In March 2016, over a plate of noodles with her friend Leigh Sales, Annabel Crabb revealed that she wanted The West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin to write her bio-pic.
“The dialogue would be so much better than it was in real life!” Crabb beamed. “Wouldn’t that be the great strength of having him write anything for you — you’d be like, Suddenly, I’m a genius and I just speak in witticisms!”
Crabb turned fifty earlier this year and decided to mark the milestone by narrativizing her own life on stage at the Adelaide Fringe in a one-woman show called 50 Odd Years of Crabb.
Most of her fans would argue that Crabb doesn’t need the verbal gymnastics of Sorkin to enrich her storytelling. She’s a “nationally adored columnist” and television star, notable for her wry political commentary, 47,9000+ loyal podcast followers she shares with Sales, along with its spawning Facebook community and her 137000+ Instagram followers.
Sydney audiences will get to experience her sharp, bodacious humour this November when the celebrated journalist and cultural icon takes her performance to the Sutherland Centre in Sydney’s south.
The show will offer an elixir of Crabb’s dark humour and verbal self-poking as she delivers snapshots of her life. There are stories from her time growing up on a farm in South Australia, to the “important life lessons” she learned in her first journalism gig at the Adelaide Advertiser.
More than anything, Crabb wants to give audiences a good time.
“I’ve never had a problem telling embarrassing stories about myself in public and that’s mainly what this show is,” she says. “There are sad bits, but even sadness, I’ve found, can be consistent with laughter. Black humour has been my saviour at a few key points.”
Her joyful memoiristic performance also contains some painful lessons about grief and loss. Crabb’s humility and tenderness on stage will likely send audiences reaching for tissues.
Last year, Crabb’s older brother James took his own life — a tragedy that Crabb described as “very sudden” and “shocking.”
“When something like that happens, it upends everything you ever assumed about life,” she said.
“The resultant cocktail of pain, shame, guilt, anger, confusion – it’s impossible to navigate without re-examining yourself. There’s no shortcut through that stuff. But if you work hard and pay attention and, I don’t know, just hang on, you do get somewhere,” she says.
“If you do it right, you can come out the other end – not fixed or anything, but definitely more aware and better at relationships and better at looking pain in the eye and not turning away, which is probably the most important human trait I increasingly think.”
Crabb’s family suffered another harrowing loss this year, when her beloved sister-in-law Anisa died from cancer.
“It was an unbearable thing to watch,” Crabb said. “[It was] unbearable to be unable to avert what was coming for her and her young family, unbearable to have to tell my own children that they were going to lose another important person in their lives, but also Anisa taught me a lot about grief and pain.”
“She talked about these things openly and generously and wisely, to me and to my children, and that lessened the fear for us I think. It was a mighty thing that she was able to do in that sense, and it filled me with awe and gratitude and love for her.”
When I met Crabb a few weeks ago, she was in the midst of post-production for Kitchen Cabinet and had just wrapped up sold-out shows of Chat 10 Looks 3 Live in Canberra, Brisbane and Sydney.
Throughout our conversation, she wore a default expression of alert curiosity. Her affable warmth calmed me and gradually eased into the sphere of sparkly inquisitiveness she is known for.
I can’t think of another Australian media figure who is so universally loved and admired, especially by the country’s women. How does she move so fluidly between hard-hitting political analysis and gossiping about the hot women on “F-Boy Island”?
“I don’t see them as very different,” she said. “I genuinely love doing a bunch of different things all the time. My true nightmare would be to have a job where I go to the same desk every day and have a manageable and predictable workload that is the same every day. My brain cooks along at its best when it’s juggling eight different things.”
My first encounter with Crabb happened in 2016, when a friend sent me a link to an ABC show called “When I get a Minute”. The 8-part series is essentially a shorter video version of their podcast. What struck me immediately about the first episode — the one where they eat at the historically iconic Chinatown food court and where Crabb talks about Aaron Sorkin, is the way they banter — it was the first time saw the kind of friendship between women I most valued, captured visually.
It represented the sort of friendship I always sought. The kind where you talk about a piece of artwork to get closer to the humanity of another person: Art as a means towards human connection.
Also — Crabb is very funny. And I prize humour, above and beyond any trait.
Around that time, my sister pressed onto me The Wife Drought — Crabb’s feminist manifesto, published a year earlier, which became one of the most influential texts in strengthening my own feminism.
To this day, the book and its author retain a singular, indelible quality that defines its enduring relevance. “I’m a curious person,” Crabb reflects. “I find the deepest pleasure in looking at the world outside my head, not inside it.”
How does she feel about turning fifty?
“I guess turning 50 is a kind of classic “ding ding” moment for reflection,” she said. “I’m a much better writer and clearer thinker at 50 than I was at 40 or 30. I know a lot of shit. I’ve come to understand the things I’m really good at (writing, talking to people, not judging people, being curious) and I’ve stopped kicking myself around so much for the things I’m bad at – answering correspondence in a timely way, admin of any kind, saying ‘No’.”
“I know whose opinions I care about, and I can genuinely laugh off critiques from absolute frauds, who I’m also pretty great these days at spotting. I’m comfortable with the way I look, and I’m not anxious about ageing because I’ve never made a living from being beautiful, and I often feel sorry for people who have because I think in that situation ageing must be very hard. I’ll be super annoyed if my brain goes though.”
Her fuel for her brain remains reading books— a source of great joy throughout her life.
“I’ve always loved reading since I was a little kid,” she said. “Reading gives me intense joy and enlightenment, and one of the greatest privileges of my fortunate life has been to get to meet some of the writers I most admire, and kind of hit them up for insight freebie.
“Helen Garner probably has the best eye and ear of any writer in Australia. I’ve learned so much from her about being a good writer and about being a human. Her recent piece about what she’s learned about happiness at age 80 fills me with delight. I rely on reading for so much —pleasure, enlightenment, provocation, the whole works.”
In the next few months, Crabb has many projects on the horizon — the latest season of Kitchen Cabinet drops on August 15; she’ll be touring Chat 10 Looks 3 Live show with Leigh Sales in Adelaide, Perth and Melbourne, and she has her one-woman show in Sydney in November.
Further ahead, Crabb is looking forward to watching her children grow into adults.
“My eldest daughter is 16 and my youngest is 10. I’ve never fretted about whether my children will be, you know, astronauts or Nobel laureates or neurosurgeons or whatever… the one fear I ever had about being a parent was that I would end up with a kid who wasn’t kind,” she says.
“But all my kids are kind people, and watching their brains grow into adulthood is the best fun; watching the books they choose to read, the movies they like, the thoughts and opinions taking shape. I’m looking forward to more of that.”
“50 Odd Years of Crabb” is playing from November 25 — November 29 at The Pavilion Performing Arts Centre. Book your tickets here.
Kitchen Cabinet’s new series is airing at 8pm, August 15 on ABC TV and ABC iview. This season features Karen Andrews, Lidia Thorp, Linda Burney, Peter Dutton, Dai Le, Bridget McKenzie, Jordon Steele-John, and Anika Wells.