No Job for a Woman

by Sallyanne Atkinson

  Bridges seem to have always been unpopular in Brisbane. Back in the 1920s there was a bridge proposed between West End and St Lucia but the Council dithered and by the 1940s the pylons were still lying in the grass at West End and the bridge was never built. Years later the growing populace understood the need for bridges to get across the river and we got several.

  The Council budget was another daunting issue. I knew from my years in Opposition that the budget process was likely to be as unwieldy as the bureaucracy itself. When Roy Harvey was Lord Mayor, he used to walk about clutching very large black folders and saying cryptically, ‘This is the Budget.’ As soon as I got into office I was excited to get my hands on the magical black folders, but to my disappointment I found they just contained reams and reams of figures.

  And this was the problem with the Budget as it was. It was just about numbers, and those numbers were simply last year’s numbers plus a percentage (from memory I think it was 10 per cent). One by one I met with the departmental managers, and one by one they presented their departmental budgets as a done deal. Many of them were quite stunned when I asked them to talk me through the details and explain why they wanted a particular amount. We held meetings far into the night. The BCC Budget was large – at one stage bigger than the state of Tasmania’s, although we lost that distinction in 1977 when the state government took away electricity from us, for it had been a generator of funds as well as energy. In 1985 the Budget was to be $551 million to cover a range of services from parks and libraries to buses, water supply and sewerage. Our single greatest item of expenditure was interest on loans, over which we had no control. Interest rates that year were around 14 per cent; they were to go up later to 18 per cent.

  By the following year we had introduced program budgeting techniques, which emphasised the importance of words as well as numbers. Descriptions of programs and measurements of their success became as important as expenditure and revenue allocation. This proved successful generally, and it was a great source of personal satisfaction for me to report in 1986 that we had been able to resurface 22.2 kilometres of road with the money allocated for 15.8 kilometres. ‘That’s 41 per cent more road for our money,’ I declared proudly in the Annual Report. ‘With concrete footpaths we got 64 per cent more for our money.’

  There were practical policies to implement, sometimes at the cost of some personal angst. Backyard incinerators had always been a feature of Brisbane suburban life, but they were a source of pollution and as a former local alderman I knew they were weapons in suburban warfare. I’d get a phone call from an irate housewife saying she had sheets hanging on the clothesline and her nasty neighbour had deliberately lit his incinerator, sending smoke and sparks her way. The personal angst took me back to childhood, as visiting the incinerator had been a daily ritual for my dad: ‘I think I’ll just go down and do some burning-off.’ We banned backyard burning, and the air of Brisbane was grateful.

  MORE THAN ROADS, RATES AND RUBBISH

  The role of Lord Mayor requires much ceremonial duty: in the English system of local government the Lord Mayor is the first citizen. The government of the City of Brisbane was more like the American system, with an executive function. However, I attended many memorable and important formal occasions, including celebrity visits. The first, just a few weeks after I was elected, was by the Duke and Duchess of Kent who were in Brisbane to officially open the new Queensland Performing Arts Centre. We organised a civic reception at City Hall for them. Brisbane designer Keri Craig made me a couple of beautiful evening dresses and the mayoral robes had to be altered in a hurry. The robes, dark and heavy, are modelled on the traditional English ceremonial robes and worn with chains made up of medallions, each inscribed with the name of a lord mayor. Roy Harvey was a big man, so hems had to be taken up to fit me. I was always curious to know if there had been an allowance of material for all the taking up and letting down; Frank Sleeman had been a small man. Later the Lace Guild of Queensland designed and made for me special cuffs and jabot to go with the robes.

  The public aspects of the office brought their own problems, peculiar to women. I had never been particularly interested in clothes and fashion but now needed to be. There would be a Letter to the Editor in the Courier-Mail one year complaining that I had been photographed in the same dress twice in one week. Steve Ackerie, Australia’s most entrepreneurial hairdresser and so successful he became known simply as Stefan, would send one of his staff up to City Hall to make sure my hair looked good. Stefan is one of the few entrepreneurs from the 1980s who continues to be successful to this day, and continues to contribute to Brisbane.

  Sometimes the details of ceremonies were not so public. The electricity authority had offered the Council a special promotional deal to install lights across the Story Bridge, which had loomed dark in the night sky since it had been opened in 1940, designed by John Bradfield of Sydney Harbour Bridge fame. We had a lighting ceremony which involved me attending an event at a riverside restaurant in the city to press the switch and turn the lights on. In reality, a man behind me phoned a man on the bridge, who pressed the actual switch and illuminated the bridge.

  The visit of Pope John Paul II in 1986 was a major event for the city, but also for me both publicly and privately. Months before the Pope’s arrival I had sat on a plane next to the priest in charge of the visit and suggested to him that it would be a nice idea if the Pope waved from the balcony of City Hall à la St Peter’s in Rome. The premier did not think it was a nice idea and knocked it on the head, pointing out that this was a state visit, not a Church visit, the Vatican being a state in its own right. Sir Joh had a record of being not only anti-Liberal but also anti-Catholic, and there had always been stories about senior public figures whose careers had suffered because of this. But I dug in and insisted that my plan go ahead. I pointed out to the planning powers that I had become a Catholic and had diligently brought up my five children as Catholics, and that my mother-in-law, the Lady Mayoress, was a devout Catholic, too. (I should explain how Leigh’s mother came to have this title. My being Lord Mayor meant that there was no title for Leigh, of course, and so I conferred the title of Lady Mayoress on his mother, Edna Atkinson. She was wonderful in the role of hostess at official functions and chair of various committees.)

  In the end I got my wish, but it did not go smoothly. The plan was that the Pope would come to City Hall where he would meet with me and the family. Then I was told that on his tour no politician’s families were to be included, so again I had to protest and again I won. A couple of days before the visit, I was talking to the children about what they were going to wear and one or two said, ‘Oh I don’t want to meet the Pope.’

  ‘You certainly do,’ said I. ‘I’ve put in a lot of effort to make this happen, and it will.’

  We had made grand plans for the pontiff to go out on the balcony of City Hall to wave to the masses gathered in King George Square. A couple of days before, the head of the Works Department, in effect the city engineer, came to my office and said, ‘The Pope can’t go out onto the balcony. I have a report that says it is structurally unsound.’

  I said, ‘Mr Wood, I do not want to see the report, I don’t want to know about it. The Pope will go out on the balcony.’

  With a note of panic in his voice he said: ‘But what if the balcony collapses and the Pope is killed?’

  ‘It won’t,’ I reassured him. ‘The Pope is God’s man on earth, and God will look after him.’

  On the day, after we had all been to mass out at QE II and the children had the great thrill of being whisked back to the city in police cars with sirens blaring, we all lined up in the foyer of City Hall. We were blessed, received rosary beads and had a few words from a rather dazed Pope. When he started moving towards the grand staircase, a great crowd of cardinals and bishops made to follow him. In alarm I said, ‘Where are they going?’

  ‘To the balcony,’ was the reply. And up they went. The Brisbane faithful got their papal wave and the b
alcony laden with the Catholic hierarchy did not fall down, although the balcony was quietly removed not long afterwards.

  Actually, that papal visit destroyed my confidence in security arrangements. We had not been used to overt security measures in Brisbane but it was laid on for the Pope. There were sniffer dogs in my office, and I presume the rest of City Hall, for days before his arrival. On the day itself there were snipers on the tops of buildings around King George Square. As the Popemobile pulled up at the front door and the Pope opened his window to acknowledge the vast crowd, a little old lady threw a rose, which landed at the Pope’s feet. Of course, there was a mad flurry from security, but I couldn’t help thinking it could just have well been a grenade.

  There were quasi-ceremonial occasions, too. The Queensland Irish Club each year had a St Patrick’s Day dinner the night before on 16 March, and a grand occasion it was. It was an all-male dinner and there were 16 speakers, including the Anglican and Catholic Archbishops, the premier and the Lord Mayor. I had heard all about it from Jim Killen who was always the fifteenth speaker by which stage most of the audience were more than slightly inebriated and he may well have been, too. The food was minimal, but the beer was not.

  I was told that a special committee meeting had to be held to discuss the problem I posed for the 1986 dinner. The Lord Mayor of Brisbane had always spoken at the dinner, but they had never had a woman. After two hours’ deliberation they decided I was to be invited, ‘but only as Lord Mayor and not as a woman’. When I arrived on the night in the lovely old dining room with carved shamrocks around the ceiling, I found that of the two toilets at the back of the hall one had been set aside for my use. This meant that, with the copious amounts of beer being drunk during the evening, there was a continuously long queue at the other.

  It was a pretty riotous night, with speakers being cheered and booed, though apparently less so than usual on account of my presence. I’m sure the regulars were relieved when sometimes in the years ahead I would send along my (male) deputy. And then some years later the format was changed and women were invited. And so they are today.

  Local government exists by virtue of the state and its Acts of Parliament, and much of its funding ultimately comes from the Commonwealth government. Thus, relationship with premiers and prime ministers, and their ministers and officials, became important and necessary. At times a political divide must be crossed.

  Joh Bjelke-Petersen was the first premier of my mayoralty. I felt I knew Joh before I actually met him. He was, of course, frequently in the newspapers, but in 1971 I had also been to his home ‘Bethany’, near Kingaroy, to interview his wife, Florence. Hugh Lunn, editor of the wraparound Australian, had sent me up to discover the power behind the premieral throne. Flo, as she was always called, was also well known locally as a strong community worker, she played the organ in church on Sunday and who kept up a presence in Kingaroy while her husband ran the state of Queensland as he had done since 1968. But she had always kept a low public profile and this was her first detailed interview. The photographer and I had a wonderful afternoon, which included sampling her soon-to-be-famous pumpkin scones, and before we left for the four-hour drive back to Brisbane we collected some manure from the farm for my garden back at Holland Park.

  In 1981 Flo was selected by the National Party for the Senate and went off to Canberra – she would become Senator Lady Bjelke-Petersen when Joh was knighted in 1984, although she was always known affectionately as Lady Flo. I have always thought that Sir Joh’s eventual unravelling began when his wife left Kingaroy and was no longer the steadying influence by his side. There was also a lovely story, perhaps apocryphal, that the plan had been for Flo to hold the seat for her husband but that when she was later asked to stand aside for him she said in effect, ‘No, thank you very much. I like it here.’ And there she stayed until 1993.

  I first saw Joh on stage at City Hall for a campaign launch in the early 1970s. What I remember most was his holding up his arm and saying, ‘On my right’ but it was actually his left. I’ve always believed this was a political ploy, Joh seeming dumber than he really was so that ordinary folk could relate to him. As a public speaker he was often almost incoherent, stumbling over his words. But in private all of this disappeared. In all my meetings with him Premier Bjelke-Petersen was focused and articulate.

  It was widely understood when I was elected, just a few years after the rupturing of the Liberal–National Party coalition, that Joh was aggressively anti-Liberal and the National Party wasn’t at all keen for me to win the Mayorship. Even so, he rang me to congratulate me, and he always treated me like the old-fashioned country gentleman. He was smart in meetings, usually with his senior advisors Sir Leo Hielscher and Sir Sydney Schubert in attendance, and would turn to them, ‘What do you think, Leo? Should we do this, Syd?’ Leo Hielscher was the Under-Secretary of Treasury and Syd Schubert the Co-ordinator-General. Leo was particularly helpful to me during my mayoral career, giving me advice on intergovernmental loans and Council finances.

  When Joh resigned during the corruption controversy that led to the establishment of the Fitzgerald Inquiry, Mike Ahern became premier for two years and then Russell Cooper for a little over two months before the government fell in 1989. Both were contemporaries of mine; Mike Ahern was a month older than me and Russell Cooper a year older. The only Cabinet minister with a university degree (in agricultural science) Mike had been a very young member of Parliament, succeeding former Premier Frank Nicklin when he retired in 1968 and Joh became premier. Mike’s father had been President of the Country Party and an enemy of Joh’s, an enmity apparently fuelled by Joh’s anti-Catholicism. Russell Cooper was a traditional Country Party politician with strong and clear traditional values. A grazier from a prominent Queensland family, he had done a stint on his local shire council before entering Parliament and had been a very effective Minister for Police.

  My early relationship with his successor, Wayne Goss, was difficult. This surprised me, because this being Queensland, we had a personal connection: his mother-in-law Bridget Hirschfield had been my brother-in-law’s godmother. At one of our early meetings tensions were so high that I asked him if all the staff present, which probably included his chief-of-staff Kevin Rudd, could leave the room. I asked, ‘Why are you being so difficult?’ and he said, ‘Well, you’ve criticised me publicly.’ I replied, ‘Of course I have, that’s politics.’ It cleared the air.

  During my time in local government I dealt with two prime ministers – Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke – and they couldn’t have been more different from each other. Malcolm Fraser was a patrician grazier from Victoria’s western district, tall and aloof. At early Liberal Party conferences I was one of several young women prevailed upon to take it in turns to sit beside him at lunch and struggle with conversation. It was hard work. His wife Tamara ‘Tamie’ Fraser, on the other hand, was delightfully warm and bubbly. The first time I heard her speak in public she said she had been nervous about doing so because she had always been the person at the back of the room making snippy comments about the speaker, and now that she was the speaker she was wondering who was at the back of the room.

  Malcolm was an interferer, took a paternalistic interest in everything, and it didn’t stop with his retirement. As Lord Mayor I was at a board meeting of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust in Sydney, and the chairman Sir Ian Potter was handed a note that he passed down the table to me. It was from a then-retired Malcolm Fraser (which did impress Sir Ian) and it read: ‘Sallyanne, you should buy Brisbane airport.’ Brisbane City Council was not quite ready for this, but years later Malcolm’s instruction was obeyed when Jim Soorley took a percentage share for the Council in the Brisbane Airport Corporation.

  In contrast, Bob Hawke was a classic Australian larrikin and the living definition of the word charisma: he was great fun, a terrific flirt and never shy about demonstrating it. I had got to know him in my Killen days when he was President of the ACTU and then went into federal Parli
ament as member for Higgins. Once, when I was in Canberra, I was waiting with a group of capital city Lord Mayors outside the chamber for the prime minister to emerge from Question Time. Also waiting was a small group of war veterans. Bob burst out, nodded to the veterans then clasped me in a waltz embrace and whirled me around the lobby space. There was spontaneous applause and varying degrees of surprise and bemusement.

  But in mid-1986 there were public concerns about the Queensland government and allegations and charges soon necessitated the Fitzgerald Inquiry into Queensland Police Corruption. From my earliest days in Council I had heard about corruption, and once in charge I made it very clear that I wanted to hear about any suggestions of bribery and would not tolerate it. In fact, I had only come within breathing distance of bribery once, and that had posed an unusual moral problem, although the money wasn’t being offered to me personally. A shopkeeper in my electorate had wanted an extension to his shop and had offered me $10,000 for the Salvation Army if I could get it through. For a split second I felt really bad at depriving the Salvation Army of such a donation, especially as I was leader of their local Red Shield appeal. But I consoled myself with the fact that as an Opposition alderman, albeit the local one, I couldn’t even have guaranteed to get through what he wanted.