by Anne Summers
The next morning my father apologised for his behaviour and told my mother that he would never drink again. She had heard that so many times before that she was unconvinced but, it turned out, this time it was true. Whatever it was that Mez had said had reached my father in a way that none of his many stints in rehab or his years working with AA had succeeded in doing. Mez told me later that all she had done was to talk frankly to him about what he was doing to himself and his family, and to tell him that he had to stop. And, amazingly, she had got through whatever firewalls he had put between himself and his demons. He never touched alcohol again, and the next few years would be the happiest he and my mother had experienced since they were a bright young couple all those decades ago in Deniliquin during World War II. Every year, on 21 April, their wedding anniversary, he would write her a passionate note on a small card. My mother kept many of these, including the first, dated 21 April 1945, which read ‘To dearest little Stinker the best wife in the world. For Our First Anniversary with All my love and wishes that it is the first of many’. I have no idea why my father called his new wife Stinker, but in future years he simply addressed her as Tun, her nickname. The last one, written in April 1988, just five months before he died, and after he had not had a drink in more than three years, read: ‘Tun After 43 years I love you more than I did on April 21 1944’.
When I joined OSW I had been adamant that I was not going to have my attention diverted to the international work which, in the past, had occupied a great deal of OWA’s attention. I could see how this work had been an attractive substitute for being unable to be effective domestically under the Fraser government; it meant the Office could chalk up some achievements, but I considered domestic policy to be the absolute priority. I could not see the relevance of the UN for what we were doing. When I discovered that Australia was a member of the OECD Working Party on the Role of Women in the Economy, I could see the relevance of attending those meetings, but I still argued that we did not have time for this stuff when there was so much to be done at home. But I allowed myself to be persuaded that Australia had obligations and responsibilities that we needed to treat seriously. In July 1983, the government had ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). This Convention gave the government the constitutional power it needed for its sex discrimination legislation. The government had successfully nominated Justice Elizabeth Evatt as a member of the committee that monitored the implementation of CEDAW, and which we were obliged to report progress on. Besides, I was told, the UN Conference on Women—the third since International Women’s Year in 1975—was coming up in Nairobi later in the year, and as it would conclude the official UN Decade of Women it was a very big deal. I was still not convinced, but the fact that the Preparatory Conference—PrepCom—was being held in New York made it suddenly seem more alluring. In April 1985, along with Senator Pat Giles, who would lead the government’s delegation to Nairobi, and Helen Ware who was the OSW international expert, I headed for the US.
I quickly learned that important as the UN work was, and I could see the value in trying to build international consensus around improving the lives of women, I was not the person to be doing it. I did not have the temperament for the politics, the games or the grindingly slow pace of working through the conference document, the Forward Looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women (the FLS). The purpose of the PrepCom was to try to reach as much consensus as possible on this document before the Nairobi meeting. Ahead of the plenary meetings where this work took place, there were caucuses of the three groups into which the world was then divided: the Eastern Bloc, the Group of 77—the developing countries or ‘Third World’ as they were still called then—and the Western bloc, to which Australia belonged. Our meetings were unexpectedly tense. Although chaired with great equanimity by Maureen O’Neill, who headed the Canadian OSW, the meetings were disrupted by the extraordinary aggression and profanity of Alan Keyes, the number two of the US delegation. As someone who’d been around the Labor Party and journalism, I was unshockable when it came to language (and a pretty good swearer myself), but I was surprised by such conduct at the UN and directed against people who were meant to be on the same side. How did he treat his enemies, I wondered? Keyes was African-American, a former diplomat who was a political appointee of the Reagan administration, and he was a master at the use of shock-tactics to try to intimidate us ‘allies’ into agreement with US positions. Later that day in the plenary session, I introduced myself to Maureen Reagan, the daughter of the President and the leader of the US delegation. We quickly found we had very little in common:
‘Honey, you’re treading on my toes,’ she said when I ventured to express a view on one of the issues we were meant to find common cause on.
I could not wait for the PrepCom to be over. I appreciated the work done by Helen Ware and by Cavan Hogue and John Quinn, the diplomats from the Australian Mission who sat beside me and guided me through, but at the end of the first day, the plenary had discussed just 38 of the several hundred paragraphs in the FLS, and reached agreement on only six of them. The rest were put in square brackets, to be dealt with ‘later’. I preferred to work at a faster pace—and to be able to judge whether or not I was getting anywhere.
So I was quietly relieved when, in late June, I told the Office that I was withdrawing from the government delegation to Nairobi. I had decided, with encouragement from the PMO, that the interests of Australian women would be better served by my immersing myself in the preparations for the Tax Summit that was to take place in early July and which was likely to agree to major changes to the tax system. It was imperative that women’s interests be protected in such a major policy shift. At the request of the Prime Minister, PM&C was developing some major policy proposals around family tax benefits and OSW was at the table: both Michael Roche and Mary Ann O’Loughlin had been seconded to work on them.
I felt guilty about pulling out. On 12 June a TWA plane bound for the US had been hijacked by terrorists from Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, shortly after taking off from Athens. The hijackers were demanding the release of 700 Shi’ite Muslims from Israeli custody. There were dramatic scenes of the plane at Beirut airport with the pilot seen with a gun to his head. One passenger was killed and his body dumped on the tarmac, others were beaten. The ordeal lasted for two weeks. Shortly after it ended, and just days before our delegation was due to leave for Africa, the Israelis released 700 prisoners. Although they claimed this action was unrelated to the hijacking, our delegation was understandably nervous about the trip and I knew, from attending security briefings, that the threat assessment was grim. Australia was being housed in the same building as the Israelis. This meant we would have the best security possible. But it also made us a target.
In the end, there was no terrorism at Nairobi but we still had to contend with the political fallout from the Middle East. Bill Hayden, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, directed that our delegation abstain on the vote on the entire FLS document unless the paragraph equating Zionism with racism was removed. Australia had voted against the conference document in Copenhagen in 1980 on similar grounds. Hayden’s decision was a slight improvement—although we were told it had taken a lot of pressure to get him to settle for an abstention—but we in OSW were still angry that, even at an international women’s conference, women’s policy was deemed to be subservient to Middle East policy. It was a bitter moment. All that work, getting bureaucratic consensus on other controversial clauses in the FLS, and getting community groups to sign on, was to be negated by a ritualistic move in the never-ending Middle East death dance. Then a miracle occurred and the women in Nairobi successfully lobbied to have the Zionism clause removed. The Forward Looking Strategies was adopted by consensus. When I spoke to Helen Ware, who had taken my place as second-in-charge of the delegation, she was delirious with relief.
‘I can’t tell you how hideous it would have been for us,’ she told me later.
T
he votes were taken in alphabetical order and Australia would be called early. It would have been a lengthy poll, and the Australians would have sat in isolated ignominy for many minutes till they got to the I’s and the next country not to support the FLS was called. As it was, being able to support FLS made it easier to obey Hayden’s other directive: that we join Israel and the United States as the only countries to vote against the paragraph on Palestine.
I was never going to be part of this game. I could see that the combat the bureaucrats so loved might be energising. I could recognise that the crushing of weaker players might satisfy a bloodlust that had few other outlets in a bland city like Canberra (my theory as why Canberra public servants drove like maniacs on the Federal Highway on their way to Sydney was that it was a rare opportunity for risk and excitement). I could see that the financial rewards—in those days, appointments were permanent and superannuation surged into golden nest eggs—might compensate for a lot of things, but I could not see myself staying in that world. I despised the deference to ministers that concealed contempt and sabotage. I hated the continual one-upmanship that passed for normal human discourse. But most of all, I was dismayed by the thought of my working life becoming nothing more than constant trench warfare.
I was no match for seasoned bureaucratic warriors. They had all the time in the world to see off someone they saw as missionary, an advocate for a cause, not mandarins like them, lifelong public servants championing good government (as if the two had to be in conflict). I was weary of the games and, more so, the confected aggression on so many on the committees I was forced to sit on. There was no sense of common good around these tables; it was all about turf and personal advancement and settling ancient scores. I found it both tedious and upsetting. How many hours did I have to spend engaged in these ritualistic battles? The Prime Minister has said he wanted it. Wasn’t that good enough? No it wasn’t. Most bureaucrats were of the Sir Humphrey Appleby school when it came to government decisions. ‘A government decision is something we agree with,’ Appleby famously said on the excruciatingly accurate television series Yes Minister, ‘anything else is just a temporary setback.’ It was not surprising that Canberra pretty much came to a standstill when that program aired each week, although ministers and bureaucrats rarely agreed on which bits of the night before’s episode were so hilarious.
I was not a bureaucrat, let alone a mandarin. I knew that much. But what was I? Most of my adult life I had been torn between activism and ‘advocacy’—wanting to change things—and the cool and often cynical stance of being a mere observer, someone who reported and judged without ever having to take a stand. The journalist in me was constantly at war with the activist and I could not find a way of reconciling the two. They were probably irreconcilable. I had to choose. But at that moment, I was neither. The bureaucrat, even a high-profile one like I was, in the end works mostly behind the scenes, unable to tell people what she has done or, in some instances, what planned atrocities she was able to prevent. Working ‘inside’ is the way to change things I had reasoned when I applied for the job. The women’s movement had accepted the ‘femocrat strategy’, although with a degree of scepticism. We femocrats were constantly on trial: were we ‘selling out’? were we becoming careerists? I suppose I had seen the job as a form of activism. I was proud of what we had been able to do: the biggies like affirmative action, childcare, the Women’s Budget Program and the many smaller changes that would remove injustices and make women’s lives better, but I did not see it as a lifelong career.
In late November 1985, I went to Europe as a guest of the EEC Visitors Program, travelling to Ireland, Germany and Greece, as well as a mandatory visit to Brussels. I’d initially seen the trip as a chance to meet the women doing comparable jobs to mine, and to check out their thinking, and the progress, around status of women issues generally and, in particular, what we used to call ‘positive action’—steps to increase women’s employment. But travelling, and meeting some extraordinary people, also allowed me to reflect on what I was doing with my life.
In Dublin I’d met Nell McCafferty, the highly celebrated radical journalist and author. She was, according to a profile in the Guardian in 2004, ‘a foul-mouthed and fearless social commentator, [who] is one of the great feminist heroes of the liberalisation of Ireland. Part Germaine Greer and part Mae West …’11 She was a pint-sized firebrand, exuding infectious energy, and I felt alive just talking with her. She gave me some of her books and I read them while I was travelling. In quite important ways, reading them changed me. I had to keep putting down The Armagh Women, Nell’s account of the ‘dirty strike’ by around 30 IRA women prisoners at Armagh prison to protest ill treatment by brutal guards. These women refused to wash, use the toilet, empty chamber pots or clean their cells. They were emulating a similar strike by IRA men in 1978 at Long Kesh prison but the key difference was that women menstruated and this was puritan and repressed Ireland where, even in 1980, such things were not discussed in front of men. The women were denied sanitary goods, so they started smearing their blood on their cell walls, along with their excrement. The public was scandalised, torn between repulsion and sympathy for these women. Reading about what they endured was almost unbearable but even more confronting was Nell’s just-published book, A Woman to Blame, about the so-called Kerry babies scandal and the persecution by the legal system and the Catholic Church of a young single woman whose ‘illegitimate’ baby’s body was found washed-up on a beach. This was Ireland in the mid-1980s where abortion was forbidden and even contraceptives only available to married women, and then at the whim of individual pharmacists. Reading about those girls in Ireland with their shameful secret pregnancies and the desperation that led them to allow the babies to die and be hidden in sad little unmarked graves in the countryside, brought back my own Catholic upbringing. We were similarly repressed, unable to even talk about sex let alone protect ourselves when, inevitably, it happened and we got pregnant. I have described elsewhere what happened to me: the terror of parents finding out, being willing to risk my life with a costly and dangerous illegal abortion in order to keep my shameful secret.12 But that had been 1965. This was a full twenty years later, when women were getting education and jobs, earning good money, having laws protect them from discrimination and inequality, and able to control their fertility with the pill or, if contraceptives failed, abortion. But that was Australia.
Not all places were as progressive. Nor were all people, even Australians whose job it was to represent the policies and values of the federal government. I was guest of honour at a dinner hosted by one of our diplomats in Bonn. Among the invitees were several leading women bureaucrats, doing similar work to me, and Petra Kelly, who was internationally-renowned for having founded the German Greens Party in 1979 and who, in 1983, had been elected to the Bundestag. I had met her in Canberra the year before and was looking forward to resuming our conversation but I found myself seated, not next to the host, which would be usual, but at the far end of the table. I don’t know if the host intended this as a hostile act, or whether it was his feeble effort at accommodating what he thought would be a feminist’s preference to sit with the spouses. I found myself talking to the diplomat’s ‘wife’—I was not introduced to her by name—and, on my other side, former General Gert Bastion, Petra’s much older partner who, seven years later, would murder Kelly, shooting her through the head while she slept, before turning the gun on himself.
A few days later I was on Chios, the small and mostly rugged Greek island close to Turkey, said to be the birthplace of Homer. Here I met up with Margaret Papandreou, the American wife of Andreas Papandreou, the popular and long-serving Prime Minister of Greece; he had come to power at the end of the rule of the colonels and had set about modernising Greek society, especially its education system. Margaret was renowned for championing both women’s and peace issues, and she was meeting up with a delegation of Soviet women, one of whom was Valentina Tereshkova, a cosmonaut and the first woma
n ever to pilot a space vehicle. (In June 1963, she had flown Vostock 6 into space, and remained there for three days, orbiting the earth 48 times.)
We had been driven to a small village high in the mountains by a team of women who were part of a local effort to promote women-owned local tourism. There was a ceremony with speeches. Tereshkova told us how peaceful it had been up there in space, how she had looked down on earth, knowing there were wars and other conflicts taking place far below her, but they seemed to be abstract and meaningless so far from the earth. She called for the end of war, and especially to Star Wars, President Reagan’s plan to build a missile-proof shield in space. (This reminded me of Otto Silha’s plan for a shield to protect Minnesota from its brutal climate.) Margaret Papandreou beamed. This, it seemed, was the principal reason we were here. It was a declaration of peace, made in the place where the Iliad, an epic poem about the Trojan Wars, had quite possibly been recited by Homer. A new legend was to be born from this place: an idea of peace, propagated by women, spread to men of good will everywhere. I was still deeply sceptical of this kind of politics. It was favoured by many Labor women and had led to arguments about whether or not OSW should advocate for women to join the armed forces. I felt we—mostly educated, employed women—had no right to deny girls the technical education that Defence offered and which was the primary reason most people signed up for the military. Besides, if a girl wanted to fly a fighter jet, why shouldn’t she? It was still government policy to deny her the opportunity because that was deemed a ‘combat’ role and was still, despite the SDA, not open to women. It was a fundamental divide in feminism and one that, I suspected, was not going to be easily reconciled.
While Tereshkova was still speaking, a wizened and weatherworn old woman appeared. Her face was deeply lined and tanned and she was leading a donkey that carried on its back a large bundle of what looked like wild thyme. She could have stepped from any of Chios’s renowned medieval villages. We would visit one, Mesta, for a traditional feast in the village square later that evening. This woman stood there, uncomprehending, taking in the strange sight of Western women in their smart modern clothes, outlining a dream that was, I realised, almost as remote to me as it was to this peasant woman. My politics were more practical. I liked real and measurable change, but then my life’s expectations were limited by where I had been born.