No Job for a Woman

by Sallyanne Atkinson

  Born in 1942 to an Irish father and Australian mother, Sallyanne Atkinson has had a long career in politics and business. A former Lord Mayor of Brisbane, former Senior Trade Commissioner to Paris and former Special Representative for Queensland in South East Asia, she has been a non-executive company director since 1991 and is chairman or board member of several organisations. The author of Around Brisbane (UQP, 1978) and Sallyanne Atkinson’s Brisbane, she regularly appears on television and radio and contributes to newspapers. She is a mother and grandmother and lives in Brisbane.

  To the memory of Ruth and Terry Kerr, who created not only me and my sisters but were also directly responsible for 15 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren – a lot of lives.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue

  AN ITINERANT CHILDHOOD

  THE COLONIAL EXPERIENCE

  NOT YET THE GOLD COAST

  SWIMMING UPSTREAM

  SOMETHING TO FALL BACK ON

  THE SWINGING SIXTIES

  THE SCOTTISH ‘BEAN CLUB’

  THE JUGGLING ACT

  AN ACCIDENTAL POLITICIAN

  LOOKING AT LIFE THROUGH A MUNICIPAL DRAINPIPE

  I’LL TAKE CITY HALL

  MORE THAN ROADS, RATES AND RUBBISH

  THE SECOND TIME AROUND

  THIS SPORTING LIFE

  AN UNEXPECTED LOSS

  LEAPING OVER THE PRECIPICE

  BRISBANE IS NOT PARIS

  FINDING SOMETHING USEFUL TO DO

  A BEND IN THE RIVER

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  PROLOGUE

  ‘They’ll never give that seat to a woman,’ they said. ‘That seat’ was the ward of Indooroopilly in the Brisbane City Council. The largest council in Australia, its wards are the equivalent of state government electorates, each with an average of 28,000 voters. Indooroopilly was so safe for the conservatives that in the 1972 election, when Labor had won 20 of the 21 wards, Indooroopilly was the only one it didn’t. Until then no woman on either side of politics had been given a safe seat to contest; it was a standing joke that women were usually given the safe seats of the political party other than the one they belonged to.

  Yet I won in the Brisbane City Council elections in March 1979 and went on to be the Alderman for Indooroopilly for the next two terms. At the time I was elected there were no women in the national House of Representatives; only four women had ever been elected to that House. Three had been one-termers and the other was the widow of a former prime minister.

  Six years later I campaigned to be Lord Mayor, and the naysayers were at it again. Even my mother said I couldn’t win. ‘Brisbane is a Labor town, dear.’

  On 31 March, the day of the 1985 election, I visited polling booths across the 1200 square kilometres that was the City of Brisbane, criss-crossing from Sandgate in the east to Chermside in the north, west to Toowong and south to Mount Gravatt. When the polls closed at 6 pm I went home to shower and change. I was keen to get into City Hall as soon as I could. As Leader of the Opposition I had an office there and when I arrived it was full of campaign people. With the tally room downstairs and results filtering in almost as soon as they were being posted, the excitement was palpable.

  By 7.30 pm I had won the mayoralty and Liberal candidates had won 16 of the 26 wards. We had taken City Hall, and I had become the first woman Lord Mayor of Brisbane, and the first Liberal. I was ushered down to the tally room amid a crowd of jubilant supporters, Liberal Party people and my children’s friends, to be greeted with cheers and applause. Roy Harvey, the outgoing Lord Mayor, graciously came forward to congratulate me.

  In the swarm of reporters and photographers, someone from the Sunday Sun showed me the billboard they had printed for the next morning. Above my smiling face the headline read: ‘She’s Our Lord Mayor’.

  Suddenly I realised I was.

  In my new role I would be in charge of a city of three-quarters of a million people, with a budget of half a billion dollars and a workforce of 8000. I would have to lead and manage 26 elected aldermen, only two of whom were women and many of whom had recently been referring to me behind my back as ‘the little troublemaker from the western suburbs’ and to my face as ‘Tinkerbell’. I was painfully aware not only that politics is probably the only profession for which there is no real training, but that city government also involves management for which I had no training either.

  I also knew that my life would never be the same again. I had had a taste of public office, I had been on television and in the newspapers, but this was different. From now on I would be vulnerable, right out in front, taking leadership responsibility and possibly exposing myself to failure and ridicule. No longer did I have the comfort of being part of the pack, of being able to bury myself in the team. As an alderman I had some experience of being a public figure who must incorporate several different personae; other people see you through the prism of their own needs and prejudices and react accordingly. Sometimes you are happy to play the various roles. But it is vital, and often difficult, to keep hold of the person who is the authentic you.

  For all these reasons, I knew that my new job was going to present a challenge, and in some ways a contradictory one. I would have to learn how to compromise and how to be firm, when to stand up for my views and when to yield. I would also learn how well my previous life had prepared me for what lay ahead.

  AN ITINERANT CHILDHOOD

  I was born in the middle of a cold Sydney winter right in the middle of World War II. Two months earlier the battle of the Coral Sea had been fought off the coast of Queensland. Weeks earlier, Japanese submarines had been detected in Sydney Harbour. Two days before I was born the Japanese had landed in Papua to be eventually repulsed along the Kokoda Track. On the very day I was born US general Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander of the SouthWest Pacific, arrived in Brisbane, having relocated his headquarters from Melbourne to be closer to the action.

  My parents had met in glamorous circumstances in the exotic city that was Colombo in the 1930s. My mother, Ruth, whose maiden name was Helmore, was a beautiful girl of 17, sophisticated beyond her years and making her first trip overseas from her home in Sydney. She had been sent to Colombo to stay with her aunt and uncle, possibly in the hope that she would marry an eligible bachelor. My father, Charles Terence (Terry) Kerr, was handsome, almost twice her age and divorced, an accountant with a Belfast company that made machinery for the tea industry of Ceylon. He had spent much of his youth in Colombo and cut a dash in the fast-moving expatriate community.

  When he met the very pretty Ruth, he assumed that she was at least 25, ‘or I wouldn’t have looked at her’. Ruth returned to Sydney and they wrote to each other over the next two years. He proposed and they were married on April Fool’s Day 1939: the groom was 37, the bride 19. The wedding took place at St Stephen’s Presbyterian Church in Macquarie Street, Sydney. My mother’s wedding dress was the most beautiful I have ever seen, in a silvery crepe material it was high-necked and long-sleeved, and fitted her like a sheath. My mother, and probably her mother, would have preferred St Mark’s Anglican Church at Darling Point, the most fashionable church in Sydney, but the Church of England did not accept divorcees. My mother’s only brother, Norman, was best man. The bridegroom had no supporters of his own.

  After the wedding Mr and Mrs Terry Kerr set off on a round-the-world honeymoon. Photographs show them in Suva, Fiji and in Banff, Canada. They sent postcards from every port of call. Finally they arrived in Belfast, where Mum was to meet her new in-laws, and most importantly her seven-year-old stepdaughter Jill.

  Dad’s first marriage had been something of an accident. In his twenties he had been engaged to a Miss Shimmons in Bel
fast, the city of his birth. Where they had actually met we don’t know, but shortly before the wedding Miss Shimmons called it off. Dad took the next ship back to Colombo. Not long afterwards, Miss Shimmons’ sister, Hylda, went out to Ceylon and married the cast-off groom.

  It was not a happy marriage. Their daughter, Jill, was born in 1932 and it was while she was pregnant that Hylda fell properly in love. Or rather improperly – Jill later told me that her mother had been six months pregnant and at a dinner party when she looked across the table and fell in love with the man opposite, one of Terry’s friends.

  Because Hylda had left Dad and he was the wronged party, he had gained custody of Jill. Jill had gone to live with him in Colombo but soon after her seventh birthday, and a few months before Terry came to Sydney to marry again, she was despatched by ship, in the company of a woman she didn’t know, to Dad’s family in Belfast. At the end of her life Jill remembered her mother standing on the dock in Colombo screaming, ‘Don’t take my baby!’

  All her life my mother was critical of my father for having taken Jill from her mother, and then abandoning her, despite the fact that Mum was partly the cause of it. However, it was standard practice at the time for young children from India and Ceylon to be sent ‘home’ to relatives or boarding school; the climate of the East was held to be detrimental to their health and development.

  Jill went to Belfast and was subsequently sent to Penrhos, a boarding school in Colwyn Bay, Wales. During Easter 1940 she was on one of two ships that crossed from Holyhead to Belfast. One was torpedoed by the Germans and sunk with total loss of life, and Jill was on the other. Not surprisingly, she didn’t return to school in Wales, and spent the rest of the war living with first her grandmother in Belfast and then with our father’s sister, Eva, and her family in Sligo. She did not see her father again until the war was over.

  Jill was a truly tragic victim of divorce. Her mother married and went to live in New Guinea, and Jill did not see her again until 1949 – and then only by accident, via a customer in the shop where she worked. Only then did Jill discover that her mother had written to her in Ireland, but our grandmother had kept the letters from her, leaving Jill to think she had been forgotten.

  After their honeymoon my parents settled in Colombo. But then came war and Mum was evacuated on the last ship to leave before the fall of Singapore in February 1942. She was pregnant with me at the time; I discovered later that I was a replacement baby. A son, Michael, had been born in February 1941 but had died when he was three days old. He had been delivered by forceps and my mother always blamed Colombo medicine for negligence.

  Michael’s death was one of the reasons Mum decided to have her next baby in Sydney, and in the end she had no choice. She arrived unannounced on her parents’ doorstep in the Sydney suburb of Neutral Bay after the vessel had dodged enemy fire all the way across the Indian Ocean. We were always told that she sat on that doorstep heavily pregnant, waiting for her mother to come home. Only when I was grown up did I realise that she had been only five months pregnant: not exactly heavily. Such are the myths of childhood.

  My father enlisted with his friends and other left-behind husbands in the Ceylon Planters Rifle Corps, and he might or might not have spent the war marching up and down the Galle Face Green, that long park on Colombo’s seafront, and drinking pink gins. Mum was always very dismissive of his war service, but years later when I was given the honour of the Freedom of the City of Colombo, the mayor announced, ‘The highest regards of our nation to your late father for his dedicated service to save our country from the perils of World War Two.’ Ceylon was indeed bombed by the Japanese.

  Sydney during the war was an exciting place, a heady mix of tension and the frenzied atmosphere generated by American and Australian troops on leave from the war zone and determined to have a good time. After my birth, my mother, just 22 and very pretty, safely married and with ready-made babysitters, had, I think, a very good war. She never said that, and perhaps I am just drawing conclusions, but my favourite toy as a small child was a koala called Fritz after the American soldier who gave it to me.

  One of the few regrets of my life is that I never asked either of my parents about their courtship and marriage. Two years is quite a long time in the life of a young woman and their only contact had been through letters. Had he changed? Had she? I would have expected that the young woman who met her fiancé on the wharf in Sydney in March 1939 might have been rather different from the one who waved him goodbye in Colombo Harbour back in 1937.

  Through most of my childhood I felt that my mother was a disappointed woman whose life had never fulfilled its early promise. Because of the Depression she had had to leave her Sydney school, Ascham, at the age of 14, something about which she was very bitter, and the reason for her determination that her own daughters would have a full education. She coped well with the changed circumstances that had her settle for most of her married life in a small Australian town, a long way from the glamour she had signed up for. She didn’t criticise my father, whose circumstances were beyond his control. But as a little girl I was sensitive to her small barbs. And my father, who had already lost one wife, would not risk losing another, so was never sharp in return. In her low moments as I was growing up, my mother would say that her mother had forced her into the marriage. But her father, my grandfather, told me they had tried to talk her out of it but she was ‘madly in love’.

  This is not to say it was an uncomfortable marriage for us children. There was lots of affection and endearments. But I for one somehow felt this was not how an ideal marriage should be.

  I remember my father as a kind and happy man, but one who wasn’t very influential in my early years. It was Mum who determined the pace and content of our daily lives. She made the rules and set the standards, and consequently was a stronger influence. I really only got to know my father in the last few years of his life. He was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect at the age of 72, had an aortic valve replacement, and died of cancer of the larynx at 78. In those years, having treatment in Brisbane, he stayed with me and my family at Indooroopilly and for the first time told me about his early life and first marriage. I remember being surprised, because he had never said so, that he was proud of what I had achieved. When I was campaigning for Council in semi-rural Brookfield and Moggill he would say to the old farmers, ‘You really should vote for this girl, she’s very clever.’

  My father told me that one of his strongest childhood memories had been the building of the Titanic in Belfast shipyards and its subsequent sinking. He kept an interest in the Titanic all of his life. At his funeral we sang ‘Nearer my God to Thee’, the hymn the band was playing as the ship sank. And though Belfast was strongly sectarian in his Protestant youth, I never knew Dad to go to church except for special events, including my wedding. When I married in the Catholic church he said as we stood at the door: ‘Did you feel the ground rumble? That’s my ancestors turning in their graves.’

  Those ancestors had been lowland Scots who had settled in Northern Ireland in the seventeenth century, taking with them the Scottish love of travel. Grandpa Charles Kerr with his wife, May, and their three children, did a lot of toing-and-froing between Colombo and Belfast. Grandpa Kerr went out to Ceylon as a young man and made a name for himself photographing local dignitaries. The eldest and youngest brothers in his family of 11 went to Japan. The youngest, John Henry, married a Japanese woman and had a daughter, Mariette. They tried to go back to Britain at the start of World War I but he died en route in India and his widow and daughter were subsequently interned there.

  Dad spent much of his childhood in Belfast, where he sang in the cathedral choir and later played cricket for Ulster. Good with figures, he went to work in the office of Belfast engineering firm Davidson & Co., who sent him back to Colombo.

  My mother’s family originated from Devon on the English south coast. My grandfather used to tell us that their name, Helmore, had been invented when the daughter of the m
an at the helm of the boat had married the man on the oar. Or perhaps it was the other way around. The Helmores were travellers, too. As a young man my great-grandfather, Thomas, had gone to America to work on rebuilding Chicago after the great fire of 1871. Afterwards, work dried up and he went to San Francisco where he met Ella Spaulding. When he decided to try his luck in Australia, she followed him and they were married.

  Great-grandfather Helmore worked in the building trade all his life, which ended tragically and early. He had gone guarantor in business for a Mason friend, who then disappeared leaving Thomas to face the bailiffs. The family folklore had him dying of pneumonia, brought on by a broken heart, but his death certificate states that he died from ‘cyanide of potash, self-administered, on Manly Beach’. He was 49.

  Ella, a lone American in New South Wales, was left with eight children, the youngest just six. The three eldest girls, aged 17, 16 and 15, went out to work, as did the eldest boy. My grandfather, Will, aged nine, was taken in and educated by the rector of Christ Church St Laurence in Sydney, which gave him a lifelong love of both learning and the church. Each of these children lived to a great age, and all settled in Sydney or on the New South Wales south coast and kept in touch with each other. Their father was buried in a Presbyterian church cemetery and suicide was never mentioned in the family.

  Will married Nell Davidson in 1913. My grandmother’s family had come to Australia from Stonehaven in Scotland, where her father had been a stonemason. He was obviously successful because they lived in a solid two-storey house in Sydney’s Paddington, which had been a middle-class suburb at the turn of the twentieth century. When I was growing up in the 1950s, Paddington was a slum and my grandmother used to say, ‘Don’t ever tell anyone that your grandmother grew up in Paddington.’