Media Tarts
Page 40
14Jane Cadzow, ‘Women about the House’, Good Weekend, 26 Nov. 1988, p. 21.
15Interview with the author, 27 Aug. 1997.
16Geoff Turner, ‘Towards equity: women’s emerging role in Australian journalism’, Australian Studies in Journalism, vol. 2, 1993, p. 132.
17Rosemary Harris, ‘Women, workers, ladies or chicks? How the Courier-Mail sees woman’, Hecate, vol. 10, no. 1, 1984, pp. 28–48.
18Grahame Griffin, ‘A profile of Australian newspaper photographers’, Australian Studies in Journalism, no. 3, 1994, p. 151.
Postlude
1Nicolas Rothwell, ‘Thirteen ways not to think about Pauline Hanson’, in Tony Abbott et. al., Two Nations, Bookman Press, Melbourne, 1998, p. 162.
2Marilyn Lake, ‘Pauline Hanson: Virago in parliament, Viagra in the bush’, in Tony Abbott et. al., op. cit., p. 114.
3Before the 1996 federal election, Graeme Campbell was kicked out of the ALP because of his anti-immigration, anti–economic rationalist views, and strong criticism of the Aboriginal affairs bureaucracy. He then successfully stood as an independent member for the seat of Kalgoorlie, and formed the antiimmigration Australia First Party. He believes One Nation stole many of his policies.
4Margo Kingston, Off the Rails: The Pauline Hanson Trip, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1999.
5After some weeks, the press themselves became the story, as they were heckled and harassed at meetings, refusing to leave one when police were called, defiantly demanding they be handed budget costings, and that the One Nation Party be as accountable as others. One Nation members became so angry with the media that they began to rely on the internet to disseminate information, setting up websites outlining policy and critiquing the mainstream press.
6Iva Ellen Deutchman & Anne Ellison, ‘A star is born: the roller coaster ride of Pauline Hanson in the news’, Media, Culture and Society, 1999, vol. 21, pp. 33–50.
7More research is needed here on the question of whether it was the volume of publicity, the criticism of Hanson, or the support given by shock jocks like Alan Jones which artificially pumped the public figure of Pauline Hanson to loom so large on our political landscape in the 1990s. See Murray Goot, ‘Pauline Hanson and the power of the media’, in Ghassan Hage & Rowanne Couch (eds), The Future of Australian Multiculturalism, Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sydney, 1999, pp. 205–302, and Murray Goot, ‘The perils of polling and the popularity of Pauline’, Current Affairs Bulletin, vol. 73, no. 4, 1996–97, pp. 8–14.
8Margo Kingston, op. cit., p. 29.
9Murray Goot & Ian Watson, ‘One Nation’s electoral support: where does it come from, what makes it different and how does it fit?’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 47, no. 2, 2001, pp. 159–91.
10Margo Kingston, op. cit., p. xv.
11Margo Kingston recorded that a photographer asked Hanson, who was having a ‘media-free’ day, if he could take a photo of her hanging out her washing, but she replied, ‘I’m at the office tomorrow, working, and I don’t take my washing to work. Have a day off; you need it, you’re looking tired.’ (Margo Kingston, op. cit., p. 41.)
12David Leser, ‘Pauline Hanson’s bitter harvest’, Good Weekend, 30 Nov. 1996.
13New Idea ran a damaging story during the 1998 election campaign which implied Hanson was a poor mother who had neglected her sick son. The headline on the cover cried: ‘Pauline Hanson’s dying son, “I can’t even speak to her.”’ Tabloids and broadsheets alike followed it up, despite Hanson’s refusal to comment. See Margo Kingston, op. cit., chapter 12.
14Margo Kingston, op. cit., p. 42.
15John Pasquarelli, The Pauline Hanson Story — By the Man Who Knows, New Holland Publishers, Sydney, 1998, p. 285.
16Murray Goot,‘Hanson’s heartland — who’s for One Nation and why’, in Tony Abbott et al, op cit, p. 72.
17John Pasquarelli, op. cit., p. 281.
18Marilyn Lake, op. cit., p. 116.
19Helen Elliott, ‘Hanson’s sexual power’, Herald Sun, 10 June 1998, p. 19
20The Daily Telegraph ran a front-page story headed ‘Very close: Hanson and her svengali’, with a photo of Hanson resting her head on his shoulder, hinting at a sexual relationship between the two. There was protracted interest in the men running One Nation, especially Oldfield and, to a lesser extent, David Ettridge, and the often condescending tenor of the articles was that they were controlling her like puppet masters. This leads to a critical, but little discussed, factor in the media’s treatment of women MPs, which is the key role press secretaries can play in the mishaps and misunderstandings of media relations. As Kingston details, Hanson’s adviser, David Oldfield, was widely loathed by journalists, considered narcissistic and patronising towards the woman he called ‘the Project’. Other women have suffered from similar problems; it is an area ripe for research.
21The subeditor at the Melbourne Herald Sun rejigged the story so Hanson was quoted saying she had the best ‘pins’ in the country. Kingston, op. cit., p. 102.
22Bob Ellis, ‘The vote for One Nation was less a vote for racism than a revolt against Economic Correctness’, Sydney Morning Herald, 22 June 1998, p. 17.
23Mike Seccombe, ‘How Hanson got her men’, Sydney Morning Herald, 15 March 2003, p. 34. He added: ‘And when she was photographed wearing a Bang label evening dress, with what was described at the time as “a revealing lace panel”, she got a big, positive response from her constituency.’
24Sonja Koremans, ‘All dressed up and going nowhere’, Courier-Mail, 14 Feb. 2001, p. 19.
25‘Pauline keeps to dress code’, Herald Sun, 2 May 2001, p. 16.
26Emma Kate Symons, ‘The evolution of Hanson’, Daily Telegraph, 17 July 1998, p. 11.
27‘Pauline’s secret prison diaries’, as told to Michael Sheather, Australian Women’s Weekly, December 2003, p. 34. The Daily Telegraph picked up the story — not to talk about her prison revelations, but about how glamorous she looked in her photographs. It reprinted the photo of Hanson in the strapless dress and likened it to a photograph of Princess Diana on the front cover of Vanity Fair, claiming ‘The black and white photos of Ms Hanson attempt to capture the same serene mood as the famous pictures taken of Di by the celebrity photographer Mario Testio for Vanity Fair magazine in 1997.’ (Dora Tsavdaridis, ‘From prisoner to princess: Pauline even has a “secret diary” to tell of torment’, Daily Telegraph, 25 Nov. 2003, p. 3.)
Conclusion
1Interview with the author, 29 May 2003.
2Interview with the author, Dec. 2003.
3Shaun Carney, ‘Down to earth for the heavenly body politic’, Age, 22 Nov. 1997, p. 10.
Epilogue
1Maxine Beneba Clarke, ‘capital’, How Decent Folk Behave, Hachette, Sydney, 2021.
2Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, TED talk, Dec. 2021, www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_we_should_all_be_feminists.
3Women’s Working Group chaired by Rosemary Craddock, Room for Movement: Women and Leadership in the Liberal Party, A Liberal Party Federal Executive Initiative, 2015.
About the Author
JULIA BAIRD is a bestselling author and award-winning journalist. She hosts The Drum on ABC TV and writes columns for the New York Times and the Sydney Morning Herald. Her first book, Media Tarts, was based on her history PhD about the portrayal of female politicians. After moving to the United States to take up a fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School, she became a columnist and senior editor at Newsweek in New York. Julia’s biography of Queen Victoria was published in several countries to critical acclaim and was one of the New York Times’s top ten books of 2016. Her most recent book, the number-one bestseller, Phosphorescence: On awe, wonder, and the things that sustain you when the world goes dark, won the 2021 Australian Book Industry Awards Book of the Year. She lives near the sea with two children and an abnormally large dog.
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