by Anne Summers
In late July, a full six weeks after I first learned about the rumours, I wrote an op-ed piece for the Sydney Morning Herald. I decided to tell the whole story, make it absolutely clear that I had been fully exonerated of whatever the rumours had me doing, and thereby warn off the rest of the media. But instead of killing the story, the sensational treatment of my piece by the Herald, with its front-page banner headline ‘My sexual harassment nightmare’, complete with a photograph of me, gave it oxygen. Now every single media outlet in the country could pick it up, and they could name names. The media circus that followed was quite extraordinary. Every radio host wanted an interview and the newspapers, especially the Murdoch-owned tabloids, had a field day. The Daily Telegraph-Mirror ran a two-page spread, entitled ‘The dismissal. Office politics gone wrong at Fairfax’6 that included the Good Weekend Christmas card with me, ostensibly, naked on the top of the tree, and a transcript of the conversation in which I had advised my deputy that she no longer had a job because of her disloyalty. Another article the previous day had been accompanied by a photograph of me at Good Weekend’s tenth anniversary party a few months earlier. I’m clearly in a party mood, holding a glass of wine and leaning in towards my partner Chip Rolley. Just to keep the innuendo going, reminding readers of my predilection for younger men. Chip gave me unwavering support, without which I wonder if I could have got through those three months, but it was very hard on him. He had to put up with sneering and innuendo, as well as the insinuation that I had a roving eye. Not only that, but the allegation that I had harassed a staff member at a Christmas party that had occurred at our house—our small house in Victoria Street—and where Chip was present, implied that the behaviour had taken place in front of him. He hid it from me but I later learned it had taken an emotional toll. And, like me, he found the sheer ferocity of the assault inexplicable and very hard to take.
My op-ed article had precipitated a round of commentary, including from right-wing journalists, who used my situation to argue that the Sex Discrimination Act unfairly laid men open also to being subjected to fabricated accusations of sexual harassment. I was attacked by journalists and the union who claimed I had taken advantage of privileged access to the opinion pages of the Herald, that other people simply did not have. Maybe that was true—although I would expect that any public figure who had been shredded in the media unremittingly for weeks the way I had been would be welcome to write an article in response. But there was also a lot of sympathy for me. ‘I was in tears as I read what happened to Anne,’ Quentin Bryce told the Australian, ‘she is the best boss I have ever had.’7 Letters, faxes, telephone messages and lots and lots of flowers started to arrive at the office. For many people, what was happening to me was starting to look like a pile-on. I was astonished to read the names on the messages. Many came from influential and powerful people, whom I had never met, all exhorting me to ride it out. A few came from high-profile women. Several, I knew, had been subjected to similar campaigns of vilification in the media, and their handwritten notes were especially heartfelt. They recognised a witch-hunt when they saw one. A number of people sent the same message: Nolite te bastardes carborundorum (Don’t let the bastards get you down). There was even an especially extravagant arrangement of flowers bearing the tag, ‘From your friends at The Australian’. At least not everyone in the media was trying to bring me down.
I had read in the press that my staff had problems with me. I was ‘imprecise’, ‘disorganised’ and ‘frequently absent at luncheons and speaking engagements’. I did receive many invitations to speak, but I tried to achieve a workable balance between doing my job and continuing my role as an advocate and commentator. Maybe I was imprecise. I liked to try new things and to keep changing layouts and headlines until they were as good as they could be. I don’t think being organised is itself a virtue, especially not in a creative job, but if I was really as disorganised as was made out I doubt that I could have done that job, let alone those I have done before and since. But this, it turned out, was a minor complaint compared with what some staff really thought. Sandra Coates, my dedicated and utterly loyal assistant, became an undeserving and unwilling go-between with several staff members telling her what they thought was really wrong with my editorship. That I had a problem with male staff, I could not get on with men, I had no empathy and that it was because I did not have children.
That was when I knew that this was not just about me. It was not just a few staff members with grievances real or exaggerated; it was not just the usual resentment of my decisions as editor to reject and thus disappoint people. It was true that some inside Fairfax were resentful, perhaps jealous, at how I’d come back from outside to a top editorial job. Others within the company were manoeuvring to force me out. There were plenty of people motivated to lend a hand in trying to tear me down. But the way it was done revealed deep and disturbing undercurrents of resistance to women in positions of power and authority. Even Miranda Devine as good as acknowledged this when she commented: ‘Even if the unflattering stories about her management style … were just familiar attempts to undermine a senior woman, Angry White Males gleefully counted her scalp as a trophy.’8
I was not attacked for being incompetent or lazy or tyrannical or any of the charges that might be laid against a boss, male or female. I was characterised, instead, as a sexual predator and attacked for not being a mother. Just about the two worst things you could say about a woman, even in 1995, just a few years away from the end of the century that had seen women win the vote, obtain the means to control their fertility, enter education and the workforce in massive numbers, move into politics and management and, supposedly, be able to do ‘anything’. Yet we were still either madonnas or whores. I was not a mother, so I must be a whore. It seemed unbelievable, yet it was happening—to me. And so many people, including in the media, even the journalists’ union itself, were all buying it. It began to dawn on me that what was happening to me was part of a pattern of hounding prominent women. Carmen Lawrence, who in 1990 had become Australia’s first female premier, of Western Australia, was one of the first to be the target of malicious and mendacious slurs designed to unsettle and unseat her, and Joan Kirner in Victoria, Australia’s second woman premier later that same year, became another.
Carmen Lawrence was now in Canberra where she was Minister for Human Services and Health in the Keating government. She had been wooed to Canberra by Keating himself, who wanted someone high-profile and clearly competent to boost the numbers of women in his government. Despite the defeat of her government in the 1993 WA state elections, she was seen as a political star. She was immensely popular. We had run a profile of Lawrence in Good Weekend in March9 in which our reporter Jane Cadzow had remarked on the adoring crowds, especially women, she attracted wherever she went. The media monitored her every move. Her high visibility would, Lawrence correctly predicted in a speech in Sydney in August 1995, become a ‘two-edged sword’. More precisely, it made her a target. Even among her colleagues in cabinet who, Cadzow reported, gave her an exceptionally tough time in her first appearance before the Expenditure Review Committee prior to the budget. Earlier, back in Perth, Lawrence had endured, and apparently survived, intense parliamentary scrutiny over a scandal about an immensely complicated story that became known as the ‘Easton affair’ because one of the principals, Penny Easton, had committed suicide. However, in May 1995, Richard Court, who as Leader of the Opposition was involved in the original parliamentary brouhaha, and who had become premier in Western Australia after defeating Lawrence’s government, announced a Royal Commission into the Easton affair. Paul Keating denounced this as a ‘political stunt’, which it undoubtedly was—and it had deadly effect. The Royal Commission found Lawrence had misled Parliament. Charges of perjury were brought against her; she stood down from her position as a front bench member of Labor, which was by now in Opposition. For the next two years, until she was acquitted of all charges in July 1999, Lawrence fought ferociously and with immen
se dignity to preserve her reputation, but she never recovered the political lustre that had propelled her to Canberra. Mission accomplished, you might say, if you had been one of those trying to derail the brilliant career of one of Australia’s most talented political leaders.
Joan Kirner was attacked for her political management, as any incumbent of the premiership at that particularly difficult time undoubtedly would have been. But no male premier would have been subjected to a cruel public campaign that mocked his body size and clothing choices. Kirner was caricatured as fat and frumpy, a housewife who’d mistakenly found herself in the corridors of power. She was even ridiculed for wearing a polka-dot dress, a fashion crime she had not committed but, as I had found, the truth has nothing to do with what finds its way into the armoury of those who want to bring down women. Jennie George would become the first woman President of the ACTU in 1996, and be subjected to media scrutiny about her sex life and other intimate details that male unionists were not probed about. Even before the attacks on me, I had noticed the emergence of this trend of trying to wound women in public life, and it had troubled me. It was a sobering rejoinder to the elation many of us had felt when women had, at long last, finally breached these previously male-only bastions. But it never occurred to me that I would become a target. I was not in elected office; I was not in a high-profile public job; nor was I a pioneer in a previously all-male field. All but one of my predecessors at Good Weekend had been women, so I had not robbed a man of his job. It was true that I had more power than previous editors, reporting to the more senior editorial director rather than the top editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. But was that reason enough to go after me? It turned out that it might have been. Although in standing or influence I did not even remotely resemble the position of premiers or trade union leaders, I had, seemingly and unwittingly, found myself occupying a position more powerful than a lot of people liked.
I had been hearing whispers about women in senior jobs who were doing it tough. These were women who ran institutions, or headed cultural organisations, or otherwise were prominent and whose views were often sought by the media about being pathfinders for women. I met several of these women, for lunch, or by chance encounter at functions and I probed, asking them how things were. I heard fragments of stories, or muttered asides, and lots of shrugged shoulders, but no one wanted to come out and talk about the price they were paying for their ostensible success. I found it sickening, even if it was not surprising. We had seen it before. It had happened to the courageous women who had taken what used to be called ‘non-traditional’ jobs in the police, the fire department, the steel works, the water board—all those complacently all-male essential services that were shaken-up by the anti-discrimination laws of the 1970s. These pioneers had endured such shocking pushback in the form of verbal and physical abuse, often with some pretty gruesome pornography thrown in, that many of them had gone to court and won. They blazed the blue-collar trails with little fanfare and precious little appreciation. But, I had always supposed, their court victories had opened pathways for other women to follow. Things would be better for those who came after. Now I wondered whether these women had, in fact, been the canaries in the coalmines.
A generation later, the white-collar citadels were being stormed and the reaction seemed to be the same. The women in these jobs were educated, articulate and forceful women—they had to be, to be there in the first place—and they, like me, were utterly astounded at the hostility they faced. More than ten years after the passage of the Sex Discrimination Act, and the employment affirmative action laws passed by the Hawke government, women were finding not just glass ceilings that prevented their getting to the very top, but impenetrable walls of hostility, and colleagues ready to go to almost any length to demonstrate just how unwelcome they were.
Fifteen years later, in 2010, when Julia Gillard became Australia’s first female Prime Minister, the initial jubilation at finally reaching this historic milestone soon was replaced in many sections of society by expressions of hostility that were shocking for their brazen crudity. When I grappled with how best to describe this situation, I could only agree with Gillard’s own characterisation in her famous ‘sexism and misogyny’ speech on 9 October 2012,10 and conclude that what we were seeing was misogyny. It was not a word that had been used much in recent decades. It had not been needed, we thought. In the mid-1990s we had but the dimmest understanding of how profound the assault on us was going to be. In the second decade of the 21st century, we found the word needed to be revived to describe the surprising and distressing rise in public hostility to women, especially women in public roles. Somehow ‘sexism’ was not sufficient to describe what was going on. These women, and perhaps even most women, were being treated differently and unequally just because they were women. But there was more to it than that. There was a naked hostility evident in the way women were being scrutinised and judged. This hostility was being directed especially at women who had entered areas of public life that were once the exclusive domain of men. Women were now newsreaders, company directors, commentators, surgeons, professors, cabinet ministers, prime ministers. Hostility had become a new weapon. It was being deployed in ways that we had scarcely seen before, both offensively—and defensively. The savage appraisals of women’s appearance, both their body shapes and their apparel, and often entailing demeaning sexual evaluations, were full-frontal assaults. But just as insidious, and in some ways more hostile, were the defensive plays. As more and more women began to take seats around boardroom tables, in corporations, not-for-profits, sporting organisations, many were subjected to pushback that was almost laughably pathetic. I heard of women being criticised for bringing shopping to board meetings (men didn’t have to do that as their food shopping was generally done by other people), for their handbags being ‘too big’, or for talking too much. Perhaps for talking at all, was what the critics meant. Stay away, lady, was the message. We don’t want you here; if you force your way in, we will make it so hard and horrible you will regret the day you ever walked through that door.
In April 1997 I was at a board meeting of the Balmain Tigers, the Sydney Rugby League team later renamed the Wests Tigers, when a board member noticed a mistake, a wrong date, in a report being presented by a fellow director:
‘I’ll have to take that up with my wife—she typed it,’ said the man who was making the presentation.
‘Don’t hit her too hard,’ interjected another board member.
‘Don’t worry; you can still see the marks from last time,’ the man replied.
I looked in disbelief at these two, and the rest of the men around the table. Sure, they were joking—they must be!—but no one seemed embarrassed or uncomfortable about the subject of the joke.
I had—very reluctantly—become the first woman to join a Rugby League Club board when Murray Sime had talked me into becoming a Tigers director the year before. I had known Murray for years, from around the Push and from when I had lived in Balmain in the early 1970s. Murray was a Balmain fixture. He was a flamboyant character, a big bloke whose rumpled appearance might lead you to suppose he was as down-and-out as the poets and gamblers and grifters who also made up the Balmain Push. But then you noticed the sharp green eyes he fixed on you through his gold-rimmed glasses, and you heard the astute comments he had for any situation, and you would then not be surprised to learn he was a very successful banker. As well as being very radical in his politics. Years before he had got into trouble for using his position at the NSW Attorney-General’s office to organise people to take part in an anti-Vietnam Moratorium march; the AG’s phone number had appeared on brochures that were distributed all around Sydney. Every Boxing Day, he held what became a legendary party for all-comers at his Balmain waterside house, to mark Chairman Mao’s birthday. It was at one of these parties that I’d first met Germaine Greer. I had had too many glasses of Jim Beam, a drink I had never tried before (or since) and, embarrassingly, had thrown up in front of her. She
had looked at me with a mixture of disdain and compassion. Despite our both being champions of feminism, we have never really connected; it was probably our first meeting that saw to that.
Murray worked for years for Citibank, presumably making lots of money for them as a Vice-President before, in 1998, establishing his own merchant bank. Murray was a constant source of advice and money for the writers and artists of Balmain. He, along with his good friend the writer Frank Moorhouse, whose patron he also was, helped establish the Copyright Agency that ensured writers got remunerated when their works were photocopied. Murray also loved his football and he had persuaded the Balmain Tigers Board, of which he was a long-time member, that they needed to recruit a woman member to help them change their brutish male image (there had recently been a rape charge against a prominent former player). Murray argued that they needed to boost the attendance of families at their games and he said he’d speak to me about coming on board. I was absolutely the wrong person for this job. I had no children, I had no interest in football, let along rugby league which I considered to be a violent and boorish game; there would be better women, I said, women who actually liked the game and would kill for the opportunity to be the first woman member of a rugby league board. But Murray would not take no for an answer. He wanted a prominent feminist, he said, to send a signal that the club was serious, and so I allowed myself to be persuaded. I knew from the first time I sat at that boardroom table that it was a mistake.
My very being there was wrong. They did not want me and I did not want to be there. I had nothing to contribute. Even my supposed reason for being there was undermined within a few weeks when Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation launched the rebel Super League to take on the existing competition. Suddenly, the Tigers were fighting for their very existence. All thought of women and families was forgotten. It was now a matter of survival in a new and unexpected world. I had absolutely nothing to offer here, but Murray was adamant that I should not resign.