Source : the age
When Muriel’s Wedding came out in 1994, I was in my first year of a communications degree in Bathurst, majoring in journalism – and Thursday nights at the uni bar. Gabby Millgate, who played Muriel’s sister, was a theatre media major in the same course.
A straw poll of younger Australians – based on a handful of my 20-something colleagues – suggests that even those who have never seen Muriel’s Wedding know Millgate’s immortal line “you’re terrible, Muriel”.
At the peak of the movie’s success, international celebrities including Madonna and Will Ferrell said the line on television, trying their best to mimic Millgate’s Aussie drawl and exact tone of horrified delight.
Millgate uttered the line three times in the movie as Joanie Heslop, and has since repeated it hundreds of times as herself. At one point, she anonymously called in to a radio contest for who could say the line the best – and lost. In the 2000s she became friends with Kyle Sandilands, and he often called her from various nightclubs at 3am with different companions, begging “say the line, say the line”. (His agent confirms this is true.)
When Millgate repeats the line now, she likes to personalise it. “You’re terrible, Caitlin,” she says to demonstrate, when we meet up for lunch 30 years after we last saw each other.
“I like seeing people light up because the movie means so much to them,” Millgate says. “I know it happens to me when I meet people who are culturally important in my life – like when I met Molly Meldrum, I was like, ‘oh, my God, if he’s real, the Road Runner is real’, and my mother had a meltdown.”
We meet at the Balmain Bowling Club in Sydney’s inner west where Millgate spent many happy evenings with her family when she was a teenager. She orders the same meal she always ate on nights at the bowlo – a bowl of steamed green vegetables and a bowl of chips. I have a Caesar salad and convince her to share a starter of prawn dumplings.
As if to prove the only constant in life is change, Millgate texts me just as I put the finishing touches on this article to say that her parents have sold the family home in Balmain and moved to Canberra to be near their daughters and grandchildren. I text back that the bowlo – the oldest in Sydney – has closed as well. “Nooo!” she says. “The universe is crumbling behind me – no going back.”
Millgate moved from Canberra with her family in senior high school when her stepfather became chief censor in the Office of Film and Literature Classification – a job that meant he later saw Muriel’s Wedding before anyone else, though he had to recuse himself from the rating decision.
After finishing school at St Scholastica’s in Glebe in inner-city Sydney, Millgate fell in love with theatre sports before getting her big break in Muriel’s Wedding in her early 20s, in what she describes as her “Alice in Wonderland moment”.
Millgate went to university as a mature-age student, then landed a gig on the comedy show Full Frontal. After that came a bit part in the sequel to Babe and a role on Celebrity Big Brother where she met Sandilands. He helped her get a job in commercial breakfast radio in Brisbane, but she soon realised it wasn’t for her. “It was like working on the Death Star,” she says.
Millgate came back to Sydney, popping up as a regular caller on the Kyle and Jackie O Show playing a character called Debbie who was perpetually angry at the hosts.
She then moved to the Pilbara, returning to radio as an ABC host, and later working at a prison. For the radio job, she travelled around the region doing stories and met a listener in Port Hedland who lived off grid with solar power, tank water, cows, chickens and vegetable gardens. “I drove out to see him, and him and I went collecting cow manure together,” she says. “We struck up an unlikely friendship, as much as you can with someone who lives two hours away.” This experience later proved relevant in Millgate’s reinvention story.
She was back in Sydney when Julia Gillard became prime minister, and decided to try her hand as a Gillard impersonator. That lasted a few years, until Gillard was deposed.
At that point, Millgate gave up trying to make a living in show business. She realised that Muriel’s Wedding had not been a launchpad for bigger and better things, but rather the pinnacle.
In many ways, Millgate’s acting career was a story of struggling to find a place amid contracting opportunities. Partly, she reflects, this was a structural shift because a show like Full Frontal that curated culture was no longer viable in Australia in an era where every individual curated their own culture. Partly it was because her early success had skewed her expectations.
“Because it had been such a random event to get Muriel’s in the first place, I thought that was my destiny, and that life would just keep handing me big destiny moments like that,” Millgate says. “Whereas the reality is, for everybody not blessed by random events, that you need to start at the bottom and work your way up.
“I was helicoptered to the top of the mountain that a lot of people struggle and strive to climb. Coming down from there, I didn’t even know the landscape, which had mental health issues that came along with it, and [a sense of] losing purpose, and all of that sort of thing. I felt like I had the potential to be a pot of gold, but I was being used as a doorstop.”
At the age of 42, Millgate decided to retrain as an early childhood educator. As we discuss it over lunch, she doesn’t miss the opportunity to joke about 42 being the meaning of life per Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Millgate says she is much happier than she was as a performer because she feels useful with her skills and abilities serving families and children. She has a sense of a natural give and take, whereas comedy and media was all “give, give, give”.
“It was hard, but I also actually trust in the process of giving up,” Millgate says. “I know in our society, we’re supposed to try our best all the time, but sometimes you need renewal by accepting the world you’ve created has come to a finale, but you’re still alive in the world.”
Millgate had never even changed a nappy when she got her first early childhood teaching job in a room full of two-year-olds in a centre in Balmain. “By the end of the year, I could recognise who needed changing just by the distinct aroma,” she says.
The children were kept indoors most of the day in a room set up to replicate the outdoors, with pot plants and a sandpit and a bike track. They were meant to visit a nearby park at least once a day, but with steep stairs and staff shortages as obstacles, it did not always happen.
She later moved back to Canberra to be closer to her sister and her niece and nephew, and started working at a centre that had outdoor space. It was just a bare backyard with a small plastic slide and a sandpit, but Millgate worked with the children to create a lush garden with bean tunnels, nasturtiums and snow peas.
“I’ve seen the difference it makes in children’s wellbeing, and how just being able to go outside and see a chicken or be barefoot on the grass can really help them self-regulate,” Millgate says. “They like digging in the ground and finding worms. Finding an egg is so exciting for them.”
They built a dry riverbed because one day they had the tap on and the children started asking questions about why the water flowed in a certain direction. That meant the children were learning what Millgate calls “ecological literacy skills” by following their own interests and having conversations.
“Regular literacy is learning the letters so that we can understand language,” she explains. “Ecological literacy, instead of ABCD, we’ve got dirt, mud, rock, sticks, seeds, plants, beans, worms, bugs, logs, chickens, all of those things.”
In another Alice in Wonderland moment, Millgate went down the proverbial rabbit hole, obsessively reading and learning everything she could find on children’s learning and development through nature. She became nature pedagogy leader at Woden Valley Early Learning Centre in Canberra, and is now president of the Australian Association for Environmental Education ACT.
Her passion project is the Early Years Climate Strategy, which she developed based on the premise that preparing the population to tackle the immense task of adapting to a warming climate is best started in early childhood when most brain development occurs.
She has been doggedly sharing the work with everyone she can – from ACT and federal politicians to the United Nations and speaking at Climate Action Week earlier this year. The work is paying off, she says, with more services adopting some of the tools she has developed.
“I feel a little bit like the baby bird in Are You My Mother?,” Millgate says, referring to the old picture book about a little bird that hatches and goes around asking a cow, a chicken, a tractor and so on if they’re its mother.
“I am trying to find the best way to advocate for children’s access to nature by going to different stakeholders in children’s wellbeing and saying, ‘Are you my way to give children access to nature so they’re up to the task around climate change, adaptation and resilience?’ ”
When I ask Millgate what her biggest adventure has been, she shares an anecdote from her time living in Patonga Beach on the Central Coast, after Full Frontal.
Every day she walked on the beach with her dog and then crossed the river on a lilo, despite the risk of sharks. One day it had been raining, and the river flow was stronger than she could handle.
“I exhausted myself trying my best to get to the other side, and I failed,” Millgate says. “I got taken quite a far way out on my lilo. What have all the stories told me, when you try your best and you fail? You surrender, you give up.
“So I let my hands and feet dangle into the water, and I stood up. It turned out I was only in that much water the whole way.” She gestures to show about half a metre.
“I walked back to the beach laughing, dragging my lilo, thinking ‘oh my god, I just scared myself so hard’.”
“You needed some ecological literacy,” I joke.
“I did, I did,” Millgate says. “I think sometimes giving up you realise the water’s not as deep as you thought it might be. That was the life lesson.”
Read more great conversations over lunch
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Stephen Brook asks Michael Rowland about his future: In the space of 14 months, Michael Rowland upended his ABC life. There’s more upheaval to come
Margot Saville laughs with Kathy Lette: Kathy Lette on ageing fabulously … and giving cheek to the King
David Wenham bares his scars to Louise Rugendyke: David Wenham on cancer, getting older and being lusted after
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