by Julia Baird
His wife does not mind him working at all, and is happy to stay in the background while he speaks, even though she is often spotted napping in her seat at functions. She is the butt of jokes from other women, who tease her about having a working husband, but she is proud of him. Miraculous Merv’s stamina has also been the subject of much surprise. Sometimes, after long parliamentary sessions lasting until 4.00 a.m., while his female colleagues stumble about having consumed far too much wine over dinner, their hair unkempt and clothes crumpled, Merv emerges without a trace of stubble, hair neatly combed and shoes shining like mirrors.
His hair is raven-coloured, thick, and styled according to the latest trends, thanks to his barber, Stan, at Hedge Hairdressing. His legs are shapely, his waist trim, and his buttocks strain ever so slightly against his tailored pants from Harrods, leading some of his colleagues to, ahem, admire his charms. ‘I believe it’s important to look one’s best at all times,’ he says. ‘Clothes are very important for a man.’
For all his good looks, charm and sex appeal, it would be a fatal error to mistake Merv for a himbo. His female opponents have tagged him ‘Metallic Merv’ for his ability to make a decision without changing his mind or breaking down in tears. Merv is known to be not just intelligent, but tough — although remarkably, with his pressed off-white shirts and navy ties, he looks more of a gentleman than a tough, surly, unattractive kind of fellow.
Women lust after him and fear him. Men don’t trust him, and while some may admire his courage, will they vote for him?
A psychiatrist who studied Merv has concluded he is smart and has the stamina to work more than an eight-hour day. ‘He’s a freak,’ says Dr Diddle, ‘a highly unusual man, but I think he could have what it takes.’ A leading party official said he was 20–30 per cent stronger than any woman, and had to work twice as hard to prove himself their equal. He is tough, but still masculine, which may be the key to his success, says advertising executive Don Knowal.
Metallic Merv has also been called the ‘Wonderboy’, Batman, 007, Muscleman, the Brunette Bomber, Napoleon, ‘Margaret Thatcher in pants’, Saint Merv, the Freak and That Bloody Bloke.
The Iron Lady in Australia
Thatcher’s visit to Australia was structured to maximise positive publicity. She told British journalists the three-week tour, which also included Pakistan, Singapore and New Zealand, was part of her preparation for the prime ministership.5 Patricia Morgan, in London for the Advertiser, wrote that Thatcher knew she was ‘going to a country where, on the whole, women are almost unrepresented by women in Parliament’. Her challenge, then, was to garner good coverage in a country almost entirely unused to a woman in her position. To that end, she was accompanied by her parliamentary private secretary, Adam Butler; her constituency secretary, Alison Ward; and her public affairs adviser, Gordon Reece. Reece, Morgan said, had been ‘widely credited with advising Mrs Thatcher to adopt a softer hairstyle, more feminine dresses, as part of the task of selling the politician as an attractive and feminine woman’. Morgan wrote that although Thatcher had made it clear she would like less publicity about her hair and more about the content of her speeches, ‘all the same, her new hairdo is an enormous success, as Australians will soon see’.
On her first day in Sydney, Thatcher held a press conference in the Boulevarde Hotel. While this was reported on the front page of major Sydney newspapers the next day, there was very little discussion of her policies or views. The Sydney Morning Herald began by describing Thatcher as splendidly British: ‘all peaches and cream and red, white and blue’. Reminding us that ‘she has been described as Dresden china and stainless steel’, Lenore Nicklin described how she answered questions efficiently, while leaning forward like an ‘encouraging schoolmarm’. Thatcher was clearly loath to discuss discrimination: ‘To all those questions about how she felt being described as an Iron Lady . . . she simply said, “If I’m never called anything else I’ll be very pleased.”’ Asked if her political achievements would have been easier if she were a man, she said, ‘I don’t know, I’ve never tried it.’ The Daily Telegraph declared she had lived up to her iron lady image by fielding a variety of questions skilfully: ‘like a schoolmistress telling pupils how the game should be played’.
It was the female reporters, the Daily Telegraph claimed, who were most interested in how a woman came to lead the Tory Party, and how her husband would cope with being the spouse of a British prime minister. In the Australian’s front-page story, her husband, Denis, was made the centre of attention, photographed sitting alone in a chair as reporters crowded around his wife with microphone and camera lights aloft. The headline read: ‘Behind every successful woman there’s a man’. He was quoted saying, ‘I just keep my mouth shut and let Margaret get on with it . . . Margaret answers the questions far better than I ever could.’ A more serious article on Thatcher’s views on the Soviet presence in the Indian and Pacific oceans ran on page three. A couple of days later, the Mirror also featured Denis in a series on ‘men behind the throne’.
The full implications of the conservative Thatcher’s interaction with a stronghold of Australian unionism at Broken Hill were largely glossed over by the media here, who portrayed her as being charmed by the rugged ‘outback’ miners. On 14 September she flew out to western NSW to inspect the North Broken Hill Ltd mine and the Royal Flying Doctor Service, as well as attend a barbecue. The next day newspapers featured photographs of the British leader in the mine — drilling in white overalls, a red tin hat, and blue and white socks and boots — and pointed to the irony of her warm reception in the heavily unionised Broken Hill: ‘capital city of all she dislikes and distrusts’. The Sydney Morning Herald cried, ‘Ice lady of conservatism breaks through the Barrier’. What the Iron Lady needed, it seemed, was a sausage sandwich and a beer with the men at Broken Hill. James Cunningham wrote that Thatcher, ‘who has been known as the Ice Lady of the British Conservative Party, thawed out yesterday in eight hours of winning hearts and minds in this rugged citadel of trade-unionism’. The Advertiser quoted Thatcher saying, ‘There was a companionship among underground workers that was unequalled in almost any sphere.’ In her memoirs, however, Thatcher described how horrified she was by what she saw as the ‘blatant infraction of liberty’ which she understood to mean that no one could live or work in Broken Hill unless they were members of the union.6
According to the reports, in just a few days Thatcher had charmed Australia’s politicians, journalists and public. The Sun-Herald opined it was still uncertain if male prejudice would keep her out of office, but that she had been impressing Australians as ‘a very remarkable woman, fully equipped to seize the chance offered by a dearth of male leadership talent in the Tory party’.7 Martin Beesley, who accompanied Thatcher on her tour, praised her preparation and application, as well as her ability to remain ‘ever charming and in control’. She had impressed all who heard her with ‘an extraordinary ability to retain and quote facts on any subject’. The tour, he surmised, had been ‘more successful than her advisers dreamed possible. Conservatives in Australia and New Zealand would welcome her as Prime Minister of the country many of them still refer to as home’.8 It is interesting to note that Thatcher’s brief recollections — of a country unused to her ‘unapologetic conservatism’ because of a culture of protectionist economics and an advanced welfare state — were entirely different, perhaps because her focus was on policy, not sandwiches and legs.9
Despite all the editorial predictions that Thatcher’s election would ease the path for ambitious women in all democracies, and that her visit would ‘make [electors] realise that there is no limit to what a woman can achieve in politics’, Thatcher’s visit in 1976, and the accompanying publicity, seems only to have emphasised that there was no limit to what the woman who was Margaret Thatcher could achieve.10 Other women simply had to try harder. In the 1970s, many commentators had argued that it was women’s own fault that they were not represented in parliament, firstly for not voting for ot
her women, and secondly for not trying hard enough. John O’Hara of the Sydney Morning Herald wrote that ‘women are sadly underrepresented by their sex in the Australian parliament for one predominant reason — they don’t try to be represented . . . that they do not choose to is largely because politics does not interest them . . . [because of] a woman’s temperamental dislike for public wrangling’. Thatcher herself said in 1974 that ‘the shortage of women politicians in Australia, the US and Britain is the fault of the women themselves’, adding that in Australia it was also the pressure of travelling long distances to Canberra, because ‘Australian women, like all women, do not like to be separated from their families and politics frequently separates a woman from those she loves’. There was some truth to this view, even if the future British PM skipped over any discussion of whether men might like to be separated from their families. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Thatcher continued to be portrayed as the exception to the rule.11
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Thatcher was, from the mid-1970s onwards, renowned for her stamina, ability and intellectual prowess. Because of her longevity and international prominence, she represented a new realm of possibilities for Australian women. But her media coverage also emphasised the unattainability of what she had achieved, as a former chemist and barrister, mother of two, who became prime minister and was praised for her beauty while allegedly surviving on four hours sleep a night. After becoming PM, she stopped promoting herself as a housewife. According to the Guardian, in 1983 ‘the Prime Minister no longer wheels out her femininity to win hearts and minds. She relies instead on an image of steely resolution’. In the 1980s she was increasingly seen as a warrior queen and Iron Lady, as the ‘ordinary woman’ disappeared behind a suit of armour, or gun-lined tank. As Beatrix Campbell wrote, she wanted to be seen as a woman, but more than a woman, and more than a man.12
Fifteen years after she first visited Australia as the new Tory leader, local female MPs were still gnashing their teeth about the impossibility of the ideal Thatcher represented. Queensland Liberal Kathy Sullivan complained in a radio interview that, while Thatcher had demonstrated what women were capable of, ‘what is unfortunate is that you’d have to be thought as good as Margaret Thatcher to be any good at all. You know, do you have to be Bob Hawke to be able to succeed in the Labor Party? No, of course you don’t. You need all the mixtures and you’ve got to have people at all levels’.13
When Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979, the Sun exclaimed: ‘She knew, and we knew, and the whole world knew, that the Housewife had become a superstar.’14 Thatcher was no housewife, of course, but she was a woman who had reassured the electorate that her power would not compromise her domestic skills. She was able to manipulate, then transgress, stereotypes because of her intellect and ability — and because she became prime minister of Britain. In Australia, the tendency of journalists to refer to her as the iconic — or only — politician for women to emulate was a source of frustration for many MPs, who insisted they had their own views, their own style, and their own way of managing their household affairs — out of the public eye.
CHAPTER ONE
Steel Sheilas: female MPs, ambition and power
Q: Why do so many people take an instant dislike to Bronwyn Bishop?
A: It saves time.
Q: What’s the difference between Bronwyn Bishop and a Centurion tank?
A: Eyeshadow.
— Jokes circulated around federal parliament in the early 1990s
In 1994, Bronwyn Bishop’s face was just about anywhere you cared to look. Even the biannual photograph of the Canberra press gallery featured, instead of the diverse mob who report on politics from the hindquarters of Parliament House, a mass of Bishop faces. Journalists had been given a fierce-looking mask of the famous Liberal frontbencher to wear for the shoot on the steps of Parliament House, and only one wore a mask of John Hewson. It was a light-hearted shoot, playing on the fact that Sydney Morning Herald cartoonist Alan Moir had been drawing Bishop as a crowd of clones, a woman with a grin like a grimace who was everywhere all at once. Fairfax photographer Mike Bowers, who took the photograph, said, ‘It was Bronnymania and we were just swept up in the whole thing.’ The mask is ghoulish: eyes cut out, black and white features beaming, hair puffed up in a chignon.
The right-wing Bronwyn Bishop was the politician journalists loved to hate, and laugh at. She was widely parodied, and called a piranha, the Barracuda, a hot pink steamroller, Superwoman, Battling Bron, Boadicea, Ice Queen, Battleaxe, Bovver Boy Bron, Edna Everage, Dolly, Australia’s Margaret Thatcher (or Iron Lady), Marge Simpson, Senator Doubtfire, Mosman’s answer to Evita, Senator Bobbitt, a pit-bull, and Attila the Hen. Legendary for her ubiquity, she was loathed by her colleagues, despised by her opponents, and loved by the grassroots of the Liberal Party. The amount of coverage she received was virtually unprecedented for someone who was not a leader, and the fascination journalists held for her was both intense and fickle. Members of the press drew the curtain as quickly as they had shone the spotlight on Bishop, blaming each other for her popularity and profile, and chafing at opinion polls that supported her. In November 1993, the front page of the Bulletin magazine posed the question: ‘Will Bronwyn be our first female prime minister?’ Political commentator Malcolm Mackerras predicted that she would be. A year later, in October 1994, another front page asked, ‘Whatever happened to Bronwyn Bishop?’ She was, briefly, a star in a dull male firmament, but her fire quickly faded, if her ambition did not.
*
The first time I interviewed Bishop I was a university student, and she’d had several months of extraordinary publicity. I was shocked by how rude she was. I was ushered into her office in Parliament House, introduced, and then stood clutching my notepad for several minutes while I waited for her to acknowledge me. She lifted her head when her mobile phone rang and asked me to pick it up off the couch and hand it to her. I then took a seat as she checked her diary entry and rolled her eyes when she said, ‘What are we talking about today? Oh, women in politics.’ She then bent her head and kept working. I started to explain myself, and, after an exchange about the subject of my thesis which completely baffled me — I told her I was planning to write a PhD about women in post-colonial governments, which she perhaps interpreted as a republican rant — she stared at me coldly and told me to leave. ‘Get out. Immediately.’ I was longing to turn on my heels and go, but curiosity and a 300-kilometre trip from Sydney drilled me to my seat. I explained again and we had a difficult, strained interview as she batted away questions about women dismissively. Not a problem. Nothing to do with her.
When I went to see her in 2003, when she was a backbencher and I was a journalist, she was smooth as silk, chatty and accommodating. Her honey-coloured hair was tied at the back of her head, not dragged skywards in a stiff sweep of blonde, and her trademark pearls bulged from her neck (yes, I know, even I repeatedly fell into the trap of describing her attire, as it was so eccentric, eye-catching and consistent). I admired her leopard-print coat, draped over a chair in her electoral office, located on the bustling Pittwater Road that winds along Sydney’s northern beaches. She smiled often, and gave me meaningful looks. At one stage she even said to me, ‘I have to say, Julia, I enjoy talking to you, and I have been quite frank with you in a way I wouldn’t be with others. Because in a way I see you facing a number of the challenges I faced earlier on, wanting to do it on your merits.’
In the span of a decade, I had witnessed both the charm and the venom of the woman renowned for ruthlessness and tenacity. I was more intrigued by her thoughts as a backbencher than the terse comments she had made when she was a shadow minister. She seemed more reflective, and willing to discuss the question of gender — she seemed to have come to the conclusion that she had been done in by her party because she was a woman, or at least a particular type of woman. She had told me in 1994 that the Liberal Party was accommodating of ambitious women: ‘To be ambitious was strange for a woman but . . . [now] it is
just fine to be ambitious.’ Nine years later, she clearly implied that tough, aggressive and ambitious women often get short shrift from men who prefer their women to be at home, compliant and supportive:
There’s always this concept that if women come into something it’s all going to go soft and soggy. Well, that’s just rubbish. The women who are coming through are strong, determined women. Well, I was addressing a sports conference this morning . . . and Pru Goward was there and we were having a chat and talking about whether people liked it if women were strong or whatever, and Pru just made a throwaway line and said, ‘Well blokes don’t like it much — look at what happened to you!’ But that’s not going to change the way I am going to feel in politics because I think the world needs strong women just as much as it needs strong men. But there are still men out there who want women to stay at home and look after the household and look after them. And I suppose there are some women who like to do it. I am not making a judgment about the women; maybe I am making a judgment about the men.
Bishop’s support was always higher among women. But when I discussed Bishop’s new-found feminism with one of her female colleagues, the woman laughed, ‘but I thought she had never even admitted she was a woman!’
Surprisingly, Bishop also told me in 2003 that she believed the way the press reported on the Mackellar by-election destroyed her hopes of leading her party — and possibly the country.
While often likened to the long-lasting populist Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Bishop was in fact the first female political celebrity — to be followed by One Nation’s Pauline Hanson and Democrat leaders Cheryl Kernot and Natasha Stott Despoja.1 She says she became like a brand: ‘Kleenex tissue or CocaCola; it’s like a breakthrough point where your identity is something that makes you public property.’ Celebrity took a long time to come to Bishop, and she worked hard for it. She tried to get elected to parliament seven times before she finally entered the Senate in 1987. A critical moment came in 1992, when her relentless interrogation in the joint committee of public accounts, particularly of the commissioner of taxation, Trevor Boucher, earned her a reputation for toughness. After this, a series of polls cemented her reputation as a growing political force, and a potential leader. These polls, conducted throughout 1993 and 1994, showed she had a clear lead — of as much as two to one — as preferred leader over John Hewson. She was no longer a stereotype, a tough Liberal woman with a blonde beehive; she was a future leader of her party at a time when the current leader, Hewson, was under threat after losing what had been considered the unlosable 1993 election.