No Job for a Woman

by Sallyanne Atkinson

  SOMETHING TO FALL BACK ON

  I was the first in my family to go to university. At St Hilda’s we had a wonderful English teacher whose Scottish brogue gave an extra musical dimension to her reading aloud of poetry. She said to my mother when I was 15, ‘It will be a trrragedy if this child does not go to university.’ My mother was happy to agree. She had always been absolutely determined that her daughters should have a proper education.

  My father was not so enthusiastic about university. He thought we should do shorthand and typing and become secretaries: ‘So you can help your husband in his business and if he dies have something to fall back on.’ This, I should point out, was not an unusual view for the times, nor was his opinion that the university was a hotbed of sin and debauchery. Nor indeed was his advice not to be too intelligent, ‘or men won’t find you attractive’. But as his general parental philosophy was, ‘Whatever your mother says’, to university we all went – including Jill, who went on to do an Arts degree as a mature-aged student in Sydney.

  Jill had left school after doing the Intermediate Certificate, and worked in a chemist shop, which was where she found out about her mother. After Jill went to join Hylda in Port Moresby, we heard very little from her for some years. She came back to Sydney after a broken engagement, got her Leaving Certificate and went to the University of Sydney, where she trained as a teacher and played cricket for the university. For the rest of her professional life she taught in and around Sydney, at schools as diverse as Frensham (a private girls’ school) and Rooty Hill High.

  I had won a Commonwealth Scholarship, as did anyone then who was half-bright, and in my case it came with a living allowance because of my father’s low income and my three siblings still at home. I chose to do Arts with honours in French – I had won the French verse speaking competitions for schools run by the Alliance Francaise and the fearsome Miss Katie Campbell-Brown of the French department at the University of Queensland.

  With six of my classmates I went to Women’s College, which only a couple of years earlier had moved from an old house, Chislehurst at Kangaroo Point, to its new building at St Lucia. Another school friend only lasted there a week before she moved into Lennons Hotel, then Brisbane’s smartest, where her country family kept a suite with their own bed linens.

  College was one of my life’s most exciting experiences. Life, admittedly, hadn’t been very long but I can still remember and feel that sense of anticipation, of the whole world opening up to endless possibilities. Away from home and family regulations there were few rules and every evening of the first week I dropped my clothes on the floor of my room, the first to be mine alone, and no one told me to pick them up. There were also boys, a hitherto fairly unknown species en masse, and more of them than us, so girls, pretty or not, had a flatteringly good time. At the University of Queensland in 1960 there were 8700 students, of whom only 1900 were female.

  By today’s standards there were lots of regulations at college. You had to fill in ‘The Book’ when going out at night, and write down ‘Where going’, ‘With whom’ and ‘What for’ (which caused lots of witticisms). You had to be home by 10 pm with only two late nights per term. You were not allowed to hang your washing on the clothesline at weekends for fear of exciting the men playing Rugby on the nearby oval, and you were not allowed to wear shorts outside college. I got into great trouble one weekend for going from the front door to my parents’ car, wearing shorts for a family picnic.

  Our principal, Miss McIndoe, was in a constant nervous state. She had been headmistress of a girls’ school in Sydney where a student had been murdered in a dormitory, and Miss M was fearful at every suggestion of danger. When the boys from St John’s College stole the plugs from our bathrooms to prove they had actually got into Women’s, she was in hysterics. When we first-year freshers were being dunked in the lake at the bottom of the drive, I can still see Miss McIndoe, her black gown flapping, hurtling down the driveway crying out, ‘No, no. I have a bronchial fresher!’ This was me, and so I was saved from the cold and slime. Miss McIndoe always wore her academic gown, as did we to dinner at night, as well as conservative dress to lectures and around the campus.

  Now as president of the College Council I think how shocked Miss McIndoe would be at today’s plunging necklines and short skirts. Male friends are allowed in the rooms, for sleepovers … so long as you write their names in ‘The Book’, in case of fire.

  I had a wonderful first term, in spite of the intellectual rigour of French honours with Miss Campbell-Brown. There were balls and parties, and lots of sitting around the refectory talking about the problems of the world. The refectory was in the GP hut, which was a Nissen hut left over from World War II, when General Sir Thomas Blamey had had his headquarters at St Lucia. GP meant ‘general purpose’ so we not only ate in the building but rehearsed our plays and revues on its stage. I threw myself with gusto into the College Players’ production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, where I couldn’t sing well but was appropriately small to fill the bill as a fairy in the chorus. We fairies had lights in our hair wired from batteries tucked down our bras. Engineering students were in charge of the batteries, so their proper placement involved much girlish giggling and boyish fumbling.

  The college of the players was St John’s, all male, and the producer was Bryan Nason, who would make an enormous mark on Queensland’s theatrical life. Many years later, as Lord Mayor, I agreed to a small but thrilling part in his production of Troilus and Cressida, that of Helen of Troy. But when we got down to details, Bryan insisted that Helen be carried onstage wrapped in a carpet, naked. I had to decline, as much for vanity as for political reasons.

  There were also the Kings College Women’s Players; in a play about Ned Kelly I played Ned’s sister, Kate. The next year, Bryan produced The Importance of Being Earnest for the Uni Dramatic Society and I played the ingénue role of Cecily, with Jennifer Maruff, the most beautiful girl at the university and the student president of Duchesne, the Catholic women’s college, playing Gwendolen. I can still remember the names of the entire cast.

  There was an extra dimension to university theatre productions. There was still the discipline of learning lines and turning up to rehearsals, the nervous tension of going onstage. I could still do my lines without stuttering, but now there was the unique camaraderie among theatre people, with fellow students as the producers and technicians.

  My stutter, or perhaps stammer, hadn’t got any better. It had only become worse, as my mother would often snap at me to stop and it caused me agonies talking to strangers that I would now meet. My stutter was cured in a way that now seems incredible: in the labour ward when I was 22, giving birth to my eldest daughter Nicola. Feeling immensely pleased with myself, when we passed a doctor who was the father of one of my journalist friends, I said, ‘Hello, Dr Dique. I’ve just had a baby!’

  ‘People usually do in the labour ward, my dear,’ said he. I suddenly realised I’d said those two ‘ds’ without stuttering. And I never stuttered again.

  Like so much else in my life, I fell into journalism by accident. Midway through my first university year, it was beginning to dawn on me that I was neither an academic nor an intellectual, and long hours in the library were starting to pall. One of my friends Chrissie said that her cousin, a reporter on the Brisbane Telegraph, had asked her whether she knew anyone who might like to be a cadet journalist. Apparently a senior woman reporter had suddenly become seriously ill and they needed someone in a hurry. I had been interested in journalism as a schoolgirl but had dismissed the idea, especially after my grandfather described it as ‘no job for a woman’. Besides, I was Going to University.

  Now, I was beginning to realise that I had no ideas about a future career and I would soon need a job. I had considered the diplomatic service, but changed my mind when a man from Canberra came to college to talk to aspiring students. He didn’t quite say it was no job for a woman, but he did tell me that it wasn’t glamorous, that I would be sen
t to nasty mosquito-ridden places in the beginning, and if I married I would have to resign. Those were the days when every right-thinking girl and her mother saw marriage very much as a goal in itself, so despite my French honours studies I decided the diplomatic life was not for me.

  I had always thought that to be a journalist you had to be a good writer, and I didn’t think I was. I had been good at English essays at school, mainly by coming up with an original point of view, but I had never seen myself as a writer. I was to find out later that those cadets who had wanted to be writers soon became disillusioned and dropped out. Good writing was not among the criteria for employment at the Courier-Mail or the Telegraph.

  It was a dilemma. To leave university meant giving up my Commonwealth Scholarship and my French honours degree. There was no one from whom to get solid advice. My mother just said, ‘Whatever you think, dear’, which I felt was most inadequate. (This was the first of only two times I was seriously upset with my mother. The other was years later when I rang to tell her that my daughter Nicola had got 985 for her school leaving exam score and Mum immediately said, ‘Kim got 990’, competing with me over our children.) Both the man from the Commonwealth Scholarship office and Miss Campbell-Brown told me I was making a big mistake. I was warned that I could not get my scholarship back if I gave it up.

  While I was loving university life, I felt guilty about it. I realised I was not a genuine student and was not going to get long-term satisfaction out of my studies. I didn’t enjoy sitting for long hours in the library to research assignments and the glow of intellectual curiosity of my last years at school was flickering and fading. I was restless for the world beyond St Lucia.

  I also had the family to consider. I had been home for the mid-year holidays and was aware of how hard up they were and would continue to be for a long time yet. Louella had three years left at school, Holly was only six and Kim just seven months old.

  So, still undecided, I asked Mrs Erica Parker, women’s editor on the Telegraph, if I could come in for a day to see if I liked it. She must have been astonished but agreed. I cringed for years at the cheek of it, for what I didn’t know then was that each year a few hundred school leavers applied for cadetships and only a handful got them. And here was I, a mere 17-year-old, making conditions. But I did spend a day there, and I did like it. I had to meet with the editor, the terrifying John Wakefield, who asked me why I wanted to be a journalist. When I brightly replied that I wanted to meet interesting people he snapped, ‘You’ll meet some bloody boring ones.’ I had to have a check-up by Dr Phyllis Cilento, the Courier-Mail’s ‘Medical Mother’ columnist, presumably to make sure I didn’t fall by the health wayside. Later, as Lady Cilento, she would give her name to the Children’s Hospital.

  My two and a half years on the Brisbane Telegraph were among the best years of my life. The Telegraph building was located in Queen Street. Nearly 30 years later I was able to preserve its facade as part of the city streetscape. I loved the excitement of an afternoon paper, with five changing editions a day and Mrs Parker barking out, ‘We need two inches, down on the stone in ten minutes.’ One of us would have to write something to fill the missing two inches and take it down to the composing room. This meant going down the round iron staircase, with all the comps looking up your skirt because we didn’t wear trousers to the office in Women’s News. I loved the thrill of feeling the presses roll because the whole building would rumble and shake. I loved the fact that at the end of the day, your job was done – the stories were written, the paper was out, and each new morning was a fresh beginning.

  I enjoyed the camaraderie and the friendship not only of the other three girls in Women’s News, but also with the men in General News. There were the doyens of the racetrack, people like Keith Noud, Bill Ahern and Bill Boyan who taught us shorthand (which I never mastered), and the top reporters such as Glyn May and Pat Lloyd, the Lovable Lad with the Lightning Left. Pat had been a policeman and his father a senior inspector in the Queensland Police Force so he had very good contacts and got all the best stories. In Women’s News we reported on the social happenings in Brisbane, fashion and other stories that women might find interesting. Once a week we produced the Teen Page, of which I was the editor, and meant I had to find a story to write each week about an interesting teenager. These ranged from a medical student at St John’s College named John Haines who took up knitting, considered newsworthy (he’s now a retired anaesthetist) to tennis champion Robyn Ebbern (whose son is now married to my daughter’s best friend) and Annette Allison, who was sent out by department store Weedmans to find out what other teenagers were wearing (she later became a nationally successful radio and television personality).

  The closest we got to mixing with our male colleagues was on Saturday mornings and Tuesday nights. On Saturday, when only one of us was on duty, we went with a photographer to cover weddings and came back to the office to write variations on, ‘The bride was a picture in tulle and lace …’ We then helped out with the races. The Saturday afternoon edition was important for racing news and results, and it was a change of interest for us girls. Tuesday nights we had a photographer allocated to take social pictures of whatever we could find happening, but because the paper was on an economy drive he had to cover training for the sports pages. I got to go where I would otherwise never have been, to boxing halls and Rugby League training. The most interesting follow-up to the social pages was the phone call the morning after we had taken a photograph at one of Brisbane’s few fine restaurants. ‘Mr Smith’ would call to ask us not to publish his picture because he wasn’t actually dining with ‘Mrs Smith’. But there were many others desperate to get their pictures in the paper, and I also had the interesting experience of having to refuse bribes.

  One Saturday morning I was sent by chief-of-staff Frank (Wattie) Watkins to cover the traumatic funeral of some children murdered with an axe. On Monday Mrs P gave Wattie the rounds of the kitchen for having sent one of her girls on such an unsuitable assignment. ‘Suitable’ seemed to be important. After much pleading and nagging, I was sent to cover courts. On my first day I was sitting in the press box when the young man in the dock was asked a question. He hesitated and said, ‘I can’t answer that, Your Honour, because there’s a young lady in the court.’ The judge looked up and said testily, ‘Young lady, go and find one of your male colleagues to come and take your place.’ So I had to scuttle out and find Hec Holthouse, the Telegraph’s senior court reporter, who was not pleased. My court reporting career on the Brisbane Telegraph ended as soon as it had begun.

  I had given up my university life, but not university altogether. As part of the cadetship scheme we had to take an evening course towards a Diploma of Journalism. This included prescribed subjects like political science and economics, as well as Journalism A and Journalism B which concerned ethics and the laws of libel. We went by bus out to the University of Queensland in St Lucia to attend evening lectures a couple of nights a week, where I usually fell asleep.

  As a cadet I also had to learn shorthand, which I did in company with the cadets of the Courier-Mail. This was how I learned to have boys as friends. I became best friends with Hugh Lunn, who later wrote a book called Head Over Heels about being in love with me. Though I could tell he liked me, I was just pleased to have a very good friend who was a boy. And he never did ask me out, although he thought he did. In Head Over Heels he describes ringing me to ask me what I was doing at the weekend and me saying I was going to the coast to visit family. In the book he said, ‘I’ll be round about seven to see you’, which to me sounded like a visit, not a date. When he arrived, I was in shorts and a shirt, not wanting to appear presumptuous but ready to change if I was asked out. Instead, Hugh sat talking to my father about cricket, and being charming to my mother and sisters. I kept thinking, ‘Is he going to suggest going out?’ But it got late, and there was still cricket talk, and then Hugh said he’d better be going. I walked him to the gate and didn’t even see his beautiful car, wh
ich he had specially polished. I tell this story to show how simple we were back then.

  Hugh was a good friend, and has continued to be over the years. In fact, many of my friends now have been journalists in the past. There’s been nothing deliberate about this, but obviously you have something in common with people who have the same calling. Or do your traits that happen to be in common lead you to the same calling? I’m still in touch with ‘the girls’ from the Brisbane Telegraph – Helen Adam, Suzanne Blake and Judithann Guerassimof. I have stayed friends with Jillian Rice and Malcolm Dean from my days on the Sydney Telegraph. Malcolm was an English journalist and later returned to London and worked at the Guardian for the next 50 years; I stay with him and his wife, Clare, whenever I’m in London. Jeanne Pratt worked on the Sydney Telegraph just before me, Marina Craig was former women’s editor of the Adelaide Advertiser and Maryanne Weston and Robyn Besley were Brisbane journalists – they are all friends to whom I feel very connected. One of my best friends is Robert Allan, who had been the City Hall reporter for the Sun newspaper, and became my press secretary and later chief-of-staff.

  One of my theories in life is that we are all shaped by our first real job. I saw this particularly in politics where a person’s first job – teacher, bank teller, farmer, nurse – seemed to inform his or her character and personality. For example, if someone had been a teacher, it was not hard to see their teacher persona inside their politician self. All of the skills I learned as a cadet reporter I have used in later roles. I had to overcome my shyness to interview strangers, to ask people questions and compile their answers into reports. When I became the Alderman for Indooroopilly and in Opposition, I would draw on this experience and ask questions about constituents’ problems then put them together as a written submission to Council. It can apply to student jobs as well as chosen careers. Three of my daughters have been waitresses which taught them a lot about people as well as how to carry a lot of plates at once.