HE may be Australia's most powerful man, but Malcolm Turnbull is by no means invulnerable.
Featuring in the latest episode of ABC’s Australian Story, Mr Turnbull spoke frankly about an unhappy and poor childhood, recalling his loneliness at school and his confusion at being abandoned by his mother.
Speaking about the time his father told him his mother — academic and writer Coral Magnolia Lansbury — left to pursue a relationship with another man, John Salmon, in New Zealand, Mr Turnbull’s honest answers often tugged on the heart strings.
“Just essentially, the house emptied and she just ... she vanished,” Mr Turnbull said.
Reading a letter from his mother to his father, Mr Turnbull continued: “‘Dear Bruce, what might have been is not what was, and that is the hardest lesson one has to learn in life.
“Poor little Malco. Do you remember once when he was having static asthma and I gave him the white rabbit with floppy ears? He couldn’t breathe but he still smiled and put out his hands for it’.”
Yet, Bruce Turnbull made sure the young prime minister-to-be never thought badly of his mother.
“My father, who had every reason to feel very let down by my mother because of the circumstances, did everything he could to ensure that I never thought ill of my mother — and he absolutely succeeded.
“You know, I have letters of his that he wrote to her filled with reproach and bitterness: ‘How could you leave us? How could you leave your son?’ Then he would say to me in the next breath, as it were, ‘Your mother loves you, she hasn’t really left you.
“No, she’s just gone to New Zealand to do some studies, she’s coming back, don’t worry, everything’s OK’.”
An Oxford Rhodes Scholar, former investment banker, barrister and journalist, Mr Turnbull’s impressive record has long since been documented.
His early entry into the digital era — Mr Turnbull co-funded his OzEmail business — soon made him a millionaire with a thirst for more.
In 1981, he entered politics, but was initially unsuccessful in preselection for the seat of Wentworth in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
In 2000, he decided to have another go, and three years later successfully wrestled the seat of Wentworth in 2004.
In 2008, he became Liberal Party leader — a role he lost in 2009 by one vote to Tony Abbott after commanding his colleges to support Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Reduction Scheme.
Today, Mr Turnbull says he is a changed man, keen to lead — yet, as one friend put it in Australian Story after being asked if the leopard had changed its spots: “Well, I think the leopard’s a fine animal. So, I think people have to be true to character.”
Yet, although Mr Turnbull himself attributes much of his success and drive to his mother’s abandonment — “If I look back, perhaps I was thinking to myself, you know, if, even if unconsciously, if I work harder and do better, will she come back? Is it something about me that has caused her to leave?” – it was his love for his father that ultimately stole the show.
Speaking with heartbreaking honesty, Mr Turnbull and wife, Lucy, recalled hearing about Bruce Turnbull’s death in a plane crash, which, more than three decades later, still clearly hurts the prime minister.
“We were just about to sit down for a sandwich or a bread roll or something exotic like that, and the phone rang and I could just see the look on Malcolm’s face just drop,” Lucy Turnbull said.
“It was the most horrible thing.”
Standing on the property Bruce had bought in 1981, Mr Turnbull recalled his father’s death “basically a year after he bought it”.
I buried him here,” the prime minister said.
“Anything I could do to attach myself to a memory of him, I did — everything. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing him. It was so hard to deal with. So I kept everything of his, and it took me many years to get used to the fact that he was gone.”
Many years later, after her final marriage had failed, Coral Lansbury returned to Australia and lived out the rest of her life near Mr Turnbull, Lucy Turnbull and their two children, Alex and Daisy.
She became ill about 1989, and died, aged 61, in 1991.
“It was grim,” the prime minister recalled.
“Very grim, very sad. She didn’t want to die. She kept on asking me to forgive her, which of course I did. She felt bad about herself, bad about, I guess, the way she’d left me.”
But despite his parental turmoil, since age 24, Mr Turnbull has always had family — his wife, who he says he fell in love with “the moment I met her”.
“I know that sounds very corny ... [but] she was beautiful, clever and calm and funny.”
Lucy Turnbull, on the other hand, thought the relationship couldn’t possibly last: “I was just under 20, two months shy of 20, and he was, at that time, 24, which is crazy young when you think about it now.
“I didn’t think we were so young then, but, like, we were babies.”
Yet, the pair married only a few years later, and the only regret they have is not having more children.
“If there was one thing I could redo in my life, it is that we would have had more children,” Mr Turnbull said sadly, while Ms Turnbull told of her two miscarriages and deep sadness at not being able to have more than two children.
“It was quite a horrible experience, actually, and I was worried that if that happened again and again, it would actually really impact on what I was like with the kids, the healthy kids that I was in process of bringing up.”
Mr Turnbull became Australia’s 29th prime minister after responding to more than a year of dissatisfaction with Tony Abbott by launching a well-planned challenge last Monday.
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