by Anne Summers
In early January 1979, Paula and I drove upstate to Purchase where there was an exhibition of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. This was the first time I had encountered Kahlo and learned that she had injured her spine in a bus accident when she was in her early-twenties and her entire life had been wracked by pain. ‘Her paintings are a graphic record of her suffering, much of it specific suffering as a woman,’ I wrote in my diary. ‘She depicts abortion and childbirth in a direct realistic way.’ I was mesmerised. I had never seen such pain—and pain that I could relate to—on a contemporary canvas. The work was raw with rage. It was too much for a group of self-improving housewives who had started to walk through the show at the same time as Paula and me. They took one long, horrified look and fled. Paula and I talked a lot. She had a studio apartment overlooking Gramercy Park where we would eat and talk. Our conversations covered the universe but kept coming back to the subject that was pretty central to both our lives: sex and the single feminist. How did we find the right men, and how did we conduct ourselves with them? How did we maintain our freedom and our independence while not frightening them away? Neither of us wanted to be—or could imagine being—subservient. We had sexual needs, but we also had emotional pride. We wanted to be able to surrender ourselves to passion and, possibly, love. Just not at any price. This was not a conversation that was being had in the women’s movement at that time. Instead, the focus of many feminists now was how to dispense entirely with men. They wanted to be woman-centred or, more radically, ‘woman-identified’ as the current language had it. Many women who had not previously seen themselves as lesbians were identifying as such, and some were arguing that you could not even be a real feminist if you were ‘male-identified’. Paula and I felt we did not belong in that conversation so we were trying to figure it out for ourselves.
I could not disguise the fascination I felt for Jane Alpert who I’d already met several times through my new feminist friends in New York, and now I arranged to have dinner with her. In my student radical days my friends and I had followed the activities of the Weathermen, but we could never bring ourselves to embrace their kind of violence. The organisation became known as the Weather Underground after so many of their members had gone on the run after bombing public buildings. Alpert had been arrested in 1969 for her role in bombing a New York Federal Building, but had jumped bail (costing her parents $20,000) and gone underground for more than four years. She moved around the country with apparent ease, getting money and other support from former colleagues. For a time, she told me, she was working in a small town in New Mexico where, by an amazing coincidence, she ran into Mark Rudd, another Weatherperson also on the run.7 For the last year or so, she said, she had worked at an orthodox Jewish school in Colorado, using the name Carla Weinstein. They had no idea who she was. With a wry kind of pride Alpert showed me her FBI ‘Most Wanted’ poster although, she told me, she had now renounced terrorism and dismissed the Weather Underground as a bunch of rich kids living off their parents. She had become a radical feminist and while still on the run, had sent an essay to Ms. magazine which was published in the August 1973 issue under the title ‘Mother Right’. She had included a copy of her fingerprints with the manuscript so the Ms. editors could verify its authenticity. The essay was extraordinarily influential and was reprinted many times in feminist anthologies. Alpert became one of the first feminists to argue that women possessed unique female qualities, based on their biology—their ability to bear children, whether or not they exercised this ability—that made them intrinsically superior to men. Many women found this thesis attractive; it provided a rationale for disengaging with men and leaving behind what was a long and exhausting struggle merely to be listened to. It fed into the emerging radical feminism that was now condemning many of their foremothers as being too ‘male-oriented’, too associated with the left in politics and not being driven by purely female needs and goals. This theme was taken-up by other writers such as Adrienne Rich and the sociologist Carol Gilligan. It was to become a fiercely contested aspect of feminism in the 1980s and not one that I was attracted to. I felt that however burdensome the struggle to be treated as equals was, and I certainly found it wearing and I was often dispirited at how hard it was all becoming, we could not abandon it. For some women, the answer might be to leave the mainstream world to live and work in all-female communities, but that was not for me. Nor, I was pretty sure, was it for most women.
Alpert had turned herself in in late 1974 and served almost three years in prison. She had not long been released when we met. I was keen to know how she saw American politics now, after her experiences. She astonished me with a passionate defence of the American political system; this woman who had hated her country so much that she had planted bombs in crowded buildings (and was very lucky she had not killed anyone) now argued that Watergate had proved that America could redeem itself. I had never heard anyone contend that. To me, Watergate was evidence of the corruption of American politics, of the criminal lengths that the Republican Party was prepared to go, with presidential acquiescence, to win re-election. It was only in America that I was confronted with this point of view: that the impeachment of Richard Nixon and his resignation proved the system could correct and cleanse itself. It was a fair enough argument, I conceded, but then Alpert got very embarrassed at how her new-found patriotism made her sound so conservative.
I happened to be in New York the Sunday in January 1979 for the press conference held by Bella Abzug after President Carter had fired her the previous Friday as co-chair of the National Advisory Committee for Women. More than half the 30 members of the committee had resigned in protest. I rushed to the offices of Ms. magazine on 41st and Lexington where the press conference was being held. Ms. magazine had been founded by Gloria Steinem four years earlier and had already acquired iconic status. For me, this was hallowed feminist ground and I was excited to have the chance to see these legendary women at such close quarters. Bella Abzug had been a Democratic congresswoman for New York; the media usually attached the word ‘feisty’ to any mention of her because she was a fiery and outspoken woman. She always wore a hat with a brim and that, as much as her strong Brooklyn accent and her entertaining turn of phrase, became her signature. President Carter had set up the Advisory Committee by Executive Order to advise him on implementing the recommendations of the Houston Conference, a 20,000 strong gathering of women in November 1977, the first and only national women’s conference ever to be funded by the American government, and intended to be the United States’ response to International Women’s Year in 1975.
Bella Abzug told the press conference that she believed that she and President Carter had had a good meeting. She had told him, she said, she was glad that he had asked for advice since none of his cabinet had taken up the opportunity to learn how the Houston recommendations might impact on their portfolios. She had no idea that they were already intending to get rid of her.
She learned that Hamilton Jordan, the President’s key adviser (and later Chief-of-Staff), had described Abzug as ‘too confrontationary’. The President had also had a problem, apparently, when she tried to explain to him that economics is a women’s question.
‘We fear that the anti-inflation policies of the President will impact gravely on women,’ Abzug said.
But apparently he was only interested in the progress of the Equal Rights Amendment not in Abzug or the rest of the committee’s opinion about what was needed for women.
‘They want to even label our issues for us,’ Abzug said. ‘We’re allowed to talk about equal rights or battered women, but not about the economy.’
‘Obviously they want us to consent, not to advise.’
This was a clever line, I thought, turning on its head the role of the Senate ‘to advise and consent’ as stipulated by the US constitution. I was tremendously impressed by Abzug, especially by her insistence that women needed to be included in economic policy. I don’t think I had heard this articulated so clearly before.
It made sense, but it was a new thought and I needed to consider what the implications were. It was the first time I had heard Gloria Steinem speak and I was less impressed by her chatty, jokey style. She dubbed Bella’s sacking ‘the Friday afternoon massacre’, an allusion to Richard Nixon’s notorious Saturday night massacre during Watergate. I would later learn at first-hand how adept a phrasemaker Steinem was, but it seemed to me this day that her turn-of-phrase disguised an absence of content. I was far more attracted to Bella Abzug’s gutsy way of putting meat on the bone.
I spent my last week visiting New York literary agents. I was amazed at the ease with which I gained appointments to see Lois Wallace, Elaine Markson and several other big names. They were for the most part friendly, although none of them thought there was a market in New York for Damned Whores. I knew I was hampered by not having a strong enough idea to propose but perhaps, I thought, if I went straight to an editor at a big publishing house I could find someone who would have sufficient faith to nurture me the way John Hooker, the publisher at Penguin in Australia, had done. After an introduction from Robert Hughes, the art critic for Time, an Australian and a friend, I sat down with Chuck Elliott, Hughes’s editor at Knopf and told him I’d like to write a book about Australia. I had what I thought at the time was an interesting take on the country and its place in the world.
‘Australia is boring,’ he told me. ‘No one cares about it.’
He showed me his latest bestseller. It was a book about a super-tanker.
‘It does not really matter what the subject is,’ he said. ‘It’s how you tell the story.’
Unless the story was Australia, apparently.
I went to drinks with a businessman I had met in the Midwest who was on the board of one of New York’s top publishing houses. He had said he could put me in touch with the right editor. We met at a well-known midtown hotel but as I began to babble about my ideas for the book, I felt his hand creeping up my thigh.
In the end, I did not stay and surrender myself to whatever America might have to offer. I opted for the small pond, the safety and security of a job, a salary, a title, a zone of comfort where I would be tested but where I would not risk everything. I knew I was again experiencing the indecision of my previous visit to New York. If I was going to change my life, follow that big dream of being a writer in America, now was the time to do it. But it did not happen. In the end I was not brave enough.
CHAPTER THREE
THE PRESS GALLERY
‘I figure it’s a 24-hour-a-day job with sufficient psychological rewards to offset any personal inconvenience,’ Maximilian Walsh, the managing editor, had written in his lengthy letter appointing me as Canberra political correspondent for the Australian Financial Review.
I needed to be out ‘beating the bushes; it is not an in-office end-of-phone job,’ he wrote. I was new to Canberra, new to political reporting and new to daily journalism. Walsh was taking a huge risk with me so he took some time in his letter to set out his expectations, to warn me of the pitfalls, and to encourage me to be confident and adventurous. As well as reporting the main political news of the day, I would write the weekly column ‘Canberra Observed’ that had been essential reading for all political aficionados when he himself had written it before transferring to Sydney to take the editor’s chair some years earlier. The column had a long and variable history. Sometimes it broke news, but mostly it was intended to provide a perspective on the week in Canberra. ‘I want to see that column become not only required reading for anybody seriously interested in politics but also for it to be qualitatively superior to any alternative,’ he told me. This was a big ask given my lack of experience and that I was up against reporters like Laurie Oakes, Paul Kelly, Michelle Grattan, Peter Bowers and others who had been in the Gallery for years, and who had a far more thorough knowledge of politics, and its history, than I did.
I had started the job in a state of high anxiety, which I hoped I was hiding from my new colleagues. If I could not put on a bold front, I would have no hope of succeeding. While I was still in the US, after I’d already agreed to take the position, I had been almost paralysed with doubt and fear about whether I could do it. Was I qualified? I was not across the big political issues of the day. Whenever I could get hold of the Financial Review (not easy in the Midwest before the internet) to check out what they were covering, I was horrified to read front-page stories about the law of the sea, about Treasury bond tap and tender issues and other topics that I had never even heard of. I kept asking myself whether my doubts were just feelings of female insecurity. I would not be the first woman political correspondent. Michelle Grattan at the Age and Gay Davidson at the Canberra Times had already broken that barrier, although I would be the first woman to do the job for the Financial Review. But I did not think my sex was the reason I was scared. I was taking on a very big job, where I would be writing about the Prime Minister and the government, and I was frightened of making a fool of myself for not knowing enough. Any failures on my part would be very public—quite possibly on page one of the country’s only financial daily. Yet, I kept telling myself, the man who recruited me seemed totally confident: If he thought I could do it, I should not let my own misgivings hold me back.
Before he had been promoted at the age of 37 to the editorship of the Financial Review, Max—or Thanksa (Thanks a million/rhyming slang for Maximilian) as many people in the Gallery called him—Walsh had been a standout member of his generation of journalists, which included such luminaries as the Age’s Alan Barnes and Peter Smark, Fred Brenchley from the Financial Review, and Laurie Oakes from the Melbourne Sun-Pictorial. They were hard-living, hard-drinking champions of the long lunch, reporters who were intensely competitive with each other. They lived to break news and would have scorned being dependent on what Paul Keating used to call ‘the quality drip’—stories which when he was Treasurer and later Prime Minister he arranged to feed to acquiescent journalists. Which is not to say that Walsh and his generation did not cultivate highly placed sources for information, but they were more likely to test what they were given, sometimes even to use it against the source, rather than merely transcribe what they had been told. Walsh, in particular, remade political writing.
Walsh came from the tabloid Daily Mirror to the Financial Review at the invitation of Max Newton, the brilliant editor who had transformed the paper from a weekly into a daily, and he accepted Newton’s theory that all politics was essentially about economics. When Newton left the Financial Review to join Rupert Murdoch and launch the Australian, his successor, Vic Carroll, put Walsh onto the major business and finance stories of the day where he rapidly showed his acumen. He built a knowledge of the real world of business and its connections to politics, as well as some of the sometimes shady people involved in business. Combined with an Economics degree he had acquired by going part-time to the University of Sydney while still working police rounds for the Mirror, Walsh possessed talents previously rare or non-existent in the Canberra Press Gallery. Carroll recognised this when he sent Walsh to be the paper’s political correspondent. With the new, upmarket byline Maximilian Walsh, he combined the toughness he’d learned hanging around cops with the expertise he’d picked up at night school to perfect a new form of political journalism. He forsook objectivity to take stands on issues, especially economic matters such as protectionism, and to use his journalism to educate his readers on the perils for the nation of hiding behind a tariff wall. ‘Walsh’s daily reports, weekly “Canberra Observed” column in the AFR and another weekly column in the Sunday Sun-Herald, became mandatory reading for mandarins, politicians, lobbyists and the rest of the parliamentary press gallery,’ wrote journalist Andrew Clark in a biography of Walsh on the Australian Media Hall of Fame website.1 ‘He informed, inspired, infuriated, and irritated. Most of all, he set the agenda. Walsh had imitators and followers, but no one supplanted him.’
Walsh was aggressive in his analysis, especially of the performance of politicians who had
rarely been subjected to such incisive probing. His forensic dissection of Prime Minister William McMahon, sharing with readers of the National Times in September 1971 what anyone acquainted with the man knew, that he was shallow and untalented, further cemented his reputation. Unusually among Canberra journalists, Walsh was stylish. He was a snappy dresser. He acquired a heritage house in the toney dress circle, inner-Canberra suburb of Forrest where he entertained well. (He sold the house to Fairfax when he went to Sydney, and it became a perk for the paper’s Canberra bureau chief; I lived there for four years.) His colleagues called him ‘word-a-day-Walsh’ for his penchant for using a new, and unfamiliar, word almost every day in his stories. Australian journalists who today frequently use ‘swingeing’ and ‘schadenfreude’ might not know it, but Max Walsh introduced these words to the vocabulary of political journalism. Walsh was also not afraid of a fight and soon he and I were shoulder-to-shoulder in a battle between the Prime Minister and the paper the likes of which had rarely been seen before in the Canberra Press Gallery.
Walsh may have seen something of himself in me which was why he was bringing me from a totally different type of journalism into his old job. I was also someone from outside the traps, who’d made a name for herself writing pioneering pieces, who might be able to transfer those skills to political writing. I have always been grateful for the guidance he gave me in those early months, yet I still found it very hard. I had, literally, been thrown in the deep end and some days I had no idea what I should be doing. What was the story? What was the angle? I didn’t want to be mollycoddled but I did need steering and, while most of my colleagues in the bureau were friendly and helpful, sometimes I found myself floundering.
