No Job for a Woman

by Sallyanne Atkinson

  Somewhere between Naples and Genoa the ship hit a rock, was attacked by a Russian sub or sprang a leak – all rumours – and we limped into port at Genoa. There we sat for a day while chaos ensued and nobody seemed to have any idea what was going on. The water was turned off so there were no toilet facilities and no drinking water for the hundreds of families on board. We mothers just sat in the lounge areas of the ship, our children around us, looking for all the world like wartime refugees. Leigh demanded to be taken to the captain and came back to report that he was a quivering mess. Leigh had told him he should stick to making ice cream, a fine piece of nationalist insult that Leigh could get away with because he was a quarter Italian. Then we were all told we were going to be disembarked and put up in hotels in Genoa while the ship was being repaired. So off we went in busloads, our family to a typical Italian hotel with terrazzo floors. I remember the floors very well because while Leigh and I were at dinner one of the children filled the bidet with water, which overflowed across the floor and down the stairs in a torrent almost to our feet.

  A few days after our arrival the owner of the shipping line, Mr Lauro himself, sent a car for Leigh to come to meet with him. He had obviously been keen to get rid of him and offered us flights home, which Leigh refused. While I admired Leigh’s principles, I was regretting the weeks of the sea journey ahead. My spirit of adventure was much dimmed. After a week in the luxury of our Genoese hotel and seeing the sights we once again set sail for home. For me the most interesting part of the voyage, via Tenerife and Cape Town, was going to the classes for migrants. Immigration department people would tell them honestly all about life in Australia, its difficulties as well as opportunities. But talking to people afterwards, I found they had only heard the good bits and still had expectations of a land of milk and honey. It was a great lesson – sometimes we really hear only what we want to hear.

  THE JUGGLING ACT

  We arrived back in Brisbane as a family in the heat of February 1970, with the Angelina Lauro steaming up the Brisbane River. Nicola and Eloise wore red cotton frocks with white Peter Pan collars that I had made myself, while I wore a navy blue dress, loose fitting to cover a bump, though I was only two months’ pregnant with our fourth baby. Eloise was a British citizen and, though not yet three, had to go through a separate line in immigration, much to some general irritation. I had deliberately not registered her as Australian in case she became a good swimmer and could compete for Scotland. Back then, the Scots were not champions in the pool; they have become pretty good since. Eloise had to be properly naturalised in City Hall some years later so she could vote.

  It had been arranged that we would go to East Brisbane, to the Atkinsons’ old house until we found our own. This was the large Queenslander that Leigh had grown up in. While Leigh’s father’s busy general practice surgery was located underneath, the house itself was empty. The only furniture was the dining-room table and chairs. We bought beds but had no dressing tables or sofas, and it was total bliss. There were vast areas of carpeted floor for the children to roll around and play on, and no housework.

  Leigh started work at the Mater, Nicola started school at St Benedict’s around the corner, which had a kindergarten for Damien, and I began house hunting with Eloise in tow. I took myself to the Catholic Education Office in the city to quiz them about class sizes and teaching standards. They were shocked that someone should query the system. It was typical first child syndrome. By the time I got to the end of the line with Genevieve and Stephanie I was pretty much opening the car door when we got to school and saying, ‘Out you hop.’ To be fair to myself, I did know much more about schools by then.

  I looked at houses every day and I’m not quite sure why it took so long to find one we liked. I think now that it may have been because although we had decided we would live on the south side of the river in order to be close to the hospital, I had a hankering for Toowong or St Lucia near the university. We were also keen on Highgate Hill and East Brisbane. Early in the piece I found a great house in East Brisbane, a two-storey brick house designed by the famous Queensland architect Robin Dods. Leigh didn’t want a wooden house or an old house like the one he had grown up in – ‘too much upkeep’ – and brick houses were not as easy to find. The Robin Dods house was in the path of a proposed highway leading from a bridge across the Brisbane River. In hindsight, if we had bought that house and stayed there we would not have gone on to later live at Indooroopilly and I would not have run for Council. East Brisbane was strong Labor territory.

  With the baby due in August, we finally settled on a simple house in Holland Park about six kilometres southeast of the CBD. It was certainly not the house of my dreams but because it was a blank canvas it had potential, as well as four bedrooms. And it was brick.

  Genevieve was born on 20 August, and we moved house a few weeks later. I settled into the role of house-proud housewife in our first real home. There was all the excitement of furnishing it, and choosing curtains and bedspreads. I found an oval dining table in a second-hand shop and carefully ‘antiqued’ it grey, in eighteenth-century French style with matching bentwood chairs. I had one wall of the entrance hall painted shiny charcoal grey with co-ordinating patterned wallpaper on the opposite wall, and can still remember my chagrin when we were selling the house some years later and I overheard a prospective buyer saying to her husband, ‘Who would have ever thought of choosing this frightful colour?’

  In those days, we were indeed housewives. There was no thought of popping down to the local cafe for a coffee and a chat. Morning teas at friends’ houses were deliberate occasions with careful preparations. We had our domestic routines, which seemed to take a lot of time. I attended to a different room every day. Monday I thoroughly cleaned the bathroom, Tuesday the bedrooms, Wednesday the kitchen, and so on. Then there were elaborate preparations for the evening meal and preparations for the husband’s homecoming – young wives were still being advised by the women’s magazines to tie a ribbon in their hair and put on lipstick to greet their husbands at the door. When I wrote my first column for the Australian newspaper I complained that men were never advised to spruce themselves up to keep their women.

  The Brisbane version of the Australian was a tabloid wrapped around the broadsheet national daily. My friend Hugh Lunn was the editor and Harry Davis, another ex-Courier reporter, was the sports editor. I wrote a weekly column based on my life as a housewife and mother, covering topics such as my children’s attitude to the tooth fairy and the trials of taking my son to football.

  While we were camping out at East Brisbane, I had been asked to do some freelance work at the Sunday Mail: more of ‘the woman’s angle’. I wrote about baking bread, a project that seems extraordinary in retrospect, and some semi-advertising pieces on childrenswear and beauty products. I also wrote a few serious articles, one on the problems for parents of children with spina bifida, another on the lives of single older women in the suburbs.

  Life was busy through the early 1970s. Nicola and Damien were at two schools, the convent and the state school, and while I was on the Parents and Friends’ Committee at the convent Leigh became president of the P&C at Mount Gravatt State School, where Damien was enrolled. Leigh had also set up a private practice on Wickham Terrace.

  Looking back I seem to have been busier than I needed to be. But, as the priest said at the funeral of a friend who had killed himself, ‘We are all the victims of our own chemistry.’ I liked being busy and I liked the variety of doing different things. I helped various voluntary causes by giving speeches and compering fashion shows. My friend Julien Beirne had a public relations business and I sometimes helped her when she had more than she could cope with. I was still contributing to medical news journals, and I had commissions from a couple of magazines.

  I also joined the Liberal Party, and so did Leigh. Once we had become involved, I did some public relations for the Party in various elections and became Queensland editor of the Australian Liberal, the party new
spaper. ‘Editor’ was a rather glorified title. I was the only person there and the position was honorary. I simply gathered and wrote stories about Liberal politics in Queensland. We had editorial meetings in Sydney or Canberra, with the ‘editors’ from other states, presided over first by Peter Coleman, who had been editor of The Bulletin and of Quadrant and was to become NSW Opposition Leader, and then by Grahame Morris who would become John Howard’s chief-of-staff and later work with me at Barton Deakin.

  Flying interstate, even for a day, was very exciting for a mother with young children. But totally blissful was the rare overnighter. The first time we had a two-day conference we all stayed at the Boulevard Hotel in William Street, Sydney. The boys made plans to spend the evening at the Harold Park trots. I said I’d rather stay in and have room service. They came past my room on their way out to persuade me to join them, but I was already in my nightie, having had a bubble bath, and about to wait for my dinner in bed.

  The ABC in Brisbane got me to do radio interviews for them, particularly in April or May when various government departments had to use up their budgets before the end of the financial year. Leigh was not totally supportive of my working outside the home, so I tended not to tell him what I was doing, and I didn’t tell him about the ABC. One day, as he was driving from somewhere to somewhere, he heard me on the radio and I was sprung.

  If the 1960s had been the first stage of liberation through the advent of the contraceptive pill, the 1970s was a time when women started to consider what they should do with this liberation. There was a lot of discussion about being able to make career choices and I knew of women leaving home and running away to ‘find themselves’. I wrote a column about the danger of that – what if you didn’t like what you’d found?

  Women were starting to think about different ways of working, so that we could combine responsibilities at home with job commitments. In spite of my working on a miscellany of projects, employers had not yet grasped the idea of flexible working hours or job sharing. I was asked to be the TV reporter for a Sunday paper, which would have meant working full-time. I suggested sharing it with a friend, which would have worked well, but that was a concept ahead of its time.

  One thing that coping with small children, a busy husband, a house and outside work does for you is make you organised. I’m not a naturally tidy or organised person. But I am adaptable and flexible, good at juggling where necessary and fitting things in. Nicola and Damien were at school, and Eloise in kindergarten. In the early 1970s we only had one car, which I could use on Leigh’s operating day, so I arranged any driving to be done on a Thursday. On other days I would go by bus to pick up Eloise from kindergarten and be back to meet the others walking home from school. When Genevieve was a baby, I simply took her with me. A friend from my ABC days remembers all four children sitting on the floor, colouring in, while I edited a radio story in the Toowong studios.

  Another important part of our life in the 1970s was the advent of Terri as our foster daughter. She came to live as part of our family in 1970 and was to give me some vital lessons, as well as lots of love. One of three little girls whose mother had been killed in a road accident in Victoria, she had been with her sisters in St Vincent’s Orphanage at Nudgee since shortly after their father had brought them back to his home city of Brisbane. When Terri was 14 and living in a family care home at East Brisbane, one of the nuns in the Catholic social work department rang in November to ask whether I would like to have a young girl to help me over the Christmas holidays. With four small children to look after it was an offer too good to refuse.

  Terri arrived, a typically sullen teenager who didn’t much want to do anything. But I was used to that, from school and home, and with so much to be done and Christmas looming there was no time for moods.

  I was to discover that in just half an hour Terri could do what would take me a couple of hours and I was full of admiration and gratitude. When the holidays were ending the nuns told me that every previous family with whom Terri had spent Christmas had sent her back, and asked whether we would like to keep her. By this time of course we were all very fond of her, and she slotted into the family in the role of big sister, much as I had done in my own family.

  The lessons I learned from her were manifold: that we are not all good at everything and she was much better at cleaning and cooking than I was; that to be praised and appreciated is a hugely important incentive; and that talking openly about issues is a major step in solving them. When I asked her why those families had sent her back for being difficult, she told me they had all talked sanctimoniously about ‘having an orphan for Christmas’ and it made her feel dreadful. Without meaning to, she showed me that because I was not very good at being domestic it seemed simple economics for me to work outside the home and have someone else working in it. So Terri stayed with us and finished her high school education, coming home from school to help me in the afternoons, much as I had done with my own mother. And then she went off to college and became a secretary.

  When she married some years later, Leigh gave her away, Nicola was her bridesmaid and we had the wedding reception at our place at Indooroopilly. Now Terri and her husband, Ray, live in Melbourne with their two sons, one of whom is father to two little boys. The boys have called me Grandma Sallyanne and I guess the little ones will call me Great.

  In 1973 I found I was pregnant again and we had to start thinking about a bigger house. It was a question of extending at Holland Park or moving. I had not stopped yearning for the western suburbs and I was also keen to build. We had several friends who were architects and the idea of choosing one was difficult, but Leigh had a patient who was a manager with a firm of project builders, which seemed a good compromise.

  We built our house in Castile Street, Indooroopilly, between the Indooroopilly and St Lucia golf courses, and it was to be the family home for the next 15 years. It also provided the impetus for my political career. A Council drainpipe at the top of the street kept bursting and as ours was the first house in the street we suffered most from the flooding. Neighbours nominated me as the person to nag the Council, and I was certainly the most affected. When the pipe was finally replaced, after a relentless campaign, I felt great triumph and a real understanding of how local government worked.

  My other motivation for a career in city government was a book about Brisbane I wrote in 1972. It was something I had thought about ever since our return from Edinburgh. The Scots were masters of national promotion and there were dozens of books about what to see and do in Edinburgh and all over Scotland. But when we had visitors to Brisbane, and there were lots, there was no literature to give them.

  In 1972 Leigh went on a three-month Rotary group study trip to Pennsylvania in the US and this seemed an ideal project to undertake while he was away. I would be on my own with the children for those months, with no evening meal to cook for a husband and a car for my sole use.

  With the children in tow, I set about exploring the city, its sights and restaurants. I included Toowoomba and the Gold and Sunshine coasts. The book, Around Brisbane, would not be published until 1978, and then by the University of Queensland Press, its original publisher having suffered in the floods of 1974. I mentioned a few hundred restaurants, many of them long since closed, and now there are thousands in Brisbane. In the introduction I wrote:

  The essential Brisbane is still a city whose people have a relaxed and casual attitude to life and pride themselves on not having been caught up in the ratrace of their southern neighbours. But Brisbane is now a young-adult sort of city newly grown up. The city skyline has soared upwards and our citizens have acquired the confidence of coming of age.

  Getting to know my city so well led me on the path to promoting it and looking after it. I also found that Brisbane people, though feeling affection for their city, had no pride in it. I asked a taxi driver to show me the sights of Brisbane and he said, ‘Ah, there’s nothing much to see here, lady.’ I wanted to change all that.

 
That time on my own, independent with my own car, managing my life, the four children, the house and running a project, changed me. I found new confidence in what I was able to do and knew I could do.

  AN ACCIDENTAL POLITICIAN

  I wish I could say that my political life began with a grand and noble cause. It actually began in a laundromat in Edinburgh. We didn’t have a washing machine in our flat in Pitt Street, Leith, so I would take the clothes to the local laundromat, sometimes going by bus at night when the children were asleep and Leigh was studying.

  One evening the woman at the next machine asked me, ‘Are you interested in politics?’ Vaguely, I said yes, because it was after all one of those obvious questions. And she said, ‘Because I’m a member of a Conservative Party Young Mothers’ Group and we meet once a month with a guest speaker, and babysitters for the kids.’

  Babysitters! I didn’t need any more convincing, and off I went to a church hall along Ferry Road, two small children in tow. While the children played games I listened earnestly to speakers whose messages I have long forgotten. I became friendly with Jane Duff (who is still a friend) whose lawyer husband Ronald was a Conservative member of the Edinburgh City Council. I helped them campaign, and that was really where my engagement in politics began.

  When Leigh and I returned to Brisbane we decided to get politically involved. It was not an automatic choice to join the Liberal Party, and we gave it thought. The Liberal government had been in power for as long as I could remember and my parents never thought about voting for anyone but Sir Robert Menzies, who had been in power before they were married and – with some interruption – was still in power when my third child was born. I used to boast that I got three votes when I turned 21: mine and those of my parents, who would do what I recommended because I had studied political science at university. Leigh’s parents had close friends who were actively involved in the QLP – that breakaway group from the Labor Party in Queensland – and his mother was later an active member of the Liberal Party’s women’s committee.