No Job for a Woman

by Sallyanne Atkinson

  At a French dinner party no one leaves the table to go to the bathroom. I did, early in my stay in Paris, and remarked to a French friend the next day about the untidy state of my hostess’s bathroom. My friend was shocked … by me, rather than my Parisian hostess. At a big formal dinner, there are long queues for ‘the facilities’ before the meal but no ‘comfort stops’ during it. I had an embarrassing moment years before on the Olympic trail when I was hosted at a lunch in the magnificent hôtel particulier that was the home of the Paris Chamber of Commerce. I asked for milk with my coffee. Then I noticed a waiter slipping out of the front door and returning a few minutes later with a carton of milk in hand. Coffee at lunch should be taken black.

  I had learned many things during my three years in France. I had also developed an appreciation for the innate confidence of the French, sometimes described as arrogance. They know who they are as a nation and don’t have to keep talking about it. What I didn’t learn was how French women stay so slim, because everyone I knew seemed to eat whatever she liked, and that was quite a lot. I think I came home not quite the Francophile I had been when I left. Paris, beautiful and exciting city that it is, is a wonderful place to visit but not quite so comfortable to live in. The long summer days do not compensate for the short, dark and cold days of a European winter that seems to go on and on.

  In contrast, I was reminded how easy life in Brisbane was and how good it felt to be among familiar surrounds. Still, I had the practical demands of finding somewhere to live and looking for a job. I bought a small and sensible car and looked for a house that was close to the city and small enough for me to manage. Though I was grateful to have places to stay, and family and friends to support me with their hospitality, I was keen to get settled. This would be the first time I would be buying a house on my own.

  One of the advantages of being a middle-aged single woman was only having myself to consider. For example, I didn’t have to think about such things as living near schools. I particularly wanted to indulge my love of Queenslanders and toyed with the idea of restoring something old and derelict. Luckily, I had just enough insight to realise I lacked the necessary practical skills and patience.

  I finally found what I thought was the perfect house in Red Hill, only minutes from the city. Like most things in life, it was not quite perfect. It was situated on busy Waterworks Road, which meant I had to back out into streams of rush-hour traffic. Damien asked the real estate agent, who happened to be a friend of mine, ‘Are you trying to kill my mother?’ My children have never had much faith in my driving ability.

  Built in the 1890s the pretty wooden worker’s cottage had been given a second storey underneath. From the street you walked into the kitchen and living room and out on to the obligatory deck, and then went downstairs to the three bedrooms. The views from both levels, across to the hills and valleys towards Mt Coot-tha were spectacular, especially when the purple jacarandas and then the red poincianas were in bloom.

  I must say I loved that house as I have loved no other, but after a couple of years its drawbacks began to show. Waterworks Road became busier, and backing out into traffic did become more challenging, for visitors if not for me. I found that those old Queensland builders had never quite understood we did have cold weather. In winter the wind would whistle up through the floorboards and through the walls. And I was burgled twice. Nothing really precious was taken apart from a suitcase with some of my Paris clothes, but someone invading your home is emotionally disturbing. The second time the burglars took only some china eggs that I had collected from various places and had on display, and the spice jars from the kitchen, which was odd enough to be even more disturbing.

  Afterwards, I moved into an apartment on the river at South Brisbane, which Leigh and I had once bought as an investment and which I had kept as my share of property when our marriage ended. It had two bedrooms but I did need a third, so I later moved to a three-bedroom apartment next door, where I still live now and intend always to be. I look up and down the river and over to the Expo site and across to the city, and cannot imagine anywhere more perfect.

  Re-establishing myself in Brisbane after a three-year absence was a time of real self-assessment. I was concerned about work, about earning a living. I realised I didn’t have any formal qualifications. My only actual training had been as a journalist, but I was rather too old to be getting a job as a reporter. I was faced with the same dilemma that many young people face – what do I want to be when I grow up?

  My problem was that I was grown up, and still felt uncertain. What I did have was experience, and a lot of it. I had been at the head of a large organisation in Brisbane City Council and in Paris I had been a middle manager as the head of a unit within a department. I knew about international trade and business and I had international contacts through my Olympic bid campaigns. I also had a profile. I realised it was time to capitalise on those skills. Whenever someone, usually young, complains to me that they have wasted time doing study they weren’t suited for or working in a job they didn’t like, I tell them sharply that nothing is wasted. Every experience is another layer in life, and prepares you for the next one.

  Before I left Paris I’d been approached by the ABC Television program Australian Story. Now a regular and popular Monday night feature, it was then in its early days. I was reassured by the fact that former Brisbane surgeon turned senator John Herron and his wife, Jan, who were also distinguished by having ten children, had appeared in an earlier episode. A crew came to Paris and filmed me in the embassy and at a footpath cafe.

  In Brisbane they followed me around for six weeks as I was house hunting, playing with Ruby, talking to friends, speaking at a function. It was quite a weird experience because after a while they became part of daily life, to be taken for granted, at least by me. It was sometimes intrusive having a camera crew hovering. Nicola strenuously objected to their turning up in the park at Milly’s third birthday party. Genevieve and Stephanie did on-camera interviews, and the finished program, which after all that filming only ran for half an hour, was called ‘The Homecoming’. I was asked, mainly by family, why I had ever agreed to it. I think my answer was that it just seemed rude to say no. Perhaps too, my inner PR consultant thought it would be good positioning.

  By the time I returned to Brisbane, I was already on the board of the Australian Ballet. Mel Ward, a vice-president of the board had tracked me down when I had visited Melbourne a few months earlier. Mel, now a Victorian, had been at school and university in Brisbane. I had been staying with my friend Jeanne Pratt and her husband Richard, generous benefactors to Australian arts and theatre. Jeanne, who like me had once been a reporter on the Sydney Telegraph, has made an enormous contribution in her own right to Australian theatre as the producer of The Production Company, which presents musicals that might not be well-known enough for commercial theatre, and gives famous performers the chance to play roles they might not normally get. Through the Pratt Foundation she has recently endowed a chair in musical theatre production. Mel asked me if I’d be interested in joining the Ballet board and I gave him an instant yes. It was an honorary role but a childhood dream come true. I was to serve on the board for 12 years and loved every minute of it. Directors were encouraged to travel with the company on overseas tours at their own expense and I had wonderful experiences in Shanghai, New York, Paris and London, enjoying the response of audiences and critics and feeling proud to be part of such a world-class company. A country’s culture is so much what defines it in the eyes of the rest of the world and our national ballet company showed that we could excel in such a refined art form. There was the Dancers Company, too, the Australian Ballet’s second company for training young dancers, which often toured throughout regional Queensland, and I tried to attend when I could.

  Soon after my return I was offered non-executive directorships for two ASX listed companies, again through the old connection network and these would be paid positions. Tony Clark, a Queenslander and a Sydne
y partner at accountancy firm KPMG, had been asked by a colleague to suggest a Queenslander for the board of Abigroup, a major construction company with work up and down the east coast; my name came up and I accepted. Similarly, Sir Leo Hielscher, former Under-Secretary of Treasury in the Queensland government and a great help and support for me in the City Hall days, was retiring from the board of APN News and Media and suggested me as a replacement. APN was Australia’s largest regional newspaper company, whose major shareholder was the Irish Rugby star and millionaire businessman Tony O’Reilly, and the CEO was his eldest son, the handsome Cameron, whose first base in the Australian newspaper empire had been provincial Rockhampton, where he cut a swathe with his charm and Irish accent. There was always a percentage of Irishmen on the board with accents that were hard to understand in our telephonic board meetings. I was the only woman and the only Queenslander on both boards but this time I was also the only journalist and felt I could make a real contribution.

  As well as commercial companies, I held positions on government boards and not-for-profit organisations. Towards the end of 1997 I was appointed chairman of the Queensland Tourist and Travel Corporation, later sensibly abbreviated to Tourism Queensland. The Minister for Tourism was a rambunctious and effective former bait shop owner from Noosa named Bruce Davidson. It was a great job, not only because I was able to travel throughout Queensland and promote it, but also because I have always believed in the importance of tourism – an industry that has not always been taken seriously.

  In 1998, as chairman of the tourism authority I went to Winton for the opening of the Waltzing Matilda Centre which celebrated the story of Banjo Paterson’s iconic poem; it is the only museum named after a song. Later, Bruce Collins, the Mayor and chairman of the board, asked me to be on it. I accepted and am still a member. I also joined the board of Binna Burra Mountain Lodge, one of Australia’s earliest eco-resorts, and subsequently became chairman. Binna Burra is on the Lamington Plateau, less than two hours’ drive from Brisbane, and where I had spent family holidays and later gone for fresh air and rainforest walks.

  Promoting Queensland also took me back to France, because we had decided to try again for another Expo, this time in the Gold Coast region. Sir Llew Edwards having been chairman of Expo 88 led the bid to the Bureau of International Expositions in Paris, but we were beaten by the Philippines, who presented a lot of very cute children singing and dancing. Unfortunately, their presentation was not backed by solid financial management and their Expo never happened. By the time this became known, the Queensland government had changed and any Expo enthusiasm was lost. The new government also removed me as chairman of tourism, and from Austa Energy, another government board to which I’d been appointed by Queensland Treasurer Joan Sheldon. This underscored for me the fragility of government appointments.

  The 1998 state election had been an odd one, which I rather crassly described in an article in the Australian as the ‘Up Yours’ election. This was what I thought the electorate had been saying to the major parties when they gave 23 per cent of the vote and 11 seats to the One Nation Party. Labor won office from the Coalition and Peter Beattie became premier. While it was a flash in the pan then, 18 years later One Nation leader, Pauline Hanson, was back in office with her own party.

  A Coalition government in Canberra meant I was appointed to a raft of national committees: the Citizenship Committee, the National Capital Authority (NCA), and the France Australia Industrial Research Group. The Citizenship Committee was set up to examine the concept of Australian citizenship and what it meant. It was chaired by Sir Ninian Stephen and included Robert Manne and Mark Ella. Our most interesting recommendation was to allow Australians to hold dual citizenship. The NCA is the planning authority for Canberra, which also has its own ACT government looking after domestic issues of health and education. We made decisions for Canberra as the national capital for all Australians. I was also co-chairman of the France Australia Industrial Research Group. This was an organisation set up by a previous federal Labor government to promote joint research projects with two chairs, one French and the other Australian, and we met each year either in Paris or an Australian city.

  These were busy years professionally and on the family front as well. Nicola and Ted had been married in Brisbane in 1992, and had produced Matilda in London, Beatrice in Hong Kong, and Eleanor in Brisbane, the event I returned just in time for. Eloise and Seamus, married in Toowoomba in 1995, now had Arthur, a brother to Ruby. In the next decade Eloise and Seamus had Frank, while Damien and his wife, Marilyn, had Leila, Abraham and Miriam. Genevieve’s daughters to her first husband, Jamie, were Georgia and Maggie, and she had Bridget with her second husband, Tim. Stephanie and Bruce would produce two boys, Gabriel and Sebastian.

  These years saw my disengagement from the Catholic Church with the annulment of my marriage. I first heard about this in a letter from the Church. Leigh and I had divorced, but the letter pointed out that Leigh wanted to marry again (he had in fact been married a few years earlier, in the Anglican Church) but would be unable to do so as our divorce was not recognised by the Catholic Church: we were considered still to be married. I certainly understood that it was the law of the Catholic Church that marriage is indissoluble. I knew that, strictly speaking, a divorced person cannot take part in the rites of the Church. But the Church has managed to be flexible in so much else, and in fact has not always insisted that someone whose marriage has been annulled must be married in the Catholic Church before taking communion.

  There are about 20 conditions for declaring a marriage invalid, including non-consummation (which was a nonsense after 30 years and five children), alcoholism, a determination not to have children and ‘my mother made me do it’. I once read that in Spain in previous centuries mothers wrote and kept letters ordering daughters into their impending marriages, thus providing grounds for annulment. The grounds chosen in our case were incapacity to make a proper decision about marriage, which I did think odd given that Leigh had been a registrar at the Mater Hospital, and the priest who married us had been one of his schoolteachers who knew him well. Certainly Leigh and I had been young – 21 and 25 – but we had both been university students with responsible careers, and had both been in full possession of our wits.

  The process was pretty dreadful. The decision was made by a tribunal in Sydney, but I was never allowed to appear before it in person. I was interviewed about our personal lives by a nun in the Church offices in Brisbane. I had been asked to provide three witnesses. I chose a Catholic friend, Julien Beirne, and and anglican one, Margaret Blocksidge, and my sister Louella. Julien said she found it a very degrading experience.

  When I was told of the decision to grant the annulment on the grounds specified, I said I was going to appeal, and I did. The appeal was to be heard in Sydney, too. Again, I was told I could not appear or speak for myself. I felt that I was being denied natural justice and not given a fair hearing; I really did want to have a proper discussion on the validity of our marriage. I was deeply concerned about the legitimacy of my children in the eyes of the Church, which would be an obvious consequence of their parents not being married.

  My appeal was not upheld, and I received a letter telling me so. It also informed me that if I wished to get married again in the Catholic Church I could show the priest the letter, which just confirmed for me that no one was listening or understood my very real distress. When I went into the Catholic office headquarters in Brisbane to discuss the decision, I was told I was not allowed to see the documents giving the reasons for the annulment, they were confidential. This seemed to me unbelievably mediaeval. I contemplated appealing to Rome, as one of the Kennedy wives had done in the US, but decided that would take too much time, energy and money. In the end, my marriage was annulled, which meant that in the eyes of the Church it had never existed.

  The experience left me feeling deserted and betrayed. I had embraced the Church willingly, had gone to mass each Sunday and made sure my five chi
ldren did, too. In my public life, I had stood up as a Catholic. Yet in spite of my connections, not one priest contacted me later to offer any support. I had made my feelings about the annulment very clear, even to the then archbishop, but he didn’t want to talk about it and suggested I speak to his canon law expert. I said, ‘Your Grace, I’m not concerned about the legal side, but the spiritual.’ (In fact, one priest did express sympathy and antipathy to the annulment process but this was because his own mother had experienced the process herself.)

  I had joined the Catholic Church with my brain and mind as well as my faith – and now my faith had been destroyed. I stopped going to mass.

  The Constitutional Convention, or ConCon, was a special event held in Canberra in 1998. I was a delegate for the Australian Republican Movement (ARM), led and largely funded by Malcolm Turnbull in his pre-political days. Michael Lavarch, former federal Attorney-General and current Dean of Law at the Queensland University of Technology, told me that our mutual friend Quentin Bryce had suggested that I might be interested in the Republican cause.

  And I was, to the surprise of some, including myself. While I had always been fascinated by the royal family – my sister Louella and I had played at being princesses and I knew the story of every British monarch from the Middle Ages onwards – it seemed to me that that had been then and there, and Australia was here and now. I thought that Australia should be an independent, stand-alone nation and we had a chance to become one in a seamless, tidy manner; so many republics had been born out of turmoil and bloodshed. I was also influenced by the nonsense of explaining to our French clients that the Australian Embassy in Paris would be closed on the holiday for the Queen’s birthday, when that queen was English and in London.