No Job for a Woman

by Sallyanne Atkinson

  Besides, the Liberal Party had asked me for help. The endorsed candidate for Rankin was finding that a political campaign was not what he had thought it would be, the seat was winnable with the right candidate, my murmurings about missing politics had been heard and I should have a go. And so I did, although I had some explaining to do about having changed my mind.

  The political pundits and many other people besides said I was foolish. They said it before the election, when it was certainly a high-risk gamble, and they said it afterwards when my run was seen to be a failure. It’s something I have never regretted. Running for Rankin was one of my most worthwhile experiences.

  Rankin was a rather mixed-up electorate. On the southern outskirts of Brisbane, it stretched all the way to the country towns of Beaudesert and Boonah and to the Gold Coast hinterland of Tamborine and Canungra. It contained the state’s safest Labor seat of Inala and the adjoining suburbs of Durack and Oxley, some marginal voting areas around them and the dyed-in-the-wool National Party areas in the country beyond. It was held by David Beddall, the Labor Minister for Small Business, Construction and Customs, and it would need a swing of about five per cent to unseat him: a swing to the Liberals was expected and so the seat was considered winnable. However it was also the GST election, when Liberal leader John Hewson, an intelligent and articulate economist, was having trouble explaining the intricacies of a new goods and services tax.

  I had never been particularly interested in state and federal levels of government, in spite of being interested in politics. I liked getting things done, and the parliaments of a nation seemed to be places where people did a lot of shouting at each other. It’s curious now when I read some of the old cuttings that I’m quoted as having federal ambitions, because I certainly never did. I think when I was asked if I might run for federal office, because it was assumed to be a natural progression, I didn’t rule it out on the basis that the future was a long way off.

  There were a lot of snide comments about a former Liberal Lord Mayor campaigning in Inala, but Rankin was more than Inala. During the campaign I said, ‘Every Australian lives here, poor urban dwellers, large ethnic groups, single mothers, retired people, dairy farmers, people growing beef, carrots and potatoes, suburban business people who have escaped the city to live on acreage. I feel absolutely right in Rankin.’

  There was also some disjunction between perception and reality, a sort of reverse snobbery. When I went to Inala the day after I was preselected I was dressed casually, as I would normally be on a weekend. I was criticised for ‘dressing down’ on purpose. One day in a shopping centre, an elderly chap said to me, ‘You really should dress properly when you come here, like you did in City Hall.’ I pointed out that I was actually wearing one of my better dresses that day, but then realised that he and most people had only seen me on television in the Lord Mayoral role.

  I covered about 17,000 kilometres in that campaign through the summer of 1992–93, driving round in a small Daihatsu Charade that my daughters had nicknamed Harry, through the outer suburbs of Marsden and Browns Plains all the way down to the sparsely populated areas on the Lamington Plateau towards the New South Wales border. I went to old people’s homes and public meetings and sat drinking cups of tea in community centres, and became even more convinced about the rightness of Liberal philosophy, of the importance of strengthening the individual. The women I met thought themselves helpless without government support, and had been made to feel so by the Labor emphasis on dependency and acceptance of their low socio-economic status. I said in one interview, ‘It’s ALP propaganda that I don’t fit into Inala. It’s putting down the people there. Labor is disgustingly patronising about people in lower socio-economic areas.’

  I was enraged by the Labor message that I was somehow ‘too good’ for Inala, and their encouragement of a victim mentality. One day, over coffee in a community centre, the women were discussing the different brands of cooked chicken they bought. I asked, ‘How often would you buy a cooked chook?’ and the almost unanimous answer was, ‘Every day.’ I was surprised: ‘But, it’s cheaper to buy a raw chicken, and very easy to cook one. You just buy one frozen at the supermarket, let it thaw, whack it in the oven and you’ve got your cooked chicken.’ One lady said, ‘It’s all right for you. You’ve got a university degree.’ The rest of the women nodded in agreement.

  One good thing I did do for Inala was to get Prime Minister Paul Keating there. He came one day to campaign and a Labor stalwart said to me, ‘We’ve never had a Labor prime minister here before. It’s such a safe area for them that they take us for granted.’

  The election was held on 13 March 1993. Veteran political reporter Wally Brown had described Rankin as a litmus test, saying that if the Liberals won Rankin John Hewson would be Australia’s next prime minister. On election day, the Labor Party was to show its real strength. Busloads of trade unionists arrived at the booths. One of their key messages was that the Liberals would scrap Medicare. My sister-in-law, Mary Lou Gilroy, a doctor in Ipswich who was handing out How to Vote cards for me, said that was just not true. She was told by Labor volunteers, ‘That’s what we’ve been told to say.’

  When the results came in that night, David Beddall was still the member for Rankin. The Courier-Mail on Monday reported ‘Rejected twice in little more than two years by voters, Sallyanne Atkinson was clinging yesterday to the slimmest of hopes that about 16,000 uncounted votes might win her the seat of Rankin.’

  These were the votes that would come in late from the country areas. But it was not to be. The final results had David Beddall winning with 32,157 votes to my 25,635, and Marian Schwarz, the National Party candidate and a farmer’s wife from Beaudesert, on just over 5000. It was this result that fuelled my determination and support for a merger of the Liberal and National parties in future years. It had shown me how silly it was to have two conservative parties competing against each other. Early in the campaign, Doug Anthony, former National Party leader and deputy prime minister and a friend, was guest speaker at a garden party in Beaudesert, a joint fundraiser for Marian Schwarz and me. Everyone had a happy time.

  At the election the Liberal Party increased our primary vote by 15 per cent and the Labor Party vote decreased by 3 per cent. However, the National Party vote fell by 18 per cent. I made my views known wherever there was someone to listen, and took part in the debates and discussions that eventually led to the merger of the two parties as the LNP.

  Campaigning for the seat of Rankin led to other projects. During the campaign I had a lot of contact with Jan Joyce from Beaudesert, who dealt extensively with graziers’ associations. She asked me to take the chairmanship of a new committee, the Drought Funds Co-ordinating Committee, whose role would be to work across a range of organisations, such as Red Cross, Lions, Rotary, Salvation Army, Lifeline and St Vincent de Paul. All of them, and some others too, had been working to help Queenslanders who were suffering from the worst drought on record. But sometimes the charities were falling over each other metaphorically, and co-ordination was needed.

  I agreed to chair the committee and found the job was both depressing and uplifting. Conditions in the bush were dreadful, but the spirit and generosity of city people who wanted to help restored my faith in human nature. I did a drive with army captain Kevin Moss through southwest Queensland, up through Chinchilla and Miles to Bollon and St George and back through Goondiwindi. Afterwards, I wrote an article for the Courier-Mail to let people know of the dire straits Queensland was in. I wrote:

  Today the women of Western Queensland are depressed and fearful, and look forward to a future filled with debt and children leaving the land for city life. They worry fretfully about how they’ll ever replace the stock that have died to produce the income to pay the debts and support their families. Country towns are tired, the grass has turned grey as if in despair and fear is everywhere … At least 19 properties in the district [of Bollon] have no one living on them. So there’s no work for the townsfolk, the sh
opkeepers, the numbers have dropped at the schools and the only dentist has left St George, the nearest town.

  Convoys of trucks organised by various organisations headed west from Brisbane and the Gold Coast, with food for the farmers and hay for their stock. Sometimes this was less than successful when, for example, the hay had weeds in it. But what was most appreciated was the knowledge that people cared, and in a practical way – schoolgirls went out to help with small children and give their mothers a break.

  In September of that year I went with the Sydney Olympic bid team to Monte Carlo. By this time I had been part of three bid teams. Prime Minister Paul Keating was part of the presentation, and a bevy of political and business luminaries joined the team. Dame Joan Sutherland attended, and Brisbane swimmer Kieren Perkins who had recently won gold in Barcelona. One morning, while we were all standing about in the hotel lobby Dame Joan said, ‘Sallyanne, do you know Kieren Perkins? Do you think you could ask him for his autograph for my grandson?’ I went over to Kieren and said with a grin, ‘Joan Sutherland is too shy to ask you for your autograph!’

  In November 1993 I was with Leigh at a neurosurgeons conference in Mexico when I got a call from John Fahey, Premier of New South Wales, and an invitation to serve on the organising committee for the Games in 2000. I said yes with great enthusiasm, without realising it would be short-lived. Something unexpected was about to happen.

  LEAPING OVER THE PRECIPICE

  Soon after my appointment to Paris was announced, I had a phone call from a woman who said, ‘You don’t know me, but I wanted to tell you that you have fulfilled every middle-aged woman’s fantasy – you’ve left your husband and run off to Paris.’

  Early in 1994 I was offered the role of Senior Trade Commissioner with Austrade, the Australian Trade Commission. This was the federal government’s international trade agency but was run as an independent authority, and had recently introduced a policy of recruiting from outside. The appointment meant relocating to Paris for three years.

  I did not accept immediately. It was a big move and would mean leaving the children in Australia, even though they were all grown up. I had recently been appointed to the Board of the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (SOCOG), which was seen as a huge coup and important because I was the only woman. But, my daughter Eloise gave me some timely advice. ‘Listen, Mum, how many women of your age get offered three years in Paris?’

  At the age of 51, I didn’t have a good answer.

  Somehow, Paris seems to be synonymous in people’s minds with escape. So many people speak of living in Paris as one big adventure, an endless series of champagne evenings on the Champs-Élysées. Of course, it’s not like that. For one thing, the Champs-Élysées was basically a street of fancy car showrooms. And working is still working, even if some of it does involve going out to some of the world’s most beautiful restaurants. But secretly, I thought that by going to live in Paris I would get thin and chic and learn the secrets of French style.

  After the appointment was announced, a friend said, ‘You’ve done everything in reverse. Usually girls grow up, go to work overseas, come home, get married and settle down. But you grew up, got married, settled down, got unmarried and went to work overseas.’

  Which was, of course, true. It meant another transition. I was going through an emotionally difficult time, having just left my marriage for the second time. Contrary to public opinion, the leaver of a marriage can be as upset as the leavee. All the reasons you have left are not far away, in time and in your mind.

  I had left our marriage after Christmas, statistically the time when most marriage break-ups happen. I just didn’t want to be with Leigh any longer and with the children grown and scattered there didn’t seem to be any purpose in putting up with being unhappy. I had tried and it hadn’t worked. Of course, any description of a marriage break-up is usually from one person’s perspective. To me marriage was about love, respect and support and in ours there just wasn’t enough.

  Even if you marry young and may grow and develop in parallel, you are still individuals. One of the major differences between Leigh and me was what had served us well in our careers – I was a risk taker and he was not, as befits a neurosurgeon. For each of us the other was not the person we most enjoyed being with. We were disconnected, and I don’t believe we even really liked each other.

  I think men and women have different needs and expectations from marriage. When I was young, in my late twenties, I wrote, ‘For a man marriage is part of his world, that part that is not his work life. For a woman it is her whole world.’ So when I first left Leigh in 1989 and he said, shocked, ‘But we’ve had twenty-five years of a very happy marriage,’ he was speaking his truth. When I replied, ‘I don’t think I was there. That must have been someone else,’ I was speaking mine.

  Looking back, I can see my mistakes. One of them was trying to be what I was not. At the beginning of our marriage, when I was in my early twenties, I wanted to please Leigh in the way that I had always tried to please my mother. So I tried to be the wife I thought he wanted, but I was not authentic. And Leigh was always a bit confused, I think, about what he wanted – a wife who would run a good home, but also one who was, in his words, a contributor. It was hard to be both very well.

  I believe one of our problems right from the start was that we had no time for companionship, the habit of friendship. Leigh was studying every evening for his surgical fellowship and I was pregnant and occupied with that. There had been little scope for discussion about our individual wants and needs in our relationship.

  So I left my husband and went to Paris.

  There I was, suddenly a single woman in a whole new world. At the time I was quoted in a newspaper as saying, ‘… it seemed like a great leap over the precipice’. I’d grown up in a large family, I’d had lots of kids, I’d always worked with people and had people around me, and then all of a sudden I was in a rowboat in the middle of the ocean with nobody around. That was just how I felt. When you have people all around you, such as in a big family and a large organisation having time alone seems like a wonderful concept. And I had always cherished time alone. Now it was not a respite, but part of my life.

  My appointment in to the new role was a bit of a scramble. I had met Dieter Le Comte, Austrade’s Europe manager, at a Sydney Christmas party. In the course of conversation I commented on how unimpressed I had been with Austrade in Paris a few years before. In late January he rang me saying he’d heard my marriage had ended. He asked me if I’d put my money where my mouth is, and apply for the vacant post. I was hesitant, but Paris was my dream city; I had to decide quickly.

  Once again, I had to have a security clearance. The man from the agency in Canberra came to Brisbane and asked me a series of questions to establish my fitness to serve my country abroad. One of them was, without a hint of embarrassment, ‘Are you, or have you ever been, Mrs Atkinson … a homosexual?’

  I replied, ‘Well, no … but if so, would this be a problem?’

  My questioner said, with a perfectly straight face, ‘Not if you told us first.’

  It’s extraordinary to imagine now that being gay would be a cause for blackmail, which was what I had to understand was the concern.

  When I took the job I knew I needed to be in Paris in time for Prime Minister Paul Keating’s planned visit in June as part of the D-Day celebrations. My departmental briefing was confined to a mere three weeks and involved a lot of travelling about Australia. My title was Senior Trade Commissioner, and when I asked in Canberra who was the junior, I was told in puzzled tones that there wasn’t one. This was my introduction to the lack of logic in bureaucracies. I said. ‘Well if there’s no junior I can’t be senior. I’m just the trade commissioner.’ Not acceptable: I was told that it was the title that was important.

  Before I went to Paris I had not experienced the frustration of working for government, the endless rules and regulations, the forms to be filled, the reports to be written and som
etimes, I suspected, never read. I went into the role with some strong ideas about what was required based on my knowledge of France and the French, the trade missions and promotions I had led. But I now had to do things the Austrade way. There seemed to be quite a few people telling me what I should do and how, including the ambassador, Dieter Le Comte in Frankfurt, and the people in Canberra. Once when I complained about this, I was told I must have experienced bureaucracy in City Hall. The difference, of course, was as that as Lord Mayor I had been running things.

  Being the first female Senior Trade Commissioner in Europe was also interesting. Someone sent me a 1963 minute paper addressed to the director, and that caused me some amusement. It began: ‘Even after some deliberation it is difficult to find reasons to support the appointment of women Trade Commissioners.’

  The nine reasons given for ‘difficulties’ included such gems as: ‘A man normally has his household run efficiently by his wife, who also looks after entertaining. A woman trade commissioner would have all this on top of her normal work.’ And ‘A spinster lady can, and very often does, turn into something of a battleaxe with the passing years. A man usually mellows.’

  I lived in the Australian Embassy on the Rue Jean Rey almost next door to the Paris Hilton and within waving distance of the Eiffel Tower. The embassy had been designed by Harry Seidler in the 1970s. It was built on the site of the old railway yards from which Jewish families had been shipped to concentration camps in World War II. This had made it hard for the French government to sell the site. There did seem to be a nice irony in the Australian government’s appointment of a Jewish architect to design its French headquarters there. The building itself, in the brutalist architectural style and in the shape of a large concrete S, was controversial among Parisians, in the way of the Pompidou Museum. Mr Seidler had been dogmatic about the decor. Told in Canberra that the Austrade apartment was due for a revamp, I said I’d like to change the ‘dreary’ colours, beige, brown and olive green, to bright greens, pinks and yellows, my favourite decorating colours. I was told that Mr Seidler wouldn’t like it, to which I had to reply that Mr Seidler wasn’t going to see it, and I got my way. I thought it should reflect the Australian personality.