Miss Maley’s Mister Wonderful

What girl can resist a leather jacket?

Lady readers of a certain age might remember Dolly, which was filled with adoring reports and gushing tidbits on the lives and loves of the pop stars whose pictures tween-age girls of the era were inclined to paste on their bedroom walls. The magazine, part of the Fairfax stable, folded years ago, leaving those who seek immersion in endless reveries of pretty boys and media-manufactured nonentities bereft of their fix. True, other celebrity-fixated rags have come and gone, but few have ever quite managed to replicate Dolly‘s unrestrained spigot of gushing adolescent mush.

Today, though, courtesy of the failing Fairfax press, Jacqueline Maley comes close, serving up a lovestruck four-hanky lament inspired by the political passing of Malcolm Turnbull. She makes no such admission in her column, but readers might well surmise that the Age and SMH parliamentary sketcher sometimes finds herself of a lonely midnight writing “Mrs Jacqueline Turnbull” over and over in the ink of unrequited love. Silly girls do that sort of thing.

As with all the best Dolly stories, the hero of her piece has no deficiencies of character or conduct, no flaws nor foibles. He’s just yummy through and through, Adonis and Einstein and a young Johnny Farnham all rolled into one. If you’re the sort who erects a shrine to your hero beside the baby-blue bedroom phone, the one for chatting with Nikki and Miranda until Dad says it’s time to scoop up Teddy and turn off the lights, your really, truly, love-him-forever heart throb can never be appreciated as anything less than the very embodiment of the perfect spunk.

Ms Maley ticks that box in her opening paragraph. Oh, golly gee, has anyone ever looked so hunky in a leather jacket? And isn’t it just a crying shame that mean old Lucy — jealousy! jealousy! — didn’t make him wear it for that last prime ministerial turn before the cameras.  Nevertheless, as Miss Maley raves, “it sure clad his spirit.”

Sartorial fantasies out of the way, the column races headlong to the summit of peak Dolly-ness, noting how the object of her adoration

“…scattered his speech with references to the progressivism of his government, the success of Australia’s multiculturalism and the proud achievement of the same-sex marriage survey.”

No mention, of course, of $1000-a-quarter electricity bills, which flighty gals need never worry about. Paying the bills is something that  grownups do.

The notion that her dreamy hunk might be a tin-eared dill, as 40 adults in his own party concluded, is dismissed with contempt, as are those whose tolerance for Turnbullism became terminal.

“… he was liberated, finally, from the talking points of a party that was always ambivalent about his leadership, and which treated him about as stupidly as it’s possible to treat someone of Turnbull’s obvious talents.”

And because Ms Maley is a good girl who does what she is told, thinks as instructed and pens approved themes as required, she gives readers a little dollop of Yeats. She knows which bits of homework to remember if the rest of her class is to be suitably impressed. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” she quotes from “The Second Coming”, as if that stark raving fairy fancier had nothing else to say.

Yeats did, of course, the point being made in the poem’s final lines. Perhaps Daddy turned out the bedroom light before she got to them:

Read More