No Job for a Woman

by Sallyanne Atkinson

  Expo certainly changed the way people thought and felt about Brisbane, but it had also involved a lot of Council staff in providing infrastructure to the site and re-routing of traffic. There were changes to the inner suburbs, places like West End and South Brisbane but also New Farm and Paddington. We established the Inner Suburbs Action Project, which was to be hugely important for the way planning was to be done in Brisbane and accessibility to suburbs. Town planning was always seen as technically driven, using technical expertise to find theoretical solutions. But in my mind it was really about people’s lives and how they lived them, and it should focus on quality of life, including a whole range of social and environmental issues.

  The director of the project was an urban planner from New Zealand, Kevin Yearbury, and I chaired the steering committee, which met monthly. It comprised people from all walks of life, for example social worker Ian O’Connor who would years later become vice-chancellor of Griffith University. The project reported directly to me and the Establishment and Co-ordination Committee, or Civic Cabinet, so that Council staff would know and understand that this did not belong to one particular department but was across all Council activities, including traffic, parks, water and sewerage; this was very important.

  Probably the most important aspect was engaging community involvement, and not just for their reaction to plans put forward by Council planners. People were involved right from the beginning of the process, and so were keen to be part of the implementation. We used the word ‘action’ rather than ‘study’, because we wanted things to be happening as a result, rather than having a series of studies which might just gather dust in drawers. The Brunswick Street Mall in the Valley and the work on Norman Creek were recommendations that were put in place immediately.

  Resulting from the Inner Suburbs Action Project were five local area action plans and then an overall strategy project, known as the Brisbane Plan. A first for Australia, it was a city plan that looked at all aspects of the life of the city, now and in the future, and understood that a city was also affected by events beyond its borders. Professor Bob Stimson came to Brisbane as project director and after a year of work the plan was released in February 1991. This was bad timing, particularly for me as it turned out. I was defeated in March so I didn’t get to see the Brisbane Plan implemented, although I was pleased to see in following years that various recommendations popped up in Council policies and practices. The Plan was re-released in September 1991 as the Stimson Report and called Brisbane–Magnet City. It covered all the vital aspects such as economic development, community engagement, traffic management and land use.

  Two major projects were classic examples of the balancing act of government, particularly local government, which is closely linked with people’s lives and the things that matter to them on a daily basis. The balance is between what’s necessary for the community good and what is politically popular.

  The projects were about waste disposal and treatment, and road building and traffic management, and both were to play a role in my later defeat.

  The upgrading of Hale Street in Milton came out of the Brisbane Traffic Study as part of the means of improving traffic flow in the city. It would later connect with the Inner City bypass. But the widening of Hale Street was going to take in some of the land of the Anglican Church at Milton and of the Lang Park football field, home of Rugby League. Both were sacred in their own way and in fact part of Lang Park had been a cemetery many years ago. We had done research which showed there were no graves affected by the road. My private view was that Christians believed that the spirit left the body on death and the remains were mere dust, but I kept that to myself. The controversy was highly charged emotionally, with parishioners saying that Sunday services would be affected by traffic noise and residents of long standing having their homes removed. The emotion was heightened by one parishoner, an articulate state member and future premier, Peter Beattie, who was loud in his opposition. It’s hard now to imagine Brisbane’s traffic network without Hale Street.

  In a fast-developing city like ours, waste management was a problem we had addressed for some years and we were looking at a range of different solutions. We had finally decided that landfill was still the best option and that current technologies could handle all the concerns of pollution, odour and noise. We spent a long time looking for a site, in and around Brisbane, and settled on land at Gardner Road, Rochedale, whose clay soil base was geologically ideal. We could have all the right safety and environmental protection and a guarantee of no toxic waste. There was strong community opposition, including from the local Liberal alderman, Graham Quirk, later to become Lord Mayor, who resigned in protest from his Finance Chairman’s position.

  There was a lot of dishonest Labor propaganda in the lead-up to the March 1991 elections, nonsensical statements were floated that the landfill would rise to the height of an 18-storey building. Politicking from the Labor state government forced us to make a decision in February rather than delay it until after the election.

  I was confident it was the right thing to do and the Rochedale Engineered Sanitary Landfill went ahead. It’s ironic given the Greens attack at the time; it now generates 130 MWh of renewable solar energy and Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard was to praise it in 2011 as an example of green energy production. Over the years, local residents have told me it wasn’t what they thought it would be and they’re happy with the result. So I’m glad of that, although they all voted against me in the election. Since then new estates have been established in surrounding areas.

  While all of this was happening in the broad scope of Council, 1989 was also a difficult one for me personally. I made the painful decision to separate from Leigh, and my mother died. I moved out of the family home in Castile Street and into an apartment in St Lucia with Genevieve and Stephanie. My office issued a statement to the media and said we wouldn’t be giving interviews.

  Leigh was surprised by my decision and I was surprised by his surprise. From my perspective we had lived for many years in an atmosphere of tension and low-level bickering. Home was not a comfortable place to be. To the world outside we presented unity and this was not a front. We did have lots of interests in common, especially the five children. A mutual friend said ‘People who know you understand and the rest don’t really matter.’ In many ways my move into public life had been a way of side-stepping my lack of emotional satisfaction.

  A few years earlier Mum had moved from Southport to Brisbane and was living at a nursing home in Indooroopilly, around the corner from where we lived. I was surprised at the intensity of grief I felt upon her death. She had been in a vegetative state for some time before she died and it had been many months since I’d had a real conversation with her. Even so, I had got into the habit of visiting her on my way home from City Hall and telling her about my day. Her eyes were closed and she never responded but the nurses would tell me she knew I had been there. I took comfort from this. It reminded me of when, as a schoolgirl coming home on the bus I would think of interesting things to tell her because I knew she would be sitting on the veranda knitting, waiting for me to share news of the day. Now she was not there. We all know that losing ageing parents is inevitable, but somehow it is like losing part of yourself.

  When Dad had died of cancer ten years earlier he had been in such pain that in the end it was a relief that he was finally at peace. The odd sayings he was always fond of kept coming back to mind again and again. And so, even though he was not there, and Mum was not there, they continued as a presence.

  But 1989 proved difficult in other ways as well. It was to be the beginning of what seemed to be a concerted effort to move me out of City Hall, and by my own party. In one sense I could say I was the victim of my own success, though I didn’t see it like that. There appeared to be an assumption that I would naturally want to move up from local government. Nobody seemed to believe me when I said I was content with the role of Lord Mayor, I had a job to do and no intention of going
anywhere until I had finished it. By the end of that year I was working on the Inner Suburbs Action Project and moving towards the Brisbane Plan which would naturally come out of it. There was to be a state election at the end of the year and the Liberal Party’s recent history had been gloomy. In fact, the state of the conservative parties was not good after the Coalition split of 1983, followed by the Fitzgerald Inquiry and Bjelke-Petersen’s demise.

  Senior members of the party came to see me, in the flat in St Lucia. They proposed a bold scheme that seemed quite hare-brained to me. They suggested I stand down from the mayoralty and run for a state seat, and then after the election Angus Innes, the parliamentary leader of the Liberals, would stand down and I could replace him. Apart from the fact that I had no interest in state Parliament and had things to do where I was, there were a few flaws in this scheme. Angus showed no inclination of stepping down and I certainly wasn’t going to knife him. The seat they had in mind for me was Yeronga, from which Norm Lee would retire. I knew Clem Jones had run for that state seat unsuccessfully years before, so the omens were not good. I could see that the Liberal and National parties, running side by side, were not going to do well at the election, and they didn’t. Wayne Goss became premier of Queensland.

  In early 1990 a similar plan resurfaced, but this time they were attempting to coerce me with a federal seat. It was an attractive one; the seat of McPherson on the Gold Coast where I had grown up was safe, the sitting member Peter White was going to retire but again I said no. I was being manipulated on two fronts, by the federal heavies on one side wanting me to run and the state hierarchy on the other wanting me to stay. Andrew Peacock, leader of the federal Opposition, told me I would have a ministry in his government. But I told him the time was not right for me. I had just separated from my husband, I had teenaged daughters at home and Canberra was a long way away. Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of the whole episode was a coercive phone call from Melbourne businessman John Elliott who was then the federal president of the Liberal Party. He called me from his private plane as it was flying over Brisbane; a call from the heavens, quite literally.

  Looking back, I obviously wasn’t strong enough in my denials to run for state or federal office, because the media were always saying I intended to. I think, because I am basically honest, I wouldn’t say ‘never’. Who could know about the future? But I think the media particularly, and people involved in politics generally, could not understand or believe that I felt deeply about the importance of local government. I used to say that the three tiers of government were horizontal rather than vertical. That is, they should be considered side by side rather than one above the other. Local government is important because that is where people live and is representative of how they live.

  At one stage late in 1990 I decided not to run for Lord Mayor again. The Brisbane Plan would be pretty much in place and my work would be done. But the reasons were mainly personal ones. Leigh and I had reconciled and he had moved out of the house in Castile Street, which we sold, and into the apartment where I was living at St Lucia. I wanted to try to get our marriage to work.

  I typed a statement of my intention to stand down. I said I felt I had made the changes needed for the good government of the city and put in train the necessary reforms for the future. I called my media advisors into my office in City Hall on a weekend to discuss the best ways of making an announcement, and also told my plans to Phil Denman, the Deputy Mayor and Bill Everingham, the Liberal Party state president. They reacted very differently. Phil, who was almost at retirement age, said he would be ready to run himself. Bill was aghast at the suggestion of my leaving and said that without me there we would lose City Hall. Bill was an old friend, the husband of Lynn who had been such a campaign stalwart, and had been at school with Leigh. He came to the apartment and argued fiercely with Leigh and eventually persuaded me that it was my duty to stay. My announcement was never made, and very few people ever knew it might have been.

  THIS SPORTING LIFE

  My passion for sport was inspired by the 1982 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane, though not then or ever as a participant. It was during those few weeks in October that I realised there is more to sport than actually playing it.

  The Olympics have been a thread running through my life for several decades, which is perhaps surprising seeing I’m so unsporting. The Commonwealth and Olympic games are not just about young people participating in sport. For me it has been watching the happiness that comes with athletic success, the thrill of achievement, the qualities of teamwork and fair play.

  My love of Rugby League stemmed from a chance last-minute invitation when I was Leader of the Opposition to replace Mal Meninga as a guest speaker at the Shaftesbury Community Centre. A few days later there arrived in the mail a very nice thank you letter from Mal and two tickets to the Grand Final in which his team, Souths, was playing. It was my first Rugby League game (I had been brought up as a Rugby Union girl) and the most exciting sporting event I had ever witnessed. I’ve always said it is the last of the gladiatorial sports – the atmosphere at Lang Park (now called Suncorp Stadium), the pure thuggery of the game and the visceral feelings as a spectator are unique.

  When I became No 1 jersey holder for the new Brisbane Broncos team, one of the owners, Barry Maranta, had the bright idea that I should kick off the first ball. Bright idea it was not. I can still see the look on captain Wally Lewis’s face when I walked out onto the field after the national anthem muttering, ‘It’s not my idea!’

  The ball was placed, I kicked … and my shoe flew off, travelling higher and further in the air than the ball.

  Any interest I might have had in cricket was stymied back in Colombo. In those days the English and Australian cricket teams would travel to each other’s country by ship on alternate years, and the ship always passed through Colombo. Each team would play a match at the Colombo Cricket Club. All the local cricket lovers would be there, including my father, and we children would be forced to spend a couple of very boring days accompanying him, although we never liked to tell him that for us it was not a treat. Later in Southport, during the January holidays and in the days before car radios, Dad would insist we listen to the Test on the wireless so that we could give him the score when he popped home through the day. Later still, I made a memorable faux pas when Hugh Lunn introduced me to his hero Ken ‘Slasher’ Mackay. I said brightly, ‘I went to the cricket in Sydney recently and it was so boring. There was one chap out there for hours and he only made four runs.’

  Slasher said, ‘That was me.’

  My father only ever wrote me two letters. One was before Leigh and I went on our first visit to Belfast and he said, ‘Please don’t tell my sister you married a Catholic.’ The other was to congratulate me when I was a reporter on the Sydney Daily Telegraph and I told him I was going to interview Richie Benaud.

  As far as sport is concerned, I have done my best. I swam breaststroke in a relay at the World Masters Swimming in Brisbane in 1988. I have batted in a charity cricket match. I have played tennis with former Wimbledon tennis champion the late Ken Fletcher after whom we named the park that has the Brisbane Tennis Centre. I continue to play with another Wimbledon champion, Daphne Fancutt, whose name was given to an amphitheatre in that park. I have tried to ski at two Winter Olympics, in Albertville and Lillehammer – naturally not as a competitor but at the hands of kind and patient volunteers. Still, the most of my sporting triumphs have come as promoter or facilitator.

  The Olympic Games are the world’s greatest sporting event and my involvement began with the Brisbane bid for the 1992 Games. After I was elected in 1985, I realised that the garbage problems and the Olympics were inextricably linked. The same manager was in charge of the garbage issue and the Olympic bid, and there were no prizes for guessing his focus. I rang Kevan Gosper, President of the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) and later the vice-president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and asked for help. He flew up to Brisbane from Melbourn
e and we talked about setting up a bid office within Council, but independent of it, with a professional sports administrator in charge. John Coates, a young Sydney solicitor with a background in rowing who later became president of the AOC was our choice. He and his wife, Pauline, moved to Brisbane with their five little boys. They spent Christmas with us at Castile Street.

  Initially I had been ambivalent about bidding for the Olympics. For one thing, it had been impossible to get firm costings out of the Labor-dominated Council. And there was no firm commitment from the federal government either: something vital for the IOC to accept the bid. I had not forgotten that a few years before, Melbourne had decided to bid for the Olympics, and Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser had refused to give the go-ahead, causing embarrassment among Australian Olympic folk and rage from the internationals, or perhaps both.

  The Olympic bid process has gone through many changes over the years. When Los Angeles held the Games in 1984, it followed in the footsteps of Munich, Montreal and Moscow, all of whose Games were troubled, financially or otherwise. Los Angeles was able to make its own rules and no money was spent on fancy facilities. The LA Games were considered a commercial and a sporting success, so in the lead-up to the 1992 bid there was a veritable troupe of bidders from around the globe.

  This bidding contest was a new phenomenon for the IOC, and so were the later scandals and allegations of bribery that led to a plethora of rules and restrictions on the bidding process. The 1992 bid was good-hearted and friendly, with lots of wining and dining and visiting, although everyone involved was fully aware of the financial aspects of the ultimate goal and the magnitude of the project. We spent just under $6 million on our bid, as opposed to Sydney’s $20 million for the 2000 Games. I honestly don’t think we could have spent any more, unless all the IOC members we had invited to visit had come.