The Topp Twins know the first thing that comes to mind when their names pop up. Dame Jools: “‘How are they? How are they doing?’” Dame Lynda: “Most people want us to become the Cancer Twins. We aren’t defined by our sickness, but how well we live our life each day.”
The pair are seated in a flash Auckland hotel lobby bar. On the table in front of them and the rep from the publisher of their new book, who insists on sitting in, is a fresh copy of the week’s NZ Woman’s Weekly. The pair are beaming from the cover behind the headline “Topp Twins’ Brave Battle – ‘We Still Have a Lot to Give’.”
As the Listener takes the Twins for a visual wander down memory lane (see below), tourists enjoying high teas at other tables look askance at the laughter and colourful conversation emanating from the sisterly 65-year-old national institution.
“She’s got the most incredible set of boobies now,” Jools declares loudly about her sister’s implant-enhanced Camp Mother costume. “They look like the torpedoes on the back of a big American Yank tank’s tail lights.”
Lynda: “I can rest cups of tea on them.”
Other items in the Topps’ character wardrobe have required less post-mastectomy alteration. Lynda says her Ken – of Ken and Ken – can now finally button up his beige jacket over his beer gut due to the reduction in chest measurement.
“The most positive thing that ever happened to me having cancer was I can now fit a suit really well,” Lynda deadpans to laughter from her sister.
Surely, given their health history, the compounded issues of the present, and possible futures, they can’t always be this sanguine?
Jools: “We’re still upbeat, which is really important …
Lynda: “We have our bad days.”
Jools: “We’d like to change the language that people use for cancer now. When they say, ‘their long battle with cancer’, it’s really not.”
Lynda: “We don’t ever want to use the word battle.”
Jools: “You’re living your life with cancer. You’re not battling.”
Jools got her original breast cancer diagnosis in 2006 and underwent chemotherapy. She now has metastasized tumours being kept at bay with hormone treatment.
Lynda got her breast cancer diagnosis in 2021 and underwent chemotherapy and a double mastectomy. One side effect of her treatment was nerve damage in her feet, which contributed to a recent fall in which she was knocked unconscious.
The head knock is still causing her visual tracking problems.
If Jools’ treatment and initial recovery became the impetus for the 2009 documentary The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls, then Lynda’s is partly behind the jointly written memoir Untouchable Girls: The Topp Twins’ Story.
It was also written without getting a publisher’s offer but needing to make some money as Covid took away their performing livelihood.
They made a list of significant periods in their lives, then worked their way through it non-chronologically. Eventually they had 31 chapters which recall how the Waikato farm girls ran away to the army, stayed on in Christchurch, and found a new home among the increasingly vociferous local lesbian community, turned their country music-honed voices into protest songs … then somehow, via the magic of television and abundant charisma and their array of characters, became beloved mainstream entertainers. Oh, and in chapter 23, cancer.
What possibly hasn’t been traversed before is the Topps’ sometimes roller-coaster love lives over the decades.
Lynda: “There was a time – well it was the 70s and 80s and everybody was being free and radical, and it was the early days of lesbian-isation in New Zealand.
“There were lots of women sleeping with different women, so there was always going to be that happening in our lives because that’s about exploring your sexuality.
“There might be some women out there who’ll be buying the book, going, ‘Am I in it?’ That’s the sequel. This is called Untouchable Girls. The next one is called The Bad Girls.”
That said, earlier this year Lynda celebrated the 10th anniversary of her marriage to Donna Luxton. Jools is happily single, after multiple relationships. She limited her writing to some of the significant ones that have left their mark.
The pair say it has been hard for their current and past respective partners with the Topps coming as a set and one that is world famous in New Zealand.
Jools: “I think it’s always hard for – what do they call them? – rock’n’roll wives.”
Snapshots of country girls
Jools and Lynda’s rural roots have stayed with them all their lives.
The Topp Twins were born on May 14 ,1958, at Huntly Maternity Hospital. Jools – christened Julie – emerged into the world first, surprising the delivery suite. The doctor soon realised the single 10-pound baby that Mrs Jean Topp was supposed to be having was, in fact, two 5-pounders. Lynda arrived five minutes later.
Six months on came the first family shift of many, as young farming father Peter Topp took up jobs on the East Coast, the King Country and elsewhere. The family photo is the Topp family – complete with the twins’ brother, Bruce – on a day (circa 1961) at the beach in Hawke’s Bay where they lived briefly before establishing the long-term family farm at Ruawaro, west of Huntly. No, not even the twins can tell which of them is which in those days.
Jools: “That was the first time we ever went to the beach. Because we lived on a farm or Dad worked on a farm, we never went to the beach. We hated every minute of it. It was windy and sand got in our sandwiches.”
Lynda: “The only time we ever went to the beach was in the wintertime because the rest of the time you’re milking cows. In that picture, Dad’s wearing a jersey and a stockman’s hat and Mum’s got the classic headband with the hand up because the sun is in her eyes.
“Our mother insisted that she did the classic hair tie in the front – it’s like a water fountain on the top of your head.”
A few years later, now living back near Huntly, the twins and their brother were driven into Hamilton to get their photos taken by a professional photographer. Jean Topp wanted portraits of all three children, just like the royal photos of the era. The book was the photographer’s prop.
Jools: “It was an interesting photo because it was the only time we absolutely decided that we would wear dresses, only because they had dogs on them. The dresses were bought by our Aunty Lorna – she was our favourite aunty – and they had dogs on them. If that hadn’t happened, we would have been in our bloody jodhpurs and our check shirts.”
These days, both twins still live rurally.
Jools: “Those roots have stayed with us. They maintain a sense of who we are, how we grew up, what values we had, the morals that were put in place for us … like Mum and Dad had those morals. If someone arrives, there is always a cup of tea, there’s always food offered … that doesn’t happen now.”
Lynda: “It still does in some places. There are still ladies out there making scones.”
Bruce became a successful florist. Jean, in her 90s, is still with us. Peter died in 2019 at the age of 91, having seen his once-rebel daughters’ investiture as Dame Companions of the New Zealand Order of Merit the previous year.
“Our father was always there for us,” Lynda writes in the book. “He never doubted us, always supported us, even though at times it must have been hard for him. Living in rural New Zealand and having three gay children can’t have been an easy road.
“But I reckon he just loved us all so much it didn’t matter to him who we might fall in love with.”
Angry in the eighties
Turbulent times taught them that being political carried some strength.
When the Topps and friends joined a sit-in on Auckland’s Newton Rd towards the end of the 1981 Springbok tour, they had already been among the fray in the previous weeks. They were among the protesters who ripped through the fence and got onto the field in Hamilton six weeks earlier, forcing the cancellation of the game between the South Africans and their home province, Waikato.
Jools: “We all thought we’re going to be batoned to death …”
Lynda: “Or killed by the rugby supporters.”
Their National-voting mum and dad supported the tour. Their daughters, though, were part of the Patu squad, one led by Māori activists and whose membership was prepared to get arrested. The Topps’ activism in the first half of the 1980s extended to the nuclear-free campaign and homosexual law reform.
Lynda: “Those were some angry days. I think that happened to everybody who was in the protest movement, because there were such huge things that needed to be changed.”
The anti-tour protest was galvanising.
Jools: “What was really amazing was that we were next to mothers and with kids and prams who had nothing to do with the lesbian movement or the Māori movement or anything. It brought people out who could not comprehend a world of apartheid in South Africa.”
Lynda: “For a lot of the protests that we were fighting for, we were seen as a large group of lesbians being bothersome, but that protest was across the board. It brought people together who would never have normally hung out together.”
In that period began the pair’s regular busking stints on Auckland’s Queen St (and occasionally in Wellington), which sometimes brought them to the attention of the police when a large crowd inevitably gathered.
Jools: “We were out on the streets being noisy and people had to stop and find some money in their pocket and put it in a case. That’s where our ability to work a crowd happened. That was our apprenticeship.”
Lynda: “But it was also if we didn’t go busking in Queen St on Friday nights, we didn’t have enough money to put petrol in the car to get home. The sewing shop nearby would always take our change for us and then they would have change on Saturday mornings for ladies who wanted to buy their cotton and needles. It was a lovely time.”
They were playing gigs in places other than footpaths, including the first Sweetwaters Festivals in Ngāruawāhia, not far from the family farm. Their first performance was on the Aerial Railway Stage, the festival’s small oasis of folk acts, absolute beginners, poets and politicians, away from the beery, beardy throng.
Lynda: “We were young and innocent, and we were identified as lesbians. We were singing our own music … the crowd was really amazing.”
Jools: “I think we realised at that moment at Sweetwaters that being political carried some strength.”
A real test of characters
The Twins’ most beloved characters were poles apart socially.
As their NZ career escalated in the late 1980s and 1990s, the Topp Twins headed overseas, taking their mickey-taking spin on country music tradition to festivals in Australia, Canada and the United States. In 1993, the Gingham Twins went to Iowa, where, out of costume in a local diner, they were mistaken for men. It inspired a chapter title in the book. “You boys are funny.”
Jools: “They thought we were young blokes, but we were ageing lesbians.”
But whether it was in the US corn belt or Tamworth in Oz, their yeeha, yodelling country music exaggerations were born out of love.
Lynda: “If you put something down, you don’t have to know anything about it. If you’re sending something up, you have to know everything about it.”
It might not seem they would know everything about the old-money ladies of Remuera and elsewhere they were sending up in the guises of Prue and Dilly Ramsbottom. But they had an in – Dame Rosie Horton, the socialite and philanthropist who became friends with the Topps and insisted any photos featuring the two characters always be shot at her mansion on the northern slopes of the plutey suburb.
Lynda: “The beautiful thing about that is when Rosie passed away, Jools and I were gifted by the family a framed photo of Prue and Dilly and Rosie and it’s massive.
“And, apparently, Rosie had that on the wall of her new house in Remuera … and she’s beautifully dressed. The classic thing with Rosie was she saw Prue and Dilly as a celebration of those women from Remuera, it wasn’t putting them down in any way.”