No Job for a Woman

by Sallyanne Atkinson

  The contraceptive pill has been the single greatest agent for change in the lives of women of my generation. The pill removed the fear of pregnancy from new marriages. It meant that young couples could choose the timing of their families without the complications of clumsy contraception, which was often not properly understood. It gave educated young women a chance to use that education and for the first time to take control of their lives.

  Brisbane was still a bastion of Australian conservatism and we were quite proud to regard ourselves as ‘a big country town’. The only whiff of rebellion was against the Vietnam War, which Australia entered in 1962, with protest marches through the city. Fresh from the University of Queensland, I was against the war although I didn’t even consider joining the protest rallies. For one thing, I could see that marching was not going to influence the government in any way.

  Growing up, I had never expected to have a career, having always assumed I would marry a nice man, have nice children and settle down to a nice life. If I had done only that I wouldn’t have had a career at all. Career opportunities were limited then anyway – most people thought that for a woman a job was only what you did before you got married. I had wanted to be a teacher, but in my last year at school I was a prefect and found no one respected my authority at all, so I didn’t think I was cut out for it. I was lucky that I fell into journalism.

  I think we all model ourselves, even subconsciously, on our parents and their marriages, editing them to decide what we like and what we don’t, and what we want for ourselves. I always had a feeling that my mother was unhappy or disappointed about the way her life had turned out and that she somehow felt that my father was the cause. And he, after the experience of his first failed marriage, wanted to do what he could for her, and he knew that whatever he did was not enough. I knew I wanted to marry a man who was strong and successful.

  Like many of my friends, I married at 21, which seems absurdly young today but didn’t then; three others in my high school class married that same year. I first met Leigh Atkinson conventionally, at a party for his sister Elizabeth at their family home in East Brisbane. Elizabeth had been a friend from school holidays at Surfers Paradise where the Atkinsons had a holiday house. She and I had met through a mutual boyfriend who had crossed the great Catholic–Protestant divide. I hadn’t known she had an older brother. Leigh, a medical student, was good-looking in a Clark Gable sort of way, and I found his older-brother bossiness attractive and masterful.

  We met again about a year later at a friend’s twenty-first birthday dance at 29 Murray Street, Brisbane’s leading venue for dances and weddings, after which a group of us went back to the National Hotel, whose manager Max Roberts was married to another friend. I mention the National because it later became notorious for all kinds of goings-on including prostitution, but we young innocents knew none of that. I remember gaily climbing up the fire escape to the bedrooms above, which must have led to all kinds of unfulfilled expectations.

  Leigh and I were interested in each other, but I already had a boyfriend and he probably had a girlfriend. It wasn’t until the next year, when my romance had ended, that we started going out. I actually made the first move by asking him to the Physio Ball in a group with my two flatmates who were physiotherapy students. He then asked me to the Med Ball with a pre-ball party at his parents’ house, and then to dinner, and we soon became an item.

  Our first real date was a trip with a group of friends to the beach at Surfers Paradise. We dropped in to visit my parents on the way through Southport. Some days later my mother had a letter from Leigh congratulating her on the good behaviour of her children, which he attributed to their upbringing. She was pleased and surprised, at the letter though not the compliment. Leigh was always a stickler for good manners. One of the things I found most attractive about him was his genuine interest in art and theatre, so very different from other medical students, and in fact from most of the boys I knew.

  The pathway to our marriage was not straightforward. I almost missed his proposal. We were sitting late one night in Leigh’s car outside my flat, talking about my going to Sydney to work on the Daily Telegraph when he said, ‘You’ll have to have the phone on your side of the bed.’ It took me a few minutes to register what he meant. When I went inside I said to the girls, ‘I think Leigh has just proposed to me!’ (The bit about the phone was not really an accurate prediction for our married life. I’m such a heavy sleeper that if I had had it on my side of the bed I probably wouldn’t have heard it. And in fact, when Leigh took a call from the hospital, got up, got dressed and drove off into the night, I often didn’t even wake up.)

  Back in 1962 I duly went to Sydney as planned. Leigh and I wrote to each other, and I missed him. I confided my news to my grandparents. Religion could be a problem, and ours was to be what was called a mixed marriage – he was Catholic, I was Anglican. My grandfather, who was a committed Mason, nonetheless urged me to consider adopting the Catholic faith. He would drive me to Coogee to have instruction with two priests of the Sacred Heart order that ran Downlands College in Toowoomba where Leigh had gone to school. Fathers Dixon and Dando were very impressive men, with intellectually challenging and stimulating views that they did not impose on me. And Leigh never asked that I should convert to Catholicism. I later continued the discussions with Father Guest at the order’s parish in Camp Hill, Brisbane.

  Becoming a Catholic was not a major problem for me. Our family were ‘High Church’ Anglicans in Sydney, where the Church was polarised between ‘High’ and ‘Low’. In Queensland the Church of England was more akin to the Catholic Church than to the other Protestant denominations, which people assumed was partly because of the great friendship between the Catholic archbishop James Duhig and Reginald Halse, who unusually for an Anglican bishop was a bachelor.

  We got engaged on 12 December 1963, which happened to be Leigh’s birthday, and I went off to work as usual at the Courier-Mail. One of my daily assignments then was to go to the Mater Children’s Hospital, photographer in tow, to write a story on a sad but attractive small child for the Children’s Hospital Christmas Appeal. As we walked up to the front door of the hospital we saw, ranged on the steps, a large gathering of white-robed nuns. ‘What’s going on?’ muttered the photographer.

  Sister Mary St Gabriel, tall, elegant and imposing, stepped forward. ‘We wanted to get a look at you, dear,’ she said to me. ‘We want to know how you got him. We like to reserve our doctors for our nurses.’

  Our wedding on 1 May the following year was fraught with the usual tensions. Mum, Dad and my sisters had come up from Southport to stay at the Camp Hill Hotel, more a drinkers’ pub than a place to stay but close to the church. Louella hogged the bathroom as we were getting dressed and four-year-old Kim tore the flowers out of her hair. The ceremony took place on the Friday night of the May Day long weekend and the bar was full of drinkers who cheered us as we left. Halfway down the aisle my veil caught on one of the sprigs of ivy decorating the pews and I stopped; Dad thought I had changed my mind. Despite this, the service was wonderful, a most beautiful Gregorian mass sung by Brisbane’s Polish choir, and even Leigh trying to push my wedding ring onto the wrong finger didn’t mar it.

  The reception was at Wanganui Gardens on the banks of the Brisbane River, now knocked down and rebuilt as a private house by Olympians Mark and Tracy Stockwell. There was lots of tension during the evening. I had asked my bridesmaids not to smoke but they did. One of them was flirting with the master of ceremonies, to which her boyfriend objected. The MC, a doctor friend of Leigh’s, said he’d take the boyfriend outside and fight him, which I told him was not a good idea as the boyfriend was a state boxing champion. Another friend’s fiancé was threatening to drown himself in the river because she was flirting with someone else, and yet another friend kept asking why she wasn’t seated next to the man she liked. She didn’t know he had asked not to sit next to her. Then there was the question of religion. The priest who had married us mad
e a speech in which he spoke of Catholics and non-Catholics, which upset my mother. It was a Friday night and the Catholics had been given special dispensation to eat meat, which caused a bit of a stir.

  It might sound as though the wedding was a disaster, but it wasn’t – the tensions were the bases for jokes later. But I do remember being glad when the time came for me to change as convention dictated into my going-away outfit, a Jackie Kennedy–style ensemble of hat and coat in cream silk. We were only going a mere few kilometres away – as far as the Sunnybank Hotel.

  Leigh and I went to Noumea for the first week of our honeymoon and then did a tour of the Snowy Mountains project in a car convoy. We spent a few days in Canberra where the artificial Lake Burley Griffin had only recently been filled. We had trouble getting accommodation in Canberra and one of my journalist mates found us a bed in the Hotel Kurrajong, a single one. Not long after we came home I started feeling sick in the afternoon. To my surprise (because Mum had seemed to make deliberate decisions about this) I found I was pregnant, thus fulfilling the prophecy of the Courier-Mail editor Ted Bray who had said when I got engaged, ‘Well, you’ll be pregnant soon.’ Getting pregnant was what every young Catholic wife was supposed to do, and I’ve always credited the single bed in the Hotel Kurrajong.

  I had gone back to work straight after the honeymoon, much to the chagrin of my new mother-in-law who said, ‘People will think Leigh can’t afford to keep you.’ This was a typical attitude of the time. Her son was more supportive of my working, saying very sensibly, ‘I don’t want you saying when you are 40 that you never had the chance of a career.’ But I was not to last long. Within a few months I was told it was time to leave. A photographer had complained of embarrassment at going out on assignment with a pregnant woman.

  It was an experience repeated eight years later at the start of my fledgling career on the ABC’s This Day Tonight. As the Queensland edition’s first female reporter I was given ‘appropriate’ stories like the quality of knitting wool and the difficulties of adoption, and not many of those either. The producer, Derek White, told me they’d never had a pregnant reporter on the ABC. I remonstrated that at least half their viewers would know that babies didn’t come from under cabbage bushes. Derek said, ‘But it’s your fifth! Who knows where it will all end?’ So, despite the sympathy of colleagues Kerry O’Brien, Andrew Olle and Des Power, I had the unique distinction of being sacked from the ABC for being pregnant.

  But back in 1965 I was quite happy to leave the Courier-Mail and throw myself into being a young wife and mother. With other young mothers, actual and potential, I gave dinner parties and went to morning and afternoon teas. The dinners were a bit of a strain, for those were the days when everybody expected the meal to include entrée, main and dessert, all using our wedding-present cutlery and crockery. I had never cooked, and spent days poring over recipe books and asking advice. Some days, a group of young mums would play tennis at Fancutts Tennis Academy at Lutwyche which then had a swimming pool as well, and we would all take turns watching our babies.

  I have often wondered if the circumstances of birth have any effect on the way a child’s nature is formed. Not the birth itself, because labour seemed remarkably similar each time, but the circumstances surrounding it. Nicola’s birth was very much that of the First Child. Though I’d been having labour pains all morning, I didn’t want to miss lunch at the Shingle Inn with Leigh’s mother and grandmother, so I went into town, all dressed up – those were the days when being married meant you always wore a hat and gloves to town. I must have been clutching the table in pain because Mrs Atkinson said, ‘You’re in labour,’ and whisked me out the door, into a taxi, and up to the doctor at Wickham Terrace. Then it was straight over to the Mater Mothers’ with Leigh’s mother shrieking at the taxi driver, ‘If this girl gives birth in this cab it’ll be your fault,’ and the poor man breaking the speed limit all the way. We swept into the Mater, me still dressed up for lunch in the city.

  It turned out to be a busy and social afternoon because Leigh’s father, his sister and her fiancé, and Leigh himself, were all on the staff of the Mater and people kept popping into the labour ward. One of the old nuns, seeing me doing breathing exercises from my book on natural childbirth said, ‘What nonsense is this?’ which was hardly helpful. As the pains got worse, I thought, ‘Well, Mum said labour was unbearable and this isn’t yet.’ After six hours Nicola was born, to much cheering from the assembled multitude. The cheering would continue, at least metaphorically, as she got her first tooth, took her first steps, went to school, became school captain, and went off to university.

  Damien, on the other hand, was born in the early hours of the morning and until almost the last moment I had only one of the elderly nuns sitting by the bedside with a beer and a cigarette, while Leigh and the doctor were having coffee down the corridor. I’m not sure whether the beer and cigarette were fantasies of my condition but they are a clear memory. The days leading up to the birth were eventful. I had recorded an episode of Beauty and the Beast on Saturday and felt I was in early labour, but had gone to a party that night with my hospital bag in the car, as well as 13-month-old Nicola in her carry basket. After a couple of gins at the party the contractions stopped. The next afternoon during mass my waters broke and I sat in my pew in a puddle. We had a Sunday night ritual where we went to Leigh’s parents’ house to watch Rawhide because we didn’t have a television set, and when it was over at 10 pm Leigh stood up and said, ‘We’re off to the Mater now.’

  Eloise had the most peaceful birth, in Edinburgh where we had no relations at all. As I had become pregnant quickly after Damien, I wasn’t sure of her actual due date. We did a quick trip around Scotland after Leigh’s exams, and then my Scottish doctor decided the time was right and she was induced. After the induction procedure I heard him giving the nurse his program for the day, which seemed to have every hour accounted for. I asked, ‘When would it suit you for me to have this baby?’ and he said, ‘About 7.30 tonight.’ And that’s when she came, with Leigh and the doctor chatting about hospital statistics and me saying, ‘Excuse me, I’m giving birth here!’

  Genevieve and Stephanie were both born at the Mater Mothers’ Hospital in Brisbane, and both were reluctant to come out and had to be medically induced. Genevieve was born three years after Eloise and the family joke was that I had learned by then what caused babies. After the induction it took all day for labour to start, and then it moved fairly quickly. I was actually in the labour ward, saying I was ready to push and the sister said, ‘You’re not far enough dilated.’ I said, ‘This is my fourth baby.’ There were shrieks all round: ‘Nobody told us that!’ As though it was my fault. It was a chaotic beginning.

  Stephanie was born three years after that. She took even longer after the induction procedure, and in the middle of the night I was alone in the labour ward with a very young nurse saying, ‘I haven’t delivered a baby. I won’t know what to do!’ To which I was able to reply, ‘Well, I do.’

  By about 2 am the doctor, having arrived, was impatient. But we had talked of this being the last baby, and I really wanted Leigh there, so they had to keep ringing him up. He didn’t quite make it.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. Leigh and I had both been the first babies born to nervous mothers – one of them, either Leigh’s or mine, used to boil our orange juice to kill the germs and with it the vitamin C – and with our first child we were determined to be sensible. When it was time to come home from the hospital with Nicola, Leigh picked me up and took me to his mother’s where we had some lunch before he went back to the hospital saying, ‘I’ve got my squash game tonight, I’ll be home after it.’ Mrs Atkinson dropped me at the flat and not wanting to interfere didn’t come in. There was no food in the flat, so I had to ask the woman next door if she would watch the baby while I ran down to the butcher’s. When Leigh came home he brought his squash partner for dinner, an embarrassed chap who later became a psychiatrist and often told this story.
But I was lucky in one sense. Having had babies at home when I was growing up meant I was never fearful with my own.

  New Farm was home to a strong Italian community so when I took Nicola to the baby clinic we were among the young Italian mothers with their babies in layers of frilly lace. In the February heat I took Nicola in a singlet and nappy. My embarrassment was reduced by the doctor saying, ‘Very sensible mother’, but perhaps he just felt sorry for me.

  There was an extra layer of tension in those days for young Catholic women, as I now was, and that was birth control. Contraception was a mortal sin, so while our Protestant friends were happily on the pill, I was not. I got the gold star for Catholic womanhood when I became pregnant with Damien four months after Nicola was born, thus busting the myth about breastfeeding being a natural contraceptive. But life was also difficult for the young women who couldn’t get pregnant, not because they were practising contraception but because it simply didn’t happen. And this did cause distress and feelings of failure.

  Young Catholic wives were allowed to take the pill to regularise our periods, so that we could practise the rhythm method, a bit of mental manipulation on the part of the church. The rhythm method involved calculating those days when ovulation was likely and avoiding sex then. The calculation involved temperature-taking and note-making and a lot of tension. A friend confided to me that she stayed up late ironing on those days to avoid difficulties in the bedroom.

  For the first few years of our married life I was always pregnant and Leigh was working long hours, often sleeping in the hospital, and studying for the degree that would qualify him as a surgeon. I was actually studying too, to finish my Arts degree, though not with the same amount of dedication. I now think that one of the problems for our marriage later was that we didn’t have the chance to get to know each other as friends. We were married young, and Leigh went straight from his parents’ home to married life. As one of a family of girls, the only male underpants I had ever seen were my father’s on the clothesline.