*
By the time Penny Wong finished school, Jane Chapman had completed her bachelor’s degree, followed by postgraduate qualifications in social work, and was employed at the Adelaide Central Mission. From the mid-1980s she also began to publish on the impact of sex-role stereotyping on couples therapy. She was part of a team that developed a non-sexist language policy for the leading Australian Journal of Family Therapy.23 Over the next decade she was to become increasingly known and respected in her field, as well as a dedicated campaigner on feminist and social equality issues. She went on to complete two other bachelor’s degrees and additional postgraduate qualifications.
Meanwhile, Toby Wong found his feet at Scotch College. He’s there in some of the class photos, a round-faced child shorter than his peers and with a strong resemblance to his sister. He is remembered by his schoolfriends as charismatic, ready with jokes, anecdotes and ideas for adventure, frequently leading to trouble. If Penny was a nerd, Toby was cool. While Penny excelled at school, Toby did not. In the later years, he was increasingly absent. His drug problem was common knowledge among his classmates and, in the final years, he simply fell from view.
Around 1985, when Toby would have been about fifteen, the Adelaide journalist Stilgherrian was drinking in a Rundle Street hotel and discussing music with his friends. He remembers, ‘Suddenly this lad turned to me and said, “Mate, your taste in music is fucked.”’24 Thus began a conversation that turned into a close friendship. Toby was a blues fan, and deeply knowledgeable about music. He was ‘a bit of a ratbag. He was going to pubs when he was too young to be doing that’, recalls Stilgherrian. Toby must still have been formally enrolled in school at this stage, because Stilgherrian remembers him being one of the presenters of Rock’n’Roll High School on the community radio station. As the name implies, the program was presented by secondary students. Stilgherrian and Toby talked about one day doing a show together that would shift between recipes and Southern blues.
By the time he was eighteen or nineteen, Toby was the front man of a blues band called Mr Wong and the Travelling Czechs. He was also a well-regarded chef – ahead of his time, according to Stilgherrian, in providing what would later be described as fusion food: East meets West. ‘He was heaps of fun. He had one dish he put on at an Asian restaurant called Mr Wong’s Authentic Malaysian Duck Pizza, and if anyone asked about the authenticity he’d come to the table and spin this great line of bullshit about Malaysia’s hidden pizza tradition. He was really charismatic. I joked at the time that he had all the charisma that Penny didn’t. She’s charismatic now, but it took her a while to find that. Toby always had charisma.’
By the early 1990s, Toby was head chef at a restaurant on Hutt Street, and Stilgherrian had a flat nearby. He gave Toby his keys so he could use the place for a nap between the lunch and evening trades. ‘So I arrived home early one day from work to find him going through my fridge and throwing things out. He’d grab things and say, “Mate, these are bullshit tomatoes. Don’t buy shit like this.” And he’d just throw them in the bin. I do miss him.’
Toby was ardent about food. Poor quality offended him; it could not be tolerated. Today, Stilgherrian credits Toby with teaching him how to cook well. ‘It was all about using high-quality ingredients with respect, keep it simple, taste as you go, and understand your ingredients so you know what each thing does.’ Toby was able to ‘throw things together and make a wonderful meal in minutes’. On one occasion – backyard cricket with the boys – Stilgherrian arrived late and hungry. Toby went to fetch him a sandwich. ‘He disappears inside, and five minutes later he gives me this beautiful sourdough with freshly grilled garfish.’
Toby later worked as a consultant, designing menus and helping pubs and restaurants to source quality ingredients at good prices. Stilgherrian remembers, ‘It would go from ordinary greengrocer produce bought at full prices to an Italian market gardener calling at the back door with boxes of great tomatoes, or the Vietnamese market gardener with the box of greens.’ South Australia legalised the sale of kangaroo meat for human consumption well ahead of other states. Toby was among the first to put it on restaurant menus. Once, Stilgherrian, Toby and Toby’s girlfriend went to an Asian restaurant, and Toby noticed there were different prices on the menu for Western and Chinese customers. After giving the management a lecture, he then insisted on going into the kitchen to ‘meet the fish’ they were about to be served.
As the friendship developed, Toby told Stilgherrian that he had ‘mood problems’ and ‘anger issues … but he never let me see them’. The drug use, and all that went with it in the way of connections to the criminal world, became increasingly evident. But this was not unusual for chefs, who often used drugs to deal with the laborious physical work and the fatigue.
From the earliest days, says Stilgherrian, Toby would talk about Penny with love and pride. It was well recognised in the family, Toby said, that his sister was ‘super smart’ and going places. It was she who would please their father, Toby said. He characterised himself as a ‘ratbag’ and ‘black sheep’.
In the mid-1990s Stilgherrian’s journalistic career took him to Sydney and, about the same time, Toby Wong moved to Melbourne. The two of them lost touch.
*
Penny Wong’s decision to go to Brazil in 1986 changed the direction of her life. The country was at a crucial point in its history. The year before, civilian government had been restored, ending a 21-year era of military rule. The new republic’s constitution was being drafted. Under the military regime, the Catholic Church had assumed responsibility for providing services, often under threat of persecution, to the poor. Liberation theology – the synthesis of Christian belief and Marxist praxis – had its firmest grip in Latin America, and the Brazilian priest and theologian Leonardo Boff was among its best-known supporters, arguing for a grassroots reinvention of the Church’s hierarchy. He maintained that there was only one answer to the question of how to be a Christian in a world of destitution and injustice – by making common cause with the poor.
Wong learned the language, Portuguese, relatively easily, drawing on the French she had studied at school but also, she suspects, owing to a mental plasticity around language that came from her early bilingual years. Being relatively fluent meant she was able to form deeper connections with her host families and with other Brazilians than was often the case for foreign-language exchange students. Despite this, she did not engage at a formal level with national politics or theology. Rather, her experience of the country was direct, visceral and transformative.
For the first half of her stay, she was hosted by a committed Catholic family in the interior of Brazil. Her host volunteered at the local hospital and aged-care centre, and Penny went along with her. Given her medical ambitions, her experiences at the hospital proved unsettling. In later life, Penny Wong laughed this off as ‘a bit of a problem with blood’.25 That was true, but not the whole truth. She was forced to deal with the realities of medicine in a developing country. She discovered that she was not good at coping with them. She doubted her ability to deal with disease and death as the stuff of a career.
Penny had seen poverty before – both in Borneo and on her travels in South-East Asia – but here she was confronted for the first time by starvation. There was the sense that life was expendable, that the disenfranchised didn’t matter to those with the power to save them. Yet even the poorest placed worship and the sacred at the centre of their lives. She sat in Catholic church services with her host family and saw, as she puts it now, what faith meant, and found herself ‘tremendously moved’.26 It caused her to reflect on her own faith – nominally Christian, refined by her education at a Uniting Church school, but still rooted in the melange of religions within her family. She had never doubted the existence of God or felt that she could live without the idea of a divine presence. In Brazil she was impressed by the power of faith and practice – praxis – in the grit of life.
For the last part of her time in
Brazil she was based in Rio de Janeiro. There, she never ate in public without children approaching and begging to be allowed to finish her meal. She carried from Brazil to Adelaide two convictions. The first was that she was psychologically unsuited to medicine and would have to find another career. The second was a powerful reinforcement of what, when speaking intellectually, she calls praxis. In Brazil, she discovered there were only two options for the privileged: either you decide that the world is simply unfair and nothing can be done about it, or you decide that, because it is unfair, something must be done, and that this places a responsibility on you to act as best you can to achieve real change, rather than standing on the sidelines bemoaning the world.
*
David Penberthy, today a senior News Corp journalist and Adelaide radio presenter, remembers meeting Penny Wong in January 1987, at a weekend event held for about sixty returning exchange students in the southern Adelaide suburb of O’Halloran Hill. He had just landed from Mexico. The aim of the weekend was to help the students with re-entry to ordinary life – a bigger challenge for him and Penny, perhaps, than for most of the cohort, who had been to less confronting places such as Europe and the United States.
He and Penny both spoke to the group about their experiences, and afterwards got to chatting. Penberthy, the product of a state school in the working-class suburb of Mitchell Park, had enrolled in Arts at the University of Adelaide, hoping to do well enough to transition into an Arts/Law degree. Penny Wong was the dux of the elite Scotch College. Yet they found they had plenty in common. Like Wong, Penberthy had been radicalised by his experience overseas. She told him that she had decided she didn’t want to pursue a career in medicine, but wanted to do something about social justice. She had changed her university enrolment to Arts/Law and had put herself down for a heavy dose of politics subjects in her first year, together with drama and Spanish – the first because she had loved it at school, the second an attempt to keep up with the closest thing she could find to Portuguese. At the end of the weekend, the two new friends agreed to catch up when university began.
3
BECOMING LABOR
Towards the end of 1988, Andrew Hamilton – a University of Adelaide medical student with a sardonic turn of phrase, a moneyed background and a lively social life – was in trouble. He had, like so many undergraduates, taken full advantage of the social opportunities at the university in the first three years of his degree. Now, about to enter the critical final years, including clinical practice, he had a string of narrow pass marks behind him. The dean took him aside and told him that he had to pull himself together. While technically he had passed, he would be given an examiner’s fail and made to repeat the year. It was a blow – but also, he began to think, perhaps an opportunity.
Hamilton was toying with the idea of getting involved in politics. He was not a member of the Liberal Party, but was friends with another medical student, Andrew Southcott, who was enmeshed in party politics and would go on to be the federal Liberal member for the seat of Boothby. He also knew Christopher Pyne, who had just graduated from the university and joined the staff of Liberal senator Amanda Vanstone. With time on his hands, given that he would only be repeating subjects he had already passed, and with the encouragement of Southcott, Hamilton decided to run for the board of the Adelaide University Union. He was elected. Hamilton’s decision brought him up against Penny Wong at the very beginning of her political career. She, too, had run for the board and been elected, representing Labor but also a broad coalition of progressive students.
Hamilton and Wong had known each other since childhood. Wong’s Aunt Kate, one of Jane’s sisters, was the best friend of Hamilton’s mother. He remembers Penny as always articulate, and always with a strong point of view. He quite liked her. But when they met again at university, they became political enemies.
At this time, student unionism was compulsory. Tertiary students were levied an annual fee that was used to help run campus services – cafeterias, sporting clubs and associations – as well as the student newspaper, On Dit. As well, the union financed the Students’ Association, which was its political arm, advocating for the interests of students within the university and beyond.
The push to make student unionism voluntary was one of the defining causes of the times, and the foundation for many nascent political careers. The generation before Wong and Hamilton had cut their teeth on the issue. Voluntary student unionism had been part of Christopher Pyne’s agenda when he had been at the university. At the University of Sydney, Tony Abbott had used his position as president of the Students’ Representative Council to try to destroy compulsory campus unions. Peter Costello at Monash University had also opposed compulsory unionism. Julia Gillard had advocated for it at the University of Adelaide before moving to Melbourne to become the penultimate president of the Australian Union of Students.
The AUS – a national body made up of affiliated institution-based student unions – had collapsed under the weight of left-wing activism over the Middle East in 1984, when Penny Wong was in Year 11. Most students saw no reason why their fees should be spent on causes so remote, and a raft of campuses had disaffiliated. Gillard was later to recall that as a Labor student politician she had ‘fought the wild Leftist tendencies’ in student politics, making common cause with those who thought the AUS should be devoted to things students cared about – education and student services – rather than international issues.1
But Gillard and others had helped lay the groundwork for a replacement body: the National Union of Students. The NUS had been established the year before Penny Wong and Andrew Hamilton were elected to the board of the Adelaide University Union, which had affiliated with the new body. The battle over compulsory student unionism was far from over.
In 1987 Christopher Pyne had fronted the Adelaide University Union finance committee, where he had opposed the payment of honoraria to elected student officials.2 It was a strike against the professionalisation of student politics. One of Pyne’s antagonists was Andrew Lamb, a Centre Left Labor member, who was on the board of the Adelaide University Union and vice-president of the Students’ Association. Lamb was in a relationship with a young, non-party-aligned feminist called Natasha Stott Despoja, who was also on the union board.
The issue that spurred Hamilton to step up into student politics, and made his election possible, was a dispute over whether senior medical students should be given discounted union fees on the ground that they spent most of their time in hospitals and so couldn’t use the campus facilities. There had been a referendum and a general student meeting on the matter. In the elections, held in late 1988, the medical students got organised and won five positions on the twelve-member board, making them the dominant faction. In alliance with the Liberals, led by Southcott, they had the numbers. Apart from the Liberals, Labor and the medical students, there was a group of non-aligned students, Stott Despoja among them. At the first meeting of the newly elected board in 1989, Penny Wong proposed that Andrew Lamb be elected president. Andrew Hamilton stood against him and won. Labor and the left had lost the numbers.
It was the beginning of a months-long, bitterly fought war of attrition, in which Penny and the other Labor members of the board were determined to tear down Hamilton’s presidency. They were relentless. There were real issues at stake, including amalgamation of campuses, award arrangements for union staff, and student fees, but Hamilton also remembers long discussions about trivialities such as the colour of serviettes at union events, and much carping. He felt that Penny leapt upon any off-the-cuff remark he made. He was accused of sexism, constantly chivvied and attacked. ‘She used to use the word “outrageous” a lot,’ he recalls. ‘As in, “That’s outrageous, Andrew.” She used the word “outrageous” in an outrageous fashion.’
The battle waged against Hamilton is recorded in excruciating detail in the minutes of the Adelaide University Union. Those opposed to his presidency, including Wong, argued that it was important every moti
on of no-confidence in the chair, every point of order, every motion that the motion be put, be recorded in detail. On several occasions, meeting time was taken up in discussing whether the minutes of the previous meeting were accurate. Hamilton was instructed to get quotes on better recording equipment so the minutes could be better kept. Sometimes one can sense, behind the deadpan recounting of these awful debates, the presence of the minute-taker. Once, she gets to speak – and remarks (minuting her own contribution) that she wouldn’t need better recording equipment if only there were fewer interjections and less shouting.
Hamilton tried to convince the board that ‘summary minutes’, such as those done for the university’s chief governing body, the University Council, would suffice. But he was opposed. Foreshadowed motions, points of order, withdrawn foreshadowed motions and debates about whether foreshadowed motions could be withdrawn were all to be minuted, and the resulting records now occupy boxes and boxes of space in the University of Adelaide archives – a depressing record of student politics at its worst, and unappealing political skills learned.
Penny, Lamb and their allies built and consolidated alliances with the independents and non-aligned student board members. By the middle of 1990, when they had amassed enough support to push through a motion of no-confidence in Hamilton’s leadership, he found it almost a relief. He had dropped all thoughts of a political career. They killed that ambition in him.
Andrew Hamilton is now a leading Adelaide cardiologist and a specialist in the early detection of heart disease. He has a PhD and a long list of proud achievements, and is in the midstream of a glowing career. Asked to recall his battles with Penny Wong, he responds with something approaching post-traumatic stress. When he sees her on the television grilling some bureaucrat at Senate Estimates, or giving stick to the Liberals in the Senate, he feels a chill of recognition. It takes him back.
Penny Wong Page 6