Unfettered and Alive

by Anne Summers

  Journalism was a hard-drinking occupation then. And not just in the evenings. Some, like Mungo, would get an early start in the non-members. Others, like me, would wait until lunchtime when we might head into Civic, Canberra’s idea of a central business district, to Charlies, the famous restaurant run by Mez O’Neill, whose ebullient personality was as much a factor in the place’s popularity as its bill of fare. Mez was married to Garry O’Neill from the Herald Sun and we’d been friends since October 1976, when I’d come to Canberra for the first time as a journalist to cover Hunter S. Thompson’s lunchtime address to the National Press Club for the National Times. I’d ended up at Charlies that night and been immediately captivated by the patrons. Not just the journos and politicians, but all sorts of other characters. Like Mary Scott who, with her wiry frame and very long blonde hair, looked a lot more like the Mary of Peter, Paul and Mary, the famous singing trio, than the senior health bureaucrat she was. But she also owned a farm and took care of injured wildlife. It was not unusual for Mary to have a wallaby or other small native animal in her shoulder bag; nor was it uncommon for one of these creatures to venture out. The first time I saw a kangaroo taking tentative hops around Charlies I wondered whether I’d had too much to drink. There was nothing like this in Sydney, I thought. Every night at Charlies was an experience; dinner could take many hours because so much table-hopping was involved. It was before my time, of course, but Mez often told me stories of the night of the dismissal of the Whitlam government when it seemed that the entire Press Gallery, along with every member of the sacked government, had ended up at Charlies. The place quickly ran out of food but fortunately Mez had adequate stocks of alcohol. People were still there at 6 a.m. When she went to clean up, she told me, there was more than one cabinet submission among the rubbish.

  Charlies was less crowded at lunchtime, which meant we could be sure of getting served quickly. We might have a pre-lunch beer or gin and tonic, a bottle or two of wine with our meal—if there were four of us—and maybe squeeze in a quick cognac afterwards, before driving back across Commonwealth Avenue Bridge and getting ourselves up into the Gallery by Question Time. Within a few years, even the Press Gallery got health conscious and at lunchtime you were more likely to see journalists jogging round Lake Burley Griffin than quaffing cognac at Charlies. But the ritual of Friday nights at the National Press Club was unaffected. This was de rigueur for political journos because so many bureaucrats drank there, and it was an opportunity to talk informally, to develop a sufficient rapport that you could ring them when you needed information in their area. The ever loquacious John Stone, surrounded by his Treasury deputies, Chris Higgins and Ted Evans and first assistant secretaries, were always there. At first I found this beer-fuelled banter intimidating. I had difficulty finding the right words and demeanour. Nor did I really like beer, certainly not in the quantities required to survive those Friday nights, but I stuck at it. I knew how to make myself part of groups, even those who did not want me. I’d done it in Sydney because I wanted to be at the exciting heart of the women’s liberation movement. Now it was my job to cosy up to people who wanted to talk trade or monetary policy, my new favourite subjects, and I had no choice but to do it.

  After a few months of living in a rented house in Turner, on the northern side of Canberra, I decided I should buy a house. It would be my first-ever big financial commitment. I was 34 and I had no shares, no savings, nothing to show for the fact I worked. Time to start being responsible, I thought. That I was thinking this way meant I had now discarded my previously held anarchist view, first expressed by Frenchman Pierre Proudhon in 1840, that ‘property is theft’. I found a brick duplex in Hamilton Row, Yarralumla that had a huge side garden that included an aboveground swimming pool. I envisaged Saturday lunches under the pergola. The house itself would need a bit of sprucing up, perhaps a paint job and the carpet could be replaced, but we were a lot less obsessed about renovations and the need for a perfect kitchen than we are today. I thought I could move in right away. I applied to my bank, then known as the Bank of New South Wales, for a mortgage on the $89,000 property. I did not expect any problems. I had a reputable and high-profile job, where I earned $31,000, good money for the time, plus I had a company car and generous expense account. I had no dependents and no debts. There was no doubt I had the capacity to meet the repayments, so I was amazed when the bank rejected the application. The reason was simple: they did not lend to women. No amount of remonstrating, or even a letter from the managing editor of the Financial Review would persuade them to review, or make an exception to, the policy. Blanket rule. Women could not borrow. I suppose I was angry but I was more worried about the very practical matter that I had already signed a contract to buy the property. A close friend said he’d speak to his father, who had a senior position at the Commonwealth Bank. I got a positive response. They would lend me the money—just as long as I had a male guarantor. I had no choice but to go along with that humiliating requirement. There was no income check on the person who signed. He just needed to be male.

  Most of the time, being a woman was not a disadvantage in the Press Gallery. All of us, male and female, were a hard-working lot, who were judged by the stories we got. Mostly my sex was not a factor with ministers; the key thing was the newspaper I worked for. If they wanted to talk to the business world and the political class, the Financial Review was the way to reach them. But there were some who responded to my serious questions with bedroom eyes, much to my annoyance, and others, such as Michael Hodgman, a Liberal backbencher from Tasmania (whose son is currently Premier of Tasmania) and who was known as Mouth from the South because he never stopped talking, who seemingly could not help themselves. When I rang him one day in his capacity as chairman of a committee that was examining proposed amendments to an ASIO Bill, to check on the status of the amendments, he asked whether I’d mind if he made a sexist comment. What could I say? He told me that when he’d looked up at me in the Press Gallery during Question Time that day, I had reminded him of Jane Fonda. He then went on to talk about the recent revelations that the FBI had bugged Fonda’s bed during her anti-war days.

  ‘I bet they heard plenty of things apart from her war plans,’ he said to me.

  I never had the experience, recounted to me by a young radio reporter, of literally being chased around a cabinet minister’s desk when she went to interview him one night. But one Sunday evening I agreed to visit a cabinet minister in his apartment, the idea being that we would have time for an extended chat about some of his portfolio issues. When I arrived and saw the lowered lights, the open bottle of wine and his smarmy smile, I got myself out of there as fast as I could. I doubt that Laurie Oakes or Paul Kelly got a similar reception if they dropped into a minister’s flat for an informal chat. I was not aware of any sexual harassment of women by their Press Gallery colleagues, although it is highly likely that we simply just did not talk about such behaviour in those days before the Sex Discrimination Act. Or that it was unchallenged because it was the way things were back then. Or that because it was not happening in my own bureau, I simply was not aware of what went on in other offices. And while most of the women reporters were professional in their relations with politicians, annoyingly there was sometimes one or two who thought it was just fine to wear a sexy outfit and bat their eyelashes in order to give themselves a supposed advantage. I was very tough on a woman in my bureau who came to work one day with a dress that was slit practically to her waist. Flirtations were one thing, and there were plenty, and there were full-on affairs that were mostly kept very discreet, especially if they involved a journalist and a politician. But there were a few politicians who felt entitled to grab what they could—and their names were on a ‘sleaze list’ of politicians to avoid being alone with. On Monday my cabinet minister’s name was added to it. The list was informal, just girls looking out for each other, an example of sisterhood in what was in most other ways a totally male-dominated place.

  One year, Fra
ser accepted an invitation from the Queensland Irish Club in Brisbane to address its famous St Patrick’s Day breakfast. There was just one problem: the club did not admit women, a rule that was not changed until 1986, and this meant that Michelle Grattan and I, the two women in the travelling press corps, were not allowed to attend. We kicked up a fuss. But those Irish ears were deaf to our arguing that they were preventing us from doing our jobs. Michelle and I stood outside the club during the breakfast, giving radio interviews, and doing our best to take a stand against sexism. We had made a half-hearted attempt to argue to the Prime Minister that he should not give his imprimatur to such a blatantly discriminatory event, but Fraser was unmoved. Women’s equality was barely on Fraser’s personal radar. Even though it was not, strictly speaking, part of my beat, I did my best to keep across what passed for women’s policy in those days. I wrote one or two articles on women’s refuge funding and I kept in touch with Senator Susan Ryan, who had been a member of the Women’s Electoral Lobby and who in 1975 had been elected as senator for the ACT. She had made reducing the gender gap in Labor’s vote a priority on her political agenda, commissioning research that showed that women’s votes could put Labor in office. She then set about persuading her party to adopt policies that might attract the votes of women. She made sure I got copies of all the research.

  Travelling with Fraser was part of the job and as he travelled a lot, so did I. Sometimes it was just to a capital city, as with the St Patrick’s Day breakfast in Brisbane, and that was always a very straightforward trip. We journalists were responsible for getting ourselves to Fairbairn RAAF base, just on the other side of Canberra Airport, where we would board the VIP plane and head for our destination where a mini-bus would usually be waiting for the press party. We’d then follow along behind Fraser who was in his official Commonwealth car. If it was a dinner, the press would usually be offered seats and a meal while we dutifully checked the text of his speech against delivery, but many times we would have to just stand around and kill time while the Prime Minister went about whatever business he had. Afterwards, if we were lucky, Fraser would say a few words to us but more likely we’d get a briefing from Barnett or one of the other press secretaries. Then there’d be a rush for the nearest public phones so we could file our stories. Michelle Grattan invariably got there first and this led to constant grumbling, especially if there was only one phone and she took her time to dictate her story.

  ‘That woman needs a phone in her handbag,’ one of my colleagues said once while we waited our turns to dictate our copy.

  We of course had no idea how much journalism, and the way we did our jobs, would change once we all had such phones. Not to mention Wi-Fi and 4G, enabling us to file from anywhere in the world. Then, we were totally dependent on our organisations’ switchboard. Many times, the kind women who answered 20944, the Fairfax number, were my lifeline. Whether I was somewhere in remote Africa or merely in a small town in Tasmania, ‘Switch’—as we called whoever answered—would deal with whatever it was, from getting a copytaker to capture my garbled words in the ten minutes I had before the VIP took off; to finding an inebriated editor in a restaurant somewhere and making him take the call; to simply being a reassuring voice in whatever madness I found myself. Once in Sydney, I visited the switchboard and met the surprisingly small number of women who did this heroic job. We went to the pub so I could thank them. Apparently I was one of the very few journalists who ever did that.

  So much of political journalism involved getting on the bus, or off the plane, or into the holding area—and then waiting. And waiting. It was extremely boring. We Press Gallery journalists got to know each other pretty well as we swapped stories during those interminable waits. We had no smart phones or Twitter or Facebook to soak up the time. Sometimes we would have to wait on the plane for Fraser. We waited one night for what seemed like hours at an airport somewhere near the Gold Coast. We were on a smaller-than-usual plane and there were only a few journalists and several Fraser staffers, including his speech writer Alan Jones who would go on to become a famous coach with both rugby codes and, much later, one of the country’s more notorious shock jocks. We passed the time by getting stuck into the Grange Hermitage. Every VIP was well-stocked with this premium Australian wine. By the time an equally well-watered Fraser arrived, the pilots were concerned we were going to miss the curfew in Melbourne so it was a very fast wheels-up. Fraser barely had time to buckle up. Not that he noticed. We learned that he had sunk a bottle of Scotch with Sir Jack Egerton, the legendary Labor fixer (whose acceptance of a knighthood from Fraser had led to his expulsion from the ALP), while the two of them worked on a plot involving preferences and other sweeteners to try to save the seat of McPherson, where there was to be a by-election following the sudden death of Eric Robinson, Fraser’s former Finance Minister. Once we were in the air, an unusually convivial Fraser got out his camera and began photographing everyone. At his insistence, I posed sitting on Jones’s knee. It was rare to see Fraser so relaxed and so playful, at least while journalists were around. That was the only time I could recall, but then again it was an exciting trip all round. In order to make the curfew at Essendon, we made the two-and-a-half-hour trip in two hours and seven minutes.

  Fraser could be very irritable and impatient and that included while he was travelling. On a trip to the Thiess coalmines in Central Queensland in early 1979, he’d simply refused to wait when, due to a misunderstanding about the time of a rendezvous back at the air strip, the bus carrying journalists and his own officials arrived a few minutes late. As we left the bus and ran towards the RAAF Chinook helicopter that had ferried us all there, Fraser simply ordered the pilots to take off. Did I just imagine that was Fraser’s face at the window, laughing at us from inside the ascending chopper? Fortunately, Sir Leslie Thiess came to our rescue with his private jet. It held fewer passengers than the Chinook so several trips were needed to get us all to the next destination. On another occasion, 27 April 1979, again when we were flying back from Queensland, Fraser decided he wanted to go straight to Melbourne, rather than drop the press off in Canberra as promised. It must have been a Friday and he was anxious to have a weekend on his property ‘Nareen’ in the western district of Victoria. It meant a couple of extra hours flying time for us journos, but they turned on the ’74 Grange to shut us up and by the time we got back to Canberra, most of us had no idea how long we’d been flying—or even where we had been.

  I gradually got to know most of the ministers, trying to call on as many of them as possible as often as they would see me. Often the visits were late at night, after dinner, while Parliament was still sitting and a division could be called at any time so no one could leave the building. I had so much ground to make up if I was to be able to compete with the other political chiefs. Most of them had been in the gallery for years. A few, like Wally Brown from the Courier Mail, Neil O’Reilly from the Sun-Herald and Alan Reid from The Bulletin, had been there for decades. After every cabinet meeting I would gamely call the offices of key ministers such as Treasurer John Howard; Foreign Affairs Minister Andrew Peacock; Philip Lynch the Industry Minister, who was a renowned player, ably assisted by Brian Buckley, his Svengali like press secretary and renowned political fixer; or Transport Minister Peter Nixon and ask if I could have ‘a few minutes with the boss’. Increasingly, they agreed and I would find myself sitting on one of the green leather couches in the corridors outside their offices. More often than not, Paul Kelly or Michelle Grattan would be sitting there as well. Once inside, I had to work fast to develop the relationship, encourage the minister to trust me—and try to get a story for the next day’s paper.

  Some ministers were harder to crack. It took me months to get a meeting with Jim Killen, the Defence Minister. Eventually, I got the summons to come to his office one morning. He had one of the best offices in Parliament House, better, in my opinion, than the box-like set of rooms that went under the name of ‘the Prime Ministerial suite’. Killen’s office w
as at the front of the building, too, but he had doors that opened out onto a terrace. The doors were open this day, revealing the Burley Griffin vision for Canberra in all its splendour, and it was magnificent. Our eyes travelled down the hill towards the lake and, across the water, up the broad avenue of Anzac Parade leading to the distant Australian War Memorial. There could be no more fitting vista for a Defence Minister.

  Killen was a dapper and courtly man whose upper lip sported a neat moustache. He was old-fashioned courteous, with a bit of rogue thrown in. He was definitely a ladies’ man although, unlike some of his younger colleagues, far too aware of our respective roles to entertain flirting with me. After he greeted me, he resumed his seat behind his desk. A cask of white wine was perched on one corner, within easy reach.