Penny Wong

by Simons, Margaret;

  Toby, though, was always the one closest to Penny – the sharer of early memories, the companion with whom she saw those butterflies, her ally in suffering during the early days in Australia. Toby and Penny were thrown together by their social isolation and by what became a vital mission to learn how to cook, to re-create the smells, flavours and good feelings that came with food. Toby used to say that, with food, you could make yourself feel good three times a day.12

  Toby became a chef. Penny, too, is an accomplished cook. A few years ago she was asked, along with other parliamentarians, to provide a favourite recipe for a Labor Party fundraising book. She contributed ‘Toby’s Fish’.13 It can be made with either fillets or whole fish, coated in rice flour, then fried until crisp. ‘Lots’ of ginger, chilli, the Malaysian shrimp-paste condiment balachan, onion and tomatoes are fried, dressed with rice vinegar and soy sauce, and garnished with handfuls of coriander. The fish is placed on top. ‘Toby’s Fish’ was also the recipe Penny Wong cooked for the journalist Annabel Crabb when she took part in the ABC television series Kitchen Cabinet. Crabb described Wong as one of ‘Australia’s most guarded politicians’ – without revealing to the audience that they had known each other since university days.14 Penny Wong let her guard down while cooking for Crabb. She moved through the kitchen like a professional, tea towel slung over a shoulder, and talked about Toby, although she hadn’t meant to. Toby’s Fish was, she told Crabb, typical of the kind of simple, tasty food on which she had been raised in Malaysia. It was also a tribute to Toby – a sign of love. Perhaps it is also a tiny consolation for grief.

  *

  Adelaide is a small city – just big enough not to be a country town but not so large that the people who lead it, or who excel in it, can avoid knowing each other. The common pattern for its university graduates has been to move east for jobs. The city is ageing, and for nearly all of Penny Wong’s life it has been the slowest-growing capital city on the Australian continent. When she was a teenager, the population had just topped a million. Today, when she represents her state in the Senate, it is just under 1.4 million.

  Adelaide can feel like a city-state. More than three-quarters of the population of South Australia live in the capital. Beyond the Adelaide Hills there is marginal farming country, then desert.

  But the city likes itself. Ever since its founding it has defined itself as different. It fancies itself less party-political and more cultured than its convict-founded sibling states. It is a state of social reform – the first to give women the vote, and the home of the progressive Dunstan government, in power when the Wong family arrived from Malaysia. Before Dunstan, the women of Adelaide used to wear white gloves when going to town; after Dunstan, they wore miniskirts and pantsuits. He decriminalised homosexuality, recognised Aboriginal land rights and enacted anti-discrimination laws. Penny Wong can be understood as one of the latest examples of the tradition of South Australian socially progressive reformers.

  Yet, beneath this history, the politics can have a particular, internecine quality.

  It is not hard for talented people to become big fish in this small pond. Rivals can’t get away from one another. Certain restaurants and bars have a commonly recognised social significance. The journalists in Adelaide have a saying. In any other part of Australia, if two people tell you something separately you are inclined to think it must be true. In Adelaide, it just means that sometime in the past week both have been drinking at the Exeter Hotel.

  One of the first things that Adelaideans ask one another upon meeting is ‘Where did you go to school?’ It is the city’s quintessential question: a way of placing people, a substitute for class. These days, the question is pitched ironically – but it still gets asked. If the answer is the name of a public school, the conversation quickly turns to a sympathetic discussion about social disadvantage. Sometimes the point will be made that former prime minister Julia Gillard went to Unley High School and despite this rose to the highest office in the land.

  Penny Wong, though, has the ultimate ‘correct’ answer to the question. Her time at Coromandel Valley Primary School was limited. After a few years, she entered Scotch College – the most prestigious school in the city, and one of the wealthiest in the country.

  The Chapmans of Jane’s generation were not rich, but they were rooted in Adelaide society. They had resources, connections and a deep knowledge of how the city worked. Jane had had the resources to buy the house they were living in outright. Francis supplied the capital, through a family trust structure, to provide continued support for his children as his fortunes in Malaysia improved. Nevertheless, it is doubtful if Penny Wong could have attended Scotch if Jane had not organised for her to sit a scholarship test.

  Wong does not remember the extent of the scholarship. If there were residual fees to be paid she never heard about it. She began in the middle school and, three years later, Toby started there as well.

  Scotch College was founded as a school for Presbyterian boys in 1919. By the time Penny began there in 1980 it had become part of the Uniting Church of Australia, and had been taking girls for eight years. The campus was only a twenty-minute drive from home, but it could have been in a different country from the edge-of-suburban narrowness of Coromandel Valley. The campus hasn’t fundamentally changed since she attended. It is a place of beauty, history and privilege, covering twenty hectares in Torrens Park, at the foot of the Adelaide Hills. At its heart lies a nineteenth-century mansion with a turreted tower, formerly the home of Robert Barr Smith, friend and employer of Penny Wong’s maternal great-great-grandfather (not that she knew of the connection at the time of her attendance). Attached to the old building is a theatre, built by the Barr Smiths as an indulgence to their daughters, who liked to put on shows for their friends and family. It was a school tradition to climb to the rafters and carve your name. The words Penny Wong are said to be found somewhere near the roof.

  The front verandah of the main building has views over a school chapel larger than most suburban churches, and beyond over playing fields and the northern suburbs of the city. Behind the main building are tennis courts, a swimming pool, a fully operational farm with a vineyard, more grand buildings and classrooms, and finally the Adelaide Hills. Further afield, there is an entire small island in Spencer Gulf, leased by the school for camps and excursions.

  From the time she started at Scotch, Penny’s life began to get better – much better. She entered as a bright kid fighting prejudice and determined to beat the bullies. She ended as a polished performer among the elite. For a Labor politician, having gone to Scotch College is a mixed blessing. Wong’s critics in the Labor Party use it against her, at least behind her back. ‘She speaks like a Scotch College prefect and she has the same attitudes,’ said one. ‘It’s all rounded vowels and ruling-class arrogance.’ Another described the Scotch College background as a political disadvantage – but for the saving grace that she was a scholarship girl.

  According to Wong, when she was there the school reflected a particularly Adelaidean form of liberalism. The deputy principal at that time was Diana Hill, later president of UNICEF Australia and the wife of Robert Hill, who rose to be the minister for the environment and the minister for defence in the Howard government before being pushed out – reportedly because he was too far to the left. Diana Hill had been at the school since 1977, when girls were still a minority. She pushed Scotch to change the uniforms, language and facilities to make the environment more welcoming for girls and female staff, as well as advocating for a shift from a ‘blokey’ sports-oriented culture to one that valued academic excellence as well.15 Diana Hill remains a friend of Wong’s.

  Scotch College, in Wong’s experience, was less concerned with privilege and more with ‘classic liberalism’ or ‘Steele Hall liberalism’ – the latter a reference to the premier of South Australia and later senator who came from a humble farming background and modernised the state Liberal Party. Hall was one of those who crossed the floor in 1988 to oppo
se Liberal leader John Howard’s move to make race a criterion for selecting migrants.

  Penny thrived at Scotch. The bullying ceased. Partly, it was because the students were worldlier. As well, among the boarders were the children of wealthy Asians paying top dollar for the benefits of an elite Australian education. For a child who had already resolved to succeed, Scotch offered every opportunity.

  The first substantial mention of Penny in the school magazine is in 1981, when she was twelve and in her second year at the school. She set a record in under-thirteen girls’ javelin. She was also captain of her house, and wrote a report on the year’s activities that recorded ‘many enjoyable outings’, including a cut lunch at the Scotch rowing shed on the River Torrens, and a roller-skating excursion followed by ‘dinner at McDonald’s, where most of us felt ill after eating too much’. Everyone had, she said, ‘enjoyed the year immensely’. Her report is terribly jolly – exactly as one would expect from an average product of a privileged private school. Among her family and friends, Penny is described as a navigator of difference, a negotiator between positions. This glimpse suggests she had navigated the cultural distance and adopted the tone.

  But there was a darker and more complex part of Penny Wong’s twelve-year-old voice. This was also the year in which her poem about the shark was published in the school magazine. Along with it was another poem, titled ‘Early Australia’. It was a distinctly anti-heroic take.

  There is a stillness

  As if the bush holds its breath.

  The convicts, arriving,

  Stagger off the ship

  Dizzy, as if intoxicated still

  by the foul smells of their vessel

  And later, there is a whipping.

  They receive their weekly rations

  A meagre handful of flour

  A few vegetables, a bit of salt pork.

  Some try to steal more

  And are caught.

  They bare their backs,

  to receive the brutal blows

  And cry out in pain.

  The overseer’s voice chanting out the number of strokes.

  33, 34, 35,

  The numbers are spat out

  like the crack of the whip.

  49, 50.

  The men do not move,

  As if they do not know their ordeal is over.

  Their backs are cut to shreds,

  red, raw and bleeding.

  It is over.

  The convicts go back to work.

  The guards hustle them along,

  The Governor returns to his papers.

  And the victims of the whipping

  are dragged to a dark hut.

  To lie in pain and agony

  till the others are dismissed.16

  It is an impressive poem for a twelve-year-old. It shows imagination, obviously, but also, one fancies, an early tendency to empathise with the downtrodden.

  By the early years of secondary school, Penny had decided she wanted to be a doctor. Her father liked the idea.17 She fancied she would work with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). Medicine seemed a natural ambition – partly because it was what bright Chinese children were supposed to do. But there was another motivation: she wanted her life to matter.

  There is a term that Penny Wong uses a lot, in talking about herself and others. It is ‘praxis’. During the interviews for this book, she spoke of a well-known public intellectual in the field of foreign policy. She described him as ‘a clear and logical thinker, but he has no praxis’. It was a striking word to use – even a little pompous. Speaking of her high-school medical ambitions, she used it again: ‘It was the idea of praxis.’ What does she mean by the term? She refers to Marx, for whom praxis meant action oriented towards changing society. ‘I’m not a Marxist in terms of outcome,’ she says, ‘but I think some of the analytical framework he used is valuable. I wanted to look in the mirror and feel like I was doing something that had meaning. And it didn’t have meaning for me to make money or to get status or to do anything like that. I had no interest in that. I was not particularly entrepreneurial, and I had no interest in building a business or anything commercial … I just wanted to do something that made me feel like my life had a kind of philosophical worth.’ Becoming a doctor, working for Médecins Sans Frontières, spoke to her father’s hopes, and to her own ambition.

  Naturally, she studied physics, chemistry, biology and maths at school, as well as languages – but despite her medical ambitions, she is best remembered for her creative work. One of her former classmates, Shane Grant, remembers Penny as being, like him, in the school’s ‘nerdy intellectual clique’. They were both in the debating team and, in a self-conscious dig at the jocks, argued for warm-up tracksuits for debaters as well as footballers. ‘I remember she supported our position, and we won.’ But Penny was not only a nerd. True to her resolve to do everything well, she also excelled on the rowing team, and in netball.

  In 1983 she won the school’s creative writing prize as well as the academic prize for her year. She finished among the top five in cross-country, was on the athletics team and performed well in swimming. The poem that won her the creative writing prize was titled ‘Age’, and it displayed a characteristic combination of cool, cutting observation and empathy.

  I sit with my friends,

  At the back of the bus,

  We chuckle at the old ones

  Shuffling to and fro.

  They are grey and withered,

  We are young and healthy.

  To us they look pathetic,

  Objects of ridicule.

  Then Melanie says

  ‘We’ll be like that some day,’

  We look at her in horror,

  ‘I’d rather die,’ we say.

  But we no longer laugh,

  For now we realize,

  Inevitably, we will become

  Like the objects of our mirth,

  We are laughing at ourselves.

  We all grow old,

  But those in youth

  Disregard that fact,

  View it with utter distaste.

  Will we be like those,

  Who dye their hair,

  Who use Orlane’s de-wrinkling cream,

  Who paint their faces,

  And wear young clothes,

  Or will we just grow old?18

  The next year, 1984, she won the Year 11 academic prize, and the Stroke of the Girls rowing trophy, represented the school in netball, toured New Caledonia as part of her French studies and wrote a skit based on her experiences. She played classical guitar and had begun to get involved in the school drama program.19

  The Barr Smith Theatre had been renovated during her first two years at the school and now a dynamic drama teacher, Andrew Jefferis, took charge of the program. In Year 10, Penny had played the role of The Walrus in a version of Alice in Wonderland that had been rewritten by the students. She remembers little about it other than the hot, itchy suit. But the next year’s program was more intellectually challenging. She was part of the production crew for a performance of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four – an appropriate piece given the year, and one that must have provoked reflections on the nature of totalitarian states.

  After that, she began to both study and act in ambitious, complex plays. She took a leading role in one of the most conceptually and intellectually dense stage works of the twentieth century, Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author. The play is a metadrama in which the characters wander around a set within a set, looking for an author to tell them what to do. According to the review published in the school magazine, the result ‘assaulted the senses … and the mind as well’. Penny gave a ‘superb performance as the egotistical but interested producer and author for the Six Characters’.20

  This was 1985, her last year at the school. She was one of two school captains, and co-captain of the rowing team. That year she also toured Ballarat with the hockey team, sang in the scho
ol choir and performed in as well as compered an orchestral concert.

  Wong and her co-captain, Peter Ker, wrote an anodyne report about their year of, as they put it, ‘trying to be responsible school leaders’. They had convened regular meetings with the school leadership team and attended an afternoon tea with the state governor, Sir Donald Dunstan (no relation to the former premier), and his wife, Lady Dunstan. ‘Treading the hallowed halls of Government House was a memorable experience,’ they wrote.21

  Penny finished her Year 12 with a score that allowed her to enrol in any course of her choice. She applied for, and was easily accepted into, the University of Adelaide medical school.

  Penny had already decided that she wanted to have a gap year. Helped by the school, she had applied for a scholarship to a volunteer exchange program run by the organisation AFS Australia. Eight Scotch College graduates, including Shane Grant, won places. The 1985 issue of the school magazine notes, ‘Penny Wong and Shane Grant, who were both outstanding Drama students, will be spending a year in a destination as yet unknown. We would like to wish them all the best for their time overseas.’22

  The reason her destination was not known was that she had decided to take a whole year off for travel. The University of Adelaide’s medical school would not allow her to defer for more than one year. That ruled out the Northern Hemisphere – the most popular destination for Australian exchange students – because the academic years would not line up. There was little point, she thought, in going to South-East Asia, because she had already travelled there extensively. She asked for South America, and at the year’s turn found out she would be going to Brazil.