Unfettered and Alive

by Anne Summers

  For a while I tinkered with the idea of telling the story of Australia’s most famous colonial criminal, Ned Kelly, from the point of view of his mother. The tough and formidable Ellen Kelly outlived most of her nine children, and was reputed to have said to Ned as he faced the gallows: ‘Die like a Kelly, son.’ I soon realised, though, that the Kelly literature was immense, dense and constantly growing. I feared there might not be an inexhaustible appetite for the Kellys. Again, it was too risky. I toyed with a biography of a house. The dwelling I had in mind was a terrace house in Challis Avenue in Sydney’s Potts Point. I thought I could tell a sliver of the story of Sydney through the lives of some of the beguiling inhabitants of this particular house. Ros Palmer, the antiques dealer, was one. She had transitioned from Rod to being a woman while living in the house and had financed the surgery by selling a rather special French clock to an up-and-coming young collector. Donald Stewart was the next to live there. He was a former policeman who had become a lawyer and then a judge, who had crusaded against drugs and corruption. He had run the 1980 Royal Commission of Inquiry into Drug Trafficking and in 1984 had been appointed the inaugural chairman of the National Crime Authority. He certainly would have had plenty of stories to tell. But to do this book, I would need the cooperation of the current occupant and, in the end and after many hours spent at the Land Titles Office checking the original subdivision of this part of Potts Point, I took the view that Paul Keating was unlikely to agree. And I did not want to press him. I let that idea drift away.

  It had become glaringly obvious that a good book idea was not going to come easily, and I could no longer just wait for the right idea to grab me. I wanted to be doing something now. I needed work. I also was keen to engage in the political conversation, which was becoming more interesting than it had been in decades. Julia Gillard had been Prime Minister, the first Australian woman to hold the job, for more than a year. There were mutterings about her, and some ugly talk, all of it around the fact she was female. People were starting to ask: is she being judged on her performance or on her gender? Some of us were asking whether these two could, in fact, be separated. I felt I should be trying to understand what was happening here. I needed to get back in the game.

  I had to find a way to let the worlds of journalism and politics know that I was still around, and that I had things to say. The best way to do that, I figured, was to write a big, bold piece that would get noticed, get people wanting to hear more from me. I rang Ben Naparstek, editor of the Monthly, the somewhat serious Melbourne-based periodical that was read in all the places where I wanted to get noticed. I proposed that I do a comprehensive profile of Andrew Bolt, the controversial right-wing columnist, who was in the news at the time as he awaited a judgment from the Federal Court on a charge of racial vilification, brought by a number of Indigenous Australians because of a 2009 column entitled ‘White is the new Black’. (The Court ultimately found against Bolt.) Naparstek readily agreed, and my 6800-word profile ran over ten pages in the October 2011 issue.2 It attracted a lot of attention, in part because I had a scoop about a past personal relationship of Bolt’s but also because of the proposition I advanced in the piece. Based on the very large number of interviews I had conducted with people who’d known Bolt over decades, including when he had very different politics years earlier, I argued that he was a political opportunist. He had seen an opening in the newly expanding and increasingly polarised world of opinion and commentary for a strong right-wing voice, especially one that was not afraid to be contentious. He had stepped into that role and rapidly made it seem as if this was who he had always been. He quickly assumed a huge media profile with his regular nationally syndicated columns that attracted a massive online commentary, plus his daily radio and weekly television shows. Bolt had not cooperated with me; he’d even refused to confirm details of his biography, arguing that to do so would give credence to anything else I wrote about him. But he was enraged after publication, angry about what I’d said about his family, his former fiancée and, I suspect most of all, how I’d positioned him as entrepreneurial rather than principled in his politics.

  The response was astonishing. I was suddenly getting work again, lots of it: more commissions from the Monthly, and I returned to regular appearances in the Sydney Morning Herald with the Age, too, now interested in my views. There were invitations to give speeches including, early in 2012, one from the University of Newcastle asking me to deliver its annual Human Rights and Social Justice lecture on 31 August that year. And Andrew Leigh, the ALP federal member for Fraser in the ACT, had asked me to deliver the bi-annual Fraser oration, in July. This was a perfect opportunity to set out my thoughts on why what I was now calling ‘the equality project’ was still not even close to being realised.3 Why, I asked in the oration, was Australia so successful with huge nation-building projects such as the Snowy River Project or the Overland Telegraph, but so hopeless at what should have been the much simpler social project of achieving equality of the sexes: ‘Why have we Australians denied ourselves the benefits of equality? Why have we been so irrational as to forego the economic and other advantages that would stem from the equality project?’ In addressing this question, I drew on what I regarded as an extraordinarily perceptive speech delivered in 2011 by US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. Speaking at an APEC Women and the Economy Summit in San Francisco, Clinton asked a similar question to the one I was posing. ‘Why, when we have already achieved so much, do we need to keep pushing further?’ The answer: ‘because evidence of progress is not evidence of success.’4 It was a light-bulb moment for me. We had spent the past 40 years measuring our progress, counting and tallying up what we had achieved, but we had not asked what success looked like. Perhaps, I speculated, we had assumed the two things were synonymous. They weren’t, but our preoccupation with progress had had the unintended consequence of blinding us to where we were headed—and whether we were even close to getting there.

  The speech got some attention, including from Kathy Bail, an old friend who was now publisher at NewSouth Books, the publishing arm of the University of New South Wales. Would I be interested in turning the speech into a short ebook? It could feed into the growing discussion around reactions to Julia Gillard’s prime ministership? Sure, I told Kathy, but you might want to also include the speech I’ll be giving next month in Newcastle which will directly address that topic. I called the Newcastle speech ‘Her Rights at Work: the political persecution of Australia’s first female Prime Minister’5 and I used it to take a hard look at the extent to which our Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, had been subjected to unfair attack because of her sex. The speech needed a lot of research because I had decided to frame the lecture through a ‘rights at work’ perspective and explore whether, if she were an ordinary employee, the way she had been treated would be in breach of discrimination and industrial relations laws. I sought the advice of lawyers and various practitioners in industrial relations and discrimination law. I had also begun seeing some of the sexualised material about Gillard that was circulating via email and on websites, so I sent out a call to friends and to the world, via Facebook, asking people to send me more examples. Soon I was seeing an avalanche of material, some of it breathtakingly crude in itself, but when ‘enhanced’ with photoshopped images of the Prime Minister, or ‘jokes’ about her, were the most sickening things I had ever seen about a public figure. It was then I discovered, too, the images the cartoonist Larry Pickering was emailing to every member of federal Parliament. Pickering had once been a mainstream artist employed by major newspapers including, just before my time, the National Times, but he had now retreated to the hate cave where he produced a daily dose of vitriol, most of it sexually based, and a great deal of it directed at Gillard. He drew her carrying a massive dildo. In a former life, Pickering had produced a famous annual calendar of male politicians with enormous penises; this ‘joke’ now seemed to have transformed itself into a view that to be a political leader, you had to have a dick. If
you were a woman, you’d have to make do with a fake one. I spoke to several serving federal MPs, who confirmed they received these disgusting cartoons virtually every day. Several sent me copies. None had thought to complain about it. ‘I just delete them,’ one MP told me. I started to compile a PowerPoint presentation to accompany my speech. I realised I would have to warn the audience before I showed it.

  On the way up to Newcastle, I heard on the radio a report that the shock jock broadcaster Alan Jones had that morning attacked a number of prominent women, including Gillard, accusing them of wanting to ‘destroy the joint’. The attacks on the Prime Minister were already in the news, in part because she herself had made some remarks about ‘misogynist nutjobs on the internet’ who had been attacking her. My speech became an instant hit. Australia, it seemed, was ready to confront why it was engaging in the cruel and inexplicable demolition of the woman who just two years earlier we had celebrated with such pride and exuberance. I received a huge number of emails and posts on social media responding to what I had said. Many people thanked me for standing-up against the vilification of Gillard, and for giving them some means of fighting back—by sharing my speech. I also received a number of letters of apology, mostly from men, who told me they had shared some of these hateful emails and now they felt ashamed. I had dozens of requests: for interviews, to reprint excerpts or even the full speech. It became part of the conversation, the zeitgeist. Articles commented on it; there was furious dispute about the culpability of the Canberra Press Gallery for not reporting the Pickering onslaught against Gillard. Almost 8000 people read the speech on my website in the first few days after I delivered it. Because of the obscene nature of some of the content, I posted two versions: Vanilla and R-rated, and gave people the choice as to which one they wanted to read. I also included an X-rated appendix of material that was just too pornographic to present on the day. Large numbers also watched the video on the University of Newcastle’s website that showed me delivering it. Then some five weeks later, Gillard gave her famous ‘sexism and misogyny’ speech to Parliament6 that instantly went viral and everything went totally crazy. In turn, my speech went international, picked-up and praised—and, all importantly, linked to—by the New Yorker. That night I got another 10,000 visits to my website as a direct result of that endorsement. The traffic continued to grow, with many people coming back to the site time and again, to re-read the lecture or to share it with colleagues. By the end of the year, a phenomenal 200,000 visitors had been to my little website. The talk around what I’d said kept growing; I became a bit of a ‘go to’ person for any media wanting a view on Gillard. A year earlier, I’d been miserable because I had no work. Now, I could scarcely keep up with all the assignments.

  I was working on a big profile for the Monthly of the businessman David Gonski, who had recently completed a review of education for the federal government, that recommended a radical needs-based school-funding model. This was a popular finding with the public education sector and soon the union had everyone wearing buttons that said ‘I give a Gonski’. Yet, it seemed to me, that unless they were regular readers of the business pages of newspapers, no one really knew anything about this man. I had followed Gonski around, observing him give several big speeches, I’d spoken to dozens of people who knew or had worked with him, and I sat down twice with the man himself for formal on-the-record interviews. A full-on profile, in other words. I took particular care in crafting this piece. I wanted to get it right: the tone, the man himself, the significance of this South African immigrant teaming up with a Prime Minister who was herself an immigrant, from Wales, to deliver unprecedented and much-needed reforms to the way Australian schools were funded. Most of all, I wanted the piece to dispel any preconceptions readers might have that it was impossible to write an interesting piece about a businessman. I was pleased with what I submitted, but I soon became anxious and then angry when I saw how the article had been edited. John van Tiggelen had recently replaced Ben Naparstek as editor and he took astonishing liberties, not just rewriting key paragraphs but actually inserting new material of a political nature that I not only had not written, but totally disagreed with. I told him that I would not tolerate such interference. He agreed to restore my original text, but a few days later when I received the copy-edit I saw that a new set of changes had been made. Just one of them, replacing my description of Gonski’s ‘soft South African’ accent with the word ‘Afrikaans’, was enough to have me yelling down the phone and resisting all pleas and promises from the editor. I withdrew the article from publication. Trust was broken, they were totally unprofessional, I would never work with the Monthly again. But what was I going to do with the piece? I’d done a lot work, it was a good article and—I could not forget—I had been expecting to be well-paid for it.

  I offered the piece around, but no one wanted it. Although it had a lot to say about a man whose name had now become synonymous with education funding reform, it seemed that magazine editors were only interested in articles they themselves commissioned. I understood this. A magazine must embody its editor’s ideas, interests, obsessions and quirks; otherwise it has no shape or, as we used to say about women’s magazines back in New York, no personality. (One of the favourite ploys of the marketing people was to have the editor try to describe the kind of person the magazine was; they would then construct their sales pitches around this persona.) I suddenly understood something else. If my Gonski profile was to be published, I would have to publish it myself. My new career as a magazine editor and publisher was born in that moment. It was a totally impetuous act. I had no money, I had no business plan, I had no plan at all, really, but I did have an idea, a very strong one that had been bubbling away in the back of my brain for a long time now. I had my own website where I posted some of my writing, but I still hankered for a publication where I could also bring together the work of others. And not just writing, either. I wanted art and photography, design and architecture, and my take on fashion. In fact, the more I excitedly thought about it, what I wanted was my own magazine. I wanted to edit, to commission and create something unique, something I considered absent from the current Australian publishing scene. Even though it would be a digital publication—there was no way I could even consider print, given the cost of paper, printing and postage—I saw it as a magazine. It was not going to be a blog or a website. It would look like a magazine, with pages that could be flipped, like an ebook, and so each page would be designed as if it were for print. It would report, not opine. The opinion industry in Australia was already large and growing. Earlier in the year, Chip had left the Sydney Writers’ Festival for the ABC, and he was now in charge of the national broadcaster’s opinion and analysis website, The Drum. His work epitomised this trend; it was his job to oversee the commissioning and publication of up to ten pieces a day that analysed or commented upon current political, economic and social issues. We were both now back in the media, although in very different places. Soon we would be jokingly comparing with each other how our respective publications represented the two major strands in contemporary journalism.

  My publication would report and reflect on the world not just as it was but as we wanted it to be. Its reporting, and choice of subject matter, would reflect the diversity and complexity of our society—and the world. But it would not confine its editorial agenda to the daily or even weekly news cycle. We would try to fill gaps left by other publications. And we would be rigorously edited. I had learned in New York that rigorous fact checking, tough editing and, where needed, numerous rewrites were essential to producing a credible and interesting publication. We would read well but, just as important, we would look great which meant we needed to have the very best art director. It would be, I explained excitedly to the people I wanted to help me realise this crazy ambition, ‘a mixture of the New Yorker, Rolling Stone and the old Esquire.’ I hoped that description conveyed my lofty ideals: big ideas, great writing, startling photography. My first call was to Ricky Onsman, the
amazingly-creative digital producer who had created and maintained my website for years now: ‘I have this great idea, Ricky!’ I heard him groan, but he came on board immediately. In short order, I found the rest of the team: Foong Ling Kong, the brilliant editor who had done such a great job with The Lost Mother and who was now freelancing; Ashley Hogan, who’d worked as a researcher and speechwriter for Senator John Faulkner and now volunteered herself as a writer, researcher and general helper; and Stephen Clark, who had a full-time design job with Fairfax but who gamely offered to give up nights and weekends to create a stunningly designed magazine. My longstanding friends David Hay in New York and Paula Weideger in London agreed to write regularly, giving me a small core of top-notch writers. Coming up with the name for the magazine was surprisingly easy. I worried that it would sound too self-promotional, but everyone I consulted advised that I was trusted as a reporter so by using my own name readers would know exactly what to expect.

  The first issue of Anne Summers Reports, which we quickly shortened to ASR, was published at the end of November 2012, just six weeks after the Monthly had rejected my Gonski profile which was now our cover story. ‘Get Gonski. Meet the man behind the schools report’ was our main cover line. Everyone donated their talent, which meant we were able to produce that first issue for just the $70 it cost to register the business name. But I’d need money for subsequent issues. The production team would in future be paid market rates for their work, and so would the writers, artists and photographers. I despised the growing trend of internet publications not paying contributors; if we could not be professional, we did not deserve to exist. I had decided that ASR should be free to subscribers, although I’d ask for donations. I hoped this way we would grow quickly, creating a large audience that would be attractive to advertisers. Digital advertising was taking off; I was confident we could make it work. But it seemed necessary, both for readers and for potential advertisers, to position the magazine more precisely. I think it was me who came up with the tag line ‘Sane. Factual. Relevant’. People loved its directness, and they appreciated a pledge that few other media at that time could credibly make. We got around 750 subscriptions and almost $4000 in donations in the first fortnight. I had hoped for more, but I had to admit that for a crazy idea that was less than two months old, we were doing pretty well. Out of nothing, something special had happened. I could not wait to see where it would go.