by Anne Summers
As a result of these two moves, whole sections of our population have become fair game. Sexist abuse is now also part of our daily discourse. So much so that on 12 March 2013, a woman felt able to yell down from the public gallery of the nation’s Parliament to the Prime Minister: ‘Moll!’ This was beyond anything we had experienced in Australia before, and I feel justified in blaming John Howard for putting the prime ministerial imprimatur on hate speech. He encouraged it and look where it has led us. And that is why I am so angry with him.
In early 1997, I took stock. Chip and I with a bunch of friends had just enjoyed a two-week visit to Vietnam, my first trip to that part of Asia. We’d travelled from north to south on the Reunification Express, seen the remnants of the war that had ended just 22 years earlier, and observed with wonder the grit and resilience of a people who were remaking their country after more than a century of occupation and combat. I realised I was ready for a remaking myself. I was proud of what we were doing at Good Weekend, but editing the magazine had stopped being fun. The battles were neverending. As the economy slowed, advertisers became more demanding, expecting editorial favours we had never had to accede to in the past. There were neverending turf battles and other attacks on me and my tenure in the job. This constant corporate slugfest was exhausting and, as I’d experienced in the bureaucracy when I was at OSW, enervating. My enemies were there for the long game, whereas I was totally disenchanted with its pettiness. It was all about power, I recognised that, but the stakes did not interest me enough to devote my life to the fight. So one Monday morning in March, after an act of treachery from a supposed colleague that was designed to undermine and demoralise me, I stormed into the CEO’s office and resigned. I had no qualms about accepting the package they offered. It gave me a bit of a cushion as I sailed off towards my next adventure.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
PEACE AND WAR
In September 2000 I was elected chair of the board of Greenpeace International. It was so different from anything I had ever done before that many people had trouble grasping it. ‘Greenpeace?’ they’d say. ‘We didn’t know you were a greenie.’ Or, ‘Don’t you mean Greenpeace Australia?’ No one seemed able to accept that I could have got myself a position on the international board of the world’s most famous environmental organisation—and that I had actually been headhunted for the position. The media was equally sceptical, even sneering, in its coverage: ‘The appointment of Dr Summers … has surprised some Australian observers who do not recall the former head of the Office of the Status of Women taking any particular interest in environmental issues’, said a page one article in the Sydney Morning Herald.1
This job did not fit most people’s preconceptions of me; it wasn’t ‘women’, or journalism. Why on earth had I stepped off my familiar path to do something so out of character? Why not? I retorted. Hadn’t I left a safe job in the public service in Canberra to go to New York in 1986? And risked my newly created post-Ms. identity in 1992 to go to Canberra for what was meant to be just a three-month job with Prime Minister Paul Keating? Wasn’t such risk-taking and adventure-seeking what I did? I was no longer the girl who’d been too frightened to stay in New York in the 1970s. Now I was up for practically anything. Most people could not fathom themselves doing anything unpredictable or risky. Nor could they see past their assumptions about the person they thought I was. And being a board chair, for an international organisation, an environmental one at that, did not fit that picture. And I resented this; I was tired of being pigeonholed. I wanted to go wherever life was going to take me.
Yet this step was a huge one—and not just because it defied people’s expectations. It was an abrupt departure from the course I had set for myself. There was no doubt that this serious and important job would disrupt the life that I was feeling contented with because, at last, I was where I wanted to be. It was two years since I had left Good Weekend and I was finally living the writing life. I had just finished a book, an autobiography to be called Ducks on the Pond, which would be published later in 1999. It was my first book in more than fifteen years. I’d been scared that perhaps I did not have another book in me, so I was as relieved as I was proud to have accomplished something large and, I hoped, worthy. (Although I had written a lengthy new introduction for a revised edition of Damned Whores and God’s Police in 1994, I had not completed a new book since Gamble for Power in 1983.) My regular column with the Sydney Morning Herald was my only published writing (and income) at the time. In April, Chip and I had got the job of editing the Australian Author, a three-times a year magazine for writers published by the Australian Society for Authors. We had brought our magazine experience to the task: hiring an art director, insisting on articles being edited, introducing photography and illustrations. We hoped we were turning it into a livelier, well-written and better-looking publication. It was a job we would hold for six years and while it wasn’t Les Temps Modernes, our editing partnership was yet one more rewarding element in the life we continued to enjoy together. We sparked off each other, liked each other’s ideas and got considerable satisfaction from crafting these into interesting magazine pieces. When people asked me what I did, I could point to the magazine, to writing books, journalism, giving speeches and some political activism. It was the life I had yearned for, but always found a rationale for not doing. Now I had finally broken the old patterns. I would soon start my next book. So what was I doing in the Netherlands in July 1999, putting myself forward for a job that, despite being part-time, would involve lots of work and a great deal of international travel? Was I, yet again, trying to sabotage myself? Or was I simply unable to refuse yet another great adventure?
Eindhoven is a small thirteenth-century city in the south of Holland, where Greenpeace International was holding its annual general meeting. As we’d driven in from Amsterdam, we saw that virtually nothing remained of the medieval city; it had been almost completely destroyed by Allied bombs during the liberation in September 1944. The new city, like the conference centre, was squat and ugly, steel and glass, with none of the charm of the canals and centuries-old houses that I’d glimpsed in Amsterdam during my transit. I was in Eindhoven because of a quite unexpected and intriguing opportunity to seek election to the Greenpeace Board. If I was chosen, I would become involved in the leadership of the world’s most famous environmental organisation. While I waited to make my presentation, I stayed in my room, checking the proofs of Ducks; once they were corrected, I would send copies to my mother and to my four surviving brothers, to whom I planned to dedicate the book. It was a story that they were mostly familiar with. Indeed, much of my story was also theirs. I had taped several lengthy conversations with my mother about her life, so she knew what I was proposing to write. I was not expecting my family to have problems with what I had written. I could not have been more wrong.
Meeting the Greenpeace people was a revelation. I suppose I was expecting earnest individuals wearing dreadlocks and sandals. Instead I was confronted with, among others, a surgeon from Brazil, an Israeli sociologist, scientists from England and Germany, a Greek shipping magnate, a Chinese barrister from Hong Kong, and a member of the British House of Lords, all of whom were either Trustees or Executive Directors (EDs) of their national Greenpeace offices. There were 27 of these national and regional offices, mostly in Europe, but also in the Americas, Russia, China (Hong Kong), Japan and Southeast Asia. These people had flown in just for the weekend; some of them, like the Latin Americans and those from Asia, had had to endure flights almost as long as we Australians routinely put up with. I should have realised from the way in which I had been headhunted that Greenpeace was a totally professional organisation. The head of its international board search committee was Ann de Wachter, a long-time member of Greenpeace’s Australian board, who lived in Sydney and had her own public relations firm. When she first approached me, I was sceptical. I had no experience and, frankly, not a huge amount of interest in environmental issues. I was undoubtedly an instinctive greeni
e, but my previous activism had been mostly around women’s equality issues or, two decades earlier in Sydney, prisons or resident action activities. Ann assured me that Greenpeace had plenty of environmental expertise. They were looking to bring onto the seven-person board someone with a good strategic mind and with media and communications experience.
After I made my presentation, the Trustees (who would elect the new board members) questioned me intently. In introducing myself, I had described my work at OSW, doing the management buyout in New York, and my work in Paul Keating’s office in helping him win an unexpected electoral victory. None of these examples had any direct bearing on the work of Greenpeace, I conceded, but I made the argument that my skills were adaptable and could easily be transferred to the service of this organisation as it headed towards the new millennium. I had not expected either the quality of the discussion, nor the range of subjects put to me. Had I been anticipating talk of zodiacs and whales? Swapping stories on banner drops and other daring exploits? Instead, among other subjects, we talked about population and pacifism. Peter Melchett, the long-term British ED who had previously been a minister in the Callaghan Labor government and who was also an hereditary peer, acknowledged that population growth was one of the biggest threats to the world’s ecology. But it was not a discussion the organisation was prepared to have, he told me. Perhaps a quarter of Greenpeace’s offices were located in countries that were nominally Catholic, and the organisation did not want to embroil itself in the perilous politics of abortion. I absorbed this and resolved to think further about its implications. Then George Vernicos, the gruff-seeming Greek guy who owned ships and who, I later learned, had been imprisoned and tortured during the junta of 1967–74, asked me if I was a pacifist.
‘No, I am not a pacifist, and nor do I think that Greenpeace is a pacifist organisation,’ I responded, ‘its flagship is, after all, called the Rainbow Warrior.’
They seemed to like that answer, but the question had thrown me. I knew non-violence was one of the core principles of Greenpeace, but did that mean it was anti-war? But how could a non-violent organisation support war? I was starting to see that this was a very different Greenpeace from the one I’d imagined. This Greenpeace agonised over the politics, the philosophy and the ethics of what it was trying to do; this was before they even got to the daring campaign strategies that had made Greenpeace a globally known organisation. I had initially been taken aback when I walked into the meeting room and had seen that the Trustees were seated around a three-sided table in alphabetical order according to country, with the country names on white cards in front of them, just like the United Nations. They might as well have had little flags as well. I had assumed a radical body like Greenpeace would have been less formal, less country-focused. I would later learn that the national basis of the organisation’s structure was one of its biggest problems. But after my two days with them, I decided I liked these people. And I liked what they were trying to do. I wanted to be part of it—if they’d have me.
I was elected, but because of a quirk in the meetings calendar, my life with Greenpeace would not start until seven months later, at the board meeting of February 2000 which was held in Italy, at the Castello di Gargonza, a former monastery in Tuscany, not far from Florence. It was not luxurious but it was very classy, because it was so old and was situated on top of a mountain surrounded by forests of fir trees. Again, it was not what I had expected of Greenpeace. (Neither did most of those attending, it turned out, and Italy was reprimanded for choosing such an unsuitable venue. In future, we were to opt for more Spartan accommodation.) But it was in Tuscany that I was exposed to the true complexity of the organisation that was trying to globalise its structure and adapt to the challenges created by the newer offices from the developing world, wanting issues like food and energy security added to the traditional Greenpeace campaigns on whales, nukes, forests, GMOs, toxics and oceans. The organisation’s growth had seemingly stalled, and although it still had more than two million members worldwide, newly energised groups like WWF were becoming competitive. As a body that shunned corporate and government donations, relying solely on individuals and philanthropy, Greenpeace needed to protect and grow its fundraising base while maintaining its campaign integrity. I would discover that funds were more easily raised to save animals or for scary campaigns like toxics and nukes than for the more abstract, yet increasingly urgent changes happening to our climate. No issue would cause us greater angst during my time with Greenpeace. In Tuscany I would also meet the legendary David McTaggart, the feisty Canadian who had argued that Greenpeace needed to be a global organisation to be truly effective. He had created Greenpeace International as a coordinating body that could direct the various national and regional offices to run these global campaigns. And it was his infamous run-in with the French Navy in 1972, when he sailed his small yacht Vega into the French nuclear testing zone in the Pacific Ocean, that led to Greenpeace adopting its signature campaign vessel. French commandos had used inflatables to board the Vega and had then badly beaten McTaggart, but the tough-minded activist was more impressed by their boats than by the beating. He and Bob Hunter, one of Greenpeace’s founders, swiftly concluded they could be put to much better use, and soon inflatables were as synonymous with Greenpeace actions as dropped banners and daring climbs. McTaggart was small and fierce. He was no longer as lean as he’d been when he was sailing, but he was as argumentative and impatient with idiots as I was told he’d always been. He was now retired and living the good life in Italy, and just a few months later he would be killed in a car accident, but that day he was sitting at our board table trying to get us to see things his way. I’ve been privileged a few times in my life to be in the presence of someone who has changed the world and it is a powerful, but paradoxical, experience. How is it that some people are able to draw on capacities that most of us doubt we have? Could we in fact do the same if we really wanted to?
On 1 November 1999 Hazel Hawke launched Ducks on the Pond with an amazingly honest and personal speech. It was four years since Bob Hawke, Labor’s long-serving former Prime Minister, had divorced her so that he could marry his mistress, Blanche d’Alpuget. Hazel had been an extremely popular First Lady, her directness and her sense of humour making her easy to like, and there was immense public sympathy for the way she had been dumped by her husband. I’d had quite a lot to do with her when I was at OSW and we had stayed in touch. I thought she was the perfect person to launch my book about the vicissitudes of being a woman in Australia in the mid-twentieth century, but I was not expecting the frank outpouring contained in her speech. She had received great sustenance from reading Damned Whores and God’s Police back in the 1970s, she said: ‘At a difficult time in my life, and my relationship with Bob, this sort of understanding [my explanation of the damned whores and God’s police roles] that put my own troubles in a wider (and yet a very Australian) context, was a valuable gift.’
But although Hazel Hawke had liked the book, and the beloved Australian novelist Ruth Park had written a generous preface, my mother had taken a very different view. She was beside herself with anger, humiliation and grief at what I had revealed about our family. She especially could not bear, she told me in several letters, that I had told the story of my father’s drinking and of his ill-treatment of me. She conceded it was all true but, she wrote, there was no need to tell the world. And she was horrified at my ‘startlingly sordid’ description of an early and humiliating sexual relationship. ‘Is it necessary to give such salacious detail?’ she’d asked. ‘This is written by Anne Summers, PhD AO, not Barbara Cartland or someone of that ilk.’ I found the letters very hard to read, especially when she told me about the physical and emotional toll it was taking. She had woken one morning after just a few hours sleep: ‘… I felt there was a band of lead across my head, and I immediately remembered that was how I felt when I woke up the morning after Jamie died’. (In 1976 her youngest child, and my little brother, Jamie, had died of cancer at th
e age of seventeen.) At the same time, I could not understand her anger and her misery. I could not believe she had not understood that I was going to write about these things. I had interviewed her about it! And while I was upset that she was upset, I also was sick of her trying to control and manipulate me, to portray me as someone I was not. She could not accept me as I was. She took the bits she liked, the public acclaim, the Order of Australia, the doctorate, the working for Prime Ministers and knowing famous people (especially when she had photographs of me with them she could display to her friends), but she did not want the rest: the unconventional elements of which she disapproved, the not-staying married, not having children, the essential person I was. She could never understand, or acknowledge, that what made it possible for me to do the things that she could brag about was that I had become a very different person—from her and from the woman she had wanted me to be. I had rejected that person, and the constraints she had had to endure, and I had made my own way. Now I was supposed to suppress my story so she could preserve appearances in front of her snobbish friends. They would be saying that I should have waited till she was dead, she told me. But I was not prepared to pretend that none of these things happened. My father had treated me appallingly, I had been used and abused by a lover, and I had had a botched illegal backyard abortion in 1965 that I was lucky did not kill me. She had spent her life trying to survive by putting on a good front, and while I understood the strategy, it was not the way I was, or wanted to be. I had become a different kind of woman, and the book I had written was my attempt to start telling the story of how I managed it.