Unfettered and Alive

by Anne Summers

  There was an incredible allure to the conversations, to being live onstage talking with a well-known person in front of a rapt audience. At times I was almost delirious with disbelief. Was I really on stage at Sydney Theatre, talking with Cate Blanchett? Did I actually just ask the head of the Australian Army, Lieutenant General David Morrison, about rape in war? I’d been bold enough to approach Blanchett because I’d seen her on British television, mentioning my name and The Misogyny Factor, while she was promoting her new movie Blue Jasmine. She agreed to the event which of course was a massive sell-out as well, and she allowed us an interview and a photoshoot for the June 2014 issue of ASR where, once again, Peter Brew-Bevan showed his singular talent. Blanchett rarely allowed herself to be photographed in Australia, so this was a very special gift.8 After Blanchett, it was easy to approach people and no one refused; we even had publicists chasing us, suggesting clients they argued would be good talent. I found myself constantly amazed at how quickly we had created legitimacy and respect.

  I was becoming increasingly proud of what our little team was able to achieve with both the magazine and the events. It was nerve-wracking constantly stepping into the unknown, but I loved this living dangerously. What would we do next? We talked of inviting Hillary Clinton. We had had a Yes from Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF, who was going to be in Australia for the G20 meeting in November 2014. I ran into Robyn Archer, the extraordinarily talented singer and international festival director at the University of Adelaide. We were both getting honorary degrees at our old alma mater, and she greeted me with a huge enthusiastic grin: ‘It’s amazing the way you have reinvented yourself.’ I loved getting such comments. I took it as validation that what I’d become was worthwhile. There seemed to be no limit to where our imagination and energy might take us, and I was revelling in it. It was just two years since I’d been marooned in lassitude and misery, because nobody wanted me. Now I was so much in demand that I worked frenetically. And now I could appreciate the awards: being named by Daily Life as one of 2012’s ‘most influential female voices’ and, in 2013, Julia Gillard and I being ranked equal No. 7 on the Cultural Power list of the Financial Review’s Power List for that year. It was satisfying that these accolades were in recognition not of past glories, but for what I doing now. The Financial Review citation read: ‘Gillard made the speech. Summers prosecuted the case. And their live talk shows sold out within hours.’9

  I look back in amazement at just how much I did during those three years and yet the more I did, the more energised I became, and the more I felt I could do. Far from winding down, as we used to believe was both inevitable and desirable as one passed what used to be the official retirement age, my life has had more challenges, become more demanding and offered greater rewards than almost any other time in my life. I was the busiest I had ever been, producing the magazine, curating and presenting the conversation events, giving large numbers of speeches, writing what had become a more regular opinion column for Fairfax media, and trying to find the time to work on this book. I was annoyed, but not deterred, when LaGarde cancelled at the last moment. I set about trying to secure another big-name international guest. Sometimes I thought I was pushing myself a little too much but slowing down was not in my nature. I was not going to stop until I was forced to.

  On 11 March 2015, the day before I turned 70, I went to see Dr Ben Jonker the man I now had to call ‘my neurologist’. The news he had was not good. In August 2014 he had detected a tumour at the front of my brain. It was a meningioma. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ he’d said, ‘but let’s check again in a year.’ Now the MRI showed it had grown slightly, from 18.5 × 13 millimetres to 20 × 15 millimetres. ‘Not too big’, he said, but neither was it ‘small’. It was on the edge of my brain rather than inside it, which was good, but it was ‘sitting very close to the nerve that controls the eye’; there was a small risk to my vision. We had three options: do nothing and see if it keeps growing; try to blast it away with radiation or take it out. Because the tumour was accessible he recommended the latter. Brain surgery. It was not urgent, he said, just whenever I—and he—could fit it in. I took out my diary. My next conversation event, with Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick, was locked in for 7 May. What about the following week? That worked for Dr Jonker. He explained in excruciating detail where and how he was going to cut open my skull. The surgery was set for 14 May.

  Whatever fear I had about what was to happen I buried so deeply that I could not feel it. I was utterly calm and totally methodical as I worked out what needed to be done over the coming nine weeks. I had initially thought I would tell everyone, even put out a press release that would announce I’d be out of action for a few months, but the reaction of the first couple of people was so extreme that I thought better of it. One friend literally screamed. I learned that you simply couldn’t say the words ‘brain tumour’ without people really freaking out. I decided I would tell my family, a few close friends and only those others who absolutely had to know.

  The next nine weeks were as hectic as any over the past year. I presided over the editing and production of the April/May 2015 issue of ASR—our twelfth—and wrote the cover story, an intensely researched and lengthy profile of Elizabeth Broderick. I ran two Conversation events, the one with Broderick and, a few weeks earlier, another with the football legend Adam Goodes. In an effort to sell tickets and build up our revenue, I’d put enormous effort into marketing both these events, including hiring Luisa Low, a smart young woman who’d run social media for the Greens during the recent NSW state election. She was to work all-out for a month to sell the Broderick event, especially to schools. And on 17 April, with my brother Tony, I’d driven the nine hours from Sydney to Deniliquin in the Riverina district of New South Wales for a two-day family reunion. Ten days earlier I’d found myself unaccountably nervous before the Goodes event. I supposed it was because I knew so little about football and while the conversation was supposed to deal with Goodes’s personal story of how he found his way as a young Indigenous Australian, and his championing of issues such as ending violence against women, I worried that my total ignorance of the game might somehow make the whole event seem unauthentic. I wanted to hide in my dressing room and try to calm myself with peppermint tea but Adam, perhaps sensing my stage fright, engaged me. Everyone else had left the backstage area, so it was just the two of us, standing awkwardly in a doorway. I’d met him just once before, at the Sydney Swans headquarters a few weeks earlier, when I had run through the topics for tonight’s discussion. It had taken more than a year of chasing to get Goodes. In 2014 he was Australian of the Year, which meant multiple speaking engagements as well as his football commitments, but he had promised to make time early in 2015. By April when we finally scheduled it, Goodes was having a very rough time on the field, being routinely booed. The hostility was widely seen as payback for his strong stance on Indigenous issues; he’d copped a lot of flak the year before when he’d singled out from the yelling crowd at a Melbourne game a young girl—she turned out to be just thirteen-years-old—for calling him an ‘ape’. She was escorted off. Later she apologised, she and Goodes had a conversation and he’d dismissed what happened as due to her youth and ignorance, but many football fans still booed whenever he came on the field. He became so demoralised that he did not play several games and in September 2015, refused to undertake the lap of honour accorded to all retiring champions in his final game. It was a shameful episode in Australian sport but that April night at the City Recital Hall in Sydney’s Angel Place you would never have guessed this young man was undergoing such a crisis as he tried to calm me. He told me he often got nervous before big games, especially those being played at iconic locations such as the MCG. ‘How did he deal with those nerves?’ I asked him. He’d run up to the top of the stand a few times, he said. That usually settled him down. I laughed. ‘There’s no way I’m doing that,’ I said, pointing to my high heels. He used language to settle me. I don’t remember wha
t he said but the effect of him—a man, a footballer, half my age—talking, working to calm me, to give me the confidence to go on, was something that moved me profoundly. On stage, he revealed himself to be as smart and self-deprecating a man as everyone who knew him had assured me he was. There were a lot of little boys in the audience that night, brought along by their mothers to experience a different kind of role model. He lifted them up, along with the rest of the audience in a way that I have seldom seen. As for me, I felt comfortable enough to ask him a few questions about football.10

  Just four weeks later I was back at the City Recital Hall to converse with Elizabeth Broderick. I felt more relaxed this time. I was familiar with the subject matter, I got on well with Liz, I was pleased that we’d varied the usual format of the event to enable Qantas CEO Alan Joyce and Macquarie Bank chairman Kevin McCann, two leading businessmen who were members of her Male Champions of Change group, to join us on stage for part of the event. Most of all I was thrilled and relieved that we’d sold a huge number of tickets … Kevin McCann could not believe the crowd: ‘You must have 700 people here’, he said. Close enough, and everyone was buzzing with excitement. It was nearly two years since Julia Gillard had been deposed and the ripple effect was continuing; everyone was here to learn how women could overcome the obstacles that still stood in the way of full equality. How could it get better? Several questioners challenged the CEOs, but it was the line of schoolgirls in uniform waiting to ask questions that was a gratifying confirmation that the next generation was stepping up.

  The day before the surgery was busy. I had to be at St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst early for another MRI; this would provide Dr Jonker with the latest possible image of the tumour. I then rushed down to the lawyer’s office in East Sydney to sign a will and documents to give Chip power to make decisions on my behalf. Just in case. Then back to St Vincent’s, for pre-admission form-filling. I am looking forward to being in hospital, I told myself, I could do with the rest. The next morning, carrying my small overnight bag, I walked the four blocks along Victoria Street back to the hospital. I passed Bar Coluzzo where I often had an almond croissant and a bitter espresso. I passed the snazzy new cancer centre which Elisabeth Wynhausen visited several times even though she, like the rest of us, knew her pancreatic cancer was unstoppable. She had died on 5 September two years earlier. Soon I was in pre-surgery wearing a blue and white striped robe, lying on a bed in front of a window looking over the street. I took a selfie and sent it to Chip. Just in case. The photo is still in my phone; you can see the plane trees of Victoria Street, and cars driving past. Just a normal day for everyone else. Before my last big surgery, more than 30 years earlier, I’d stared at myself in the mirror, at the Textacolour lines the surgeon had drawn on my chest, and knew that if nothing went wrong I would wake up a different, more confident person. Now I was about to have my skull cut open, and I had a letter from Dr Jonker outlining everything that could go wrong, ‘including death’. In the photograph I do not make eye contact. I am looking downwards, but I am smiling. I do not look worried. Or even resigned. I am simply there. Waiting.

  After surgery of some three and half hours, I was transferred to the ICU for a night that was incredibly stressful and made worse by Chip not being allowed to stay for more than a few minutes. It was not the whisper-quiet attentive place one sees on television. There was a hierarchy of ministration; the hearts got one-on-one constant care, while we brains had to wait for a passing nurse to notice our parched mouths and lips. I was relieved the next morning to escape to the greater democracy and comparative quiet of the ward. Dr Jonker looked with approval at his handiwork as he photographed it on my iPhone. That strip of shaved scalp and the black cross-hatching of the stitches, was that still me? I had had something cut out of my brain, my head hurt a lot, and my skull resembled a baseball. Now that it was over, I allowed myself to feel a little bit scared.

  I stayed in hospital for six days, until the pain subsided. I read Keith Richards’ highly entertaining autobiography, Life, on my phone. Dr Jonker told me about his neurosurgeon friend in New Zealand who had cared for Richards after he’d injured his head falling from a palm tree in Fiji. Neurologists from all over America kept calling, he said, but Richards decided to stay where he was. Later, the doctor accompanied the Rolling Stones on their European tour. Just to keep an eye on the patient, he said, but his rather envious colleagues felt that maybe he had rather too good a time with his newfound friend. Like Keith Richards, I fully recovered. Dr Jonker had been able to remove the entire tumour. It was benign. ‘No further treatment required’, his follow-up letter said. As I lay in my hospital bed, I thought of my many friends who had died in this hospital or across the road at the hospice: Peter Wilenski, Mick Young, Peter Blazey, Peter Field, Sasha Soldatow, Elisabeth Wynhausen. Once again, I was the lucky one. If you had to get something, and most of us will, I was fortunate that while what I got sounded terrifying, it had been easily treatable. I had no side-effects or ongoing problems. Two years later, my fingers could barely find the scar, my hair grew back the same as it had been and, unless I mentioned it, no one was any the wiser. Unlike so many of my friends, I did not need chemo, or radiation; I did not lose a limb, a faculty or my life. Nor was my sense of self in any way unsettled. I did not doubt that I would pick up my life exactly as it had been.

  I rested at home for six weeks, enjoying the unaccustomed luxury of spending my days reading. I read lots of trash but once I emerged from the opioid fog I devoted myself to Frank Moorhouse’s Edith Campbell Berry trilogy.11 I read the three lengthy volumes one after another, and was able to get a true appreciation of the magnitude of what Moorhouse had accomplished. I marvelled at his writing, at his research, his diligence and his dedication to such a long project, particularly after the Miles Franklin prize had so stupidly ruled his first volume ineligible for not being ‘Australian enough’. I was glad that he had not been deterred, because most of all I admired the character Frank had created. I could not think of her like anyone in Australian fiction: a smart, ambitious woman who’d dedicated her early working life to world peace through her job at the League of Nations in Geneva, who’d experienced the bitter disappointment of its failure and the consequent Second World War, who’d been shut out of its successor, the United Nations, but who had returned to Australia to play an important role in the creation of our national capital in Canberra. Edith Campbell Berry was like so many of the women I knew. She was brave and creative, a hard worker and a risk-taker, sexually adventurous, a loyal friend, someone who rode the wave of history that she’d been born into with verve and joy. In so many ways, she was me. And I was not the only woman who identified with her. At the 2011 Sydney Writers’ Festival, Annabel Crabb, the much-admired ABC-TV star, arrived dressed as Edith to chair a session called ‘What would Edith do?’ As did several of her friends. They are a good generation younger than me, but they too wanted to be this woman.

  When I was young and looking for someone on whom to model my life, I too turned to fictional characters, but once I’d outgrown fourteen-year-old Judy in Seven Little Australians, I could not find any Australian women to guide me. I despised Mary Mahony, who I judged as characterising the worst God’s Police tendencies, subverting the ambitions and mocking the dreams of her endlessly restless husband Richard. (When I re-read The Fortunes of Richard Mahony in 2009, I took a totally different view of these two characters. Now I saw Mary as long-suffering, put-upon, even abused by her erratic and irresponsible spouse.) The fictional character who most influenced me in my twenties was Martha Quest, the woman whose life from girlhood to middle-age was chronicled in five novels by Doris Lessing, in what was known as the ‘Children of Violence’ series. I empathised with Martha’s emotional turmoil, her striving for individual freedom and her struggle to know who, underneath everything, she really was. But the books were set in what was then known as Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe today), and Martha’s colonial life and communist politics had scarce resembl
ance to my own. I had thought I would be better imitating the lives of real women, even if they were French, like Simone de Beauvoir, and much older than me. I thought the way she lived was ideal: a free relationship with her lifelong lover, no marriage, no kids, a life of writing and reading and political activity conducted in cafés, and travelling to exotic places like Algiers. Her life was, I used to think, a template for the one I wanted. More than any of the American or British feminists, most of whom were closer to my age and still figuring life out for themselves, this strange French woman was a model for this young Australian woman. It wasn’t just the feminism—a word we did not use then—it was the freedom, the escape from suburban dreariness, the life of the mind, conducted with elegance and sophistication. Decades later, de Beauvoir’s life was revealed to have flaws that would have horrified me when I was younger. She had been sexually rejected by Sartre while she was still in her twenties; the free and open relationship he had proposed turned out to be very one-sided but she stayed loyal to him, working side by side with him almost every day and editing his work until the end of his life. She agreed to find girlfriends for him, often by first seducing them herself. It was not until she began her affair with the American writer Nelson Algren in Chicago in 1947 that, at the age of 39, she experienced her first orgasm. Nor, until she began work on The Second Sex in 1946, she claimed later in her life, did she have any understanding that women were systematically subordinated.12 Despite her very considerable literary achievements, her decades-long fame and her being practically worshipped by younger generations of feminists, de Beauvoir was a doormat when it came to men. These revelations, laid out in Deirdre Bair’s important biography,13 in de Beauvoir’s own letters and Hazel Rowley’s marvellous book about the relationship of these two important existentialists,14 forced us to see our heroine’s flaws and shortcomings. I did not feel a sense of betrayal on learning these things. Once, I might have judged her more harshly, but now I understood that we still are prisoners of our early formation, even when we think we have repudiated it. Doris Lessing, a decade younger, says she started writing around the same time as de Beauvoir but maintains, ‘She didn’t like being a woman, you see. She talks with real dislike and disgust about her body’.15 Perhaps she just did not like what being a woman meant more than seven decades ago. French women had only recently won the right to vote (in 1944) and while she proved that women could rebel against the bourgeois strictures they had been raised to conform to, could get an education, practise free love, refuse to be a mother or a wife, it turned out she could not completely escape the tyranny of her sex. She documented her journey of freedom, with all its contradictions and heartbreaks, so that we too can retrace the troubled road to emancipation. But none of that mattered in the 1970s, when I was learning about a life that women like her made possible for women like me.