It is just possible that the story you are reading here will not be to your liking. I am not sure I like it myself. I am not a fan of the national pastime of eating our own young, especially if they are pretty, clever and precocious; and this one, some would say, is a national treasure, a cover-girl who counts Kylie Minogue as a friend, whose records go platinum on release, and whose old jeans can pull $22,000 at a charity auction. That\u2019s more than Kylie\u2019s do.<\/p>\n So I want to make it plain I am not setting out here to eat Nikki Webster. I am not setting out to play the Wicked Witch to her Dorothy. What I want to explain is why, after 25 years in newspapers and thousands of interviews, I could be reduced to fist-thumping frustration by a quick chat with a 15-year-old girl.<\/p>\n It is that phrase, \u201c15 year-old girl\u201d, that is the nub of the problem. Looking back, I did not actually interview Nikki Webster, the 15-year-old girl, for 35 minutes at her West End apartment this week. I interviewed Nikki Webster, the phenomenon. This second Nikki looks just like the first with her curly blonde hair and lively eyes. But she is a little like Austin Powers\u2019 fembots in reverse: Snapped on to the real Nikki, she is a robot with an implanted chip, a niceness chip that holds predictable, pre-programmed phrases and sanitised attitudes. Like the fembots, she is too good to be true. But, like Austin Powers, we dearly want her to be.<\/p>\n I should have known all this from the beginning, even before I began the research, when acquaintances who had been singularly unimpressed that I\u2019d met Bill Clinton, Muhammad Ali or Lauren Bacall became suddenly animated when they heard I was meeting Nikki.<\/p>\n It would not have been that way two years ago. Even after her astonishing entry into the national consciousness, via the Olympic opening ceremony, when her fresh, unspoilt image seemed a symbol of the nation, it would have been different. She was just a pretty 13-year-old then, with a clear, pure voice. Brave, too, to be soaring 45m above the stadium in a little pink sun-dress. But in September 2000, no one would have expected her to know a great deal, or even to be an interesting person.<\/p>\n It would be a mistake, however, to underestimate the powerful impact a home-town Olympics can have on the collective psyche. Nikki Webster, Hero Girl, held up a mirror to us: there we were, young, healthy, good-looking, brave and good, all the qualities we desire. Neither should we underestimate the impact of a new star\u2019s PR people, agents and managers on that tender psyche. With our collaboration, they made Nikki the vehicle for those desires.<\/p>\n Implicit in all this, says Karen Brooks, senior lecturer in popular culture at the Sunshine Coast University, is the magic that has attached itself to a girl who, in every other sense, is quite ordinary.<\/p>\n \u201cLife since the Sydney Olympics has been this dream for Nikki, it has been magic. She was an ordinary little girl, not particularly talented or particularly attractive, and she won the lottery,\u201d Brooks says. \u201cI say, good on her for what she\u2019s achieved.\u201d<\/p>\n A big part of Nikki\u2019s attraction to her very young fans, according to Brooks, is the suggestion that, if it happened to Nikki, it could happen to anyone. \u201cThere\u2019s really nothing remarkable there, and that\u2019s good, too, it means you don\u2019t have to be extremely beautiful to win,\u201d she says. \u201cIt puts celebrity on a level playing field,\u201d<\/p>\n But the Nikki vehicle has begun to move very fast. Following quickly upon Nikki\u2019s Olympics came multiple public appearances and the release of her single, Strawberry Kisses<\/i> (which went platinum), and her own CD, Follow Your Heart<\/i>. She started her own website (I was visitor number 342,143), made television guest appearances and sang at every second public function around the country.<\/p>\n By her 14th birthday she had amassed an extraordinary following of pre-teen fans, fascinated by her verging-on-vamp outfits (she designs them herself), her favourite drink (water) and her favourite Chupa-Chup flavours (cherry and pineapple).<\/p>\n She appeared on the cover of Barbie<\/i> magazine and in Who Weekly<\/i>\u2019s \u201cmost intriguing\u201d list, and their \u201cindustry power\u201d list, coming in at No. 10 and whipping Cate Blanchett, Russell Crowe and Lisa McCune in the process.<\/p>\n She won awards, became the face of Jager cosmetics and a spokesperson for Spastic Centres of New South Wales (as well as youth ambassador for Kids Help Line) and an unlikely gay icon with several Nikki impersonators romping through last year\u2019s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras in Sydney.<\/p>\n Not bad for a girl who first trod the boards at four and broke into television in a Twisties ad at six. (She\u2019s since spruiked for Codral cold tablets, Campbell\u2019s soup, Optus and Sultana Bran.)<\/p>\n Then, late last year, the icing on the patty-cake: She scored the leading role as Dorothy in the musical Wizard of Oz<\/i>, a role young Judy Garland made her own in a movie few people would not have seen.<\/p>\n After seasons in Sydney and Melbourne, the show opened at the Lyric Theatre in Brisbane this week. I sit through part of a dress rehearsal and my note, taken in the dark, record how tender Nikki is with the dog playing Toto. Against the word \u201cvoice\u201d I\u2019ve marked a big tick, against \u201cacting\u201d a big question mark.<\/p>\n People who know her say she is not precious, or precocious, just a down-to-earth, nice girl. But it\u2019s hard to get there, as the girl has been completely overtaken by the phenomenon, created by the phalanx of managers and minders who now have a stake in her stardom.<\/p>\n She is both shielded by them and controlled by them, so much so that even though she agrees to a photo shoot to accompany this interview, and is clearly prepared for it, word comes from those who pull the strings that it is to be cancelled. There\u2019s not enough time to prepare, (read: control) say the managers, so she complies, telling us firmly, no photos.<\/p>\n We sit down \u2013 sans minders, surprisingly \u2013 for our allotted hour together. The show? \u201cIt\u2019s great,\u201d she says, \u201ca fantastic musical to be involved with.\u201d In the breaks she\u2019s had time to launch her new album Bliss<\/i>, which has already gone gold. She\u2019s done lots of shopping centre appearances and the feedback is \u201cgreat\u201d. It\u2019s \u201cgreat\u201d to meet your fans.<\/p>\n In the following minutes I learn her parents have always been supportive; that she feels she hasn\u2019t changed, her friends are the same old friends and they don\u2019t give her special treatment. She still has \u201cgirly\u201d nights of gossip and movies. She still gets thousands of letters a week which she insists on answering with the help of her mum; she doesn\u2019t mind being a recognised face because \u201ceveryone is so nice, everyone who comes up to me is supportive and down to earth.\u201d<\/p>\n A day in her life is just getting up and getting ready and going to the theatre and coming home. Pretty basic, she says with a smile that flashes over the sentence and is gone. She nods her head in a gesture that says, that\u2019s all. Just the outline. No colouring in.<\/p>\n By now I\u2019ve realised that all the time-honoured interview techniques of digging deeper, of getting under the skin, of connecting, are failing. Every attempt at follow-up is getting the same sort of answer: pat, packaged, rehearsed and delivered with the same lightning smile. If this was an adult, you wouldn\u2019t let this happen. You\u2019d be using a sharper shovel. But this is a 15-year-old girl, a child, not yet at the age of consent. And we don\u2019t eat our young.<\/p>\n Even as she is telling me her next best career choice is working with disabled children, how lucky she is to do charity work, that no, her parents have never urged her to become a bank clerk, and how nice her fellow performers are \u2013 Kylie, John Farnham, Olivia Newton-John, Kasey Chambers \u2013 I am sinking deeper into this morass of goodness. Please, Nikki, I want to say, I am not a munchkin.<\/p>\n But perhaps Nikki is. Karen Brooks is concerned that, because of the magic powder Nikki is dowsed in, and the image of ing\u00e9nue she is locked into, she is in danger of becoming trapped on an endless Yellow Brick Road of her own making.<\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s 15 now, but still locked in this saccharine sweet image. There doesn\u2019t seem to be a dark side at all. But at that age she has a social responsibility to say things that relate to her age, to show a depth and a breadth of thinking. She should have an opinion,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n It\u2019s important, Brooks says, because those in her great legion of young fans actually want to be Nikki.<\/p>\n \u201cBut it\u2019s as if she\u2019s on this Yellow Brick Road in search of a heart, a brain and courage, but the theme of the Wizard<\/i> is that these things are inside you, you have to unlock them yourself. I\u2019m afraid she is going to be happy with the little fake pink heart pinned on her dress.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI would say to her, \u2018Don\u2019t keep wearing those ruby red slippers that everyone else has worn. Kick them off. It\u2019s OK to be normal.\u2019 If she want to maintain this level of celebrity, she is going to have to reveal something of herself.\u201d<\/p>\n Brooks says adults relate very differently to the Nikki phenomenon. There\u2019s concern that with the idolising of her clothes and make-up, she\u2019s sexualising young girls way too early. And in research with her students, Brooks has turned up adverse and sometimes cruel comments about the young star\u2019s looks and talent, reviews panning her songs, and even groups who use Nikki photos as a dart board.<\/p>\n \u201cBut even that is an attempt, I think, to pierce the outer layers, the spin, and let out the real girl underneath,\u201d Brooks says.<\/p>\n So what is there to reveal? Back at West End it\u2019s becoming rapidly clear I will not find out in this interview. Even a year of playing Dorothy \u2013 doing eight shows a week for months and school work in between \u2013 can\u2019t crack the fa\u00e7ade. It\u2019s all good fun, she says, and she doesn\u2019t get tired. Well, maybe a bit.<\/p>\n Thirty minutes into the hour, it\u2019s me who\u2019s tired. I close my notebook and prepare to leave. But there are two little surprised left, each as revealing as the other. What\u2019s happening after Wizard<\/i> finishes? I ask.<\/p>\n \u201cThat will be December 23rd,\u201d Nikki says, and then for five miraculous seconds, the real Nikki shines through. \u201cThen it\u2019s Christmas!\u201d she says with the smile of a child. It\u2019s so natural, so ad-lib.<\/p>\n We\u2019re at the door. In one movement, she pecks me on the cheek, a quick fembot kiss, chirps a bright \u201cBye!\u201d and heads off. I walk away, unaccountably disturbed. We\u2019ve been acquainted for half an hour. But we don\u2019t know each other at all.<\/p>\n Source: The Courier Mail Nikki Webster is living the dream of many a young girl. She\u2019s become a star. At 15 she already has fame and fortune. But what exactly do we love about her? Kris Olsson investigates. It is just possible that the story you are reading here will not be to your liking. I am not sure … Continue reading<\/a>Too good to be true<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-15"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1796,"href":"https:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70\/revisions\/1796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2002\/11\/CourierMail.jpg\")
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