Aldermen in Brisbane, today called councillors, worked full-time and were paid a percentage of a state member’s salary. The amount was fixed by a formula, which was to give me grief later on. The demands of the job were too much to allow for another job, and few tried it. Business owners could have perhaps put in a manager as country state members did with their farms. Ray Smith, who was a barrister as well as the alderman for Chermside, tried to keep up his practice but found it impossible. About the time I came onboard Council aldermen started to have offices and secretaries; before that they had operated out of their homes with their forbearing wives taking calls and helping with the admin. We were given offices in City Hall, basically small cubicles. Today, councillors not only have offices and two staffers instead of one, they are also provided with cars and phones. I have been intrigued at the need for all this extra support when I had assumed that computers would lessen the load and the need to write letters, but I am assured that social media has increased the accessibility of councillors and the personal demands on them.
Any elected representative has to enjoy dealing with people and nowhere is this more important than in local government. Issues affect people’s lives in a very meaningful way which makes them important, but no matter how large or small the council may be, the councillor is always going to bump into constituents in the street or shopping centre. I enjoyed going to the Boy Scout meetings and the CWA teas and found it stimulating to hear about a local issue and then prepare a submission to Council to have it seen to. I was lucky that I had a fantastic ward secretary, Narelle Cowan, who had worked for Council since she was 16. She had been a relief secretary for my predecessor and when told that his permanent secretary wouldn’t work for a woman Narelle asked if she could have the job. She was only 18 and I was told she was far too young to be in charge of a ward office, but I wanted to give her a go and I was rewarded. Quite often constituents don’t realise how much of the real work is done in the local office, at every level of government.
I received lots of phone calls at home, and often at night. We had a second phone line installed so that the main line would be always free for Leigh’s urgent calls from the hospitals. The kids used to refer to the two phones as the Brains and the Drains. I didn’t believe in having an unlisted number, for the constituents’ benefit, and the children wanted to be listed for the sake of their social life, and there were some funny calls. One night, after I had become Lord Mayor, I answered the phone to a young man who said he was in the pub and he’d had a bet with some mates that he could get the Lord Mayor on the phone. I said I hoped the bet had been a good one. Another call, about one o’clock in the morning, was from a distressed gentleman at Murarrie, on Brisbane’s south side, where residents had been complaining about the dreadful smell from the local abattoir. ‘I’ll hold the phone out the window so you can smell it,’ he said.
There were serious and difficult issues. I went to court to fight the Indooroopilly Golf Club selling some of their land for a housing development. The land in question was the Sir John Chandler Park which the Club had been given in a land exchange with the Council back in the mid-1970s, but it had been designated parkland since 1949. We lost, and it had been difficult because the Club membership was made up mostly of the Liberal males in the area, including my husband. This being Brisbane I knew John Gallagher, QC, the barrister on the other side, so when I asked him to repeat a question and he said, ‘With your Arts degree I thought you could understand English.’ I was quick to reply, ‘With your Law degree, I thought you could have put it properly.’
I went to the March 1982 Council election, my second, with Orme Olsen as Liberal Party leader and me as his deputy. Orme was a typical old-style alderman, a successful businessman, determined to give back to his community, in this case the City Council. He had had a furniture company called Olsen and Goodchap. After the election, which the Liberal Party lost but gained one extra ward to give us 10 seats, there was a move in the Party room to replace him with me. I obviously had the advantage of looking different – I was a woman, I was younger, and I was also a mother of five. The media had been kind to me during the campaign, looking, I suspect, for an easy story. I had also topped the polls in the election. In Indooroopilly, I won with 75 per cent of the vote. The closest was Len Ardill, the Labor Deputy Mayor in Sunnybank. Numbers in Council were now close. Labor had 11 seats to our 10, and they included that of the Lord Mayor who had been elected by the Labor majority.
The new Lord Mayor, Roy Harvey, the alderman for Mitchelton, had been vice-mayor under Frank Sleeman who had retired. But Orme was keen to stay on as leader for the Commonwealth Games in August, and this I totally understood – as Leader of the Opposition he would have an honoured place in all the Games events. And I wasn’t in a hurry, I was going to be the fourth Opposition leader in a little more than three years. The first had been Syd McDonald, known as Syd the Pieman, because that had been his business, the second John Andrews, a well-respected surveyor. Syd was to resign in a huff from the Liberal Party later that year and to stand unsuccessfully for the next election as an Independent.
The Commonwealth Games was a hugely important event for Brisbane, the largest we had ever held in the city and responsible for what everyone described as our ‘coming of age’. Part of the success for Brisbane was giving lie to the ‘Great Southern Putdown’ – the belief that we couldn’t do it. (When I launched my book on Brisbane a Sydney journalist had quipped to the publisher’s publicist, ‘How long is it? One page or two?’)
Our facilities, funded by Commonwealth and state governments as well as Council, were ready so far ahead of time that I joked they might be worn out by the time the Games started. They were used for swimming and athletic events of all sorts the year before and we were proud of our achievements. In the weeks before the Games started there were athletes running around our streets, Africans and Asians, not a common sight in suburban Brisbane then. I had to go to Sydney for a meeting a few weeks before the opening, and was having withdrawal symptoms just being away from the excitement.
The Games were opened by the Duke of Edinburgh and there was a civic reception in City Hall when he asked one of my children what it was like to have a busy working mother and she replied, politely but frankly, ‘Just like yours!’ My best memories are of the athletes’ village, in the halls of residence at the newly established Griffith University where friends, David Williams and Reet Howell, were the commandants of the athletes’ separate male and female quarters. I was able to spend time with the athletes and experience the Games from the inside. There was a cinema in the village where I went to see the movie Gallipoli sitting between a German professor of sport and a New Zealander, so that the film really underlined the futility of war. In the final dramatic scene the heroes had to sprint for the Turkish trenches. As we left the cinema I heard one young man say casually to another, ‘D’you reckon that was a one-hundred-yard dash or two?’
After the Commonwealth Games, life got back to normal. Except that I became Leader of the Opposition. Almost as soon as I was appointed I began to understand what sexual harassment is, in the non-physical sense, when Labor aldermen nicknamed me Tinkerbell. One day I was speaking in Council Chambers and Ian Brusasco, actually one of the more intelligent on the Labor side, called out, ‘Are you pregnant, Alderman Atkinson, or just fat?’ This was a particularly telling barb because I was self-conscious about my increasing weight. Eating is a definite political hazard; Clem Jones told me once that he put on four stone (25 kilograms) while he was Lord Mayor.
Lord Mayor Roy Harvey was quoted in the press as saying, ‘Alderman Atkinson has yet to realise that there is more to running a city than running a house.’
Young women would now simply refuse to put up with a lot of what we had to endure then. Not all the barbs were meant unkindly, and sometimes the sexism was quite unconscious. At one stage I took to wearing flat-heeled shoes to better manage all the walking around I was doing. Orme Olsen took me aside and told me
that ‘the boys’ would prefer I got back into my high heels because they looked better. And I’m embarrassed to say that I did.
But there were defenders too, and some surprising. Some years later as Lord Mayor, I was the subject of debate in state Parliament. Labor member Bill Prest, a former mayor of Gladstone, said the only job I was fit for was as a TV weather girl. Sir William Knox, hardly the most radical of parliamentarians, chided him for making a sexist remark. (I actually had been a weather girl for a week in the 1970s, filling in for someone who was on holidays.)
There was formal sexism then as well. Back in 1979, Indooroopilly Golf Club was still at St Lucia on land leased from the Council and when I went to call on the Club manager, I was unable to step inside the clubhouse. Women were banned; it was for men only. As the local alderman it was inconvenient, but something I accepted as how things were.
Life in Opposition was always going to be a slog, particularly as there was no extra staff support for the role. In the year before the election a group of businessmen, understanding the handicap I was under, paid for an extra staff member in the form of Digby McLeay, son of a former federal minister. Digby was quick-witted and entrepreneurial and great with the media. He had worked on radio and one of his more successful tricks was to record an interview with me on a tape recorder, and then give the tape to a radio station who would play it just as it was. After a while the radio stations woke up to what was happening, but I had been able to spruik a lot of policies on air.
Looking back through the newspaper cuttings of those years, it is amazing how much space is given to City Hall and local government matters. In my days on the Courier-Mail there had been a City Hall roundsman, senior journalist Peter Trundle who had been famously banned from City Hall by Clem Jones, which of course only increased his stature. The newspapers in the early 1980s, and there were three dailies in town, were full of stories about buses and dogs, the visit of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, the venues for David Bowie’s concert and petty squabbles with the state and federal governments. The squabbles were petty, even if their causes were not, for intergovernmental funding was always contentious. But the big and ongoing issues of the early 1980s were garbage, heritage and Games, both student and Olympic.
It could not be denied that everyone cared passionately about garbage disposal, especially in Brisbane’s hot and steamy climate. The Council began moves in 1983 to change the way our household garbage was collected. The ‘garbo’ had always been a picturesque character in Brisbane’s suburban life and the efficient collection of rubbish a vital contribution to its good health.
Brisbane’s Olympic aspirations began with the Commonwealth Games. No one seems to know exactly when the light-bulb moment happened, but Lord Mayor Harvey stood in Brisbane’s Queen Street mall late in 1982 and said that the Council was considering Brisbane bidding for the Olympic Games. Everyone acknowledged that the Commonwealth Games had been a huge success so trying for the Olympics was almost a natural progression. But then the administration decided to bid for the Student Games or Universiade, a lesser and perhaps more reachable target. These Games somehow lacked the brand appeal of the Olympics and all through 1983 and 1984 there was controversy, with renegade Labor aldermen holding out on the decision behind closed doors, while others were taking investigative trips that were spotlighted in the full glare of the media.
The Universiade was indeed the second largest multi-sports event in the world after the Olympics, but the competitors were university athletes and because no one had ever heard of them it was hard for the Council to sell the benefits of bidding for and hosting the event.
In January 1984 Primo Nebiolo, the Italian president of the Universiade’s governing body, the International University Sports Federation, came to Brisbane and held a press conference to push Brisbane’s case for hosting the Student Games. In an unfortunate case of timing the tenders for Brisbane’s multimillion-dollar refuse collection had been called a few months earlier in September 1983 and almost immediately there was trouble. Services were disrupted and this meant that during the Brisbane summer household garbage bins were filled to overflowing, smelly and maggot-ridden. Regrettably, when the Italian Universiade president made his visit the journalists only wanted to talk about garbage. Primo stormed out of the press conference saying, ‘I didn’t come here to talk about garbage!’ (My favourite Primo Nebiolo story was during the Barcelona Olympics in 1992. He was in the royal box at the tennis when he noticed Princess Anne, the British International Olympic Committee (IOC) member sitting in the stand below with her children. He grandly sent a note down to the princess suggesting she join him in the royal box. She is supposed to have sent a note back: ‘Wherever I am, that is the royal box.’)
Despite the political posturing, Brisbane’s bid for the Student Games was unsuccessful.
I do find it extraordinary looking back at the amount of media I was able to get as Leader of the Opposition. In part this was because I was, put simply, a good story. I was young and a woman. And as the mother of five children I was not the stereotypical career woman. Because I had been a journalist I knew what made news. I knew, for example, that talking about Council finances was never going to spark the interest of reporters, but that issues concerning their own lives and those of their readers would. In one sense this was to create a rod for my own back later, when I would be accused of being a lightweight and not interested in Council finances and intergovernmental relations. These were matters to be dealt with seriously, but they were not made for the media. And because of the Labor administration’s paranoia and policy of secrecy, we on the Opposition side of the Chamber were never allowed to look at the real figures on any of the important issues, such as the garbage contracts.
To attract media attention, we offered up lots of initiatives, and interesting ones. For example, I had been in correspondence with American planning lawyer Richard Babcock who was visiting Australian cities in early 1983 and was to lecture at the University of Queensland in early April. His visit to Brisbane coincided with Easter and the university had to cancel. He was still keen to come, so I invited him and his wife to stay at our house in Indooroopilly and asked him whether he would give a seminar in City Hall. We organised a venue, and invited planners, developers and business people – it was a great success. Even more successful was the publicity. Mr Babcock held a press conference in our front garden and told the media, who were having a quiet Easter, that warm weather was bad for the brain and all the great thinking of the world had happened in cold climates. This of course went national, and Melbourne and Adelaide were particularly excited. Mr Babcock’s special field was transferable development rights, a planning concept allowing the sale of unused rights from one site to use on another. It never quite took off here, despite my attempts, and I can only think of one example where it was used, the preservation of Naldham House in the city.
In Opposition we had to take initiative, and did. The visit of Richard Babcock also showed how unexpected opportunities can lead to friendship. He and his wife, Betty, became great personal friends, and I was to visit them in Chicago several times, as did some of my children. It was on one of those visits that I learned something new about Brisbane. Introduced to Dempsey Travis who had written a book called An Autobiography of Black Chicago, I heard for the first time that black American servicemen in Brisbane during World War II had been segregated on the south side of the river. We had never been told about this.
The editor-in-chief of the Courier-Mail, Olympic historian Harry Gordon, who happened to live in our street, asked me to write a column. There were complaints about this from the Council administration, though one of the other columnists was radio personality Janine Walker, who had been a Labor candidate. I was told not to write about politics or local government. Instead, I wrote articles on all kinds of things, from cricket to the new Chinatown mall, and could be as whimsical as I liked. I once suggested we move Christmas to Easter, saying I was sure that God wouldn’t mind. Christmas i
n December, with all its gaudy decorations was a necessary relief in a Northern Hemisphere winter, but here the heat of summer, the end of the school year and Christmas were all inconveniently timed together.
Heritage became the defining issue of my early political career. Once, after I had made a particularly impassioned speech to Council, Lord Mayor Frank Sleeman called me in and told me I had been clever to take up this cause. He was not congratulating me, he was being cynical. Frank happened to be the only person in my professional life who has ever made me cry. I don’t remember exactly why, but I do remember feeling very upset by his scathing attack because I respected him; he actually reminded me of my father. He was small and understated and had been a surprise choice as Lord Mayor by the Labor Party room. But he was strong, as were all the men like him who had survived as prisoners in Changi during the war, and he was authentic. His nickname was Sandbank Frank; fishing from his dinghy, he had been stuck on a sandbank in the middle of Moreton Bay and had had to be rescued.
Throughout my political career I never minded being criticised or attacked by people I didn’t care about or respect, but I would be upset by comments from people who mattered to me or whose opinion I valued. There’s a lot of criticism you take on the chin, without appreciating the effect it can have on others. I remember one of my daughters coming home very upset during my first aldermanic campaign because one of my posters had a moustache painted on it.
I really discovered ‘heritage’ when I had been researching for my book, Around Brisbane. The first house I loved had been ‘Hazeldene’, a lovely old Queenslander in Southport and the first house my parents had bought, 14 years after their marriage, and sold when Dad lost his job in Colombo. Hazeldene was a true Queenslander, painted white with verandas all around and rooms on either side of a central hallway, and a big garden. It is a house that features a lot in my dreams. Like so many of the lovely old Queenslanders it was knocked down years ago to be replaced by a brick apartment block.
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