No Job for a Woman

by Sallyanne Atkinson

  Another company I’m involved with, Fidelis Investment Group, is going strong. It’s a specialist property fund manager that offers opportunities to investors, a small company with a group of people who know a lot about property investment and management. My job as chairman is to run meetings, set directions and monitor governance, and the deputy chairman is my old friend and campaign manager, real estate-guru Rod Samut.

  I also kept myself busy with a role as the Honorary Consul to Brazil in Queensland. Why Brazil you might ask? It happened almost accidentally. I was in Canberra at a conference for the Crawford Fund and struck up a conversation with the Ambassador for Brazil, Fernando de Mello Barreto. We got talking about my hero, Arthur Phillip, who had spent some years in Brazil before he became Australia’s first governor, which was news to the Ambassador. The First Fleet had stopped in Rio de Janeiro in 1787 on its way to New South Wales, so Australia and Brazil have strong historical connections. All this the ambassador included in the opening of his speech about ethanol, to the interest and admiration of the assembled scientists.

  Later he told me that the Brazilian government had decided to appoint its first honorary consuls in the Australian states, and asked whether I knew anyone in Queensland who spoke Portuguese and did business in Brazil. I did not. A few days later he rang to ask whether I’d like the job, to which I had to reply that I neither spoke Portuguese nor had business in Brazil. We decided that I should do the job until someone else was found. This turned into a seven-year stint, far beyond the four mandated by the Brazilian government.

  The role of an honorary consul is just that, honorary. It was a satisfying post in many ways, not the least of which is spending time with all the other consuls representing their countries. Queensland is the only Australian state with a sister-state relationship in Brazil and an office in Minas Gerais, whose mining interests match our own.

  Brisbane’s West End was where Australia’s first samba school was established by Tarcisio Teatini-Climaco in 1987. I learned the samba there, not well, and in 2010 took myself off to Brazil as part of Tarcisio’s team for Carnivale in Rio de Janeiro. I actually got to ride on a float, which was unintended but there was a sudden space and someone hauled me up on it. I’d like to have been able to say I was feather-clad, but I was dressed as a lion. After all that excitement I went to Minas Gerais, São Paolo and had a couple of days in Brasília, that monument of a city, Brazil’s answer to Canberra, although it is still to acquire the lived-in feel of our capital.

  I had been learning Brazilian Portuguese at the University of Queensland evening classes, but that visit totally destroyed any smidgen of confidence I’d gained. The spoken Portuguese seems to bear no resemblance to the written and I couldn’t understand a word of what anyone was saying. When any Brazilian rang me at home and, quite naturally, wanted to speak Portuguese, I would say ‘Nao falo bem Portuguese …’ (‘I don’t speak Portuguese very well’).

  My interest in Brazil and my interest in Arthur Phillip had begun almost simultaneously. Like every Australian child I knew that Arthur Phillip had sailed from England to establish a convict colony in Sydney, a fact that we celebrated every Australia Day on 26 January as the birth of modern Australia. But I knew nothing else of Governor Phillip at the time.

  While I was working in my Paris office one day I heard that as part of the Embassy library’s closure they were throwing out books. I rushed down and one of the books I rescued was one of the few biographies of Arthur Phillip, Admiral Arthur Phillip: Founder of New South Wales, 1738–1814 written in 1937 by George Mackaness. I found that Phillip, to outward appearances an ordinary man, had done some quite extraordinary things in the course of a fascinating life. He was extraordinary for having brought 11 small ships and more than 1000 reluctant passengers 15,000 nautical miles to settle in an unknown land. But what was most extraordinary was that he has never been properly honoured. I started to read all I could about him, which wasn’t very much.

  When a dear young Australian friend from Paris, Nic Martyr, was posted with her husband and children to Rio de Janeiro I took the opportunity to visit them, and Arthur Phillip. I had the moving experience of retracing Arthur’s steps through the square in front of the Paço Imperial, and walking up the stairs – now underneath a freeway – that he would have climbed from the harbour so like the one he was to later find in Port Jackson.

  Since then, the life of Arthur Phillip has been a thread through many of my travels including visits to London, Lisbon (where he joined the Portuguese navy), Paris and Toulon (where he spied on the French for Britain). I wanted to write his biography, and intended to. The book was finally written by Sydney judge Michael Pembroke, Arthur Phillip: Sailor, Mercenary, Governor, Spy. I was pleased that it had been done, and better researched and written than I could have managed, and that Arthur was finally being properly recognised. I was also pleased and proud to be in Westminster Abbey in 2014, on the bicentenary of his death, when a plaque in his honour was unveiled by the Duke of Edinburgh, and in Bath (where he died) where there is a beautiful sculpture dedicated to the former Australian governor. Arthur and I will always be friends and I will continue to promote his name. In many ways he reminds me of my father, in character and attitude.

  The G20, that grand gathering of leaders from all over the world or at least the 20 leading countries was held in Brisbane in November 2014 and I had a small but interesting involvement. Brazil was one of those countries and President Dilma Rousseff was one of our guests. As honorary consul I had no formal role but informally I would discover the intricacies of international protocol. Some months before the G20 event the Brazilian delegation had expressed that they were not happy with the hotel they had been allocated. The Royal on the Park was not in the first line of our hotels but it was a very good hotel, and in fact where I had launched my Mayoral campaign. But final accommodation decisions had been made. In the week before the opening, Brazilian officials were still not happy with the President’s suite in spite of the fact that the Sultan of Brunei, who owns the hotel, had spent his own money doing it up. They wanted some Aboriginal art on the walls. By this late stage I had no idea where I could find any so I had the brainwave of offering some of my own. I propped a couple of paintings on the sofa in my living room, photographed them and emailed the pictures. Back came the reply: ‘We like those but we also like the paintings behind them. And the sculpture you have there.’

  We packed up everything from my apartment walls and they graced the walls of the Presidential Suite for the weekend of the G20 summit.

  I met Dilma Rousseff only briefly when she arrived, and saw her again the next morning when she chaired a meeting of the BRIC nations (Brazil, India, Russia and China), all considered newly advanced nations. I couldn’t actually go into the meeting, but I was able to get a good look at Russian president Putin. I have never quite lost my girl-reporter enthusiasm from the Telegraph days.

  The G20 was the biggest thing ever to happen to Brisbane, with 4000 delegates and 2500 media. There were policemen for security on every street corner. American President Obama went to the University of Queensland and the security was such that people had to wait for hours before he arrived.

  In 2009 Brisbane Lord Mayor Campbell Newman told me he was setting up a board to run the Museum of Brisbane and wanted me to chair it. The museum had been on the ground floor of City Hall, which was being renovated, and both the museum and the Council Chambers had been relocated to a building in Ann Street, officially named the Roy Harvey House but always known as The Roy.

  Campbell had just discovered that the next major exhibition of the museum, then part of a Council department, was to display the history of gay and lesbian Brisbane. I had to contain my mirth at his rage, and readily accepted his invitation to chair an autonomous board to control the museum. As it transpired, Prejudice and Pride was a great success and there were none of the political consequences that he feared. Interestingly, in 2016 Council passed a motion supporting gay marriage.


  Back in City Hall, though now located on the top floor, the museum showcases wonderful exhibitions with a good balance of history and art. Our mission is about being ‘all that is Brisbane’, which can be achieved in many ways. Arguably our most successful exhibition in terms of numbers has been Costumes from the Golden Age of Hollywood, which might seem to have nothing to do with Brisbane, but was a collection of movie star costumes from the 1930s and 1940s that had been collected over a 24-year period by a Brisbane lawyer and kept in his garden shed. (Who knows what other treasures might be lurking in Brisbane backyards?) I particularly enjoyed this show because every film star from my childhood was represented, and all the great movies. Most exciting for me was Esther Williams’ swimsuit. Dad, keen to encourage Louella and me in our sporting endeavours, had taken us to every Esther Williams movie. She would have been in the Olympics except for World War II, and she became the on-screen pioneer of synchronised swimming. We asked people to sponsor a costume for the exhibition and I chose the swimsuit she wore in Million Dollar Mermaid.

  Among the many exhibitions have been those of Brisbane artists like William Bustard who not only painted but did the stained-glass windows in several Brisbane churches, and Stephen Nothling whose show called The Last Street in Highgate Hill was an evocative collection of paintings around one neighbourhood. We have had a collection of jewellery-as-art by local jewellers and we asked six young artists to be inspired by the writings of David Malouf, arguably our most famous author. The result was a wonderful show, and David himself wrote the program note and gave public talks. Timed to coincide with his eightieth birthday, and as someone who grew up in Brisbane all those years ago, he could give audiences great insights into life back then. For example, he talked about the Queensland primary school readers which contained excerpts from classic books and gave schoolchildren examples of fine writing. I too remember the books well from my first years at Southport. His point was that Queensland children in those days had great literary opportunities, despite our reputation as a cultural backwater.

  Every city should have its own museum, to display and explore its character and establish its identity. My favourite exhibition so far has been a three-year display on the Brisbane River, which like the river itself wound around the museum space and was constantly being changed.

  And so it has been with my life, twists and turns and sometimes meeting the unexpected around the next bend. I can see how important it was to face my challenges head on and overcome adversity, even when I was faced with choices that I had not necessarily planned or hoped for. In adapting to life’s ebb and flow I made many new and wonderful discoveries. After all, who wants to float along in a straight line where the scenery never changes? I’ll keep navigating my way around through each turn.

  EPILOGUE

  The first time a man stood up for me on a tram I knew I was grown up. I was 22 and pregnant; I was very pleased. The other day a young man leaped to his feet when I got on a bus. I was not very pleased, but I thanked him for his good manners and gratefully took the seat. It struck me that I am now of an age that I once would have thought of as properly old.

  Life can be like a game of Snakes and Ladders – you can be up a ladder one minute and down a snake the next. My own life has been one of unexpected lessons. Through the highs and lows I have found resilience and have learned much. Some of these lessons came early, from my wonderful grandmother who taught me that when your knickers fall down in Martin Place you simply step out of them, your head held high, and stride on. I still adhere to one of her maxims, ‘Never stand when you can sit, never sit when you can lie, and never pass a lavatory without going.’

  I have learned that success and leadership, two topics that I’m often asked to speak about, aren’t always what they seem. Success can be defined by money, though not by me. It can be defined by achieving a goal, making a scientific discovery or painting a great picture, although you need to find the goal in the first place.

  To me, true success should be about personal satisfaction and to me this means having the love of family, the affection of friends and the respect of people who matter. My greatest personal success is having five children who each make a contribution to their world, who are all nice people and the ones I most like to spend time with. I’ve also thought of the extraordinary accident of birth, that my five children are each so different from one another. We are each conceived in an instant, our conception a coming together of genes, and if that conception happened a second later or a second earlier we would each be a different person.

  I’ve heard leadership defined as getting people to do things they don’t want to do. I think it’s about a whole lot of indefinable qualities, not just about being the captain of the team or the leader of the Party. It can be about setting a good example in an ordinary life. At Women’s College, one of our mantras is ‘Ready to Lead’, which means we want our young women to be very good at whatever they do in whatever life they lead.

  In the leadership of organisations, teams and political parties I believe there are several specific attributes that a leader should possess. Being able to take risks, make decision and nurture followers are the top three. Implicit in the first two, taking risks and making decisions, is the willingness to fail and then being able to take responsibility for that failure.

  I’ve learned some lessons about our political culture. Politics is about approval, or at least getting elected is. And so is staying there. But it’s somewhat disconcerting when the approval isn’t of the things that really matter and is often about how things are portrayed. It’s a dilemma for politicians when perception gets confused with reality. In politics the perception is reality.

  I believe politicians fall into three groups: the true believers, the technocrats and the people persons. True believers are so ideologically committed that they cannot believe anything good can come out of the other side. When they go into politics they see their role as furthering the cause. In the words of Graham Richardson, doing ‘whatever it takes’. Technocrats are managers who want to be in politics to make things happen and to ensure things are properly run. People persons are usually extroverts who get their energy from other people. Most politicians are combinations of at least two of these personality types; I think I’m a combination of the second and third.

  I grew up wanting to be useful and going into politics was a way of doing that. The former Mayor of New York, Ed Koch, was once quoted as saying, ‘I’m an ordinary man doing an extraordinary job.’ I knew what he meant. I am indeed an ordinary person, and I have been lucky to have been able to have an extraordinary journey.

  I’ve always had a theory that nearly all male politicians are eldest or only sons: I haven’t done a study of women yet. But eldest children are conditioned to seek approval. The first baby’s first tooth is a major event for the parents, the first step a cause for applause, the first day at school an emotional happening. In my own case, growing up as the eldest child I became used to applause and looked for it. Without it I was vulnerable.

  Looking back over the various stages of my life I have had some recurring voices in my head – those of my mother and my father, my ex-husband, two schoolteachers and my first editor, Erica Parker. Things they have said and views they have expressed, in both positive and negative ways, have influenced me greatly. I realise that subconsciously I have been seeking their approval. I think now I must be old enough to let those voices go.

  Today, as I sit on my balcony overlooking the Brisbane River and across to the city’s Botanic Gardens I think how much the city has changed and how its life, like mine, has been a series of transitions and transformations. The Botanic Gardens were once the vegetable gardens for the officers when Brisbane was settled as a penal colony in 1824. When I first came to university in Brisbane in 1960 the south bank of the river below me was a collection of wharves and rickety old buildings. Over time it has been miraculously transformed into the site for Expo 88 and is now the South Bank Parklands and the cu
ltural centre of the city. The Brisbane skyline I look out over is now dotted with buildings 30 storeys high; once they would have been no higher than three storeys.

  As I contemplate these great changes I appreciate the importance of place, and how certain places have left their mark on me. Like everyone, I have been shaped by place, by where I have belonged. Colombo, Belfast, Sydney and the Gold Coast were all different parts of my childhood – moving between them showed me a great variety of possibilities and helped me adapt to change. As an adult I lived in and was shaped by Edinburgh and Paris.

  But central to my life is Brisbane. Back when I was a 36-year-old suburban wife and mother I wanted to be the alderman for Indooroopilly. I said in my first electioneering pamphlet, ‘Brisbane is a unique city. Nowhere else has our winding river, our flowering trees, our distinctive architecture, our subtropical lifestyle.’

  This city, like all others, has changed in the years since then, and so have I. But essentially we’re still the same and it is my city, my place. I wonder what the future will bring for us both and look forward to exploring the next twist in the river, the next chapter of my story.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I always knew that writing a memoir was going to be difficult. It’s the ultimate exercise in the examined life and then having that life exposed. All lives in one way or another set examples and give directions to those who come after, and all are a product of their time. I didn’t want this to be a book only about me, although by definition that is what a memoir is. Rather, I wanted it to be a book about my life, lived as it has been in different times – growing up on the Gold Coast before it became a tourist destination, being a working mother before anyone had even thought of maternity leave, taking on roles that I was told were ‘no job for a woman’. Nor was this to be a political book, though it is a book about politics. I wanted to show how politics can be lived, from the inside, and to give people some understanding of the workings of government. And I wanted to write about cities, where most Australians live. My city is Brisbane, but all cities have similar issues.