No Job for a Woman

by Sallyanne Atkinson

  Living in Paris, even in the embassy rather than the city itself, was an extraordinary experience. I was never to learn the secret of French chic but I did have some interesting conversations in my search for it. A French friend was surprised that I should think that style was something special rather than being taken for granted. Growing up in France, she told me, little girls understood they had a responsibility to look good for the people who would be looking at them. It was not vanity but a social obligation. She also told me that French women stayed slim because morning and afternoon teas were not French habits.

  I had to learn to deal with the dreaded placement when officially entertaining. In Paris there was a hierarchy of who could be invited with whom to a dinner and great offence would be taken if mistakes were made. The afternoon of one dinner party I had a phone call from the Baron de Rendinger saying he and his wife couldn’t come that evening because they had the flu, and all I could think of was: ‘What about the placement?’ The one person who was a definite dinner drawcard and who everyone wanted to sit next to, even though he wasn’t the head of his company, was Rugby legend Nick Farr-Jones, who was living and working in Paris. Being a ‘rugbyman’ outranked all else.

  I found all kinds of bureaucratic rules in place for Canberra sur Seine. There was tight security, too, though not as tight as it probably is today. Our security guards, like other Australians working in the embassy, had come from all kinds of backgrounds and were usually young graduates keen to work in Paris but unable to do so under French law. For example, we had a Sydney lawyer who was keen to study the wine industry. Damien, coming home late one night and not being able to remember my apartment number, buzzed the guardhouse and asked to be let in. Not surprisingly, the guard asked for some proof that he was who he said he was. Damien proceeded to recite ‘Clancy of the Overflow’. He was let in.

  As part of my contract I had a car for my own use, which implied I would have to drive it. There were two problems. It was a big car, bigger than I was used to. And it would have to be driven on the wrong side of the road. The first problem I solved, though not without difficulty. The car was due to be changed at some stage, so I said I’d like a smaller one please. This caused consternation because my rank entitled me to the bigger one and what, said Canberra, about my successor? I suggested they put a note on the file, or whatever, saying I had chosen to take a smaller car but that whoever came after was entitled to a larger model.

  I decided I would begin my Paris driving around the Arc de Triomphe. That famous monument to victory in the heart of Paris is in the middle of a great circle with eight great boulevards radiating off it. Vehicles roar up the boulevards towards it, crossing the circle to reach another boulevard, and who has right of way is a mystery. I was told it was the only place where insurance companies automatically decreed that both cars were at fault in an accident. So I gave myself the scary and exhilarating experience early one quiet Sunday morning and found that driving around the Arc was like riding the dodgem cars at the Brisbane Ekka. It became my best party trick for visitors, to really frighten them. I recall one of my children saying, ‘That’s how Mum always drives!’ Paris policemen signal drivers to move faster ‘Vite, vite!’ When I came back to Brisbane I kept getting speeding fines.

  Negotiating the highways of France was another challenge entirely. I had enrolled in a language course at Pont l’Esprit in Provence and for the first time had to navigate the countryside. The problem was that driving in the country meant driving to it, and that in France meant down the huge motorway. There were trucks on either side of me so large it was like driving between tall buildings. Just before I got to my destination I had an accident. Tired after so many hours of unfamiliar terrain I turned to take the exit and sideswiped a fast-moving sports car. No one was hurt but it was a very French experience involving excited police and ambulance, and my inadequate language skills. The damage to the embassy car meant I did get the smaller one sooner than I might have.

  As trade commissioner I saw my role as promoting Australia as a whole, which meant the way we lived as well as the products we had to sell. Austrade’s brief was to help Australian companies sell their products and we helped them by finding particular opportunities and researching and developing markets. Liz Johnston, a journalist friend on the Australian, quotes me as calling it ‘a sort of Shop Australia promoting the idea that Australia is a good place to do business and a good place to buy from’.

  Australia’s main exports to France were wool and coal but they were established and didn’t need our help. We organised companies to participate in food fairs and leather goods fairs, and we were part of the first Australian label in the French fashion shows. Collette Dinnigan was showing her lovely dresses in the famous Angelina’s coffee house on the Rue de Rivoli and we lent her dress racks from the embassy. Australian wine was just becoming known in France and being promoted by young French winegrowers who had done stints in Australia and loved the new ways they had learned. I tried to explain to people in the French industry that we didn’t regard Australian wines as in competition with theirs, just different from them. Our climate, our sun, our soil all made our wines unique. We promoted businesses that were starting off and gave them advice about their potential success. A Queensland friend was keen to export opals to France, but the local staff in the Austrade office told me they were considered bad luck.

  The French are fairly obsessed with good health and the variety of ‘cures’ that contribute to it. One’s doctor can recommend a week or two at a spa and the state will pay for it. A company that ran a seawater health resort on the coast of Brittany consulted me about bringing their seawater techniques to Australia. I had to explain that Australians were accustomed to getting their seawater for free.

  My official title in France was Ministre des Affaires Commerciales which gave me diplomatic ranking but also involvement in political issues. The big one was the French nuclear testing in Tahiti and politically there was a stand-off. Trade was affected, according to official figures, with sales of champagne and other luxuries falling in Australia. There didn’t seem to be much of an effect at the French end. Although Australian unions had banned the loading of coal to France, it was simply shipped to Belgium or Holland and freighted down. Certainly the French, long reliant on nuclear energy, could not understand our position.

  Trying to explain it to a French business associate, I said, ‘We might have been happier if you had conducted the tests in France, rather than in Tahiti.’ He looked at me in astonishment. ‘But, Madame, Tahiti is France!’ The French attitude to colonies is quite different from the English. These countries became part of France, even to having representation in the French Parliament.

  One thing that did suffer was Brisbane’s sister-city relationship with Nice in the south of France. It had been initiated early in my time as Lord Mayor by a group in Nice, a city much given to having sister cities. They had researched Australian cities to find the most suitable match, and that was Brisbane. I, of course, was amenable to anything French. The sister-city concept can be misunderstood and seen simply as an excuse for Council junkets. But properly used sister-city relationships are vehicles for business-to-business opportunities as well as opportunities for young people. For example, a schoolboy football team from the Brisbane suburb of Inala went on an exchange to Nice. For some years we had exchanges with the botanic gardens in Nice, whose conditions were remarkably similar to ours. A young woman wrote to tell me of losing her money and passport and going to the Nice offices and being helped when she said she came from Brisbane.

  In protest at the nuclear testing, my successor Jim Soorley publicly tore up the sister city agreement. Actually he tore it up several times for the cameras, leading someone to drily remark that I must have left photocopies. The people in Nice thought this was rather rude but as they had about 20 other sister cities, they could just shrug their civic shoulders.

  The other two sister-city agreements I signed as Lord Mayor of Brisbane wer
e with Auckland and Kobe. I was only much later to hear of the background sensitivities. Apparently, way back in Frank Sleeman’s time the city of Fukuoka in Japan had approached Brisbane but Frank Sleeman had been a prisoner of the Japanese in the war, and he was having none of it. Years later when Kobe made overtures and was accepted, Fukuoka was affronted. They then became a sister city with Auckland so we ended up being related after all. Auckland had a very personal connection – I had become friends with Mayor Dame Cath Tizard, later to be Governor-General of New Zealand, when we were both members of our respective councils and had met at library conferences.

  I was also accredited to the former French colony of Algeria, as well as Morocco, Tunisia, Belgium and Luxembourg. Algeria was considered so dangerous that I wasn’t allowed to go there, and as there were horrific stories of barbaric butchery, including of a group of French nuns, I was happy to obey. I did go once, when there was a temporary cessation of hostilities and our ambassador was able to present his credentials, but it was not a happy place. I almost made a great faux pas on my first visit to Belgium; I was to make a speech in Antwerp. I had carefully prepared it in French but was luckily warned in time that ‘you’d have rocks thrown at you’ in Flemish-speaking Antwerp. English did very well in trilingual Belgium.

  In Morocco I experienced the difficulty sometimes experienced in doing business in different cultures. I was speaking with a government official about the potential for selling Australian windmills in that drought-prone country, and he outlined the costs involved, which included some unofficial payments to government officials. I explained that I represented the Australian government and we couldn’t possibly do business that way. He just shrugged.

  My Olympic connections stood me in good stead, and John Coates gave me the title of Deleguee Europeene of SOCOG with nice big business cards in the French style on which I had my name written the French way, as two words, Sally Anne. Austrade organised an Olympic business seminar in Paris and among the speakers was SOCOG president, Gary Pemberton, who was so perfectly coached by our Nathalie Curtis that people kept speaking to him in French later.

  I had kept in touch with various IOC friends and among them was the Comte de Beaumont, who also happened to be President of the Cercle D’Union Interalliee, the smartest club in Paris, to which he got me instant membership. The count, at this stage aged 90, had been president of the club for 20 years. He was a very distinguished Frenchman who had represented France in hurdling and clay pigeon shooting in the 1924 Olympics, and had also been the member for Indochina in the French Parliament.

  One of my more memorable Paris experiences was a lunch he hosted for me and Pamela Harriman, the newly appointed American ambassador to France, but most famous for having once been married to Randolph Churchill. The count said, ‘I hope you will not mind if she is on my right and you are on my left’, which of course I didn’t. My only disappointment was that I would have had to peer past him to look at her and the equally famous facelift, but I did observe that no matter how good the facelift, old-lady hands are a giveaway. A few years later Pamela Harriman came to the embassy for Australia Day. I noticed she was standing alone and went over to talk to her. She told me she had been in Australia when she was three and her father had been aide-de-camp to the Governor-General, a fact not known. I said, ‘Which Governor-General was that?’ But she quickly laughed: ‘Oh, you’re not going to catch me like that!’ I had forgotten that her age was a well-kept secret.

  Austrade in Europe was organised so that each post had lead responsibility for a particular sector. Ours in Paris was education, which I was very pleased about. I had good contacts in schools and universities in Australia but I also believed that educating young people from other countries here in Australia was the best way to increase trade and business in the future. Education was an important ‘export’ even then, but today has become a huge industry. In 1996 there were about 70,000 overseas students in Australia. The figure is now over 660,000.

  Something I tried to do was encourage Australian companies to venture outside Paris to the provinces. Chambers of Commerce in all the major French towns were formal organisations, financially backed by government and often with impressive headquarters. They were very happy to help us with seminars on doing business in Australia and buying from Australia, and we organised them in Bordeaux, Marseilles and Lyons, to name a few. Nantes was memorable. Australia’s new Deputy Prime Minister Tim Fischer was coming to France and was keen to drive a train. I think he actually requested a TGV, the fast train, and the closest TGV journey was to Nantes, 385 kilometres west of Paris. I rode in the driver’s cabin with him to help with translation. It turned out I was not needed – he and the driver could communicate without language and the driver was overwhelmed at Tim’s knowledge of signals and interchanges. In Nantes, the local chamber of commerce, also overwhelmed at being visited by such an important politician, had organised a seminar complete with a translator for the ministerial speech. But Tim had only uttered about four sentences when the translator burst into tears and rushed from the hall. She couldn’t cope with the Australian idiom.

  There were other Australian promotions in Cannes, home of the famous film festival but also of trade shows for the music industry, property and IT, all of which required the presence of the Senior Trade Commissioner. They were exciting times, staying at the Ritz-Carlton hotel, where there were always welcome flowers from Xavier Roy, the head of Reed Midem, the company organising the trade fairs. There were lunches and dinners at restaurants on the Corniche, but most of all I enjoyed being able to talk up with pride the best Australia had to offer.

  I had other duties. I took a phone call one day from Tony Roche, Pat Rafter’s coach. Pat had reached the quarter-or semi-finals in the French Open tennis championships. He would be playing against a Spaniard who would have his family in the players’ box, while Pat, so far from home, would have no one. Tony asked if I would go out the next day and watch the match. It wasn’t hard to say yes. That night French television identified me as Pat Rafter’s mother.

  I did miss Brisbane and family, but Paris is a magnet for visitors to Europe and I had friends to stay. I found I could spend more time with them than at home, and the children were able to come at various times, including a magical snowy Christmas when we all went to church together. I went home for Stephanie’s twenty-first birthday and then the wedding in Toowoomba of Eloise and Seamus.

  I popped over to London for the birth of my first grandchild, Matilda, born to Nicola and Ted. I was fortunate enough to be there for the actual birth. Being present at a birth is a wondrous experience and I was lucky to have several of them. It was particularly wonderful after having given birth five times myself. Childbirth is a miracle indeed, and I’ve felt privileged every time I’ve been a part of it. I do sometimes think it is more natural to have older women present – mothers rather than husbands – which now seems to be the modern way.

  Not long before I was due to leave France, Eloise and Seamus came from Brisbane with Ruby, who was three months old, breastfed and perfect to travel with. We stayed in bed and breakfasts in provincial France, and went to Prague for a weekend where cooing waitresses in restaurants would carry blonde-haired, blue-eyed Ruby off to the kitchen.

  Damien, Genevieve and Stephanie all came to visit. Damien and his English girlfriend came over from London. They experienced firsthand the language problem when they were leaving from the nearby railway station and wanted a meal at the cafe beside it. The issue was solved in a typically French way. No English was spoken but the manager took Damien by the hand and led him around the occupied tables so he could point out what he wanted.

  My three-year contract with Austrade was to finish in mid-1997. I had an option to renew for a further year, and it was tempting, but, apart from missing family and friends, I thought three years was a proper length of time to stay away from Brisbane. If I stayed away any longer it would be difficult to go home.

  BRISBANE IS NOT PARIS
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br />   I arrived back in Brisbane in time for my fifty-fifth birthday and the birth of another grandchild, which happened to be two days apart.

  Looking back now, 55 seems quite young but at the time it seemed old, particularly to be starting a whole new chapter of my life. I didn’t know what that was going to look like, nor where I was going to live. I had plenty of options for temporary accommodation and moved between Eloise and Seamus’s house in Whynot Street, West End, my friend Andree’s historic home Nyrambla in Ascot, and Bill and Imelda Roche’s Gold Coast holiday house. I was a grandmother of no fixed abode. Actually, my first priority was not finding a house but finding a car, because Brisbane is not Paris and public transport did not provide an easy way to get around. Being mobile was a priority, especially with so many of the children and grandchildren living in Brisbane.

  My return reinforced some of the lessons I had learned and observations I had made in Paris. Back in my home town, I understood again the importance of family and friends. Though I was very much a single woman, I was lucky to have adult children to give me help and advice, and old friends who were pleased that I was back among them.

  I brought back with me a whole new appreciation of what it’s like to be a foreigner in a country where you understand some of the language but not all of the nuances. And there are a whole range of small social rules that are never quite formulated but really do matter: in France, for example, cutting the cheese the wrong way. I had brought up my children not to put their elbows on the table, but in France that’s polite. I was told by a French business colleague that it was an old social rule – that keeping your hands under the table meant you could have one on your sword. To which his friend added, ‘Or on your neighbour’s knee!’