Women of a Certain Age

by Jodie Moffat

  I wrote a letter to the newspaper saying that women were being left in vulnerable positions at night and they should drink and drive rather than waiting for cabs that never arrived, because losing their licence was better than losing their life. It was an irresponsible suggestion but it was what I felt at the time.

  I had recurring dreams of Sarah being held in a basement of a house, close to the river; I could see a street sign but I couldn’t read the name. I drove the streets of Claremont looking for that house. I ended up in police headquarters, at their suggestion. I felt stupid being there but they were amazingly supportive and said they never discounted clues, whatever the medium.

  Several months after Sarah’s disappearance, I was interviewing a girl for a job and she told me she read my letter to the paper and that I was right. I told her I wasn’t, but asked her if what happened to Sarah had changed her. I was heartened to hear that she never walked or waited alone at night anymore.

  Last year, as I began writing this, a man was arrested in connection with the disappearance of Sarah and the murder of the two other girls. I hope this leads to closure for their families, and that justice is done.

  In the late 90s, I got an opportunity to step outside my traditional planner role, and I was grateful for it. The Shire and Town of Albany councils were to amalgamate to form a new city council. The councillors resigned and the state government appointed commissioners. There was a desire to include women in government appointments, but not many had the professional background and the personal flexibility to take on a part-time, short-term commitment. I had the right skill set and I knew someone who worked for the local government minister. I was appointed to the council as a commissioner, taking unpaid leave and working extra hours at BSD to have time off so I could attend council meetings.

  Albany was where I had my first planning position, and where my former husband was now a local planning consultant. He often had matters before council. His new wife was a journalist with the local paper, covering council meetings. We had no conflicts, personally or professionally, although one fellow commissioner commented wryly that there were often too many of us with the same surname at meetings.

  Throughout most of my working life, I have been a woman in a man’s world. Two particular encounters with men in the course of my career stand out as disappointing examples of the inequality that still exists in the workplace, no matter how competent or accomplished the woman.

  In the first encounter, I found myself on a flight seated next to a man with whom I worked but who was also, in terms of the pecking order, my superior. Let’s call him ‘the statesman’. This man was well-known and twice my age, with daughters older than me. An hour from landing, he put his hand on my thigh and slid it up my skirt. Before it – his hand, not the flight! – could reach its destination, I knocked it away and gripped my hands over my lap. My mind was in turmoil. Even with what I’d experienced in my professional career, where older, usually married, men often surprised me with their unwelcome advances, this was a new low. My shock was followed by sadness, well before any anger arrived. Earlier in the flight he’d offered to drive me home, but when we landed I rushed off to find the cab rank.

  It wasn’t the first time and it wouldn’t be the last that a man used a position of power to try it on. I knew I would have to work closely with the statesman for some time, and I was realistic – who was I compared to this respected elder statesman? Such things, if not commonplace, were not unusual and, after all, what had he really done? Whilst a father or partner might express outrage, in my experience most men would say everything from ‘good on him for trying at his age’ to ‘you should be flattered’. Women would sympathise with me and say ‘what a sleaze’, and that would be it. This was an appointment I valued – did I want to be seen as a precious, overreacting hysteric the government would regret appointing?

  I was on my own; it was my problem to solve. After thinking the matter through, I asked the statesman to have lunch with me. He happily obliged, perhaps assuming I wanted to progress a personal relationship. During lunch I tried my first line of attack, asking him how he would feel if someone of his age did to his daughters what he had done to me. He shrugged and said, ‘So, you aren’t interested then?’

  Moral outrage clearly was not going to work. I changed tack. I said firmly that if he ever touched me again I would go public and I would take action. They were hollow threats really – this man had accolades for his services to the community. But he didn’t touch me again.

  Although I didn’t show it, I was shaking throughout that lunch, while he was totally unaffected. Afterwards I enquired about his reputation from colleagues who’d worked with him. I was told of rumours of women who left quickly, and that he demanded his secretary take dictation on his lap. But no charges were ever laid against him. This is a familiar story, and at that time, it seemed that women had to tolerate and accept it. What alternative did you have? Who could you tell who would do anything about it?

  Fast-forward a couple of decades, to a time not so long ago – you might hope that the world had moved on. But my second encounter showed that it has not. I choose to call this man ‘the bully’, because this time it was not a case of sexual advances but rather of his attitude towards me as a woman, relative to my peers. When I queried why I was offered board tenure renewals of only one year when my male colleagues were offered multiple years, the bully simply withdrew any offer of renewal and I lost my position, despite being praised for my performance by my peers. I knew my initial appointment was not only because of my professional background but because they needed a woman on the team; I believe I am no longer there because I was not sufficiently token or compliant. What disappointed me most of all was that (male) colleagues expressed shock and disappointment at the bully’s decision and at other examples of how I had been treated by him, and still did nothing.

  I decided, however, that life was too short, and my mental and personal well-being too important for me to pursue any form of discrimination action. I consoled myself with the belief that, with time, the rule and influence of such men – who are of a certain era – will come to an end. My only regret was supporting that same man when a female executive raised bullying allegations against him partway through my term. I should have done more to investigate her claims – he was a bully and he got away with it.

  Clearly, as women in the workplace, we have a way to go yet.

  I found a more positive response and what I consider to be a more enlightened European attitude in the late 90s when, through BSD, I was tasked by the European Space Agency to help them gain approvals to erect an antenna in WA to track the Rosetta spacecraft on its mission. The foothills of Perth were first proposed as the site of the antenna but it wasn’t welcomed by the locals, who seemed to believe that it was some sort of covert spy operation.

  Working with the Spanish project manager, I instead looked to sites around the wheatbelt town of New Norcia, known for its beautiful stone monastery and Spanish Benedictine monks. After breaking bread together and conversing in their native tongue with the project manager, the monks found the Agency a suitable site for the antenna, and construction began in the early 2000s.

  Buried beneath that antenna is a time capsule with the names of those who helped to erect it, including mine. One hundred years from the day it was buried, the capsule will be dug up and I will supposedly be remembered, although doubtfully by anyone who actually knew me.

  My life took a more philanthropic turn around that time when, for ten days in 2000, I went to East Timor as one of three volunteers from the Planning Institute of Australia to assist local planning, engineering and architectural students and practitioners to establish a professional institute. I had the support of both the then WA Minister for Planning, whose son had served in East Timor, and the then Shadow Minister for Planning, who had been a UN observer during the independence elections. On her behalf, I took some books to a local missionary.

  On arrival, we met with th
e eager first members of the fledgling institute and began almost immediately to help draft their constitution. We walked through the broken city of Dili and its beautiful countryside devastated by conflict. I slept in a shipping container, rode in tanks with UN soldiers, ate a humble lunch from a communal pot of cabbage in the ruins of the university, and wondered what the future held for the world’s newest nation. I helped the institute establish guiding principles to sustainably develop their country. They asked what Australia’s guiding sustainability principles were. I still don’t know the answer.

  Not long after returning, I was appointed as a commissioner for the City of Cockburn. The council there had been dismissed pending a corruption inquiry, and I served two years as deputy chair whilst it played out. As has been my observation of such inquiries, thick reports were produced, people’s reputations were sullied, but nobody went to jail.

  After serving on Cockburn Council, and whilst still working full-time for BSD, I applied for and was appointed as a part-time member of the newly formed WA State Administrative Tribunal (SAT). This was a big step for my personal accountability. As a council commissioner, I had always made decisions collectively, with the council. Now, for the first time, my individual decisions directly impacted the lives of others.

  I remember lunching with a former chairman of the West Coast Eagles and being feted by him to the restaurant owner as one of the most influential women in Perth. Even now, when I look around the city, I can see the physical impact I have had, in buildings, in suburbs, streets and houses. I also think of all the young people who worked for me at BSD and who have gone on to successful careers, many of whom stay in touch.

  In 2006, I moved back to Sydney with the global company that acquired BSD, one of fewer than ten female senior principals of over eight thousand staff internationally. This was largely a mentoring role and, with time on my hands, a belief that I could have made quite a good lawyer, and my experience on SAT, I applied for and became a part-time (acting) commissioner of the NSW Land and Environment Court, a role which became permanent in August 2016 when I decided it was finally time to quit consulting and the private sector.

  I met my partner in 2013. He has made me appreciate that life holds much more than work, and that every extra hour we work, we dilute the hourly rate we are paid, and therefore our value. He and I have the benefit that neither of us really needs to work and that is the best situation to be in – when you choose to work because you like it, not because you have to.

  The same week I was advised that my time on the board in WA wouldn’t be extended, he was told his contract role would also be finishing early. We decided to celebrate rather than mourn, and spent nineteen weeks travelling around Europe. Having gained a taste for extended travel, this is now our long-term aim, along with spending more time with our ageing parents and extended families.

  Last year, I woke to the news that the Rosetta spacecraft had successfully intercepted a comet some eighteen years after I found its tracking antenna a home in New Norcia. At that moment, I understood that sometimes what you do in life makes a difference that is not always evident to you at the time; and that loving what you do, and participating in shared endeavour, can lead to unexpected, if not always tangible, rewards.

  Flying kites — Mehreen Faruqi

  I don’t think I ever had a burning desire to be a politician, but I’m quite sure my relentless questioning about why girls were not allowed to do the same things as boys drove my mother to the end of her tether.

  Growing up in Lahore, on the top of my list was doing everything my two older brothers were allowed to do – stay out late at night, play cricket, fly kites on the large cement rooftop of my home, study engineering and work professionally. Permission from my parents to play cricket and fly kites was hard fought, while studying and working as a civil engineer came much more easily.

  In my early teens I often sneaked up to the roof, quiet as a mouse, on a rickety bamboo ladder outside our kitchen door, to join my brother and his friends flying kites till I was ‘discovered’ and hauled down by my mother yelling, ‘Mehreen, come down this minute. You know you shouldn’t be up there with the boys! You will ruin your complexion!’

  Climbing to the roof and my mother’s protestations happened almost every day during the spring kite season until my mother finally gave in to what she called my ‘stubbornness’. This same persistence served me well in negotiating a truce on cricket. While I wasn’t allowed to play with my older brother and his friends, I did get permission to play with the younger brothers of my girlfriends in the neighbourhood, as long as it was in the front yards of our homes and not on the local community cricket pitch. I remember summer evenings spent hitting fours and sixes, the elation felt at making more runs than the boys, and going home to eat luscious, juicy mangoes to celebrate a game well played.

  Now, as an MP in the NSW Parliament, those childhood tussles in Pakistan are a distant memory, but my passion to change what I see as unfair has not dampened. The reasoning, skills and determination I honed on my mother come in handy in the political arena, helping me to contest long-held views and archaic laws that need changing, from decriminalising abortion in NSW, to marriage equality and fighting racism.

  In a strongly patriarchal society, where there are clearly discriminatory laws and sexist attitudes working against women, I was lucky enough to have a father who valued equal education for his sons and daughters (all four of us did civil engineering as our first degree). For my father, also a civil engineer, a good education was as much about opening up your mind to think deeply and critically as it was about increasing the capacity for earning a good income. Both he and my mother resisted attempts from family members and friends to find me a ‘suitable boy’ right after I had finished high school.

  Knowingly or unknowingly, a number of women have had a profound influence on the choices I’ve made in life. The four that stand out are my mother, my grandmother, my paternal aunt and my mother-in-law. All of these women taught me, in their unique ways, to be strong and to live life with meaning and purpose. Their guidance, advice and love have given me the resilience and passion to help make me who I am today. I hope to do the same for my daughter.

  My mother is generous, kind and trusting. She is the favourite aunt, and the loving niece and daughter of the family. Friends and family turn to her for advice, and more often than not she puts others’ needs before her own. These traits could well brand her as a typical ‘mother’, always ready to sacrifice herself to nurture others. But her very gentle and acquiescing nature hides strength within.

  She rode a bicycle to college in the 50s, she travelled the world with my father, leaving their three young children (I was two years old at the time) in the care of her parents, and she embraced social media and email when she was in her sixties. While some of her attitudes are quite conventional, in many other ways she pushes boundaries without making a fuss, and still shows me how to break the mould. I think she learnt this from her mother who was fun, active, dynamic and independent well into her eighties. In my grandmother’s home, I was free to play cricket and fly kites to my heart’s content, morning, noon or night.

  My aunt was a writer, a poet, an activist and feminist. Her husband passed away when I was four and I always saw her as fiercely independent. On extended family gatherings when discussions around the dining table turned to heated debates on politics and religion, she was often the only female voice arguing loudly for women’s rights and progressive politics. She was spunky and fiery and her views connected very deeply with me. Given that I spent a lot of time with her, I’m sure my urge for gender equality is her direct influence. She taught me to stand up for myself no matter the circumstances.

  My mother-in-law left a lasting mark even though she was only in my life for a short period of time. Like my aunt, she was widowed when quite young, and was left with four children aged between eight and eighteen. The respect her three sons have for the women in their lives is testament to what
a positive role she played. She died in 2001 shortly after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease. I miss her honest, forthright and wise advice. But what I most admired was her calmness, despite facing difficult circumstances throughout life, and especially the way she did what had to be done without seeking any recognition or reward.

  In my own case, I can remember hushed conversations between my parents about one marriage proposal or another. Once I overheard my grandfather chiding my mum. ‘You’re leaving it too late. Once she becomes an engineer, it will be harder to find a good match. She will be more educated than many men, and she’ll have stronger opinions about who to marry.’

  I’d get anxious because I wanted to finish my degree and work professionally before getting married. I wasn’t even sure if I ever wanted to marry.

  I would brace myself to refuse when they came to ask my view. But my parents knew me well by then, and knew what I wanted, so those conversations never happened till I was a fully-fledged engineer working in the largest consulting firm in Pakistan.

  As it happened, I met my husband, also an engineer, at work. We secretly fell in love, and our wedding was arranged by my beloved aunt and his aunt, both friends.

  People are surprised to hear that I never planned to be a politician, that it all happened quite organically or perhaps accidentally. In fact, I’ve never been one to rigidly plan, but rather when there’s a fork in the road I will take the road less travelled. Growing up in Pakistan in the 60s and 70s in an environment where, for girls and young women especially, many key life decisions are made by their parents or family elders, forward planning just didn’t make much sense. So for me, life was more about taking up an opportunity when it arose or fighting a battle when it was needed.