Late last year, Crikey chronicled the greatest hits of one Linda Hurley, wife of Australia’s Governor-General David Hurley. Her excellency, it turned out, appears constitutionally incapable of attending any event without writing a song for the organisation and performing it.
We noted that in the course of performing these songs, such as the one she delivered at the Invasive Species Solutions Trust, she was capable of things that many other artists simply couldn’t contemplate:
Joni Mitchell might have said ‘I cannot work the concepts of a ‘Centre for Invasive Species Solutions’ and ‘philanthropic opportunities’ elegantly into a verse, let alone those exact words’. Kendrick Lamar would have looked at a couplet like ‘Philanthropic and corporate partners are invited to join / folks, environmentalists, primary producers, help them win’ and said ‘You cannot expect me to get that many syllables into a single bar.’
Hurley shows them up to be the unambitious cowards they are.
This was followed by a flurry of tipsters getting the vertiginous flash of recognition and realising they weren’t the only ones to have seen this happen. “I don’t think many people could pull it off, but she did,” one said, adding it was “both the weirdest and greatest thing ever”.
Alas, we think we’ve found a situation that was beyond even her powers. The most recent footage to emerge of Hurley singing is at an event celebrating (oh God…) National Palliative Care Week.
If the song, delivered in that same prim, bright and earnest tone that’s now her trademark, wasn’t enough to have attendees curling their toes clean off with embarrassment, she leads the room in an encore (again, she does this a lot) of “You Are My Sunshine”:
