Like many of Australia’s more charming and inexplicable national behaviours, it remains a mystery how or why Tina Turner’s Nutbush City Limits came to be played at every wedding, school dance and playground in the country. Many of us would not even remember when we learned the line dance that goes with the song (knee, knee; kick, kick). Sometimes an unconfirmed theory resurfaces, like the dance being developed by education departments in Queensland or New South Wales, as a form of PE for children.
But most of us simply accept that, somewhere along the way, we absorbed this Australian Macarena through some puzzling strain of cultural osmosis. We simply can’t help but dance to Tina. Knee, knee; kick, kick.
My pitch: the MCG, SCG, Gabba and all other major stadiums around Australia should open up so we can all come together for one mass performance of The Nutbush.
— Mark Humphries (@markhumphries) May 24, 2023
Some Australians who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s will even confess to believing that Turner, the big soul singer from Nutbush, Tennessee, was actually an Australian, given her significant presence in the national consciousness: through the nation’s affection for Nutbush-ing, yes, but also as the face of Australia’s rugby league and as the big-haired villain in George Miller’s Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. (In an interview with Guardian Australia, Miller remembered Turner as “magnificent”, saying: “She embraced Australia and Australia embraced her.”)
Australia’s love affair with Turner began in 1979. Having escaped her abusive marriage to Ike, Turner also wanted to split with her then manager, who was “doing a good job booking me on the cabaret circuit, but I had dreams and they were big”, she wrote in her memoir. “I wanted to fill concert halls and arenas like the Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart. That was quite an ambition for a 40-year-old female singer, whose best years seemed to be behind her.”
Enter Roger Davies, a young Australian who was in the US as the manager of Olivia Newton-John. Davies and Turner were an unlikely pair – the 40-year-old soul singer and the 26-year-old former roadie from Melbourne – and immediately they hit it off. “It was our destiny to come together at this moment,” Turner wrote in Tina Turner: My Love Story. “Two people standing on the brink of new lives. He wanted an artist. I wanted a manager. His ambition was to build a star and I needed someone to believe in me, to take me to that place. We both got what we wanted.”
As an Australian, Davies understood that musicians needed to have an audience around the world, Turner wrote, when Americans in the music industry “didn’t acknowledge that the rest of the world existed”.
Six years later, the Australian director George Miller knew there was only woman who could play Aunty Entity, the tough, Amazonian-like ruler of Bartertown in his 1985 film Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. “Every time we talked about Aunty Entity as we were writing, we’d say, ‘Oh, someone like Tina Turner’,” Miller said on Thursday. “She was the only person we could think of. And sure enough, she was the only person we ever asked.”
Vale Tina Turner. This behind-the-scenes clip from MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME shows the music legend on set in Australia as Aunty Entity with director George Miller. Please note parts of this clip are silent. See more MAD MAX 3 on our website: https://t.co/riEIEZGhPd pic.twitter.com/UeIshuNCCW
— NFSA National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (@NFSAonline) May 25, 2023
That a US star was willing to travel to the remote opal town of Coober Pedy – not dissimilar to Nutbush, Turner would joke – to thunder down dirt roads in scrappy soapbox racers endeared her to many down under. But it was another role – the face of Australia’s rugby league – that cemented her place in the nation’s heart. In the roundabout way that all weirdly perfect decisions seem to happen, it came via a strange connection. John Quayle, then CEO of the Australian Rugby League, was looking to bring in more women to the traditionally blokey, blue-collar game. His assistant at the time was Micki Braithwaite, the first wife of Horses singer Daryl Braithwaite, who happened to know Turner’s manager Davies.
The decision was made to make an ad that would give the sport a sexier edge, with Turner singing her track What You Get Is What You See over footage of muscly players working out. Some questioned why a Black American woman who had never seen rugby league before should end up promoting it – but it worked. The New South Wales rugby league (NSWRL) then bought the rights to her 1989 track The Best for a follow-up ad, which became even more synonymous with the game.
Turner was inextricably linked to Australian rugby: she performed at the 1993 NSWRL grand final, and even re-recorded The Best with beloved Australian singer Jimmy Barnes, who described working with her as “a highlight of my career”. After her death hit the news, the NRL announced that her ads and songs will be played at all matches in this round.
Perhaps we love her because she was so game to engage with Australian culture – from the apocalyptic hellscapes of Mad Max to the blue-collar world of rugby league. “She was the real deal,” former rugby player Benny Elias told Sky on Thursday. “She came from a really tough upbringing and it was very difficult for her to come over here do something that she’s not familiar with … but she did it to a T.”
Turner’s music will live on – obviously in the charts, but also in rural school discos and suburban weddings and sporting stadiums up and down Australia. And maybe, finally, the Nutbush will travel beyond our shores. On Thursday, the US embassy in Australia shared footage of its ambassador, Caroline Kennedy, doing the Nutbush with great gusto. “Today, we’re all learning the Nutbush,” they tweeted, “in honor of Queen Tina.” Knee, knee; kick, kick.
Today, we're all learning the Nutbush in honor of Queen Tina.
— U.S. Embassy Australia (@USEmbAustralia) May 25, 2023
📹 Ambassador Kennedy doing the Nutbush at the Marine Corps Ball pic.twitter.com/ESKIIyj5ZT
