Australia has gone through its share of pop culture punchlines. The joke du jour is currently Shannon Noll, who’s become the subject of countless memes and tongue-in-cheek campaigns.
It’s fun. We centre on a target seemingly arbitrarily — usually some disposable piece of Australian cultural detritus — and have a collective chuckle before discarding the subject entirely.
Indeed, it’s pretty easy to forget there’s an actual person behind the memes and jabs. Sure, Nollsy seems to be in on the joke, but it’s harder for a teenage girl to take things in stride.
Nikki Webster experienced this phenomenon first hand. The Sydney native was catapulted into national attention at the tender age of 13 when she performed at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
Dressed in a summer dress, with pink ribbons tying back her strawberry blonde locks, the entire world’s attention was on Nikki as she flew high above the Olympic stadium crowd.
It was an apt metaphor for the young singer, who was chosen out of 500 other young girls to perform at the Olympics. Webster capitalised on her Olympics stardom with a debut single.
‘Strawberry Kisses’ entered the charts at number two and stayed there for seven weeks. Meanwhile, Webster’s profile as Australia’s sweetheart rose and she became a household name.
But the child star, who’s now 28 years old, recently revealed that her post-‘Strawberry Kisses’ life was a “dark” period that left her confused and wanting to escape Australia altogether.
“I was the punch line of everyone’s joke and I was just a kid,” Webster told The Daily Telegraph. The singer moved to LA to escape harassers and negative attention in her homeland.
As she contemplated staying in LA to work on a legitimate music career on her own terms, Webster was being told to “be like Britney” and the harsh spotlight became her “norm”.
“People were telling me how I needed to change my career and break through like Britney and change my image and I was thinking, ‘is this me?’. It was confusing,” she told the Tele.
“I was just this young naïve artist trying to make a go and work hard. I’d worked damn hard and I wasn’t getting the reception, I couldn’t understand it.”
“It was quite dark and I think that’s why I went to LA, because I thought ‘I need to do this by myself’. I did question whether I wanted to come back as an artist here at all.”
Webster’s subsequent releases did not meet the expectations set by ‘Strawberry Kisses’, though it didn’t stop her label from releasing The Best of Nikki Webster a mere three years after her debut.
The singer’s popularity quickly waned as the decade rolled on and an appearance on Dancing With The Stars in 2005 saw her copping more flak for having an unfair advantage over other contestants.
The same year, a now-18-year-old Webster appeared on the cover of FHM and Zoo magazines and returned to music with a new, sexed-up image in 2009 with the song ‘Devilicious’.
That single, which indeed saw Webster attempting a Britney-like salacious reinvention, came and went quickly and Webster resigned herself to working behind the scenes of the entertainment industry.
Webster is now mother to a baby girl and recently opened a new performing arts studio in Minchinbury, in addition to her Dance @ Nikki Webster studios in Leichhardt and on the Central Coast.
According to the former child star, she never expected the harsh judgement she received after she shot to fame and reckons it’s just another case of the Australian Tall Poppy Syndrome.
Source: tonedeaf.com.au