by Anne Summers
This was just one example of relatively small, but carefully targeted, policy announcements on women’s health in direct response to women in the focus groups. A few months earlier, Brian Howe had announced a $64 million program for the Early Detection of Breast Cancer and named Dr Mary Rickard to be the public face of a campaign that, within five years, would be able to screen 860,000 Australian women. This followed an earlier decision to allocate $23 million for a cervical cancer-screening program and to appoint Dr Edith Weisberg as the spokeswoman for that. I had arranged for Howe to make these two announcements to a group of women’s magazine editors in Sydney—in the cabinet room in the federal government offices. There had never before been a media briefing there, so I was pretty sure the editors would all turn up—just so they could say they had been there—and they did. Once the official business was over, I had a quiet word with Nancy Pilcher who was the editor-in-chief of Vogue.
‘Would you be interested in an interview with Annita Keating?’
‘We’ve been trying for months,’ she said, smiling widely.
It took several months as magazines have very long lead times, but the March issue of Vogue featured a spread of photographs of the Prime Minister’s wife looking ultra-stylish and, sensationally, her usual tangle of curls replaced by long, straight hair. All the media picked-up the photographs. They were reproduced on the front pages of all the newspapers and featured on television news bulletins meaning that few Australians would not be aware that Annita Keating, mother of four, could hold her own in the country’s top fashion magazine, wearing Australian apparel and looking absolutely stunning. I’d also been instrumental in talking to Kathy Bail, editor of Rolling Stone magazine, about featuring the Prime Minister on the cover. I’d gone with him to the photo shoot, at Lorrie Graham’s Surry Hills loft studio, where Keating was surprisingly receptive to being treated like a rock star. Perhaps it reminded him of his early days in Sydney, when he’d managed a band called the Ramrods, before he’d opted for a career in politics. The cover showed him looking supercool, peeking out over the top of a pair of Ray-Bans. Inside was an interview conducted by the musician Reg Mombassa, and writers Linda Jaivin and Peter Corris. The Prime Minister stated that he did not think marijuana should be legalised and revealed that his favourite Beatle was Paul McCartney. No surprises there. The PMO was ecstatic. ‘Annita in Vogue and Paul in Rolling Stone …’ enthused one staff member to the Sydney Morning Herald, mocking the Opposition efforts with far less-groovy publications.15
My final media effort was with Woman’s Day, which had been only too happy to accept my offer of unprecedented shots of the Keating family relaxing on the lawns at Kirribilli House. The children were young and, like their parents, arrestingly photogenic. They even had a good-looking dog. These media gigs were not a substitute for policy initiatives, and were never intended to be. They merely added a few more pieces to the mosaic of altering perceptions about Paul Keating, especially by women. They were not artificial; instead they revealed things about Keating and his wife and family that were apparent to anyone who was close to them, but which had never before been on public view. I thought it was totally appropriate for the people who would be deciding who should govern the country for the next three years to know more about the Prime Minister, to see his lighter side and to watch him interact with the family he adored. It was part of who he was, but it was a part that he had always been reluctant to share before.
Paul looked exhausted and dispirited when he arrived at the State Theatre in Market Street, Sydney at midday on Sunday 28 February 1993, for what was ostensibly the launch of Labor’s arts policy, but in fact was a concert to honour him. I was waiting at the kerb with the movie actor Sam Neill, who would escort Paul and Annita to their seats. Garry McDonald was there too, in character as Norman Gunston, getting in the way with his camera crew, trying to engage with the Prime Minister. As he emerged from the car, Paul swatted at him as if he were a troublesome insect.
‘I don’t think I’ve got a twenty-minute speech in me today, Annie,’ Paul said as I hurriedly briefed him on what to expect inside and handed him some notes Don Watson had prepared.
I followed them into the theatre; it was dark, except for the spotlight on a lone Circus Oz aerialist who, clinging to a rope, swung daringly across the void above the heads of the audience. He was a bit like Paul Keating the politician, who was also a high-wire act performer, putting on a dazzling show, taking risks, no net. You could see, as the Prime Minister watched the brave performer swing from side-to-side in that cavernous space, that he felt something of a connection. He seemed to perk-up a bit. Then the audience realised that Keating had arrived and there was a mighty roar. A tumultuous wave of sound swirled around the room that bore within it the affection, the admiration, the gratitude and, also, the fear of what was to come if this man were to be swept from office and replaced by John Hewson. That morning, when he had spied Sam Neill handing out pro-Labor pamphlets at the Double Bay shopping centre, the Liberal leader had threatened him with the words, ‘You will never work in this town again.’ The applause was raw and raucous, and it bore Keating down the aisle towards the front row seat from where he would watch the performance. You could see his shoulders lift as he surveyed the screaming adoring crowd, a huge grin breaking across his face. He sat down, and the show began.
The concert started with a short piece by Russell Page from Bangarra, the notable Aboriginal dance company. Then, following a scene-setting speech from leading actor Bryan Brown, there was a short, sizzling dance by Jan Pinkerton and Paul Mercurio, the star of the current Baz Luhrmann hit film Strictly Ballroom. Mercurio was wearing his trademark white singlet, the same one that—unwashed and still smelling of sweat—would be auctioned-off at the end of the week, along with many other significant items, including a Prime Ministerial tie, to raise money to pay for the costs of this extraordinary show.16
It had been made to happen by a high-powered group of people from various parts of the arts industry who decided that, whatever the election outcome, they wanted to thank Keating for the support he had given them throughout his public life. Arts for Labor, as they decided to call themselves, first met at the Birchgrove, Sydney home of publicist Rae Francis. I was invited and soon found myself the liaison person between the PMO and the group. Its core members included Anne Britton, the federal secretary of the Media Arts and Entertainment Alliance; film producers Erroll Sullivan, Michael Thornhill and Hal McElroy; literary agents Rosemary Creswell and Jane Cameron; the Writers’ Guild’s Jeanette Paramour; and Michael Lynch, who was general manager of the Sydney Theatre Company. They had met regularly over a couple of months and conceived a show that would be part-performance, part-tribute, showcasing the best of Australian arts in an unprecedented act of gratitude. One Saturday I drove up to the northern beaches with Erroll Sullivan to Bryan Brown’s home to persuade him to lend his support by emceeing the event. Once he was on board, the other big names quickly followed.
After the first performances, the actor Robyn Nevin read excerpts from scores of testimonials from grateful recipients of government financial support for the arts, including almost every single living person who had benefited from a ‘Keating’. This was the unofficial name given to the generous two-year Australian Artists Creative Fellowships, instigated by Keating in 1989 when he was still Treasurer, to provide financial security for mature artists across all genres. Between 1989 and 1996, 65 artists received Keatings. They included writer Frank Moorhouse, who used his to produce two of the books of his impressive League of Nations trilogy; theatre director Neil Armfield, who created Cloudstreet, based on Tim Winton’s novel and which became one of the most successful theatrical productions ever staged in Australia; poets Les Murray and John Tranter, who produced significant collections; writer Kate Grenville, who wrote The Idea of Perfection which won the UK Orange Prize for Women’s fiction; and a host of other Australian greats, such as Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Dorothy Hewett, Thea Astley, Richard Meale, G
eoffrey Tozer, John Bell, Reg Livermore and Garth Welch.
Paul Keating understood the concept, and the value, of ‘soft power’ long before it was touted as a tool of diplomacy. The ‘Keatings’ cost a total of $11.7 million over their lifetime (they were abolished by the Howard government). Compare the value of this investment in Australian creativity and its value to the nation (even if it cannot be measured with any precision) with, for instance, the embarrassing and unsuccessful tourist campaign on television in 2006, that featured a bikini-wearing blonde woman on a beach shouting ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’ and which cost $180 million.
That afternoon in the State Theatre the words were followed by more performance: the Hermannsburg Ladies Choir—a group of middle-aged Aboriginal women who had never before travelled from the former mission in Central Australia, and who were brought to Sydney by Roger Foley; Jane Rutter did a sexy flute performance; Reg Mombassa performed with his band Mental as Anything; and a vocal ensemble, The Song Company. All the while, Roger Foley, in his capacity as lighting-master Ellis D. Fogg, projected brightly coloured psychedelic images onto a screen at the rear of the stage. Mardi Gras, Sydney’s boisterous annual gay pride march, had been on the night before and quite a few members of the audience had not yet been to bed. There was a lot of nervous energy in the room, and the kind of low hysteria brought about by exhaustion and anxiety. It was almost hypnotic in its allure.
I had been living in New York for almost seven years and, I realised, that despite my frequent visits home and the American tours to the Big Apple of everyone from Midnight Oil to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, I was totally out-of-touch with Australian creativity. I watched spellbound. I had never seen anything like it. Not just the array of talent, although that was impressive and stirring; it was also the generosity and the gratitude. This was so different from the cynical and backbiting Sydney arts community I remembered from the late 1970s, it told me something was happening in this country. Something good, that perhaps I wanted to be part of.
The final performance, by several more men from Bangarra, was a moving reminder of the ancient culture on which everything else we do rests. When they had finished, Keating walked onto the stage. He was a radically different man from the one who had dragged himself out of his car an hour earlier. He stepped lightly, he was grinning. You could tell that he was profoundly moved—by the show itself, and that it had all been put on for him. He said later that it was the turning point in the campaign. He was suddenly energised—and motivated. He was not going to let-down these people, nor this country. As Don Watson describes the event in his book, ‘… the prime minister could not stop smiling and bowing.’17
He threw aside the notes Watson had prepared and launched into a passionate address. ‘There’s no way the Liberal Party would understand this,’ he said of the performances he had just witnessed. ‘They don’t understand that the Arts resonate the opportunity and energy of Australia … they don’t see its importance and they never have.’
He told his avid audience that ‘even though we pulled the budgets back in the ’80s we always kept the Arts budget growing, and we did because we know to let the Arts down is to let ourselves down’.
‘How many countries have had the chance to put together a new society,’ he said. ‘Here we are on the oldest piece of crust on the earth’s face, with one of the oldest nations of the earth, Aboriginal Australians, with ourselves as though we were towed on a raft into one of the most interesting parts of the world, next door to a civilisation 900 years old, 180 million people—what a phenomenal opportunity we have to develop a new country, a multicultural country, a new society, with new expression, new feelings, and new resonances.’ He spoke for 40 minutes, and as he unfolded his theme, drawing on historian Manning Clark’s language, of Labor as the enlargers ‘out there feeling the resonances and pushing out the boundaries’, something in me responded. I considered, for the first time, whether I might want to stay in Australia if Keating won.
When it was over, an exuberant throng of performers joined Keating on stage. The newspapers the next morning showed photographs of the Prime Minister in his slightly rumpled light grey Zegna suit, standing close between two Bangarra dancers who were wearing not much more than lap-laps and a bit of body paint. It was an arresting image: representatives of this ancient civilisation beside the modern man who, if he won, would follow through on his promises in his already famous Redfern speech18 two months earlier, that Australia’s first inhabitants deserved to be treated with dignity.
The Saturday after next he’d be on another stage, in the Bankstown Sports Club in the western suburbs, in the heart of his electorate, again unable to stop grinning as he stepped onto the stage and proclaimed:
‘This is the sweetest victory of all.’
The night before his entire staff, including the cops and the drivers, had gathered at a Chinese restaurant in The Rocks. Most of us wore ‘Keating is Right’ badges. Don Russell had them made as a take on the ‘Lang is Right’ buttons worn in 1932 by supporters of the controversial NSW premier, who had been Paul’s political mentor. Unlike the originals, our buttons did not bear an image of the Prime Minister; just simple white letters on a solid black background. We wore them with irony, and to distract from the tension we all felt. When Paul spoke, he said that Labor ‘might be able to win’. Unlike at ALP headquarters, which had written us off and briefed a gullible national media accordingly, there were pockets of optimism in the PMO. Weeks earlier, on the Sunday that Keating had called the election, when along with all the advisers I had gone into the office, I was overcome with gut-churning apprehension. Elections can change everything and this one could very well alter the course of Australian history but now I was convinced, after being based in Sydney for the weeks before the election and talking to a lot of different people, that Keating could win. I had even accepted a $1000 bet from Barbara Riley-Smith’s husband, who was an out-and-out Lib. If Labor lost, I did not know how I would be able to pay him. Perhaps that’s why I was so fervent when I yelled out at the dinner, ‘You’re going to win, you’re going to win!’ ‘Let’s hope so, Annie,’ Keating had replied. ‘If we win, it will be the win of the century.’19
The early votes from Tasmania the next afternoon (they were an hour ahead of the mainland, due to daylight saving having ended early) were promising. We staffers mooched around in a room somewhere out the back of the Sports Club, trying to keep our hopes contained while the numbers guys crunched furiously with their computers. I found it hard to breathe, and not just because the ghastly carpet had absorbed decades of spilt beer and cigarette smoke. As the night wore on and certainty grew, we allowed ourselves a few self-congratulatory smirks, and then the key advisers were gathering around Paul while he went over his speech. Just before he walked onto the stage, I grabbed his arm.
‘Don’t forget to thank the sheilas,’ I urged him.
The crowd eventually calmed and settled back to hear Paul Keating claim his win and to tell them: ‘This is a victory for the true believers, the people who in difficult times have kept the faith …’ His speech that night was subsequently criticised for being insufficiently humble, and for suggesting that he would govern only for those who had voted for him, but it did not sound that way on the night. At least, not to me or, it seemed, the rest of the team. We were exultant. He had won.
And then he said, ‘an extra special vote of thanks for the women of Australia who voted for us believing in the policies of this government.’
Although I had asked him to, I could scarcely believe he was saying it. Putting us at the heart of who he was and how he would govern.
Later that night a group of us gathered at Zanzibar’s in Kellett Street, Kings Cross which was one of the few restaurants in Sydney to stay open into the early hours. Paul and Annita, Laurie and Trish Brereton, Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin (who’d designed the backdrop curtain for Bankstown), Tara Morice (the star of Strictly Ballroom), Mark Ryan, Don Watson, maybe a few othe
rs—and me. It was late, well past 3 a.m., when the doors of the restaurant burst open and in came another bunch of revellers. We looked up at them when we heard a woman scream. It was Anna Cronin, Hewson’s chief-of-staff. Of all the gin joints, the team we had literally just defeated in the ‘unwinnable election’ had chosen this one. They looked at us and fled.
On the way back from Bankstown I’d rung Chip who was in Washington DC, with ABC journalists Heather Ewart and Barrie Cassidy, at an Embassy party where the diplomats had clearly expected, and seemingly wanted, a different result. I had trouble telling Chip how I felt. To say I was happy would be trite and insufficient. I had turned 48 the day before the election, but I’d barely stopped to acknowledge this milestone. Nor did I now, as I was so overwhelmed by waves of relief, of gratitude, of pure joy that I actually did not feel a thing.
I offered to spend my final couple of weeks in the PMO organising a special celebration to mark the extraordinary election win. Paul agreed and no one else demurred, not at first anyway, but the immediate feedback from ALP headquarters was that my proposed True Believers Victory Dinner, to be held in the Great Hall at Parliament House on 23 March, was ‘too American’ and, at $100 a ticket, plus the cost of travel to Canberra, ‘too expensive’. I argued that some American traditions were worth imitating, and celebrating an unexpected victory with grace and style was one of them. I suggested we allocate a certain number of freebies for party supporters, to be subsidised by the more affluent attendees. I promised that I could bring in a classy event that would pay for itself. I got grudging agreement and then I went to work.
