It’s just gone 9 o’clock on a moody autumn morning in the affluent Melbourne suburb of Kew, just east of the city. “I only moved here because I couldn’t afford Carlton,” says Celia Pacquola, as if to explain herself when we meet outside the 1940s clinker brick apartment she shared with her best friend.
But when the pandemic descended and lockdowns were enforced six years ago – almost to the week – the proximity to the winding, gum-lined paths of the Yarra Bend trails were a welcome balm. Originally hailing from the verdant hills of the Yarra Valley north-east of Melbourne, Pacquola imagined her city life to be “young and hip and cool” – like Carlton in the inner north. “I still don’t identify as being from Kew. But it’s where I’ve ended up. At least it’s green.” She shrugs off her ambivalence and we head off.
The walk we’re embarking on, Pacquola explains, is just one of many routes she walked, danced (rehearsing for her stint on Dancing with the Stars) and – during a particularly ambitious period – jogged on alongside the circumstantial family unit she found in her flatmate and their two rescue dogs during that “dark time, which we do not discuss”.
Since she first picked up a mic two decades ago, Pacquola has become one of Australia’s most well-known and beloved comics. From one-woman comedy specials to her performances on popular Australian TV series such as Offspring, Utopia and Rosehaven (which she co-created with longtime collaborator Luke McGregor), Pacquola’s brand of self-effacing physical comedy has earned her Logies, Actaas, Writer’s Guild awards and even an Aria nomination, as well as her reputation as an endearing comedic everywoman.
Pacquola’s veneer drops away when talking about her three-year-old child. Photograph: Ellen Smith/The Guardian
In person she’s just as snappy as she is on stage, gag-ready as the conversation leaps haphazardly from one topic to the next. It’s only when speaking of her three-year-old that the comic’s veneer drops away. I mention my own teenage daughter and her mood instantly shifts from entertainer to wrapt audience: “I have so many questions.” We briefly discuss the perils of kids and tech use before she launches into an anecdote about a homemade swing set.
We stride along Studley Park Toad; traffic whirs past as Pacquola reminisces about her whirlwind romance with her partner photographer Dara Munnis. “I always thought I was going to be single forever and absolutely happily so. I just thought, that’s my life. I tell jokes and I’m single, that’s fine.” But, she says, “unfortunately” Dara was very charming.
double quotation markI’m talking shit about him up and down the country. It’s pretty fucked, but he’s OK with itCelia Pacquola
“I was walking along here the first time we ever spoke,” she suddenly recalls. The pair met on the apps and spent months texting; her online reconnaissance led her to believe he was Italian. “Turned out he’s Irish, I’m just crap at flags.” The aforementioned phone call may or may not have been the moment his true nationality was first revealed. She can’t remember.
One thing she, Dara and anyone who attends her show, Gift Horse, at this year’s comedy festival won’t be forgetting anytime soon is the ill-conceived gift he presented her with for her birthday last year.
It’s been 20 years since Pacquola’s first comedy gig. Photograph: Ellen Smith/The Guardian
“Did I want a kayak?” she stops on the noisy verge. “Let me put it this way,” she says, straining to compete with the din of the traffic. “On the morning of my 42nd birthday when I walked into the lounge room and saw an INFLATED inflatable kayak, that was probably the first time I ever used the word kayak.”
The significance of the kayak is the starting point of the show. “It’s about gift-giving and relationships and friendships and what it means when someone gives you a gift that feels wrong and about who knows you and what you know about each other.”
Pacquola’s standup has always leaned personal, and frankly she’s surprised she’s found someone who’s OK with that. “If you’re in a relationship and you give your partner a present they don’t like, at worst it ends up in the family WhatsApp group. I’m talking shit about him up and down the country. It’s pretty fucked, but he’s OK with it.”
When it comes to the couple’s daughter though, she says that approach may shift. Joking about her own experience of pregnancy and new motherhood she reckons is fair game, but so far, however, she is resisting the temptation to share the trials and tribulations of their own child – “but it’s gonna be awkward when she gets to an age when she starts doing funny things”.
As we thump down the gravel trail, through a corridor of lanky blackgums towards Yarra Boulevard, she considers how other aspects of motherhood will unfurl for her.
“I know there will be a time when she’ll tell me to go away and she hates me. It’s going to really upset me but I know you have to be strong and not be their friend and be their mum. I’m just dealing with the problems as they occur. But it’s wonderful right now. She believes magic is real, and she’s really into me.”
The taking it day by day is something Pacquola takes seriously. “As soon as we pass one milestone, that information is dead to me. It’s gone,” she says. “I used to know everything about breast milk and sterilising shit, and now, no idea, gone.”
With an adventurous preschooler on her hands, her current crucible is feigning calm. “I’m a gasper mum,” she says. “I got it from my own mother, but it’s such a useless parental warning system because it does nothing to stop the dangerous thing from happening or protect anyone. It just scares the shit out of whoever you’re standing next to.”
Pacquola had assumed that ‘all the mum things’ would magically be downloaded to her brain upon becoming pregnant. Photograph: Ellen Smith/The Guardian
“If I called her right now and told her we were out walking, she’d tell me not to get hit by a car,” she explains. In the same breath she says her mum is one of the bravest people she has ever met. When she left Pacquola’s father in her mid-40s, “she went travelling, learned how to juggle, did public speaking, got her pilot’s licence”.
Gesturing broadly at the native shrubbery we’re wandering past, she adds “she’d know what all these plants are called too”. Pacquola had assumed that “all the mum things” would magically be downloaded to her brain upon becoming pregnant. As that disappointingly did not occur she finds herself more in awe of her mother than ever. “She has the answers to things. She knows so much stuff … like how to do tax and how to get a stain out and all of this other stuff that I don’t.”
Making our ascent to the lookout, Pacquola is mulling the wide angle of her own life and career. “It’s been 20 years since my first gig, 10 years since I hosted the gala. These even numbers feel good.”
Looking out over Melbourne’s hazy city skyline, she prods the show’s central themes some more while pointedly refusing to give away any punchlines. In a world that feels so chaotic and fragmented it’s our connections with other humans that matter now more than ever she muses, careful to deliver the philosophical kernel with a hint of mock gravitas.
“It’s the most trivial show I’ve ever done,” she hastens to add, but on a deeper, “secret” level it’s an interrogation of one of the most revealing ways we communicate with our nearest and dearest. A present speaks a thousand words, so what the hell was Dara trying to say with this kayak?
She has theories, but she won’t tell me – that would spoil the show. “It’s so ridiculous that the biggest hook is, come and find out if I took up kayaking.”
Celia Pacquola is touring Gift House at Melbourne Comedy Festival until 5 April, Brisbane Comedy Festival from 8–10 May and Sydney Comedy Festival on 15 & 16 May