Days of Wine and Rage

by Frank Moorhouse

  Portrait of a Powerful Australian Woman

  Andrew Clark

  (abridged, from the Bulletin, 24.4.79)

  In December 1978, after the ABC strike, Chairman John Norgard made an unannounced visit to Canberra to plead with Malcolm Fraser to put away his razor and stop slashing Auntie’s budget.

  Accompanying Norgard was a good-looking, middle-aged woman, wearing a pleasant fifties dress, her slightly greying hair set to suit the same period. During the discussions she smiled readily, and laughed occasionally, but remained reserved. When she spoke it was forcefully and to the point. The Prime Minister was impressed.

  Patrick White, on the other hand, calls the same woman ‘Killer Kramer’, a member of her staff says she’s a dragonfly, and feminists have accorded her their ultimate insult – the title of honorary man.

  The subject of these sobriquets is Professor Leonie Kramer, D.Phil (Oxon). In appearance she typifies the attractive, well-groomed, intelligent and conservative women who are occasionally found among the more exclusive suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne. Dr Kramer, fifty-four, is more than that – more intelligent, more hard-working, more experienced, more dedicated, more complex, and more interesting. Most important of all, she is more powerful.

  Through her membership of an extraordinary range of official and private bodies, Leonie Kramer’s presence is pervasive, though not always identified, in Australian public life. She has, because of the peculiar way in which these positions reinforce each other, been placed in the position where she helps mould the moulders of public opinion.

  As institutions become more conservative, her power increases.

  Distinguished from all but a handful of Australian women by her access to, and use of, power, Dr Kramer is no darling of the feminists, although she claims she’s a ‘feminist in another kind of sense’. The feminist explanation of this paradox is that she is a success because she has sold out: a token woman who is a threat to no one, least of all the established order.

  The reasons for the antipathy are more complex. However, it is so strong now that of the women who are both prominent and apparently moderate or conservative – like Margaret Guilfoyle, the Minister for Social Security, and Dr Jean Battersby, of the Australia Council – Dr Kramer is the target of the most vitriolic attacks from women’s liberation groups.

  She does not help to smooth waters with comments like this: ‘I find an awful lot of women are boring.’ Further, ‘I don’t believe in solidarity. I can’t bear this shoulder-to-shoulder, backs to the walls, brothers and sisters business. It’s quite alien to me. I’d rather do something on my own. It may take longer and it may be less effective but I couldn’t work the other way.’

  Critics ascribe this reaction to an establishment, elitist background, and a jealous regard for her own position. There is some truth in this explanation – Dr Kramer admits it has some validity, too – but the facts tell a rather different story.

  Leonie Kramer’s background is not establishment but genteel middle-class. Her father, Alfred Gibson, was a clerk with the State Savings Bank of Victoria, and she was brought up in the staid Melbourne suburb of Kew. Both her parents read widely, and made a substantial sacrifice to send her to PLC (The Presbyterian Ladies’ College), immortalised in Henry Handel Richardson’s The Getting of Wisdom.

  PLC implanted both discipline and learning in its pupils, in varying doses. Leonie Kramer benefited from the school, and was happy at home. She says much of her amazing energy and determination comes from her family background. ‘In a way that’s where it all began. I was also brought up to believe that you came into the world to do something.’

  She graduated from Melbourne University at the end of World War II with first-class honours, majoring in English and Philosophy. ‘I had one ambition – to go to Oxford,’ and she was accepted there as a postgraduate student. Before leaving Melbourne she collected material on Henry Handel Richardson, and wrote the first of three monographs on the great Australian author and former PLC student.

  At Oxford the significant influence was ‘the place rather than the people’. She also met her future husband, Harry, a South African doctor, who was at Oxford on a Nuffield scholarship. She completed her D.Phil, writing her thesis on seventeenth-century English Literature. She spent a few years teaching at St Hugh’s, a women’s college, and Ruskin, host of worker-students, before the newly married couple returned to Australia in 1954.

  Dr Kramer’s first job in Australia was lecturing in English Literature at the Canberra University College – later absorbed into the Australian National University. After two years, her husband, now a pathologist, was transferred to Sydney, and she was without a job.

  For Leonie Kramer, a strong believer in formal work structures and institutions, it is paradoxical that it was her freelancing over the next two years which laid the groundwork for her later influence. Through an old friend, poet and English teacher Jim McAuley, she joined the editorial board of Quadrant, organ of the right-wing Congress for Cultural Freedom. This link provided her contact with an influential group of conservative barristers, academics, businessmen, trade unionists and journalists.

  She wrote book reviews for Quadrant, the Bulletin, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Observer and Nation (both now defunct). She also made regular appearances on ABC programs, and became active on the commission’s advisory bodies. Nearly a quarter of a century later, this long association with the ABC was capped with her appointment as a commissioner.

  In 1958 Dr Kramer returned to formal academic life as a lecturer in English Literature, and was later promoted to associate professor. In 1968 she became Professor of Australian Literature at Sydney University – the first woman professor at Australia’s oldest university, and the second person in the world, let alone Australia, to hold a chair in Australian Literature.

  In the decade since that appointment her power and influence have spread, especially in education, current affairs broadcasting, and literature. In education, her base begins with her job at Sydney University, a position in which she is currently more powerful because she also heads the English department. Influence was spread for many years by her membership of the University senate. It has spread even further since 1974, when she was appointed to the Australian Universities Commission, which advises the government on funding and policy towards universities.

  Moving from official to private, her prominent role in public debate over education issues is guaranteed by her joint founding and membership of the Australian Council for Educational Standards (ACES) which has acted as a critic of some education experiments since shortly after the Whitlam government entered office and the Schools Commission was established.

  Official influence in secondary education is underwritten by her membership of the NSW Secondary Schools Board, which advises the state education department on policy.

  Finally, there is her position on the ABC, a body which runs many education programs, and airs debates on education policy.

  In literature a similar pattern emerges. It starts, again, from her university position, moves to the ABC, with its numerous programs on literature and drama, then to Quadrant, where she not only reviews but commissions articles and reads contributors’ material, and last but not least finishes with her Vaucluse dinner parties attended by members of the Sydney literati.

  In current affairs, the starting point is the ABC, then moves to Quadrant and the Association for Cultural Freedom, a promoter of public debate and a body with a definite influence and line on current issues.

  However, Dr Kramer says she did not seek many of these positions, and professes to be ignorant about the development of power, and its personal implications. ‘I don’t think I’ve got any concept of power for myself. In fact, when I first became head of the department I used to joke with myself and look in the mirror to see if I felt that glorious sense of power, and nothing happened.

  ‘I don’t feel as though I’ve ever been ambitious. Everything I’ve ever done seems to
have just happened to me.’

  Why is she a member of so many commissions, committees, and boards? A combination, Professor Kramer says, of proving that she is a hard and effective worker, and their desire to have a token woman.

  She claims to be ‘not very good’ at committee work because ‘it takes me a long time to feel that I have something to contribute’. Members of committees she has joined, particularly the Sydney University senate, and the advisory board on prisons in New South Wales, complain that she does not speak up enough.

  However, seasoned Kramer observers see this reticence fitting into her style. As one close associate of Professor Kramer, who insisted on remaining nameless, put it: ‘She’s like a crafty dog at a committee. She walks round and round the bone and seems to be ignoring it. But she knows it’s there and she’s determined to get it eventually.’

  Her strong point in committee work is an ability to seize a central point, and ignore the fat and waffle of debate. It is an ability she also employs at university seminars, combined with a gift for stimulating students to develop their basic points further, instead of simply picking holes in the argument – in other words, playing the old academic point-scoring game.

  At the ABC she is more forceful and contentious. She attacks individual programs at commission meetings, and praises others. She admits expressing ‘fairly strong views that may or may not be acted on’.

  However, Professor Kramer is being disingenuous when she claims ‘I don’t think I have any influence at all at the ABC.’ Both Kramer and Norgard, a former senior BHP executive, were appointed to the ten-member commission at the beginning of 1977. Since then a discernible Norgard–Kramer axis has developed, and she is regarded by senior ABC executives as the most influential commissioner.

  Many of her ‘fairly strong views’ have been expressed about Broadband, a current affairs discussion program, broadcast on ABC radio four nights a week, and Coming Out Ready Or Not, a weekly radio program produced by the ABC women’s unit. Broadband was formerly broadcast for an hour and a half each night, but was last year cut back to forty-five minutes. Dr Kramer, and Laurie Short, were active critics of the program at commission meetings.

  Her criticism of the program, like her views on education, literature, and women’s liberation, concern style as much as content. She objected to Broadband’s non-use of the fruity-voiced ABC announcers, but a more personal style. She has also attacked its alleged radical bias. ‘Some of the programs have been good and some have not been as objective as I would want them – not by any means.’

  When I asked whether any serious, probing current affairs program could ever be objective, as opposed to ‘balanced’ or ‘fair’, she said: ‘I don’t think objectivity is incompatible with people expressing strong views.

  ‘There is a proper place for minority programs and minority views as long as they are responsible, and as long as the people taking part in those programs have as their object the promotion of soundly based arguments and discussion.’

  Dr Kramer said, ‘Australia does not seem particularly good at sustaining argument and discussion. It’s very important that a national broadcasting system like the ABC set a kind of standard for how it can be done, and how rigorous and exciting it can be.’

  Of the program produced by women, for women, and about women, Coming Out Ready Or Not, she said: ‘I don’t listen to it much, and I don’t like it particularly because of its whingeing tone. However, I’m sure some of its programs are good.’

  Typical of the reaction of feminists to Dr Kramer is that of Eva Cox, head of the NSW Council for Social Service, who chaired the ABC advisory committee in that state. She found Dr Kramer ‘a very tight-minded, bigoted girl who is not prepared to be pleasant. I think she has got very rigid ideas and anybody who offends her ideas offends her. She certainly tended to put a blight on discussion.’

  Miss Cox said Dr Kramer reported a female ABC employee who was attending an advisory commitee hearing in an official capacity after she interrupted discussion to explain the function of the women’s unit.

  Professor Kramer says she attended only one meeting of the advisory committee and never spoke personally to Miss Cox. ‘That’s an opinion based on absolutely no evidence. It depends on what you mean by bigoted. People can say having an opinion is bigoted, and you can’t do anything about that, can you?’

  Dr Kramer said she did not report the woman employee by name at the commission meeting, but told commission members she thought it was ‘improper’ for her to ‘rudely interrupt’ a member of the committee.

  At one commission meeting, Professor Richard Harding, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Western Australia, and a Labor appointee to the commission, took Dr Kramer to task over her criticism of feminist programs. He used the following very Australian analogy to justify their continuation: He was a racing man, and after every Melbourne Cup there was an Oaks day when ‘we give the fillies a go’.

  The ABC is not the first place where she has had a run in with women’s liberation groups. During the mid-seventies she opposed the introduction of a women’s philosophy course at Sydney University, joining ranks with fellow Association for Cultural Freedom member David Armstrong who is Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University. During that imbroglio she was awarded the title of ‘honorary man’, and described as a ‘fascist’, ‘reactionary’, ‘and all sorts of other names’.

  Women, she says, should work within the system to achieve their aims. It is ‘incredibly naive and paranoid’ for feminists to believe that male-dominated institutions deliberately work to exclude women, she says.

  ‘Why should you suppose that a collection of professionals that happens to be men for a whole set of historical reasons would try to keep you out. In fact the record of this (Sydney) university, like the record of the ABC, shows that this doesn’t happen.’

  Affirmative action programs for women are, she says, ‘full of pitfalls’. A university could not appoint the best person for a particular job ‘because that person isn’t a woman. That’s against all the things that anybody would want to press for.’

  I asked if her attitude was influenced by the fact that she had made it, while many of her detractors had not.

  She said, ‘That’s an assumption that a lot of people would make, and there may be some truth in it. My interpretation is that it’s less to do with having made it than knowing what you have to do to make it. It doesn’t do any good at all to jump up and down and shout about the injustices you are suffering from. It takes a long time to deal with them, but in the meantime you’ve got to show that you can operate effectively.

  ‘When I first started as an academic I can’t tell you how many women asked: “How long do you have to go on working?” So many women treated me as some poor creature whose husband couldn’t afford to keep her properly. I was criticised almost every week of my life. These were not feminists, but housewives, and some of them very intelligent women.

  ‘I’ve become case-hardened, and I would certainly resist a simple explanation of why women would criticise me.

  ‘To make it as a woman you have to be better in a way, but not necessarily more intelligent or more capable. It involves more stamina, energy, and will, which is slightly different to ambition.

  ‘You really do have to be prepared, as a man doesn’t quite have to be, to work very hard if you have a family: that is, if you take the rather old-fashioned view that, apart from whatever help you get in the house, it’s still your responsibility to look after the children, to attend to their woes and miseries, to feed your husband.

  ‘People say that women don’t get to positions because of the forces that keep them out. I’m fairly sceptical about that. I think the forces that operate against them are those of temperament, willpower and stamina.’

  Dr Kramer admits she has never had many women friends. ‘I’ve worked in a man’s world all my life and I’ve been in a situation where I’ve been the only woman. That means that many of my
acquaintances have been men.

  ‘I’ve partly not had many women friends because they have not been in my area, and partly because I think an awful lot of women are boring. I know an awful lot of men are boring too, but the interests of a great many women are extremely limited. I find it difficult to pretend that I’d prefer to talk to them than a man whose interests may be just as limited but different to mine – for example, businessmen.

  ‘While I may not be a femininist in one way, I am in another – I don’t like seeing women making themselves substitute men.’ I reminded Dr Kramer that feminists at Sydney University had accused her of this same sin.

  ‘I can see why that’s said,’ she replied, ‘and it really bores me. The description is wrong. Anybody who wants to do serious and hard work has to behave rationally. You can’t afford to be quirkish and irrational and use women’s tricks, which women have rather successfully developed.’

  An incident four years ago at the University of New South Wales once again brought both Dr Kramer and feminists, and other groups, into conflict. Her daughter, a medical student, reported home on a lecture given on human sexuality by sexologist Bettina Arndt. Professor Kramer, already a member of the Australian Universities Commission, rang the dean of the medical faculty, Professor Robert Walsh, to complain.

  Following the complaint, a group of academics at Sydney University wrote a joint letter which said that Dr Kramer was employing her position improperly, and attempting to interfere with academic freedom at another university. Dennis Altman, a senior lecturer in government at Sydney University, who has written widely on homosexuality, and Sue Wills, who holds a similar position at the Ku-Ring-Gai College of Advanced Education, also gave lectures on male and female homosexuality.