No Job for a Woman

by Sallyanne Atkinson

  As I was driving around Brisbane researching for the book and really thinking about the city, I came to realise how unique was Queensland architecture and how it defined and contributed to our identity. In early 1978, I went to Rome with my friend Julien Beirne and it struck me how important the very old buildings were to an understanding of that city and the appeal to tourists and economic development. When I came back to Brisbane I was invited to speak to a group of architects by a friend whose husband was the organiser and I talked about the value of our heritage. It struck a chord of sympathy for some and surprised others. And this was to be part of Brisbane’s dilemma. In prosperous postwar Australia we wanted everything to be modern and many people couldn’t understand why we should cherish the old.

  This was Frank Sleeman’s criticism also. He was surprised that his son in Sydney was keen on old houses rather than the brand spanking new ones replacing them. I remembered my own surprise as an eight-year-old when I first saw the flimsy timber and tin houses of suburban Brisbane from the train and thought them so awful after solid redbrick Sydney.

  After Around Brisbane was published in 1978 and I was preselected for Council, I continued to talk about Brisbane’s heritage and how vital it was to the city. Nobody seemed to be very interested but it was a good issue for the media. Then came the demolition of the Bellevue Hotel by the Deen brothers in the dead of night in April 1979 under the direction of the Bjelke-Petersen state government. This galvanised the press and the community, although I suspected then, and still do, that this was more about the way the demolition had been done than for what had been demolished. The Bellevue Hotel was a grand and elegant old building on the corner of George and Alice streets and on the corners opposite were Parliament House, the Queensland Club and the Botanic Gardens. In its day it had been the smartest place in town for weddings and balls and many famous people had stayed there. I had interviewed Yehudi Menuhin and his sister Hephzibah at the hotel, memorable for me because when the famous violinist opened the door of their suite he cried, ‘Look Hephzibah, it’s a teenage reporter!’

  The Queensland government bought the hotel and used it as a sort of boarding house for country members of Parliament. The building fell into disrepair, there was much discussion about the cost and worthiness of restoration, and the lovely old cast-iron railings were taken away for ‘safekeeping’. There was a small rallying to the cause. Our Liberal Party branch passed a motion calling for the Bellevue’s preservation and Liberal members of Parliament waxed eloquent. In the mid-1970s we had organised a street corner rally opposite the Bellevue where there were more media than protesters. We were just a handful, including the Anglican Dean of Brisbane, Ian George, eminent barrister John Greenwood, later to be Minister of Survey and Valuation, and me with Stephanie in her stroller. The National Trust was loud in its protest. However I realised to my dismay that the general public was not really interested in preserving heritage buildings, and this was later proved true when we tried to save other public buildings, including Her Majesty’s Theatre.

  However, the 1979 demolition of the Bellevue did spark outrage and focused media attention. When I was elected to the Council that year I was able to continue the campaign with calls for heritage legislation for the state, and regulations for Council. There was a lot of networking. Allen Callaghan, the premier’s former press secretary and an old Telegraph colleague, who was then head of the Department of Arts, National Parks and Sport, was sympathetic and came to a lunch I organised at the Queensland Club with Professor David Yencken as speaker. Professor Yencken was chairman of the National Heritage Commission, established in 1975 after Australia became one of the first countries in the world to sign up to the International Heritage Register the year before.

  During my research on Around Brisbane, I had found that a funny old building in Ann Street had once been the stately Brisbane School of Arts but had long been boarded up with a fibro front, and I was able to point this out to Council. The building was subsequently restored with the frontages ripped off to reveal the old building behind, and it still stands today. The Council set up a heritage committee and I was appointed. I became vice-president of the National Trust and later was made a life member. State heritage legislation finally came in with the Queensland Heritage Act of 1992, but before that we had lost many valuable buildings. Our Town Plan, with its heritage conditions and regulations, could only go so far.

  It makes me very happy today to see that Brisbane residents are valuing old houses. The grand houses around the city and suburbs have always been considered desirable, but now we are seeing little cottages painted so that their railings stand out in white, while in the inner suburbs we can admire the ornamentation that was part of building styles of a more leisured time.

  Not having access to research resources in Council led to looking for opportunities outside. My Council ward, as well as my home, were not far from the University of Queensland where I had always kept up my contacts. I was able to tap into academic expertise in planning and engineering, for example, and get help with projects. This was before the university realised it could sell off its expertise to the world outside and I managed to convince various lecturers about some useful projects for their students. Dr Bob Pretty from the School of Engineering had his students draw up a bikeway plan for Brisbane, and I even managed to convince Minister for Transport Don Lane to make his first visit to the university to have a look at it. These were the days when government and university were at loggerheads, the days after the years of anti-Vietnam protests and the Springbok tour of 1971 and continued student unrest. In 1986 when the university announced they were awarding Premier Bjelke-Petersen an honorary doctorate there was a riot at the graduation ceremony, to which Sir Joh did not turn up.

  As Opposition leader I was awarded a US Visitors Grant, given to up-and-coming young leaders to study American political trends for a couple of weeks. It was a wonderful opportunity and in November 1983 I went to Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, Atlanta and Texas. San Antonio was famous for its river development and its mayor Henry Cisneros, who was touted as a future-first Hispanic president.

  New Orleans was preparing for Expo 84 – though non-preparing would have been a better description, as everything was way behind schedule. In New Orleans I was introduced to the mayor as ‘Mrs Atkinson, the Leader of the Opposition in her Council. We don’t have an Opposition in our Council.’ To which the mayor replied, ‘Oh yes, we do. It’s called the Council.’ Atlanta, which I was to visit again for the 1996 Olympics, had some charming historic neighbourhood programs.

  In Los Angeles and Chicago I was to see public participation in action, with local citizens actually taking part in Council committee meetings. There were lots of ideas to bring back to Brisbane. I had also seen firsthand the strength of American volunteerism, for in each city I was escorted by a local volunteer who drove me around, had me to dinner and made me feel like a friend. These are the experiences that make a visitor remember a place, and something we always emphasised when talking about tourism in Brisbane.

  At the end of my US tour I took myself off at my own expense to Edmonton, Canada, which had been the site of the Student Games. My strongest memory of Edmonton is of a cold even more biting than Edinburgh’s. Just flying in was a shock, the blinding whiteness of snow as far as the eye could see and covering everything. On my first evening I was about to walk out of the hotel, bare-headed, to go to the theatre, when the doorman said, ‘You can’t walk outside in this cold.’ I thought this was nonsense, but after three steps in the frosty air I felt as though my ears were being sliced by knives.

  As leader of the Liberal Party in the Council, I became a member of the Liberal Party State Executive and witnessed some turbulent times, including the break-up of the marriage between the Liberal and National parties that formed the Coalition governing Queensland. The political events of 1983 were to have a direct impact on my future. In August, Terry White, Minister for Welfare and member for Redcliffe, led a grou
p of rebel backbenchers across the floor of the Legislative Assembly to vote against the premier. As a liberal Liberal, known colloquially as a small ‘l’ Liberal, I sympathised with their principles if not the practicalities of upholding them. In the days and weeks after, Joh Bjelke-Petersen showed himself a cunning tactician, closed down Parliament and called a state election for October. Out of the Coalition the Liberal ministers had resigned their portfolios and the party had lost all the practical benefits of ministerial offices.

  At the election the Liberal Party was almost wiped out and held just eight seats. The National Party won 41 of the 82 seats and, when Liberals Don Lane and Brian Austin defected to it, was able to govern in its own right. The National Party, until a decade earlier called the Country Party, had run at least one candidate in the 1982 City Council elections without success. There was now new confidence and pressure to try again, a move resisted by the National Party hierarchy despite Minister for Local Government Russ Hinze being quoted in the press as saying, ‘We’ll take City Hall.’ For the first time the National Party held state seats in Brisbane, Toowong and Aspley.

  In April 1984, after months of rumour, discussion and controversy, Russ Hinze changed the City of Brisbane Act to have the Lord Mayor elected at large and the number of Council wards increased from 21 to 26. The Brisbane City Council was important to the Labor Party because it had held it for 23 years, and during a time when Labor had no power in state government. Much of the debate was around the fact that the change reversed an earlier change to the mayoral election process, made by the same government in 1972, apparently for good and proper reasons, to have the Lord Mayor chosen by the majority in Council, following the method used by premiers and prime ministers. However, the obvious and improper reason had been to get rid of Labor Lord Mayor Clem Jones, and that hadn’t worked.

  Now the plan – which Russ Hinze revealed to me but not to the public – was to run a National Party candidate who would win and have the unique power under legislation of the Lord Mayor of Brisbane, including control of the budget without being beholden to the majority in Council. He said he had candidates in mind and Test cricketer Greg Chappell was rumoured to be one.

  Labor MP Eric Shaw said during the debate, ‘It would be fair to say that the bill is politically motivated. It is a cynical attempt to manipulate the democratic procedure for the election of the Brisbane City Council.’ Eric Shaw had himself been an alderman in Brisbane.

  Another amendment, little noticed but significant, was that after the word ‘his’ in the Act, the words ‘or her’ were to be inserted. I rather felt this might be an omen.

  As a party, we protested the changes. Certainly I was then, and would continue to be, firmly against state government interference in matters pertaining to the Council or local government. But I knew our protest would make little difference to any government decision. And privately I was excited and ready for the new challenge. The proper title of the original Act, assented to in 1924, is An Act for the Good Government of the City of Brisbane. I was ready to do what I could to carry this out.

  LOOKING AT LIFE THROUGH A MUNICIPAL DRAINPIPE

  In some ways my life experiences had prepared me for my role as Lord Mayor of Brisbane. When I came back from living in Edinburgh I felt that Brisbane was a better place than its residents thought it to be. Researching for my book on it confirmed that view. At my first preselection I had said it had the potential to be one of the great cities of the world. Grandiloquent as that may sound, a great city is not one with the tallest buildings, the largest population; it is a city that is a great place to live, and that’s what Brisbane is. But for that livability to be sustained there has to be growth and prosperity. I saw city government as being about more than just the provision of services, I saw civic pride as a tangible economic asset. I also knew that good financial management was necessary to look after all the other assets and provide services. Brisbane was very much a collection of suburbs and I had been living a suburban family life, and knew it well.

  In many ways Brisbane was also preparing itself for me, or for someone like me, immodest as that may sound. A city government, unlike other levels of government, is not so much about politics as about managing the structure of people’s lives. Cities have distinct identities and characteristics that determine the feelings their citizens have for them. The development of a city is determined by those feelings. A city ideally chooses to be led by a government that reflects how those citizens feel about themselves.

  Local government in Australia, unlike in other parts of the world, has never been given the respect and recognition it deserves. It is, after all, the level of government that most affects the daily lives of ordinary people.

  When I chose my campaign slogan ‘It’s Time for a Change’ I was reflecting what people were saying to me, what I was hearing on the streets. There was resistance in some quarters because it was a similar slogan to Labor’s ‘It’s Time’ in the 1972 federal election, but I was insistent. I knew that people in Brisbane were feeling different about themselves, and I knew I represented something different. Every great city (think Paris, Rome or New York) has its own personality and Brisbane was a city in the process of defining itself, a city that was changing.

  I never actually thought of myself as a real politician, despite my interest in politics. I was involved in local government, the management and nurturing of places where people live and how they live. Politics produces outcomes, and I do love outcomes, real achievements that make a difference to people’s lives. I was chatting one day to a bricklayer who was working in the Chinatown mall, and he said, ‘I can bring my kids here and actually show them what I’ve done at work. It gives me a great feeling.’ I knew exactly what he meant.

  Despite my optimism and determination, running for the mayoralty was a huge risk. Labor had been in power for 23 years and under the Liberal banner we had tried and failed in three consecutive elections to unseat the incumbent Lord Mayor. The recent changes to the City of Brisbane Act meant that I would have to give up my seat of Indooroopilly, not only the Council’s safest conservative ward, but a constituency that I had identified with and cared about for the previous six years. If I lost the mayoral election I would be out of Council altogether. The changes to the Act also meant that I would have to secure the support of the majority of the three-quarters of a million people living across Brisbane’s 1200 square kilometres. A few years later, and after I was in office, Russ Hinze introduced further amendments to the Act that gave the Lord Mayor even more power. Prime Minister Bob Hawke was to remark to me, ‘You’re the most powerful politician in Australia, with more voters than anyone else and control over more money.’

  The decision to run for Mayor was both tough and easy. It was tough because there was a risk of losing and having to give up the ward of Indooroopilly, where I could have stayed as long as I wanted to. It was tough because I knew it would not be easy for the family. Leigh was not only busy with his practice and at the hospital, but also the various medical and neurosurgical organisations he was involved with, usually as chairman or secretary. The children also needed attention. In 1984, Nicola was 19 and Damien was 18 – both were studying Arts/Law at the University of Queensland, Damien after a year’s jackerooing in far western Queensland. Eloise and Genevieve were at All Hallows’ School and Stephanie, aged 10, was at Ironside State School. They were all used to me being out a lot and in the media, but becoming Lord Mayor would take it to a new level.

  The decision was easy because I was Leader of the Opposition, and it was a natural progression to take on the administration that I had been so actively attacking. To do otherwise would have made a mockery of my efforts thus far. When I went into Council I had never in my wildest dreams thought about being in charge. As with everything else, I had focused on the present, doing the best job I could, without any clear thought about where it would lead me.

  As I came to know Brisbane as one of the city’s aldermen, I really came to understand t
he city it was and its potential. I felt a sense of excitement for what Brisbane could be. I had been learning about local government in every way I could. I had been to all the annual local government conferences, at my own expense. I had accepted invitations to speak whenever I was asked, usually to planning conferences or women’s functions, including in other states, and I would always make contact with city government people in whichever city I was in. These were not always without friction. In 1983 I was asked to be a speaker at the Institute of Municipal Management conference in Canberra, and Brisbane’s then Lord Mayor, Roy Harvey, had made a formal complaint to the organisers that they had invited the Leader of the Opposition and not him. My speech itself caused controversy, which also surprised me. As I remember, I talked about being able to be more effective as a councillor if you went and talked to council workers at the local depots. My saying I sat on a desk and had a chat to the workers seemed to convey sexual overtones. At any rate, Roy Harvey made a long speech in the Chamber the following week accusing me of embarrassing Council. However, it was the Lord Mayor of Wellington, New Zealand, the charismatic architect Sir Michael Fowler, who caused real excitement. Warming to the theme of the conference ‘Managing With Less’, he said he could certainly do with fewer women in his Council. There was uproar.

  I was endorsed by the Liberal Party to run for Lord Mayor in May 1984. The standing ovation from the delegates to the preselection was not a true indication of behind-the-scenes enthusiasm, but I didn’t know this at the time. The general view, apparently, was that I couldn’t win.

  This was to be a new kind of campaign right across the whole city and the Liberal branches were all involved with fundraising and campaigning for their local candidates. Even some of my own branches in Indooroopilly resented the fact that I would have to skip meetings to go to functions in other parts of the city. The Liberal Party president told journalists I wouldn’t win. My mother agreed, pointing out that Brisbane was a Labor town. The business community who should have been my best supporters for an unashamedly free enterprise candidate were too afraid of retribution from the Labor administration.