The Big Four - O

And going strong:

Kylie Minogue turns 40 today. And at the risk of not sounding much like a straight man on the wrong side of 40, can I just say three words? Oh. My. God.

Certain things, like milk and Bindi Irwin, seem difficult to imagine after a certain date. And while Kylie looks like the most fabulous 40-year-old in the southern hemisphere (oh dear, there I go again), the big four-oh is traditionally a time for taking stock of what has happened so far, assessing how one got to that point, and deciding where to go from there.

Kylie - we don't need the surname any more, so let's not bother using it - is like Vegemite. You may love it, you may hate it, but it has undoubtedly become an Australian icon, something you can't avoid. And despite the fact that she has homes in Britain and Paris, and her accent has transformed into that weird quasi-English/European melange favoured by people such as Elle Macpherson, there is something definably Australian about her which she will never lose, even if she was never to set a dainty foot on our soil ever again. At heart, Kylie is a dag.

Despite the model boyfriends and the designer threads and the jetsetting lifestyle and the oh-so-unwrinkled face, she still has that sense of self-deprecation and ability to laugh at herself which someone like Madonna never had and never will have. From knowingly reciting the lyrics to I Should Be So Lucky at the Poetry Olympics at London's Albert Hall in 1996, to appearing on Kath & Kim as future bridezilla Epponee-Rae, she is what Australians of a certain age would refer to as both "a good sort" and "a good sport".

...Her sainthood was not always so assured. In the late '80s, Kylie was laughably uncool. She was in Neighbours, and back then it wasn't retro or geeky/cool to say you watched Neighbours. I Should Be So Lucky was huge but, as Anthony Dennis reported in 1988 in the Herald, where he coined the nickname the "Singing Budgie", three Sydney radio stations refused to play it after market research revealed that their 25- to 40-year-old demographic found the song intensely annoying.

Kylie is the girl who could have it all, but doesn't. Yes, she's worth a lot of money - at last count, $83 million. But there are the critics, who don't take her seriously. There is her self-confessed failure to crack the United States market. And there's the man thing. Perhaps only Jennifer Aniston has been the subject of more hand-wringing by the tabloids and glossies over their "concern" for her failure to find lasting love and then reproduce.

And on Kylie's 40th birthday that kind of speculation can only intensify. In a telling sign of how much she has become part of the national consciousness, after breaking up with the French actor Olivier Martinez last year, she quickly became "our Kylie" and he became "the love rat".

People love Kylie because of her personal and professional problems, not despite them. Her extraordinary ordinariness is often pointed out, and those big white teeth and that she stands only 152 centimetres in her stockings only adds to the hugability factor.

...There's a reason Kylie is thought of more fondly than her sister, Dannii. Despite the fact that she reportedly is driven and a workaholic, she doesn't have the appearance of someone trying too hard to be liked. Sure, she's pushing her stuff and working that butt to get across. But she doesn't give off that whiff of desperation for 15 minutes of fame, or, as in the case of the "stars" in this current plague of TV dancing/singing/talent shows, a desire to regain another few minutes after the allotted 15 minutes expired a while ago.

As a result, no matter how daggy or glitzy she is at any point in time, Kylie will still be embraced by the general public when she's 60. Maybe more so. We've already got a prime minister called Kevin. Doesn't President Kylie have a nice ring to it? We should be so lucky.