by Anne Summers
Chip and I eventually found a house we wanted to buy, in Victoria Street in Sydney’s Kings Cross. It was a smallish terrace but with three storeys, and it faced out over the Domain towards the city, giving us what we liked to call our ‘mini-Manhattan’ view. Both of us loved the informality of the house and the spaces it gave us for work, relaxation and sleep. The two rooms plus tiny galley kitchen on the ground floor were, we’d say, for dining and relaxation. Once we’d got some furniture we started to have friends for dinner, making up for all those years of being away. The second floor was for personal maintenance, with its bathroom and two bedrooms while the top floor, with the two attic rooms converted to offices for each of us, was the factory. In June 1994, after we had a large party to celebrate Chip’s 30th birthday, we began to feel that we were putting down roots in Sydney. Chip was doing freelance journalism, getting assignments for the Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone and similar publications, and he joined the Sydney Philharmonia Choir, where for almost a decade he sang some of the great choral works, including ‘Mahler 8’ at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the proms concerts—and I waited in line for hours to get a standing room ticket to be part of this absolutely thrilling experience. During the same trip the choir also performed at King’s College, Cambridge, and that afternoon we’d gone out on the river, both of us in summer whites, Chip punting and me savouring being propelled along, an unfamiliar treat. But the biggest gig was undoubtedly the Sydney Olympics, where he was part of the massed choir that performed in the Opening Ceremony.
It would take almost a year before Good Weekend began to reflect my sensibility and many months before I could even signal what I wanted to do. The three-week long production lead times and the weeks, sometimes months, it took a writer to produce a profile or feature article meant that I had to plan a long way ahead. I eventually overhauled, removed or improved every single one of the many elements that go to make up a magazine, but meanwhile we still needed to produce an issue each week. I drew on already-commissioned pieces while I made my plans, and got to know the lay of the land at Good Weekend, I concentrated on the one element that was readily available to me: the cover. I was very fortunate to have in Jeff Allan an art director who was a creative risk-taker and extremely talented; there was nothing he would not try and over the four years we worked together we created some memorable work, most often advertised by a striking cover.
We first showed what we could do in late July 1993 when we published a cover that appeared to show a naked Jeff Kennett, then premier of Victoria, addressing a public meeting. The cover line, ‘Unreal, Jeff ’, provided a clue that perhaps what you saw was not entirely believable. And of course, it was not. The story, titled ‘The Lying Eye’, was a serious and pioneering piece of journalism dissecting ‘the new world of the digital image,1 the recently available technology that enabled photographs to be manipulated. ‘From now on,’ our piece reported, ‘the camera can never be relied on to tell the whole truth.’ The article looked at the technology itself, the ethics of such manipulation and the fact that there were no guidelines, let alone laws, to curb the use of this technology for mischievous or even sinister purposes. We reproduced a couple of digitally-altered photographs that had recently appeared in newspapers to illustrate this, but I felt we needed to create our own arresting image to really make the point. Photoshop and other programs for digitally-altering photographs are now within the reach of anyone with a smart phone or a computer, but in 1993 few people understood the potential—and the risks—involved. We devoted a full page to showing how in the Good Weekend studio we had photographed a model, standing in a similar pose, to a stock news photo of Kennett addressing a public gathering in Geelong in 1991. An artist using a Qantel Graphics Paintbox XL positioned the model’s naked body over the suited-image of Kennett, substituted Kennett’s head, and created another head in the crowd ‘in front of the groin area to spare the Premier’s blushes’, as we put it in our caption.
I thought the final result was wonderful. Using such a well-known person clearly showed how a photo could be manipulated. The cover attracted a lot of attention, including from the Victorian premier himself. We had given him a heads-up, as a matter of courtesy, and I had expected him to enjoy the joke. But Kennett’s sense of humour did not apply to himself. He made a formal complaint. I think it even went to the board. I got my knuckles rapped.
Five months later, we published a full-page Christmas greeting to our readers. All of the staff, wearing dark green T-shirts and holding candles and decorations, arranged themselves in the shape of a Christmas tree. We called it the Good Weekend Family Tree. I was at the top, the angel or the boss, whichever way you wanted to look at it. We also had the image printed as a Christmas card; some people received the version where the photograph had been digitally-altered so that I was sitting atop that tree naked. I hoped Jeff Kennett would get the joke.
While our primary editorial task was to produce big feature stories on subjects—be they people or issues—that were of current relevance, I also relished the opportunity to have some fun, to be quirky and to generally try to reward readers with a few surprises at least every few weeks. I had already renovated the cooking page, upgrading what had been a small column into a lavish three-page spread, which I called Appetites. Each week we featured a leading Australian chef, such as Stephanie Alexander, Maggie Beer, Tony Bilson, Jill Dupleix or Gay Bilson, writing about food. (I also tried to bring on new talent by encouraging previously unknown food writers, such as Siu Ling Hui.) Huon Hooke and Mark Shield contributed shorter columns on wine and beer and spirits respectively. The chef ’s words were accompanied by a gorgeous image created by the top photographer, George Seper, and styled by Tom Rutherfood, who was a caterer who went on to create his own restaurants. It was the era of so-called gastro-porn. Australians were into food, shopping for it, cooking it, eating it, looking at it. Cookbook sales were in the stratosphere. Celebrity chefs had entered our lives and long before television, shows such as Masterchef had a profound impact on everyday Australians enthusiasm for food, it seemed we could not be too extravagant or excessive when it came to food. It turned out that you could, and it was a June 1994 column by Gay Bilson where she wrote about trying to make sausages from her own blood that provoked reader outrage and disgust.2 I had been enthusiastic about the article, encouraging Gay to be as frank and explicit as she wished. I’d had some fun positioning the piece, giving it the title ‘The Blood of Others’, in what I thought was a witty allusion to Simone de Beauvoir’s 1945 novel of the same name. While de Beauvoir certainly wasn’t a cook, as a Frenchwoman she would have eaten her share of boudin noir and I had written, ‘Only the most sanguine of cooks would contemplate using themselves as a principal ingredient’, to guide readers into the article.
It was a wonderful piece of writing in which Gay described how a year earlier she had decided to make sausages ‘from my own blood for a dinner centred around the body, our bodies’. She would, she wrote, ‘prove my blood to be safe, freeze it over the period needed to obtain about three litres, then personally make the sausages. Our blood has similar properties to pig’s blood, so as “food” I knew they would be palatable.’ No one could ever accuse Gay Bilson of being frivolous, and this article was certainly not meant to be anything other than a serious rumination on blood and its value as food. It included a reference to the famous pig-killing scene in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. But Bilson was unable to persuade any of her coterie of cooks and servers to take part in such a dinner. Was it the time of AIDS that made it so unacceptable? Or was it that a woman proposed to use her own blood? In 1993 the London artist Marc Quinn had carved a bust of his head from his frozen blood. Was that acceptable because ‘his blood became sculpted material, not food’? Bilson asked.3 Good Weekend’s readers made clear they would prefer more conventional food columns in the future. One described it as ‘stomach-churning’, another suggested she donate her blood to the Red Cross. But I relished the unconventional, and coun
ted this article as one of those I was most proud to publish.
I had been similarly unrepentant about another unusual editorial choice earlier in 1994, when I had devoted a total of eight pages to reprinting a New York Village Voice article they had titled ‘A rape in cyberspace’, but which I chose to call ‘Data rape’.4 It was unheard of for us to run an article of this length—it was almost 10,000 words—let alone on such an esoteric topic. The article explored what were fast becoming increasing interactions between our actual lives and those that existed virtually in cyberspace. In this case, a man who went by the online name of Mr Bungle committed several acts of sexual violence, including rapes, on other virtual characters in a fictional world that went by the name of LambdaMOO. The question as to how someone who does not exist could be violated by another fictional character was quickly overtaken by an urgent online debate, about how real people, using their fictional persona, could perpetrate such acts. The article was an early foreshadowing of the issues of online violence, trolling and similar uses of the internet to intimidate—and even kill people—that we are grappling with today. Back then, scarcely anyone knew what we were even talking about and I did not win any friends in the upper echelons of Fairfax, let alone from the advertising department, for publishing something most people thought was, frankly, weird. I did, however, receive a congratulatory phone call from Bruce Gyngell, the Nine Network’s television guru (and the man who was known as Mr Television for having been the first person to appear on Australia’s television screens some 40 years earlier). ‘It was the most interesting thing I have read in a long time,’ Gyngell told me. That was good enough for me.
In early March 1995, Fairfax relocated from its long-term headquarters in Jones Street, Broadway to a glass tower perched on the edge of Darling Harbour, on the western side of the central business district of Sydney. Whatever the original rationale was for locating Good Weekend away from the mothership was forgotten, and we too found ourselves in a spanking-new set of offices on the 24th floor. After the move, everything changed. We were now part of the Fairfax ‘family’, sharing spaces, running into colleagues from other parts of the company in the lifts or the coffee shop downstairs. People actually came to see us (something that never happened while we were at Palm Beach). There was also a perceptible change in my status. Our masthead was on the wall of the company reception area. That rankled with some people who thought it incongruous, if not downright impertinent, for a magazine, a mere supplement, to have a separate billing from its host the Sydney Morning Herald, and equal status with the Sun-Herald and the Australian Financial Review. Michael Hoy included me in all editors’ gatherings, so I often found myself at dinners or meetings with the men who ran the major mastheads. While I appreciated being treated as an equal, even I could not make a plausible case that my responsibilities, let alone staff numbers and budget, even came close to those of the editors of the newspapers. I also differed from these editors in having more of a public profile than any of them. I received constant invitations to give speeches, attend conferences and other public events. At the same time, being Good Weekend editor automatically conferred A list guest status. I’d been astonished when I started the job to find my inbox brimming with invitations to opening nights at the opera and the theatre, movie premieres and all sorts of fancy social events. Not to mention the gifts. Endless cosmetics and other beauty products, liquor, homewares and all kinds of other usually very stylish and rather expensive goods arrived so regularly, my office started to resemble a gift shop. It was very different from just being a journalist; I was sneered at as a ‘celebrity editor’ by former colleagues, who questioned whether I would be capable of applying journalistic impartiality if any of the pals I socialised with found themselves in trouble. The name Carmen Lawrence was mentioned as an example. I was occupying a strange place in the journalistic pantheon. Good Weekend was publishing good and important stories but there were plenty of traditionalists who, as well as questioning my credentials, viewed anything published in a magazine as inferior to the ‘real thing’ in newspapers. And, it would turn out, there were also some for whom my newfound status was intolerable.
On 14 June 1995, after I had been at Good Weekend for just over two years, I received a phone call from my good friend Elisabeth Wynhausen, who was now working at the Australian. Did I know, she asked me, that rumours were circulating that I had sexually harassed a member of my staff? No. I most certainly did not. I asked her for details. It seemed, she said, that I had been, or was about to be, formally accused of harassment by a Good Weekend male photographer. The story was apparently being spread with especially malevolent glee, spreading like wildfire, especially in media circles, up and down the east coast of Australia for almost a week before I knew anything about it. Suddenly, a number of things made sense: people looking at me sideways in the lift at Fairfax; people who normally greeted me avoiding my gaze and I’d had some strange phone calls from friends who, I later learned, when I said nothing had simply assumed I did not want to talk about it. The story had assumed the force of fact before I was even aware of it.
‘Have you heard the rumour about Anne Summers?’ I later heard one colleague was asked.
‘It’s not a rumour,’ she was informed by another Fairfax journalist. ‘It’s a fact.’
The story was especially insidious because of its veneer of apparent verisimilitude. The so-called harassment had taken place at a Christmas party. I was soon to learn that this was a key word in the lexicon of sexual harassment complaints. (So much so that Chris Ronalds, a barrister friend of mine who handles a number of harassment complaints, told me she thought Christmas parties should go the way of Guy Fawkes Night and be outlawed altogether.) People who would not normally believe that I would harass an employee might concede that anything was possible at a Christmas party. Worse, there were supposedly photographs. Proof, in other words. It had taken an especially Machiavellian mind to construct this scenario, but the people who were putting the story around (and I learned later that the story was, most likely, deliberately concocted and circulated) found that it fell on fertile ground. It was a damn good story: one of Australia’s leading feminists hoist with the petard of the very laws she’d had a hand in developing. (While I worked in Paul Keating’s office in 1992, I had helped with amendments to the Sex Discrimination Act that implemented recommendations of a review of the legislation by Michael Lavarch that, among other things, extended the sexual harassment provisions of the 1984 Act from employment to education and the provision of goods and services.) Not long before, she’d defended Helen Garner’s book The First Stone, a sympathetic account of a man accused of sexual harassment at a university college in Melbourne. It was a story that people simply could not resist repeating and, before long, reporting.
Miranda Devine, the well-known right-wing and anti-feminist columnist, then employed by Sydney’s Daily Telegraph-Mirror, who in more than two decades has rarely bypassed an opportunity to comment unfavourably about me, wrote a colourful column about the ‘fabulous characters’ who ‘peopled’ the rumour:
‘There’s Summers herself, 50, blonde, leggy and sharp. Her toothy young American-born boyfriend Chip. Her serious short-haired deputy Deborah Tarrant fighting for her job with two small children at home to support. Then of course there is the mysterious anti-hero, Good Weekend photographer Brendan Read, who takes beautiful pictures and looks beautiful himself, in a long-haired beefcake way,’ she wrote. ‘There were great props, too, like the Good Weekend staff ’s festive season poster with Summers as a nude angel on top of a human Christmas tree. And, of course, there’s The Tape, recording an acrimonious meeting on July 7 between Summers and Tarrant, complete with intimate exchanges.’5
As this florid account suggests, this workplace drama was so bizarre that it resembled a soap opera. Even more than twenty years later and recounting only an outline of what happened, the story is scarcely believable. But at the time I had to believe it, because it was happening—and it was happ
ening to me. I tried frantically to find out if a complaint was going to be made, and what conduct on my part could possibly have prompted it. Ultimately, there was no complaint—nor any reason for one—but that did not stop the rumours from escalating and accumulating more salacious detail on every retelling. Nor did it prevent the journalists’ union from escalating the matter into a full-blown industrial dispute and, in the three months before it was finally over, several people losing their jobs.
Essentially what happened was this: the Good Weekend photographer involved told Fairfax management he did not propose to lodge a complaint and that there was no behaviour of mine that he wished to complain about, but it took him two weeks to sign a letter to this effect; I fired my deputy editor for disloyalty for behaviour associated with the matter; the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), the journalists’ union, instigated industrial action, first directing a work-to-rule at Good Weekend, then a Fairfax-wide stoppage, to protest my management style. Ultimately the photographer resigned, the MEAA ended its campaign, several of my staff left and I continued in the job. But this bland summary scarcely does justice to a situation where other agendas were being brought into play, old scores against the company being settled, and individual grievances that had nothing to do with me became part of the mix. And I was the one in the spotlight, I was the one who, in defending herself and her reputation against insidious rumours of poor behaviour, became the target. As well, intimidatory tactics were used to pressure those of my staff who were loyal into lining up against me. All the time this was happening, I was trying to control my emotions. I could not afford to crack-up but I came very close. How do you retain composure, and continue to try to put out a magazine, when you are the subject of such lurid speculation?
