Penny Wong

by Simons, Margaret;

  On the other hand, dig deeper and you hear about an unappealing aspect of Penny Wong. She can be worse than sharp to her staff and her colleagues. She does this in front of others, and she does not always apologise. Rather, she tends to rationalise her own behaviour. It is the same combativeness and temper that make her effective in opposition, but when turned on her own, it can be ugly. Those who have observed this remark that these episodes are usually related to her levels of fatigue. In their view, she doesn’t manage fatigue well.

  She works very hard indeed, starting in the early hours and finishing late. She over-prepares for media conferences, for Senate Estimates, for everything she does. She likes to feel more than across the material. She can be a control freak. A few times a year, when tired and stressed, she gets migraines severe enough to confine her to home. It is usually when approaching this kind of exhaustion that she shows her impatience and her acid tongue to those who work with her.

  In many contexts Wong’s aggression is a political strength. When ill-judged, it is also her main weakness. The aggression can undermine her reputation as a good negotiator. Only rarely do these ill-judged displays of temper become public. If they were on display more often, it is easy to imagine the fast erosion of her public popularity.

  On the other hand, good staff stick with her, and are loyal. It is not her staff who complain about her temper. Rather, it is the people who have observed how, on occasions, she speaks to her team. She can be generous to her staff as well. She is known for taking them all out to lunch and picking up the considerable bill. Talented people want to work for her.

  While she is personally and politically ambitious, she is not a psychopath or a narcissist. (These things need saying, in the era of Trump.) The strength and longevity of almost all her personal relationships attest to that. With her inner circle of friends and her family she is warm, devoted and fiercely protective. In these troubled times of populist politics, Penny Wong’s is a different model of leadership. She is principled, intellectual, private, restrained and sane. Having eschewed populism, she is now popular – which is perhaps a cause for hope about our political processes.

  The negative comments about Wong came almost exclusively from the losers and combatants in the internecine factional disputes within the Labor Party. ‘I’d like to meet someone as smart as Penny Wong thinks she is,’ said one. Woven through these comments – all from men – there was a strand of misogyny, though not obvious racism or prejudice based on sexual preference. There was resentment that Wong has a public profile as a darling of the left – an irony, given that if she has a political weakness it is her dislike of personal scrutiny. She is a private person.

  There was resentment at the way she involves herself across the board, in areas beyond her shadow portfolio, and as Senate leader. She was key in knocking out the opposition to Anthony Albanese’s becoming leader after the 2019 election defeat, for example. Her early declaration of support for Albanese made it much harder for others to contest. As well, she has earned enemies through her aggression in shadow cabinet and caucus. Her critics say there is a gap between her supporters’ perceptions of her and who she actually is. They say she is not as left-wing as her fan club likes to think, and much more of a machine politician than the soft left fancies. A hip Melbourne café in the Green-leaning suburb of Brunswick serves an open sandwich called the Penny Wong, in tribute. It is vegan, with lentils, hummus, pumpkin, ‘almond feta’ and ‘coconut bacon’ on ‘activated charcoal toast’. Food is important to Wong – tangled with love and memory. But it is difficult to imagine her ordering the sandwich that bears her name. When I told her about it, she asked how one activated charcoal (answer: you soak it).

  There was talk, from Wong’s Labor antagonists, of provoking her, in party-room and shadow cabinet meetings. She can be fierce in response. She does a good line in articulate rage.

  In summary, Penny Wong is easy to like and demands admiration, but is also easy to fear.

  Here is her shark poem, written as she was gaining a foothold in her new country, and delivering on her resolve to beat the bullies in every field of endeavour.

  Menace of the deep

  Man fears and hates you,

  Yet admires you.

  You slink through the water

  Like a snake.

  Cutting cleanly through the dark ocean.

  Your skin like well-stretched leather,

  Eyes that gleam like embers

  In the murky water,

  Razor-sharp teeth ready to rip and tear.

  Little fish scuttle behind rocks,

  Eels slither away in fear

  As you glide above them.

  Even the mighty whale

  Will not tangle with you.

  And Man, conqueror of all,

  Dares not trespass

  In your domain.

  It is not unusual for children on the edge of adolescence, developing their sense of self and finding their voice, to focus on darkness and suffering. Wong had more reason to do so than most of her privileged classmates. Apart from her own pain, she had been raised with an awareness of the history and legacy of British colonialism, as well as war, invasion and death – and the luck and determination that lay behind her own family’s survival.

  Penny Wong was born in 1968 in North Borneo, which had recently become part of the new nation of Malaysia. Borneo and Australia seemed very different places to her, yet they were also, as an account of her father’s professional life put it, ‘kindred offspring’ of the same colonial empire.5 To Borneans of the post-war generation, engagement with Australia was both an expression of growing independence from colonial masters and an embrace of a more fortunate sibling. The strands of history are interwoven, and they meet in Penny Wong.

  Wong, like most of us, tells well-honed stories about herself. In these, her main motivation for entering politics was to combat racism. Of course, it’s more complicated than that, but the experience of racism formed her, and in more ways than she is aware. It is part of her family history. It is part of what made her, long before she walked through the schoolyard at Coromandel Valley Primary.

  *

  The sailors carried the settlers pickaback through the shallows to the beach. Before them stretched the Adelaide plains, punctuated with kangaroo grass and freshwater lagoons. There was a constant music of mosquitoes. The hills loomed blue in the distance. It was November 1836, on the cusp of a hot summer. The settlers travelled inland and pitched their tents in the shade of gum trees, including one that had been bowed into an arch by the south-westerly winds. The sandy soil was full of flies and fleas. Rats stole their supplies. Bullants and frogs came inside their tents, and one day the new colonial secretary, Robert Gouger, put his hand to the ground and almost touched a scorpion.6 This site, though, had been chosen by Colonel William Light for a new settlement, the beginning of the colony of South Australia, founded upon idealism and a belief in the goodness of man. Christmas Day was intensely hot – more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. A few days later, on 28 December, the new colony was proclaimed in the shade of the arched gum tree.

  Watching the ceremony were Penny Wong’s great-great-great-grand-parents: 22-year-old Samuel Chapman and his wife, Charlotte,7 and their infant daughter, also Charlotte. ‘I always think it’s amusing when people have a go at me, you know, all the racists? And I think, on this side of my family, I go back further than you,’ says Wong. On her mother’s side, she is as deeply rooted in Australia as is possible for someone not of Aboriginal ancestry. Her personal history and present geography are studded with the names resonant of that connection. Her electorate office is on Gouger Street – titled for the colonial secretary almost bitten by a scorpion in those first days on Holdfast Bay. When she studied at the University of Adelaide, she would have spent time in Elder Hall, which was named after the man, Thomas Elder, who employed her great-great-grandfather and opened up the state to agriculture. Her high school, Scotch College, was once home to
the family of Scottish pioneer Robert Barr Smith, Elder’s business partner, who was friend to her great-great-grandfather, and his son, her great-uncle. Most of this history does not weigh upon her. She learned some of the details of her mother’s family during the interviews for this book.

  The Chapmans had arrived with more than eighty other settlers aboard the Cygnet, which sailed from London in March 1836, travelling via Rio de Janeiro. Of the eighty-four passengers, fifty-two were ‘adults conveyed by the emigration fund’ and fifteen ‘persons of a superior class’.8 Included were surveyors contracted to assist Colonel Light in choosing and designing the new settlement.

  The Chapmans were not of the ‘superior class’. Samuel was a cabinetmaker. He and his wife were descended from farmers and artisans in Cambridgeshire and Surrey, the first generation to grow up amid the transformation of the Industrial Revolution, when the benefits of industrialisation were not yet felt by the poor. They suffered from low wages, poor diet and insecure employment – constantly at risk of sinking into the kind of poverty that Charles Dickens wrote about. The Chapmans crossed the world in search of new opportunity in a settlement that, it was promised, would be different to the eastern colonies of New South Wales or Port Phillip – South Australia would be idealistic, civilised, untouched by the convict taint.

  There are glimpses of the Chapmans’ voyage in the journal of Boyle Travers Finniss, who, two decades after serving as an assistant surveyor to Light, would become South Australia’s first premier. On 7 April, after nearly three weeks at sea, he records that there are complaints about ‘the dirt’ below decks. The married passengers are referred to, Samuel Chapman among them. Later, there is a reference to the number of people who have fallen sick due to the foul air beneath the decks. Bilge water and vegetable matter had accumulated. Finniss laments that all married passengers are separated from the rest only by canvas, and that there are no tables at which to eat, ‘making [t]heir berths a perpetual cook’s shop. Meals going on at all hours must be productive of dirt and disorder’.9

  The voyage was troubled. The crew staged a walk-off in Rio, and there was conflict between George Kingston, the deputy surveyor and head of Light’s staff, and the captain, John Rolls. This delayed passage, and although the Cygnet had sailed a month before Light’s ship, it arrived a month later – on 11 September 1836, arriving at Kangaroo Island. Light had already left to scout the coast and, having found the Torrens River, chosen his preferred site for the new settlement. The settlers were ordered to abandon their freshly established reed huts on the island and sail to Holdfast Bay in Gulf St Vincent – the site of the present-day suburb of Glenelg.

  South Australia had been founded on a principle of being charitable to the ‘native peoples’, but it was already too late for any uncomplicated pursuit of that ideal. Sealers and whalers had been operating off the coast since the 1820s and had made occasional raids on Aboriginal camps, kidnapping women and taking them back to the islands. About six years before the Cygnet’s arrival, smallpox had spread along the Murray River from the colonies in eastern Australia. Many Aboriginal people had died, and the survivors bore the disease’s tell-tale pockmarks. Indigenous society in the region was already stressed and traumatised. The first settlers at Holdfast Bay lived in fear of attack from the ‘natives’. Yet relations were friendly enough between the two groups in late 1836. Aboriginal people arrived, were shown around the tents and huts, and shook hands with everyone. They were taken to the commissioner’s stores and fitted out with trousers, flannel shirts and woollen caps.10

  The idea for the new colony belonged to settler Edward Gibbon Wakefield. The existing Australian colonies had been used as a dumping ground for the criminal class. Wakefield wanted the colonisation of South Australia to be an antidote to pauperism: a settlement guided by a landed gentry. The problem, as for all colonialists, was how to work the land. Where was the labour to come from, if not from convicts? The answer was the sale of ‘waste land’ to migrants, whose work would allow the gentry to forge ‘civilised life’ with ‘liberal feeling and polished manners’.11

  The Chapmans likely responded to advertisements that began to appear in London in 1835 seeking free migrants from the ranks of ‘small farmers and others … persons of skill and industry and possessed by some capital but unable by the use of it to procure a comfortable livelihood’.

  You naturally inquire, where is South Australia? What sort of place is the new colony? And what shall we do when we get there? I will tell you. Australia is a great big island, situated in the south sea or Indian Ocean. They used to call it New Holland.12

  For the Chapmans, the South Australian dream worked out. In just one generation they were transformed from poverty to wealth. Today the Chapmans are one of the ‘old Adelaide families’ associated with privilege and establishment – although the monetary wealth had dissipated by the time Penny Wong’s mother was born. By 1839, Samuel Chapman was a shopkeeper and licensed victualler, operating his business from public land.13 By 1849, just thirteen years after arrival, he had a cabinetmaker’s shop in Carrington Street. Chapman apparently had a talent for self-promotion. The South Australian Register recorded that he had submitted to the newspaper for appraisal a ‘superb library chair, made to order’ and later a library table with lion’s paw feet.14 The Register praised the ‘beautiful execution’ – the ‘chaste beauty and masterly execution of the carvings’ as well as the ‘most effective’ French polishing. ‘We can only add that the colony may well be proud of those who, like Mr Chapman, can accomplish so much at so early a period of our history.’ 15 Advertisements in the Register began to list the fact that furniture had been made by Chapman as a selling point at auctions.16

  Charlotte Chapman died in 1876, and Samuel six years later. His obituary described him as ‘a colonist of unblemished reputation’ who was ‘widely known and respected’.17 He had had ten children – one of whom, a son, had died when only a year old. Eight were daughters, and they had married the children of other settlers, taken on new names and moved throughout the Adelaide plains and hills. It was his only surviving son, Alfred Stephen Chapman, who made the leap into wealth. As a teenager he had begun work for Elder & Co. – an agricultural company founded by Thomas Elder and his brother-in-law, Robert Barr Smith, which was settling the state’s dry northern saltbush regions. In 1874 Elder made two large donations that helped the newly established University of Adelaide to gain quick renown. Barr Smith, too, was a philanthropist, and present-day Adelaide is dotted with his name. At Scotch College a young Penny performed in the Barr Smith Theatre. At the University of Adelaide, she sat on the Barr Smith lawns and studied in the Barr Smith Library.

  Alfred Chapman married Annie Horsley, an emigrant from London. By the time of his death in 1912, from typhoid, Chapman had served more than fifty-five years with the company and risen from office boy to manager. He was one of the best-known and most respected businessmen in Adelaide. Barr Smith wrote a letter of eulogy:

  Looking back 50 years, when as a lad Mr. Chapman first came to the office of Elder and Co., my first impression of him then was his capacity and willingness for hard work. If any department was behind, and an assistant was required for night work, Mr. Chapman presented himself, with the result that, going through all the departments in this way, he soon knew as much about them as the man in charge, and so when any one dropped out of his place in the office there never was any difficulty about replacing … I fancy Mr. Chapman must have filled almost every post we had to give. Let me add that he has always had the strictest sense of honour and the most fair and reasonable consideration for everybody with whom he came in business contact.18

  Alfred Chapman and Annie had eleven children. One, Alfred Horsley Chapman, followed his father into business at Elder, and became a member of the National Council of Wool Selling Brokers. Another son, Penny Wong’s great-grandfather, Samuel William Chapman, farmed the property Edialta, in what is now the suburb of Cherry Gardens in Adelaide, a few minutes’ dr
ive from the primary school at which she was bullied.19 Today Blackwood Golf Club covers part of the old property, and there is an Edialta Road. The rest has been subdivided for housing. This Samuel Chapman was the family’s first politician – a councillor in what was then the Clarendon District.20 His son, William, was Wong’s grandfather, also a farmer. He married Esther Hannaford, from one of the wealthiest Adelaide land-owning families. In the family mythology, William was a simple farmer, but Wong’s mother remembers him quoting poetry – Homer and Shakespeare – as he brought in the sheep and cattle. ‘He was obviously extremely well read and extremely literate,’ Wong remarks.

  Her mother, Barbara Jane Chapman but always called Jane, was born in 1944, the middle daughter in a family of five girls. Their mother died in 1961, when Jane was a teenager, and their father a few years later, just before she turned twenty. The five sisters relied on one another for comfort and support. The family structure was set – a tight-knit, fiercely loyal group of women who looked out for their own. It was these women who embraced Jane, Penny and Toby when they landed back in Adelaide in 1976, and the Australian part of the Penny Wong story began. The family dynamic, Penny Wong says today, is matriarchal.

  *

  In 1838, two years after Samuel and Charlotte Chapman arrived in South Australia on the Cygnet, a British adventurer named James Brooke moored his boat in Kuching, Borneo – the third-largest island in the world and then part of an empire ruled over by the sultans of Brunei. The origins of the Sultanate are lost in history, but for as long as history records Borneo had faced outwards to the world – a trading nation set in the heart of the archipelagos of South-East Asia, between China and what today have become the Philippines and Indonesia. The sultans held sway over seaways and coastal merchant towns, leaving the jungled interior to the indigenous Dayak people. When Brooke arrived, they were in revolt against the sultan. Piracy and European trade were disrupting the maritime empire. Brooke helped the sultan defeat the rebellion and was rewarded with a parcel of land in the north-west, on which he established the Kingdom of Sarawak and founded a dynastic monarchy of so-called White Rajahs. This began the break-up of the island and its domination by outsiders. Today Borneo is split between Malaysia, Indonesia and the minuscule remnant of the Brunei empire, all but surrounded by Sarawak, the first White Rajah’s creation.