In a shady patch of Sydney’s Centennial Park, Jess Mauboy is letting me in on a secret.
“I’m pretty private but I also like to party,” she whispers, putting her hand on my shoulder and giving it a conspiratorial scratch. “And somehow that’s never made headline news, which I’m really happy about!”
Her idea of a good night? “I’m not a drinker. I just love a dance. You play me 90s rave dance music or anything that just gets me going and I am on the dancefloor.” Recently, she tells me, she went out clubbing for her cousin’s 40th, and by the end of the night was dedicatedly photobombing strangers every time the club photographer lifted their lens. “I don’t know where these photos are. I’m just waiting for them to [show up].”
Mauboy is a singer, songwriter and actor with 16 top-20 singles and roles in films like The Sapphires and Bran Nue Dae under her belt. She is also a frontrunner for the title of Australia’s Sweetheart; someone who you’re probably cheering for even if you’ve not spent much time listening to her songs.
Despite having been on stage and screen since age 16 – when she came runner-up in season four of Australian Idol and signed a record deal with Sony Music – Mauboy has managed the rare feat of staying in the public eye for nearly 20 years without so much as a whiff of bad press. Or, even, the leak of a silly club photo.
Mauboy greets with a hug when I meet her in Centennial Park, a place she regularly comes to work out and walk her dog, a cockapoo called Leo (named after Mauboy’s star sign, with which she fully identifies). It’s a hot Wednesday morning but she’s not bothered by the relentless sun. “For the last two weekends, I’ve been up in Darwin. So I love this weather.”
Mauboy was born in the Northern Territory capital to a Kuku Yalanji and Wakaman mother and Indonesian father, one of five girls in a house she has previously described as “loud”. By the age of 11 she was entering country music talent quests at the urging of her parents, who recognised her rare vocal strength. By the time her dad told her she had to try out for Australian Idol, she already felt burnt out.
“I ran upstairs and said, I’m not doing it!” Mauboy remembers. “I’d done multiple competitions before and I just want to go to school and do normal things and not sing country music.”
Then one day she came home from school and found her parents sitting at the table, waiting to greet her. She thought “something was really wrong” but they just wanted to tell her that her mum was going to take her to Alice Springs to audition. She was mortified and again refused to go, afraid of “not being good enough” for the judges. But her parents won.
“My dad ended up scrounging money off one of his good friends – which I didn’t know about – and got us a Greyhound to Alice Springs. It was a huge trip and we didn’t have a lot of money. It takes two days to get to Alice Springs. And on a Greyhound! Oh, it was awful,” she says, stopping to pick up Leo’s poo.
Of course, her fear wasn’t discovered – quite the opposite. And today she is glad her parents pushed her to audition: “I always look back to that moment because it gave me so much courage, because it felt like being out on open waters.”
After inking her new record deal, she moved to Sydney, promising her parents she would be on her best behaviour. “And I was!” It was difficult navigating a new city and the music industry as a teen – “there were moments where I’d go home and have a bit of a cry because I felt like I didn’t do the right performance” – but her career quickly began to take her to incredible places. An early highlight was supporting Beyoncé on tour. The superstar, who had been watching Mauboy rehearse, told her she was good and should keep going. “I just couldn’t stop looking into her eyes,” Mauboy remembers.
She heeded that advice and is now up to album number five, the exuberant Yours Forever, out on 9 February. She’s particularly excited about the track Never Giving Up, which she says is a reflection on last year’s referendum results. “There’s so many Uncles and Aunties around Australia with very heavy hearts who were trying to move that issue forward.”
She is explaining how this is her “proudest album yet”, walking towards the bins to deposit Leo’s poo, when a pair of fans recognise her.
“Love you, Jess!” a woman yells out, her teenage daughter trailing shyly behind.
“Hi Sissy!” Mauboy yells back, flinging the lid of the red bin open and depositing the plastic bag. “Hope you’re having a lovely walk.”
Emboldened by Mauboy’s friendly response, the pair approach. They have just met but Mauboy greets them with the familiarity of old friends, stopping for a full seven minutes to chat about the cyclones in North Queensland where the pair hail from (Mauboy has family up there too and is worried about the situation) and the daughter’s own training to be a dancer (“You gotta teach me how to move soon!”).
Throughout the conversation, Mauboy will pull the pair in for a hug, or just place her hand on their shoulders as she talks, something she has a habit of doing when trying to make a point.
“I’m going to cry. Your journey and your story – she hasn’t missed a day of it,” the woman says gesturing at her daughter, eyes welling and voice wavering. “You’re a beacon!”
As we part ways with the mother and daughter, I ask Mauboy if that kind of thing happens a lot.
“It’s always the young ones,” she laughs. “They’re like Mum, Mum, it’s her! And the mum’s like, no it’s not. And then they look up are like, are you-?”
Alone again, we get back to talking about the album. It also packs love songs inspired by her now-husband, Themeli Magripilis, who Mauboy met at age 18 (“in the club” – a running theme here), and who she describes as a source of stability and safety in her life. “When he comes home and talks about his civil construction, I’m like, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but it sounds cool. I wanna get up on a machine and dig stuff up.”
The pair married in 2022 – not that you’ll find a wedding photo online. Mauboy wasn’t interested in selling the snaps to a glossy magazine, and the ceremony was mostly attended by family. “I think management were quite anxious about [photos leaking], which I found quite odd, because our mob aren’t like that – they’re very respectful.”
Before her publicist arrives to put her in an Uber and whisk her away to the next engagement, I ask Mauboy what she’d go back and tell the 16-year-old Jess who begrudgingly showed up for that Idol audition. She considers her response.
“There’s going to be ups and downs, you’re going to be away from your family and the people you love, you’re going to probably miss out on sex. There’s going to be sleepless nights. You might have benders. But it’s worth it! There’s some things that are worth it in the end.”
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Jessica Mauboy’s album, Yours Forever, is out now.