From journalist to lawyer to businessman to Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull is a classic Renaissance man. Now on to that crowded resume add another line: bawdy balladeer.
The good folk at Sydney University student newspaper Honi Soit have unearthed and reproduced an extract of a 1974 Turnbull poem entitled The Ballad of Gundamire – and it's a little risqué.
"Such indecency'd rarely be seen in the lewdest of nursing homes," the extract begins.
"I can see a naked woman and she's stretched out flat on the bar. Not only is this a perve show, but clearly a massage parlour!"
Turnbull wrote the poem as part of a student union debate on the bizarre old quote, "A woman is just a woman but a good cigar is a smoke".
Indeed, that is how Turnbull's poem concludes, with a judge chastising a drover that he's just sentenced to six months "in the clink" for a crime that's not made entirely clear in the extract.
"There's one thing you must remember, you being a law-abiding bloke; a woman's just a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke."
Predictably enough for the over-achieving Turnbull, the poem was a big hit. It won the university's annual Henry Lawson Prize for Poetry, which comes with a cash prize.
But it wasn't a hit with his mother.
Coral Lansbury was herself an accomplished writer and poet. She won the Henry Lawson Prize in 1948 for a more traditional, romantic verse play entitled Krubi of the Illawarra.
And she was horrified her son won for his ribald rhyme, taking it as proof that societal standards were slipping.
University of Western Australia poetry expert Dennis Haskell says the poem reads like a kind of parody of the kind of bush ballad popularised by poets like Banjo Paterson and Mr Turnbull does "have some sense of ballad metre".
"The final line is sexist, of course, but it's put in the mouth of the judge," Professor Haskell said.
"While it's not exactly great poetry it's reasonably well handled. He is clearly a much better poet than Clive Palmer."
Another poem by the Prime Minister entitled A Return to the Temple also recently emerged.
Published by the Sydney Grammar School's, The Sydneian', in 1970, when Turnbull was just 16, that poem explores religious themes.
