When I worked at theage(melbourne)magazine I was lucky enough to interview singer Olivia Newton-John in 2004 for a regular column we had called ‘expats’ – reflections by well known ex-Melburnians about the city they came from, in their own words.

The story ran to about 900 words but I’ve included my full interview transcript below because I think it shows what a lovely, naturally friendly, and down-to-earth person Ms Newton-John was. We chatted for about an hour in a Southbank hotel by the Yarra and I found her to be gracious, charming and incredibly patient with my parochial line of questioning.

My deepest sympathy to her family – vale Olivia Newton-John.

Melbourne, November 2004

I came to Australia when I was five-years-old from England. My father had been asked to become the master of Ormond College at Melbourne University. He was the youngest Professor ever in Australian history, I’m very proud of that. I didn’t realise it at the time, he seemed so old to me then but he was 40. So we lived on the grounds of Ormond College.

We lived in Ormond Lodge, which was this beautiful, big stone mansion, which, looking back as a child, seemed absolutely enormous to me. The ceilings were probably, like, 12 feet but they seemed 60 feet high! It was a very large house with lots of corridors and cupboards and (was) a little spooky as a young kid, I remember. We lived on the grounds of the university and I’d walk to school. I went to Teacher’s College Practice for school, which was in the grounds of the uni where the new teachers would learn how to teach. So that was why it was called Teacher’s College Practicing School, every month we’d have a new teacher. We’d have our main teacher and a new teacher. And all the kids that I went to school with were the children of the professors and teachers at the university and most of them were Melbourne kids.

The Melbourne of my childhood was the university and the school. Then my parents separated and my mother moved to Parkville and we lived behind the zoo. And my memories of the evening were of hearing lions roar because you could hear them from my flat. There was a huge park out the back, which has kind of been re-done a lot since I’ve been in Melbourne, they’ve planted lots of trees there. But it was a kind of creepy park in those days, now it’s nice.

I remember big rainstorms and being so small I could swim in the drains, you know those storm drains? I remember that being in the first year that we arrived in Australia, like, really excited by the rain and the water. And the memory that I have always loved and still love and crave about Australia is the bird song in the morning and the different sounds of the birds. It’s all about sound. The lions, the birds – it’s interesting being a singer, I guess that’s why I thought about it later on! The smells, the…horses. I was very into horses and there used to be a circus that would come ‘round and they would tether their horses down the street from where I lived and I’d look down every day to see the horses and feed horses it all the Paddocks. There were lots more paddocks in those days, now they’re all houses.

After Ormond College, when I was about seven we moved to Parkville. Then I would catch a tram to school. After I was at the Teacher’s College Practicing School I went to Christchurch Grammar, on Toorak and Punt Road. And I used to catch the tram there. My memories of that school? Singing in the choir, going to church every morning. I went to University High after that, I guess I was maybe 13 [or] 14? I’m not sure exactly when the transition was now, maybe 12.

University High, at the time when I went there, was pretty strict. They had prefects and monitors checking to see that your skirt was the right length, and you were wearing your hat and gloves when you left school, and that you didn’t talk to boys – I mean, you didn’t…[inaudible] with a particular boy to the tram and all that. I’m sure it’s a lot different now, but that’s how it was in those days! We had separate stairs for the boys and the girls at each end of the school. We had separate playgrounds, which is kind of bizarre when you think because it was a co-ed school, and everything was totally separate. We still found ways to talk to the boys!

What do I always do when I come home? It used to be that I had a meat pie and a milkshake, but now I’m on a non-dairy, non-wheat diet – I like the meat part! When I went to Sydney I’d go to Manly and have fish and chips because my dad used to live in Manly. With my mum, I liked to take a walk around the Botanic Gardens, because that was where my mother lived, next to the Botanic Gardens. Sadly, she died a year and a bit ago, but that’s where we would always go. So that’s something I love to do and it’s a beautiful place. I like to take a walk down at the beach, at Brighton beach. I love to go, when I have time, to the Dandenongs or to Fern Tree Gully or somewhere out in the country. I love to be in nature, anywhere I can be in nature. Mainly now, coming home is about my friends. It used to be about things I did. Really, it’s more about people I see now. I have a group [of friends] in Melbourne and I have a group in Sydney and I have a group up where my property is there, old friends.

The great thing about this profession is that if you’re touring wherever you’re going there’s usually a couple of hours you can have a get-together and see everybody. So, that’s how I get to see my friends mainly because I don’t often travel just for the pleasure of it – which is something I look forward to doing in the future – usually, it’s connected with work. And that way I get to do both.

I moved out of Australia in ‘66, I think. Yeah, about ‘66/67 I went to London thinking I was going to come back here. But I’ve never really lived here full-time since then, even though I still think of Australia as home. I’ve lived in London, and then I’ve lived in Los Angeles. So I really lived away but still have thought I was here (in Australia). It’s interesting.

I have always come back once or twice a year to visit my mum and my dad and my brother, who is living here, and my nieces and nephews and everything. But I always felt that I was coming home, but when I really look at it I never really lived here. But I bought a piece of property in 1982 because I wanted a piece of Australia that was mine, that I could come to. And in the ‘80s, when “Physical” was doing well and I had the money to invest I said, ‘I’m going to buy a little piece of land so that I know there’s a piece that I can come back to.’ So a friend of mine was a friend of a Don Crone, who designed the Sydney Tower, you know the spire, what’s it called? It’s got a restaurant on the top, that one, it’s got a name you’ll add it later [aka Centrepoint Tower]. Anyway, he was a friend and I’d met him and he flew me with my friend Jill and my ex-husband and a girlfriend we flew up in a little plane to look for a piece of land. We stopped up the coast in this little plane and I ended up in the Byron Bay area, where I wasn’t really intent on. I didn’t think I was going to find anything there.

Anyway, long story made short we were driving from the airport to look at this piece of land and I fell in love with this area. I said, ‘where are we? What is this?’ He said, ‘well, this is such-and-such,’ and I said, ‘well is there anything around here? I love this.’ There was just a feeling about it, and he said, ‘well, actually a farm’s come for sale down this lane.’ And we drove down this lane, drove onto the land, we had, like, an hour because it was going to get dark and we had to get back. And I bought this piece of property, kind of, without even seeing it all. I went, ‘yep!’ And then every year I go back and sit, I go to the local motel, book in for a night and go sit in this property and go, ‘one day, one day I’ll have a house here.’ And here we are 25 years, 30 years later and I do have a house there and each year I plan on spending more and more time.

But it was just like this instinct that I needed my own little piece of Australia. (I like) its beauty, trees, it has a beautiful vista with no other houses visible. The birdsong, it’s next to a rainforest. It’s pure and it’s Australia, pure Australia. It’s pristine, the sound. There’s no urban sprawl there and it’s my piece of Australia. 

I didn’t see the whole piece because it was, like, quite a few acres, it was a hundred-and-something acres, and I just saw the top bit and the view and I went, ‘yep.’ And I’m a Libran, you know, it takes me usually a long time to make a decision, but there was just something I knew, that this was mine.

I left Australia in the ‘60s after winning a talent contest on Johnny O’Keefe’s Sing Sing Sing. I was still at school and much to my amazement made the semi-final, then the final, then won. I had another year left at school at Uni High and Channel 7 offered me a contract on Time for Terry. Before that, over the Christmas holidays, I replaced Lovely Anne on the Tarax Happy Show, as ‘Lovely Libby’ [laughs] and that is kind of my entrée into television.

Then I had to decide if I’d go back and finish school and the television station offered me Time for Terry and I was doing The Go!! Show and was on channel 10 (it was Channel 0 then). So I left school and went into it full-time. At the end of that year, my mum said, ‘you know what? This ticket that you have won to go to London is going to expire if you don’t take it and I think that you need to expand your horizons.’ Because she was German, European, [and] really educated, [she] thought that I should go to RADA and study and learn the craft. Of course, she dragged me screaming and yelling out of Melbourne because I didn’t want to leave my boyfriend – typical teenager – and we left on the ship and went to London.

I kept booking my ticket back and she kept canceling it at the local travel agent until I actually started to like it and Pat Carroll came over and ended up sharing an apartment with my mum and I. And we ended up being a double-act – I’m making this very succinct for you – and doing work together around England before we came back. But really, my impetus for going was winning the talent contest.

I didn’t like England at all. I kept saying stupid things like [adopts teenage Aussie accent], ‘This place is so old!’ [laughs]. Because at that age I didn’t understand. Now I appreciate antiques and things but at the time I was your typical teenager. I just wanted to go home. It was cold and you know…But my mother was right. It was a wonderful thing to expand my horizons and I really appreciate her wisdom in hindsight – at the time I didn’t. I didn’t go to RADA. I had my own very strong opinions, I just wanted to work. And I probably wouldn’t have got in anyway, I never got round to auditioning because I started doing clubs and other things. Then Pat and I started working as a double act so I never did do that.

I’ve always been very inquisitive, I’ve always loved life and have always loved what I was doing in the moment wherever I was, pretty much. But in those days I found performing was a bit nerve-wracking. If we can tie this beginning into my album a little bit. The song that I won the talent contest with “Anyone who had a heart” is on my new album Indigo, and that’s one of …all of the songs on the album have a meaning to me in some way, whether they were a special song in my life that changed my life or the people influenced me, or there was a moment that I relate those songs to.

I was very homesick when I was in England. I missed my boyfriend, of course.

I think I went to the United States in around ’73 or ’74…or ’72 maybe.

My first time in America was when I was sent there to promote a movie called Tomorrow that I had made (I was in a group called Tomorrow). We were a put-together, manufactured group a la The Monkeys, actually by the same gentleman, Don Kirshner, who put the Monkeys together and Harry Salzman who put the Bond movies together. So, they wanted us to be this hot, new group that made a series of films. And we made it in London, in Pinewood studios with Val Guest. It was a space musical. Strange as it sounds! And here’s another tie-in – Phil Ramone, who was the producer of the [latest] album produced this album. So, if I had not done that I wouldn’t have met Phil. The movie died and we had all been under contract and flown all over the place. We flew to New York.

My first experience of America was New York, and that was pretty scary. I remember walking into a shop and a lady said, ‘Whadaya want!’ And I was like, ‘Oh, I’m sorry!’ You know, I was so like, I couldn’t believe it how aggressive everyone was. I was 20/21, something like that.

I came to settle in America because I had a hit record in ’73 maybe. I think it was “If you love me, let me know” or was it “Let me be”? It was one of those. And I went to see Helen Reddy and her husband in Florida, where I was for some reason and she was doing a show. I went to see her and she said, ‘you know, you have a hit record.’ She said, ‘If you want to make it here you have to be here. You have to be available.’ And that’s really all I needed because I had just lost the Eurovision Song Contest in London to ABBA, they were singing “Waterloo” – no surprise, they were brilliant. My love life was in a bad state, so I thought, ‘why not move?’ So, I moved to Los Angeles. And that’s really how it happened.

I like the idea of LA, that’s where the music was, really, and nicer weather. I knew I didn’t want to live in New York. So, Los Angeles was the other alternative. And Helen Readdy and her husband lived in LA, so it seemed the perfect place to go.

[Now] I live in Malibu. It’s kind of a beach community. I’ve lived there ever since I’ve lived in California. I think there is a certain similarity [between there and Australia], there’s a lot of gum trees there and it’s the ocean. There’s mountains behind, which is different, we don’t really have the mountains that we have there, but there is a certain feeling that is kind of Australian.

I was always working. There was always a project or this or that and Australia was just too far to commute. What I need to make clear is that at the time in Australia you could go so far. The recording industry wasn’t very big yet and everyone had the dream of making it in England or America, that was your dream. Because all the artists that were big were from England or America and Australia didn’t accept its own. Now Australia accepts its own, you know, John Farnham, and Delta and Tina Arena and all these wonderful young artists, Human Nature. All the people I have worked with too were accepted in their country first but that wasn’t the case when I was young. You had to go away and come back, like Pat and I, because we’d been in England, we had our own special. Because we’d just been away and worked overseas. Australia was not confident in itself. Now Australia has this incredible confidence but at the time you had to be proved worthy somewhere else before you were worthy to be accepted here. So that was the reason. If I could have done it from here and been accepted maybe I would have stayed.

I’ve always thought that I was coming back. In fact, I never thought I left. Even though I live away and I live in America. I was at a health spa recently and you had to stand up and say what’s your name and where do you come from? And I said, ‘my name’s Olivia Newton-John and I’m from Australia,’ before I even realised it had come out of my mouth! And someone said to me later, I thought you lived in Los Angles, and I said, ‘actually I do. I don’t know why I said that.’ But when I’m not really thinking, that’s what I feel. Isn’t that strange? And I have a property here (in Australia) and I always like to go back there as often as I can, and I visualise that that’s where I’ll end up.

I do [feel Australian]. It’s interesting living all around the world and actually being born in England, I left when I was five and I think those years between five and 15, when I went to school here and formed my first tastes and everything was in Australia. And I have the accent, I haven’t really lost it. Some people think I sound Anglophiled or Americaphiled but to me, I sound Australian. It becomes stronger when I hit the soil!

I’ve always felt Australian and I was always very proud of it. Whenever I would travel I would talk about Australia. And remember, in the ‘60s Australia was an unknown quantity and people would ask if there were kangaroos in the backyard and koalas on the streets. It was so far away and so inaccessible. It used to take Pat and I 36 hours to fly from England to Australia. Now you do that one in probably 18 and LA in 14. So it’s that much faster now. But I have always felt that, and I have always talked about Australia. A lot of Australians I know lost their accents and are talking with an American accent or a British accent to be accepted. I never did. It’s like being who you are. I felt I was Australian. Even with Grease, when I was first approached to do Grease they asked me, could I do an American accent and I said, ‘sorry, I can’t. Either you make me Australian or I don’t think I’ll be able to do it because I’ve got to feel like I can pull this off and if I’m trying to do an American accent it’s not going to work’. So, thank goodness, they did. And they just wrote a couple of lines in about Downunder and stuff [laughs].

[My Australian-ness] is just there, I don’t think I have to work at it. A lot of my closest friends are Australian: John and Pat Farrar, Steve Kipner and his wife Lizzie – she’s English, he’s Australian. We have a little Australian mafia going over there in Malibu. And Coral Browning, who I’ve known since I was 15, she lives there, so there’s a whole clique of us and I understand why people [subscribe to the idea of] birds of a feather because there’s just an unexplained understanding about humour and cultures and stuff like that.

When people ask about Australia now they’re not as clueless as they used to be because there’s been so much exposure about it. When I started there were hardly any famous Australians. Helen Reddy was probably the one most known before me in the singing circles, and you had Rod [X, a famous actor], and the tennis players were all known, Rod Laver and Newcombe and all those boys, but in acting and music there weren’t terribly many. Lana Cantrell and Helen Readdy before me, Helen probably being the most-known, and so people were pretty clueless about the country, you know, it was such a long way [away], as I was saying before. Now, just about every famous actor is Australian, it’s totally the reverse. There’s Nicole and Russell and Mel, Kate of course and the new girl who’s so wonderful, Naomi Watts. So just about every second actress and artists, the Jets, there are so many acts that are doing well over there. So people know about it and there’s lots of documentaries and people come here now for their holidays, which was not done years ago.

What Americanisms have I picked up? I’m spoilt. I want service quickly, now! I want my phone put on today! [laughs]. No, I’d probably say ‘trunk’ instead of ‘boot’ and I say ‘elevator’ instead of ‘lift’ because otherwise, people don’t know what you’re talking about. But for the first few years, I refused to change the words, but then it was just frustrating not to and then you find yourself…it’s just second nature after that. You start to say things…they spell ‘centre’ c-e-n-t-e-r and we do ‘r-e’, which is the English way – actually it makes more sense with ‘e-r’ but I was very stubborn about that kind of stuff. I still spell our way, so yeah. Just a couple of colloquialisms like that, but otherwise I stick to my guns!

I think Australians generally are pretty outgoing and friendly. It’s just the way we all are. Don’t you think? I think Aussies, even when you’re travelling and you run into them, they’re pretty…

It’s hard for me to separate myself from just being an Australian because when I come in the room people know my name, there’s an immediate association with celebrity, which doesn’t mean I’m just an Australian there’s a celebrity link. So I can’t disseminate the two things, one from the other. You sit down next to someone on a plane and start talking, people know the accent now. They’ll say, ‘Oh, you’re an Aussie, where are you from?’ Generally, people pick up on it more. Sometimes they mix you up with England and South Africa but I think Australians are just a little more outgoing than just your average person and more friendly. Well, my generation, I don’t know about the new generation.

It averages twice a year sometimes three. As I’ve just lost my mum, she was always a motivation for me to take an offer to come do something or just to come see her, or she would come and see me, I tried to see her two or three times a year, maybe three times if I could.

I come back to Australia two or three times a year and as many times as I can. And hopefully now, for longer periods of time. Because my dream is to spend half my time here and half my time travelling or being in America.

There’s no timeline now, it always seems to be dragging out, but I’m working on this house of mine, a property, and it’s kind of a goal and you know, when I came out here looking for land I never foresaw I’d have a property and now I have a property and a house so it’s all in its own time as it’s meant to me. It’s just beautiful to know that I have this little piece of Australia that is mine. Not that we own it. We don’t own anything, it’ll be passed on but for this moment it’s mine [laughs].

I miss my friends, of course, because your friends and your family…that’s the component of it that makes it what it is. But there’s just something here that grounds me. It is the sounds and the animals and the birds and it is the smells of the flowers and the gum trees and the colour of the sky. When Pat Carrol and I started Koala Blue we wanted to reflect in our logo and our products the brilliance of the colour because even though some of the cities are getting more polluted you get a little bit out of the city and you get this beautiful, rich colour. The sunsets here are like nowhere else, it’s just golden, the golden light. I think the light, the sounds, the food is incredible now. It’s always been good but it’s got even better, I think.

ends