I wrote this a few years ago, but hearing the sad news about one of the great girl heroes – Chrissy Amphlett, thought I would post it.

Every Girl Needs a Good Role Mole

It began with a typo: ‘Lindy is a good role mole for women’.

Lindy is a smart, be-suited lawyer, but the image that jumped to mind was Kat Stewart playing Roberta Williams in Underbelly. This got me thinking about the importance for girls of examples of women who aren’t quiet and compliant.

Growing up, ‘mole’ was a grubbier rendering of slut. Editors sometimes translate it to ‘moll’, but ‘Mole’ was the word we spat at one another and wrote on toilet doors.

Feisty, passionate, Roberta is a ‘role mole’. No one tells Roberta how to talk, what to wear or who to sleep with. She’s also a gangster’s moll and while I wouldn’t want to live near her, it’s great to see such a strong woman on TV.

Whatever else she is, Roberta is always Roberta, and allowing women to be themselves is not something our culture is good at. ‘Boys will be boys.’ Girls are still expected to be sweet and nice.

Yet, it’s not the good girl, the School Captain, the business-woman, that we remember. It’s the bad girls, the loud girls.

Suzi Quatro ‘comin’ alive in Devil Gate Drive’ was my first role mole. Suzi was replaced by the Divinyls’ Chrissie Amphlett driving home ‘all the boys in town’. You knew she was having a way better time than all those girls going home alone.

Similarly Rizo in Grease was having lots more fun than prissy Olivia Newton-John as Sandy. A point underlined by the unsuccessful attempt to turn Sandy into a role mole at the end of the movie.

Role moles aren’t new. Marlene Dietrich oozed it, and what’s Mae West’s ‘is that a gun in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me’ but role mole in action? Marilyn Monroe, however, was always too vulnerable.

Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra is a role mole, but not in National Velvet. Julia Roberts as Ellen Brockavitch is one, but, too needy and compliant in Pretty Woman to qualify.

Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is getting there. Madonna in her early years was, but then she found the Kabala and dwindled to Madge.

Germaine Greer gets disqualified for trying too hard – the essence of role moleness is that it appears to be uncalculated. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is not one, but her slayer half-sister Faith is.

Current role moles include the Ramones-loving sisters from the Spazzies – following in a tough-girl pop tradition including Blondie’s Debbie Harry, (Call me, anytime …) Chrissie Hynde from the Pretenders (I’m special …) and Courtney Love before drug problems turned her into just plain mole.

I even suspect that beneath the power suit and the well modulated speech, Julia Gillard has a touch of the role mole about her. So with such great role moles out there, why are women still being taught to be ‘nice’?