weeks shed write half-a-dozen 15-minute episodes.

Id sit under the desk watching my mother, one long leg flung over the armchair, head swung back as she became transported in the drama of her imagination. Shed act out every part:

George [deep voice, on the verge of tears]: Forgive me, Maria, forgive me. [He sobs]

Maria [cool and deadly]: This is the end, George. [Sound of revolver being cocked]

George [sensing his doom]: No, Maria, remember our love, remember [gunshot]

Maria [screaming]: What have I done?

All this was dutifully transcribed by the typist without any sign of emotional recognition. Not sobs, screams or the loud BANG of the gunshot caused her to turn a hair.

Portia ran for nearly 20 years and over 3500 15-minute episodes, of which Coral wrote many. Reverend Matthew went for years too, and over a thousand episodes.

Mums parents started their family late. May Lansbury was eight years older than her husband, Oscar, and gave birth to Mums only sibling, also named Oscar, when she was 39. Coral was born seven years later.

My uncle Oscar was a keen sailor and, according to Mum, ran away to sea to join the merchant navy. He finished his working days as the harbourmaster in Port Adelaide.

Coral was a brilliant student, both at North Sydney Girls High School and at Sydney University. She won prizes in history as well as the Henry Lawson Prize for Poetry in 1948 for a verse play about an Aboriginal maiden called Krubi of the Illawarra. She was both delighted and appalled when I won the same prize in 1974 for a hundred lines of rhyming doggerel Id put together as a speech for a Union Night Debate, with the characteristically frivolous topic of A womans just a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

My maternal grandparents were both actors. Theyd come out to Australia from England in the early 1920s as part of the cast of The Vagabond King. Oscar, a baritone, had a wonderfully rich and beautiful voice. He spoke in perfect unaccented English. He didnt sound posh or grand, nor did he ever acquire an Australian twang.

Oscars father, Arthur Lansbury, was a dentist who immigrated to Australia in 1884. After stints in Sydney, Newcastle and Brisbane where Oscar was born in 1892 Arthur established his practice in Roma. In his advertisements in The Western Star and Roma Advertiser, he claimed to be the only qualified dentist west of Brisbane. He returned to England with his family in 1901.

Arthurs brother, George Lansbury, had also immigrated to Australia in 1884 but stayed only a year and returned to England to immerse himself in radical politics. He helped found and later led the British Labour Party. George Lansbury was best known for championing womens right to vote, hence his nickname Petticoat George. He was also a Christian socialist, a pacifist and a passionate believer in unilateral disarmament, an idealistic position that became increasingly unrealistic as the dictators rearmed in the 1930s.

Georges son Edgar, also a Labour politician, married an Irish actress, Moyna Macgill. Their daughter, the actress Angela Lansbury, came out to Sydney in 1958 for the filming of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, based on Ray Lawlers 1957 play about the lives and loves of Queensland cane cutters. A sign of the times: none of the four leads were Australians but Angela certainly did a better Australian accent than Ernest Borgnine!

Meeting Aunty Angela and playing with her (somewhat older) children is among my first memories. More than 50 years later we met again when she was in Australia appearing in the stage version of Driving Miss Daisy. Angela and Mum shared a distinctively Lansbury look.

Oscar was a star of radio, first as a singer and then as a master of sound effects. Hed performed in music hall as well as opera, and he taught me several music-hall numbers, including The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo. Every number had its own patter, a line of chat that went before, during and at the end of the song as part of the entertainment.

As a child, I loved visiting Pop Lansburys studio at 2GB, an Aladdins cave of delights. The radio serials were produced live in the studio and so, at the appropriate moment, Oscar might have to fire a gun, bang a drum, drop something in a barrel of water, close a door, break a window, simulate the wind through the trees or not too quietly creep up a gravel path.

It was probably because of this connection with radio drama that Mum began writing radio plays at 16. An early one was a Gothic romance called Ringarra, which involved a fierce, giant pig ravaging the Australian countryside (Hound of the Baskervilles Goes Down Under, you could say). She later turned that into a novel. There were many others, all dramatic, all romantic, with handsome heroes and swooning but plucky heroines. While studying English and history at Sydney University, Coral supported herself by writing.

Two of her university friends I remember coming to dinner when I was very young were Neville Wran and Lionel Murphy. The former would go on to be premier of New South Wales and the latter a senator for New South Wales, attorney-general in the Whitlam government and finally a High Court judge. Neville and Lionel were firm friends at university. Where Neville was as handsome as any movie actor, Lionel was quite the reverse. His red and bulbous nose later became a cartoonists delight. Murphys career was colourful and controversial, but even his harshest critics (and he had many of them) would concede that he was remarkably charming. He could make the dullest dinner companion feel that he or she was the most fascinating person hed ever met. I brought that up with him once, and he replied, While men are seduced through their eyes, women are seduced through their ears.

At university, Mum and Lionel had dated briefly. But I know very little about her romantic life prior to my birth. On 20 February 1953, Coral made a most improbable marriage to George Edwards, a 67-year-old radio actor and producer. He was known as the man of a thousand voices for the way he used to write, produce and then act all the parts in his own radio plays. But not long after the wedding (Edwardss fourth) the groom fell ill, and he died on 28 August that year. Decades later, Mum claimed that her fearsome mother had bullied her into this match. It cant have been for financial benefit as very little of Edwardss modest fortune found its way to his young widow, despite the best efforts of her lawyer, Neville Wran.

However, the young widow wasnt entirely bereft of companionship. Her marital home was a comfortable apartment at 14 Longworth Avenue, Point Piper, overlooking Lady Martins Beach. In the back basement of the rather more modest block of flats next door at number 12, then called Kenilworth, there lived an impecunious but devilishly handsome young salesman called Bruce Turnbull.