Meet change champion, Elizabeth Broderick

Transcription

Number 12 April/May 2015
Sane
Factual
Relevant
Texas, the reddest state
How to fight jihadism
Everyone’s a star
on YouTube
Plus
The art of
Cressida
Campbell
Meet change champion, Elizabeth Broderick
#12 April/May 2015
Anne Summers
EDITOR & PUBLISHER
Stephen Clark
ART DIRECTOR
Foong Ling Kong
MANAGING EDITOR
Jay Cooper
DIGITAL PRODUCER
Paula Weideger
ART & DESIGN
CORRESPONDENT
David Hay
NEW YORK
CORRESPONDENT
Judy Kosgei
AFRICA
CORRESPONDENT
Rowena Johns
RESEARCHER
Helen Johnstone
PARTNERSHIPS
MANAGER
partnerships@asr.gmail.com
Christine Howard
EXECUTIVE ASSISTANT
TO THE EDITOR
assistantasr@gmail.com
WELCOME TO THE TWELFTH ISSUE of ASR, a couple
of weeks late, but I trust you will think it was worth the
wait to receive our strong mix of stories you will not have
read elsewhere in the media, as well as our strong focus
on art and design. I hope you will enjoy reading about
the extraordinary achievements of Elizabeth Broderick,
who is about to end her term as Australia’s longest serving
Sex Discrimination Commissioner. We are thrilled to welcome acclaimed artist
Cressida Campbell into our pages for the first time.
We have a strong international focus this time, with an
outstanding news story from Matt Thompson about the
likely emergence of jihadism in the Philippines (the place
that helped bring us 9/11) as a result of fumbled anti-terror
actions by the government.
We are also pleased to have a very interesting report
from Paola Totaro about how Denmark is dealing with its
Get Anne Summers
foreign fighters—a very different approach from Australia’s.
Reports sent to you
via email. It’s FREE
We take a quizzical look at whether the Danes are really
as happy as the UN official reports claims, then it’s over
to Texas to check out what the state’s ultra-conservative
policies mean for its people.
We have had two conversation events so far this year,
with Chief of the Army Lt General David Morrison and
Sydney Swans legend Adam Goodes. Our third, with
Elizabeth Broderick, takes place next week. See the
Help keep us going.
Feedback section for a report on the Morrison and Goodes
Donate a one-off or a
events. These conversations are gaining quite a following,
regular payment
both in person on the night and afterwards on our website,
where you can enjoy videos of all these events.
I am very gratified at how well these events are being
received. They certainly are a vindication of my conviction that audiences are hungry
for the ideas and inspiration these guests provide. The criterion for selecting the
people I talk to is that they be well enough known that people will want to buy tickets
(so we can fund the continuing publication of ASR), that they have something to say,
and that what they have to say adds to the Australian story. We learn about them, but
we also learn something about ourselves.
I am pleased to welcome Qantas as a sponsor for the Broderick event, and welcome
the continuing involvement of EY with our conversations. We will be taking a break
after the Broderick event and will resume both the conversations and the magazine in
August (meaning we will not publish in June this year). We will have plenty of great
material—on the page and on the stage—in the second half of the year.
Until then.
ANNE SUMMERS
Anne Summers Reports
is published by Anne
Summers Reports Pty Ltd
ACN 165 910 609
PO Box 70
Potts Point NSW 1335
AUSTRALIA
Editor and Publisher
WITH THANKS TO OUR MAJOR SPONSORS
2
12
DETAILS
36 /
The reddest state in the union
Is the Texas miracle the
template for America?
4 News Countering jihadism in the Philippines
and in Denmark; Jigger plan in Kenya
13 Scorecard Motherhood statement
15 Follow-up
16 Gallery Cressida Campbell
D a v id H a y
44 /
Finally, some help
Abused children get counselling
via the Royal Commission
J u lie t t e S a ly
MUSES
50 Art The first political
caricaturist
55 Books Anna Bligh;
Kate Grenville and
Biff Ward; Susan J
Neuhaus and Sharon
Mascall-Dare
64 YouTube
Everyone’s a star
C R E S S I D A C A M P B E L L O Y S T E R S ( D E TA I L ) , 1 9 9 4
REPORTS
B stands for book, buy and Booktopia
23 /
Elizabeth
Broderick’s
legacy
Clicking on the orange B next to a book title will take you to
Booktopia’s online bookstore, and ASR gets a small commission
for every title you purchase.
EXPLORE
68 Travel Valparaiso
77 Those Shades of
Grey Mona Eltahawy
81 Zeitgeist
How happy are
the Danes?
87 Primary Sources
90 Feedback
95 Donors
96 / Contributors
Meet a true champion
for gender equality
Anne Summers
Cover photo NICK CUBBIN
CONNECT
ANNESUMMERSREPORTS
@GMAIL.COM
WWW.FACEBOOK.COM/
ANNESUMMERSREPORTS
3
@ANNESUMMERSREPS
12
Details
Living dangerously
The killing of 44 Filipino police in a bungled counter-terrorism
raid risks encouraging the very jihadism the police were trying
to eliminate, with potential implications for Australian security.
A GRISLY AND CLUMSY US-ASSISTED RAID
in January this year in the Filipino province of
Maguindanao to get a man responsible for the 2002
Bali bombings has unleashed havoc in the Philippines.
Forty-four Filipino policemen were massacred in the
ill-conceived and ill-executed raid into rebel-held
farmland on the southern island of Mindanao, many
shot in the face and head as they lay wounded.
The bloodbath in the cornfields has discredited
a tortuously negotiated peace settlement with Muslim
rebels, triggered the first coup murmurs in years, and
sparked a military offensive displacing more than
120,000 people. Malaysia, which crushed an incursion
by Filipino rebels in 2013, is preparing offshore
military bases should the peace settlement collapse
outright and large numbers of refugees stream across
the Sulu Sea.
An unsettled and enigmatic crossroads of empires,
cultures and religions, the Philippines is an often
overlooked or misunderstood nation. The state of
play between Manila and the array of armed Islamic
groups in the archipelago’s south matters to Australia,
given the symbiotic relationship between the rebels
and the more internationally focused jihadists that
they host. Foremost among these is Jemaah Islamiyah
(JI), the Southeast Asian group responsible for
the Bali bombing and other attacks on Indonesian
nightclubs, hotels, embassies, diplomatic residences
and miscellaneous targets. Many of the JI bombers
involved were trained and, in turn, trained others at
these southern rebel domains.
The prime target on 25 January was Zulkifli Abdihir,
a Malaysian-born graduate of an American university
(with a degree in electrical engineering) in his late
forties. Zulkifli had taught bomb-making in the rebel
Filipino infantry escorting the author along rebel ambush
routes of the southern Philippines last year. S O U R C E : M AT T
THOMPSON
zones of the Philippines for decades. He worked in a
“university” of terrorism and guerrilla warfare, Camp
Hudaibiyah, in central Mindanao, a joint facility of
JI and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), a
powerful rebel movement that has since signed a
peace deal and declared a ceasefire in return for
regional autonomy, the details of which are now being
4
Filipino infantry near rebel camps in the south where Malaysian terrorists teach bomb-making. S O U R C E : M AT T T H O M P S O N
interrupted the pair’s plot for multiple jetliner hijackings
on suicide missions against targets including the
Pentagon and the WTC, and Ramzi was caught in
Pakistan in 1995, but KSM remained free and carried
out their plan in September 2001. Mohammed Jamal
Khalifa, bin Laden’s brother-in-law, set up shop in
Manila in the late 1980s, using Islamic charities as a
cover for funding terrorist groups. Camp Hudaibiyah
was captured by the Philippine military in 2000, with its
functions and Al Qaeda connections since devolving
to smaller sanctuaries in Mindanao and the Sulu
Archipelago.
debated in government hearings.
Zukifli had not only trained generations of Filipino
terrorists and guerrillas, but was a commandcouncil member of JI. He had fought the Soviets in
Afghanistan, garnered decades of experience in the
conflicts of the southern Philippines and, courtesy of
the US State Department, had a US$5 million bounty on
his head.
The International Crisis Group (ICG), reports that
many graduates and instructors from Camp Hudaibiyah
were involved in atrocities in Indonesia and the
Philippines. The camp replicated jihadist training
centres in Afghanistan, where many of Southeast
Asia’s mujahideen developed close relationships with
Al Qaeda in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Philippines was a centre of operations for
Osama bin Laden’s network. When Ramzi Yousef
planned and executed the 1993 World Trade Center
(WTC) bombing he was a Manila resident, as was
his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM). Police
AMERICAN COUNTER-TERRORISM AGENTS, using
mobile phone intercepts, had pinpointed Zulkifli’s
location inside farmland held by the Bangasmoro
Islamic Liberation Front (BIFF), a MILF splinter group.
The American agents believed that staying with Zulkifli
were another Malaysian, Amin Baco, alias Jihad, and
a Filipino bomb master, Ahmad Akmad Batabol Usman.
5
the security forces’ rage that was turning on him.
“We had picked up coup chatter—the first coup
chatter since he became president in 2010,” the
analyst told ASR.
But there will be no final victory over insurgents,
according to a highly experienced senior officer of
the Philippine Army’s Sixth Infantry Division, which
has pressed the post-raid onslaught. While short-term
tactical gains may be made, he told ASR, the divide is
rapidly widening again.
“We have been fighting our own people for decades
and cannot kill our way to peace,” said the officer, who
is Catholic.
“Now the hate between Christians and Muslims is
so intense,” he said, describing how several of Zulkifli’s
students have dispersed across the country. “I fear the
The Americans did not trust the local military,
believing that too many soldiers were related to the
rebels or too friendly with them. So the Americans
instead informed Philippine National Police officers,
who then planned a raid, codenamed Oplan Exodus,
for their Special Action Force (SAF), an FBI-trained
commando-style unit.
A spearhead of commandos was to sneak about
4.5 kilometres into rebel country to “neutralize” the
terrorists , while other SAF squads waited along
the route. With the military—with air and artillery
support—out of the loop, the police were gravely
exposed as they were strung out along a series of
marshes and cornfields.
President Benigno Aquino III personally approved
the raid, even though it was largely managed by a
police general (and close friend) whom he knew was
suspended from duty over graft allegations, and despite
the extreme danger to police that was obvious to
anyone who knew the southern Philippines.
Now the hate between Christians and
Muslims is so intense, I fear the ISIS fever
will take hold in the young.
THERE IS A PHENOMENON well known to security
forces called a pintakasi, one translation of which
is “cockfight”, which refers to a situation where
Muslim tribes and factions temporarily put aside their
differences and defend each other against common
foes such as the police or army, which can lead to well
over 100 men grabbing guns and fighting.
The BIFF is a minority of MILF fighters who rejected
the regional autonomy deal with Manila and are
fighting on for full independence. They number in the
hundreds compared to the thousands the MILF can
field. The police banked on the MILF ceasefire holding
but when gunfire erupted in the dead of night, and
word spread of shooting and civilian deaths (these are
rural communities, not just rebel encampments), large
numbers of MILF poured into what became a pintakasi
and the cornfields ran with blood.
The slaughter shocked many, deepening the divide
between Christians and Muslims and heightening
antagonism towards the autonomy deal. That the
half-baked plan was personally approved by Aquino
infuriated many in the police and military. A Filipino
private intelligence analyst says that Aquino ordered
a subsequent “all-out offensive” on the BIFF to diffuse
SENIOR OFFICER
ISIS fever will take hold in the young.”
The miscalculations of the Zulkifli raid have
worsened communal and political tensions at a
time when fears are rising that the 1990s and 2000s
onslaught of jihadist violence will be reignited as the
Islamic State so spectacularly role-models militant
Islam’s intent on state power.
The BIFF have declared allegiance to IS, and
ham-fisted raids risk increasing their appeal and
influence in poverty-stricken communities.
In the southern Philippines, this risks breeding
more local fighters and shutting down communication
between the security forces and local communities,
which might otherwise have encouraged the genuine
and representative rebel movements to expel or
“neutralize” the mad bombers of Southeast Asia, and
so avoid further onslaughts like those which caused so
much grief in Bali and Jakarta.
Matt Thompson
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6
‘Here are the holy warriors from Denmark’, proclaimed the Danish daily newspaper Berlingske in September 2014,
publishing photographs of 11 Danish Islamists it claimed had travelled to Syria and Iraq to fight jihad. S O U R C E : W W W. B . D K /
Engaging with jihadists
The Danish city of Aarhus pioneers a new program to counter
the rise of home-grown terrorists by getting to potential fighters
before they leave Denmark—and supporting those who return.
Today Denmark is well into a pioneering—and
courageous—experiment in which police, educational
and state welfare services have joined forces to build
a holistic “exit” program for radicalized youth.
A vast intelligence network of police, families, social
workers, religious leaders, community and parents has
been created and what is known as “InfoHouse” has
become the state’s first port of call to guide and target
welfare resources and specialist attention to potential
fighters before they leave Denmark—as well as those
who return.
To date, no prospective or returning fighter has
ended up in jail.
GLOBALLY, SECURITY AGENCIES ESTIMATE that a
quarter of the 12,000 foreign fighters who have entered
Syria since the civil war began in 2011 travelled from
the west. Of these, 1000 came from France, 500 from
the UK and Germany respectively, 250 from Belgium
and an estimated 100 from Denmark. A further 70
travelled from Australia.
After the shock of the 2005 London bombings,
and the realization that terrorists were being grown
at home, Aarhus, Denmark’s second largest city,
intervened and actively countered radicalization to
prevent home-grown terrorism occurring there. Efforts
were ramped up when the Syrian crisis erupted.
7
from a different angle, to have a more … nuanced
understanding. A broader horizon.”
Steffen Nielsen, a crime prevention advisor in
Aarhus, told Al Jazeera that the support had to be
more than cursory to be effective, and include help to
return to education or finding a job.
“A lot of guys who come home have experienced
a loss of innocence and some sort of loss of moral
belief. They thought they were going down there for
a good cause. And what they found was thugs who
are decapitating women and children and raping and
killing people.”
The program has its critics, but senior police
officers have backed its success, and the Danish
government has just committed US$9 million to extend
the program for three years, mostly to prevent Muslim
youth being radicalized, with US$1 million to be spent
on returning fighters.
The Danish approach is in contrast to that taken
by other countries, including Australia. In the UK and
Germany in particular, there is a schism between those
who support more benign, preventative approaches to
counter youth radicalization and those who advocate a
hardline law-and-order–driven response.
UK law already empowers authorities to revoke the
citizenship of a dual national, and British suspects can
be held for up to fourteen days without charge. Terror
training at home and abroad carries a ten-year jail
sentence, and a raft of new laws are in the pipeline.
The exact nature of these laws will depend on the
results of the 7 May UK general election.
Similarly, Germany has criminalized support for
Islamic State and around 300 people are already facing
prosecution.
Measured by proportion of population, Australia
is facing similar problems to Denmark. ASIO says 70
Australians are known to have entered Iraq or Syria
to fight, and 20 have died in conflict. Another 100 are
suspected of providing material support by making
donations or recruiting fighters.
Australia has also adopted a hard line, boosting the
powers of security agencies, strengthening border
security and, under legislation passed last November,
cancelling benefits, including welfare payments for
returnees or other terrorists.
Of the 31 young men who went to Syria from Aarhus,
five have died, ten remain overseas and sixteen have
returned. Unlike some British families who have spoken
out about the treatment of their sons, the identities of
the Danish fighters remain a secret but authorities say
the vast majority are Somalian; the others are Turks,
Palestinians and an Iraqi.
All who returned are known and their movements
are tracked. Six have insisted they don’t need help
and simply made a bad decision. Their files have been
handed to intelligence services, who keep an eye on
their activities while they try to reclaim their lives.
The remaining ten have accepted assistance and
cooperate with the program, which involves one-onone mentoring. Their experiences vary: some were
horrified by what they saw in Syria but others are
considering returning.
Although an excitable right-wing press has
simplistically dubbed the program “jihadi rehab”,
the Aarhus “exit” program is in fact driven by the
message to disaffected and alienated youth that their
community wants to re-embrace rather than shun
them, to prevent rather than punish.
AT THE GRASSROOTS LEVEL, social workers, local
mosques and families work together to identify
vulnerable youth and offer counter messages to
religious extremism. Treatment—both psychological
for mental trauma and medical for physical injuries—
on return is provided, along with long-term mentors,
and all efforts are made to help reinsert youth into the
community, to help them find paid jobs or a return to
school and education.
One mentor who spoke to the Guardian revealed
the depth of radicalization on impressionable young
minds. His latest young charge is obsessed with
travelling and fighting to the exclusion of everything
else. “Michael” meets the boy at least twice and week
and involves himself with his life and schoolwork for
several hours, often confronting the issue by engaging
the youth in religious and moral debate.
“The goal is not to persuade them to give up their
religious conviction,” he said, “but to help them
balance that religious perspective with school, work,
family—with life, in fact. To be able to see questions
8
The CIA and studies by ISCR and the Soufan Group put the number of foreign fighters helping overthrow
President Bashar al-Assad’s regime at a much higher 15,000 from at least 80 nations. S O U R C E : WA S H I N G T O N P O S T
who head off idealistically as relief workers, only to
encounter horror and brutality on the ground. Services
include advice and guidance on stays in Syria,
networking groups for relatives and help within the
hospital system.
“With our effort, we wish to offer these people a
chance of rehabilitation and return to an ordinary
Danish everyday life characterized by security for
themselves and the people who surround them,” he
It’s different in Denmark.
It may not be a politically palatable message to
some, but the Danes recognize that young fighters
often return plagued by the same horrors and trauma
suffered by military veterans. They believe that helping
to restore mental health is the greatest guarantee
against the potential for violence on home soil.
Aarhus Mayor Jacob Bundsgaard says that help
is offered to both combatants and young people
9
it began before the growth of Islamic State and is still
experimental, shaped by trial and error.
However they also warn that while the brutality and
gross violence of ISIS has helped workers counter
extremist messages with youth in the west, it has
also fuelled domestic demand for more British-style
hardline legislation.
Toke Agerschou, Section Chief of the Aarhus
program, says the goal of the work is not just
to prevent radicalization but also to tackle
“discrimination and unequal treatment because it
is this too that can lead to criminal acts and risky
behaviour”.
“But we make a sharp distinction between attitudes
and actions,” he said. “All attitudes must be dissected
and debated. This is the lifeblood of a democracy.”
told ASR. Bundsgaard said the starting point for the
program lies with the Danish democratic tradition for
openness and dialogue.
“We wish to create a safe and good city for all
by working long-term and intensively with crime
prevention, while at the same time clamping down on
offences and tendencies toward harassment, racism
and discrimination.”
The focus of the city’s problems has been a mosque
in the rubble-strewn streets of a poor neighbourhood.
Some of the imams of the Grimhoj Mosque have
previously refused to denounce acts of terror and one
could soon be jailed, although mosque leaders are
now moderating their position.
Such has been the problem that a fifteen-year-old
boy was recently removed from his family because
of fears he was being radicalized by his father, who
attended the mosque.
Researchers and experts on radicalization in Europe
agree that the Danish approach is significant, even if
Paola Totaro
See Happiness is a sad Dane, page 81.
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Damned Whores and God’s Police
The classic work about women in Australia
by Anne Summers
This new edition contains:
The entire 1975 original edition
The infamous “Letter to the Next Generation” from the 1994 edition
The Timeline of Women’s Achievements from the 2002 edition
A fabulous new cover featuring an original painting by acclaimed artist Gria Shead
Out of print since 2008 - now available as an ebook at
www.annesummers.com.au
ePub and mobi $9.95
10
Eaten alive
The government of Kenya is finally addressing the major public
health problem created by a tiny parasite, almost invisible to the
eye, that is causing misery and even death.
OVER 2 MILLION KENYANS are being eaten alive by
the jigger (Tunga penetrans), also known as chigger
or sand flea, a little known parasite found in most
tropical and subtropical climates. For the last six years,
more than 300 people were eaten to death by this
barely 1 mm (0.04 inch) long flea, the smallest around,
although the figure may be higher, since most cases
go unreported.
A female flea can jump as high as 20 centimetres (8
inches), embedding itself on exposed human skin and
burrowing in. Once inside its host, the jigger feeds on
a blood-only diet and multiplies by laying hundreds
of eggs. No body part is spared, from the face to the
eyes, hands, feet and, in some cases, the whole body.
Kenya is the first African country to admit that jigger
infestation is a big problem in the twenty-first century,
this coming 50 years after independence, and after
eight years of intensive lobbying by an anti-jigger
organization. The lobbying has led to the launch of a
policy of jigger eradication by the Kenyan government,
the first of its kind without the help of an international
body such as the World Health Organization. The
policy requires various ministries to take part in the
prevention, control and treatment of jiggers, and to
build capacity to strengthen institutions. A national
Jigger Day will be marked annually on 3 March.
According to the Kenyan government, over 2 million
people, or about 4 per cent of the population, are
jigger-infested, with another 10 million at risk.
The anti-jigger lobby group Ahadi Kenya Trust,
says that 60 per cent of those affected are children,
with some 1.5 million missing school. They cannot
walk to school because their feet are eaten up or
Children with jigger infestation have trouble writing and
some cannot walk to school. S O U R C E : J U D Y K O S G E I
11
severely inflamed with ulcerations; nor can some
even hold a pencil because of disfigurement caused
by the infestations. The 40 per cent of adults who are
afflicted may not be able to work or vote.
Jigger victims are stigmatized much like leprosy
victims are, and since most come from the poorest
households in endemic and high-transmission
counties, they will end up dying.
According to Dr Stanley Kamau, the founder of
Ahadi Kenya Trust, tetanus is a common secondary
infection, and the sharing of needles and pins that
jigger victims use to remove the parasite from their
body has led to transmission of the HIV/AIDS virus.
Twelve-year-old James Njehia Njabia finally went
to school in 2013—nursery school, where he is the
oldest in his class and taller than the rest of the
children. Painful sores on his feet, hands and knees
forced him to drop out when he was five. He could not
write with pus oozing out of his infected fingers, and
his feet and knees were eaten up by jiggers that had
burrowed into his tender skin, so painful that he could
not walk to school.
In class today, he wears a distant look as tries to
catch up. The pain is still visible in his eyes as he tells
me, “I want to be a doctor so that I can help those in
pain”. The scars in his before-and-after pictures tell it
all, and why the pain still traumatizes him.
There have been recorded cases of people who
have gone mad due to the misery caused by jiggers
and require mental health support.
Njabia became jigger-free, like thousands of
victims, by using readily available treatment and
medication. Through the lobby group, volunteers use
soap and water to clean the affected areas, then soak
the limbs in potassium permanganate solution for at
least fifteen minutes, after which petroleum jelly is
applied to soften the skin. The procedure is repeated
three times a day for two weeks, after which they
hope to be declared jigger-free.
Community workers then fumigate households to
avoid re-infection, and follow up on the recuperating
jigger victims. Where jigger infections have led
to paralysis and anemia, patients are referred to
hospitals.
With a jigger eradication policy now in place, the
Meet the Jigger
The jigger (Tunga penetrans) has an angular head, no
comb or spines, with narrow thoracic segments at
the top. This small pin-head-sized flea is found in the
sandy terrain of warm, dry climates. It prefers deserts,
beaches, stables and the soil and dust in and around
farms. It hides in the crevices and cracks found on
the floors, walls of dwellings and items like furniture. It
feeds on warm-blooded hosts, including humans, cats,
dogs, rats, pigs, cattle and sheep.
S O U R C E : A H A D I K E N YA T R U S T
Ministry of Environment will approve and monitor
chemical control of jigger infestation in schools and
households.
Because jiggers thrive in dirt, education on hygiene
is an ongoing effort.
For most jigger victims, however, poverty could
see them slide back into the vicious cycle. The Ahadi
Kenya Trust is campaigning to bridge the poverty gap
through empowerment and rehabilitation programs
that will help to create self-reliant farming and
business-generating projects.
Judy Kosgei
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12
Scorecard
Mum’s the word
Compiled by Hazel Flynn
N
EW
YOR
K TIMES, “CHINA
’S
BR
1. Median age of first-time mothers in Australia in 1961, the
year the contraceptive pill became available: 23.2 years
UT
AL
ON
558m
E-C
D POLICY” BY MA
HIL
JIA
N,
Mandatory abortions and
forced sterilizations there
since 1971 according
to the Chinese Health
Ministry
2. Now: 29.3 years
3. Adolescents 15 to 19 years old who give birth
each year worldwide: 16 million
2
4. Births per 1000 girls in this age
group in Eastern Asia: 6
1.
5. In Sub-Saharan Africa: 122
5.
13
6. Most children ever born to one woman
(in Shuya, Russia, starting in 1725): 69
7. Number of times a woman in a developing country is more
likely than one in a developed country to die from a maternalrelated cause: 23
8. Of 185 countries examined by the International Labour
Organization, the number which provide a mandated maternity
leave of at least 14 weeks: 98
FRO
0
CT
I
S
ON
A
33
BI
RT
2010, QUOTIN
HS
G P
R
OJ
E
12. Year in which Jarvis was arrested for
protesting the commercialization of the day: 1925
BS
,
11. Year in which Mother’s Day was first observed,
led by American Anna Jarvis: 1908
Estimate of women
in Australia now
who will never have
children
0-
10. Of all Australian births, those involving Assisted
Reproductive Technology (e.g. IVF): 4%
M THE 1998 E
D
ITI
ON
28%
1.
9. Of the 185 countries, number that provide no statutory
cash benefits during maternity leave: 2 (PNG and USA)
13. Cost of a Belly Art pregnancy plaster cast: $160
14. Cost of 10 UNHCR Clean Delivery Kits for emergency childbirth: $26
1 . M E D I A N A G E 1 9 6 1 : A U S T R A L I A N B U R E A U O F S TAT I S T I C S ( A B S ) : 4 1 0 2 . 0 - A U S T R A L I A N S O C I A L T R E N D S , 1 9 9 8 , “ F E R T I L I T Y T R E N D S ” ; C O N T R A C E P T I V E P I L L A R R I VA L “ A N
I N C O M P L E T E R E V O L U T I O N ” , C A E T LY N D AV I S , T H E V I C T O R I A N W O M E N ’ S T R U S T, 2 0 1 1 , 2 . A B S 3 3 0 1 . 0 - B I R T H S , A U S T R A L I A , 2 0 1 3 ( L AT E S T AVA I L A B L E D ATA , P U B L I S H E D 2 3 . 1 0 . 4 ) , 3 .
W O R L D H E A LT H O R G A N I S AT I O N ( W H O ) , “ A D O L E S C E N T P R E G N A N C Y ” , 4 , 5 . U N I T E D N AT I O N S , T H E M I L L E N N I U M D E V E L O P M E N T G O A L S R E P O R T 2 0 1 1 , 6 . G U I N N E S S W O R L D R E C O R D S
7 . W H O , M AT E R N A L A N D R E P R O D U C T I V E H E A LT H , 8 , 9 . I N T E R N AT I O N A L L A B O R O R G A N I Z AT I O N , M AT E R N I T Y A N D PAT E R N I T Y AT W O R K , 1 3 . 5 . 4 , 1 0 . “ A S S I S T E D R E P R O D U C T I V E
T E C H N O L O G Y I N A U S T R A L I A A N D N E W Z E A L A N D 2 0 1 1 ” , M A C A L D O W I E , WA N G , C H A M B E R S & S U L L I VA N , U N S W, A U G U S T 2 0 1 3 . , 1 1 , 1 2 . N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C , “ M O T H E R ’ S D AY ’ S
D A R K H I S T O R Y ” B Y B R I A N H A N D W E R K , 1 2 . 5 . 1 2 , 1 3 . B E L LY A R T ( M E L B O U R N E ) B E L LYA R T. C O M . A U , 1 4 . U N H C R C H A R I TA B L E G I F T S W W W. K A R M A C U R R E N C Y. C O M . A U
Constance Stokes
Art
& Life
by
Lucilla Wyborn d’Abrera
DAVID MORRISON
ASR#11
As flagged in ASR,
David Morrison
retires in May 2015,
to be replaced by
Lieutenant-General
Angus Campbell.
SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
BOARDROOM QUOTAS ASR#9
The Australian Institute of Company Directors
has set a target for 30 per cent of board
seats to be filled by women by the end of
2018. AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW
HILLARY CLINTON ASR#9
Yes, she is. As she embarks on Hillary2016,
here are her campaign kickoffs over the
years.
NEW YORK TIMES
VIDEO
MALALA YOUSAFZAI ASR#7
Constance Stokes: Art & Life, researched and written by
her daughter, Lucilla Wyborn d’Abrera is the first serious
book to be published devoted exclusively to the life and
works of Constance Stokes (1906–1991).
Stokes is represented in most galleries in Australia, and
her works keenly sought after by private collectors here
and overseas.
In her Foreword to the work, the renowned writer,
Anne Summers, states:
“Constance Stokes has a habit of getting lost…(it has)…
everything to do with the neglect of this important
painter by the Australian art world...the time has come to
honour and recognise the extraordinary work of one of
our country’s finest artists.”
Art
& Life
Constance Stokes
Follow-up
NASA’s Amy Mainzer discovers
an asteroid between Mars and
Jupiter and names it for the
Nobel-winning Malala Yousafzai.
INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS TIMES
KITCHEN GARDENS ASR#4
800+ schools have set up gardens and
cooking classes through the Stephanie
Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation.
Lucilla Wyborn d’Abrera
Published February, 2015
by Hill House Publishers
(Melbourne & London)
Email: lucilla.dabrera@gmail.com
Tel: 03 9751 1141
Mob: 0448 343 110
Website: www.constance-stokes.com
234 pages, full colour throughout
Dimensions 315 x 260 cm.
Laminated dust jacked, hard cover and
square back binding.
ISBN: 978 0 947352 06 6
ABC
500 copies for 1st Edition
Price: $95.00 (+ p&p)
Available from the publishers at www.constance-stokes.com
and from all good bookshops.
Gallery / Anne Summers Reports
Cressida Campbell
R E N U N C U L U S W I T H I N D I A N C L O T H Wo o d b l o c k , w a t e r c o l o u r o n c a r v e d p l y w o o d , 2 0 1 0
The desire to create a still life begins with the excitement I get when I look at it. I am not a symbolist and have
never been interested in the narrative in pictures. It is purely the visual beauty I respond to, although the subject
matter can add another dimension—whether melancholy, curious or humorous. My still lifes are always carefully
composed despite not appearing so. I draw on a woodblock from life, but paint from memory in the studio, editing
out any part that’s irritating (or later by cutting bits off the block) for a tighter composition. Years ago I painted a
picture of a plastic compost container. Despite appearing uncontrived it was carefully placed and edited.
16
TA I L O R S H O P Wo o d b l o c k , 1 9 8 5
It is just coincidence that some of my pictures like The Tailor’s Shop have captured places that no longer exist.
I choose a subject like that for its visual and comic interest, not for any historical reason. I don’t think it matters
whether art captures the changing times or not. Great art—like a Morandi still life—is timeless. Even with political
art the work will only live on if it is visually brilliant. For it to be a great work of art relies on its visual power. Partly
because I am a very slow painter and drawer I don’t make time for Twittering and Instagramming and I don’t use
Facebook. I love Netbank, for example, because I don’t have to go to the bank and I love the radio as I lead a
relatively solitary life and it connects me to the world—as does the landline.
I first met Margaret Olley at film producer Margaret Fink’s house, when I was 27. We gradually became great
friends. I can talk and paint at the same time and I often prefer to talk to someone on the phone than in the flesh.
We would talk on the phone with both of our brushes tinkling in the background. Both of us had the problem of
never being totally satisfied with a picture. She gave me wise bits of advice like “Never presume anything” that I
often find myself not obeying, unfortunately. I miss her.
17
I N T E R I O R W I T H B L A C K L A C Q U E R C H A I R Wo o d b l o c k , 2 0 0 7
The black lacquer chair with the curved arms belonged to Leo Schofield when he lived at Bronte House,
not far from where I live. When he moved, he had an auction of objects he’d bought for the house. I thought
the chair’s undulating arms would be good in compositions and I liked the contrast of grandeur with
the modest rattan sea. 18
S T I L L L I F E W I T H K N I F E A N D B U T T E R F LY Wo o d b l o c k , 2 0 0 5
The butterfly and the knife image came from a request to do a picture inspired by Puccini’s opera Madama
Butterfly. I have visited Japan twice, the first time in 1985 to study woodblock printing in Tokyo and I’ve loved
Japanese ukiyo-e prints since I was a child—particularly Utamaro and Hokusai. A couple of days after my arrival
there was the worst earthquake since the one in 1923 that destroyed a lot of Tokyo. It was unnerving. For seven
weeks there were little quakes every day and a sign in a Kyoto hotel read ‘In case of earthquake: creep’.
I admire the Japanese attention to design in many things but particularly in everyday objects: nothing is ignored
aesthetically. I only recently learned about the Japanese philosophy wabi-sabi, but I have always appreciated the
beauty of imperfection and transience. I often draw plants in varying states of decay. Having visited gardens in
China, I love the way they treasure old trees, propping them up when dead and petrified. Once I painted the dark
spots on some persimmons and later a Chinese woman who wanted to buy the picture was worried they would
bring bad luck.
19
WA S H I N G U P Wo o d b l o c k , 1 9 9 9 / 2 0 0 5
I have sometimes pondered if there is a conection between what I do and my father* did. In art of any kind the
result depends on how the subject is expressed, not what the subject happens to be. Sometimes it’s the taken-forgranted details that make for the most original and interesting telling.
I often include unromantic objects in an interior. People have said to me “Why have you included that lamp’s
electrical cord in that picture?” as if it has ruined the aesthetic, without realising the whole image is balanced by
the line of the cord. A deadpan observation of a functional implement combined with more poetic objects surprises
the viewer and prevents saccharine connotations. Also: humble yet practical objects are often interesting shapes
to draw.
* Ross Campbell, much-loved Australian Women’s Weekly humorist whose columns about family life in suburban “Oxalis
Cottage” featured stories of his four children. Cressida was the youngest, nicknamed Baby Pip.
20
P E R S I M M O N S A N D S I L K Wo o d b l o c k , 1 9 9 7
This image is the cover of The Woodblock Painting of Cressida Campbell, the book published in 2008 which
was the idea of my late husband, Peter Crayford. It took about 17 months to complete. Initially we were inspired by
Verve, the 1930s magazine that was printed on beautiful art paper, had original lithographs by artists like Matisse
and Bonnard, and was a work of art in itself. We were both as meticulous as possible and obsessive. We ended up
printing three editions of the book. I slept overnight for four nights in the factory in Singapore, woken each one and
a half hours for the colour check. Anyone who has had anything to do with printing knows it is not an exact science
but you try to get as good a result as possible. I can see many faults in the book but I do love the tactile quality of the
heavy unsurfaced paper we used from Japan that gives a feel similar to my original woodblock prints.
21
F L A N N E L F L O W E R S Wo o d b l o c k ( w a t e r c o l o u r o n p l y w o o d ) , 2 0 1 3
Perhaps because I am a nervous person I try and create as peaceful an environment around me as possible,
visually and sound-wise. It is a very constructed world, the opposite to travel where you have to ‘go with the flow’.
No matter how well planned any of my travels have been there has always been a drama: the earthquake in Japan,
riots and strikes in Paris, Indian uprisings, plane crashes. All seem trivial compared to the terrible things going on
in the world daily but when at home, safe and sound, friends did use to ask “Where are you and Peter thinking of
travelling this year? Because we will know not to go there!” It almost seemed some higher power was trying to let
us know that you can’t control everything, unlike in a painting.
FOR MORE, GO TO WWW.CRESSIDACAMPBELL.COM
SHARE THIS GALLERY
22
12
Reports
From the
to the
Getting some of the most powerful men in
Australia to sit and listen to women telling their
stories of violence and abuse has become
Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner
Elizabeth Broderick’s signature method of fighting
for gender equality, writes Anne Summers.
23
Reports / Anne Summers Reports
L
ET’S CALL HER SHEILA. She’s 60 years
of age and is working as a bartender in
a club when, without her knowledge,
one of her colleagues changes the
display name that pops up when she
operates the till. For two weeks, Sheila puts with the
raucous reactions from customers and other staff
members every time GILF (which is an acronym for
“Grandmother I’d like to fuck”) comes up on the till.
She asks her manager to have it changed but he does
nothing.
This is everyday sexism in Australian workplaces.
It takes different forms but the bottom-line effect
is the same: the person to whom it is directed feels
belittled, intimidated, powerless. They often feel
unable to do their job properly. And it does not just
happen with barmaids.
It happened to Elizabeth Broderick, now
Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner, when
she was a young lawyer, just starting out. She’d been
introduced at a small drinks party hosted by her
firm to a man representing their largest client. The
next day he phoned her. She felt unable to refuse his
invitation to lunch but then, as she recounted the
episode many years later, he told her “the old story
of ‘my wife doesn’t understand me blah, blah’”.
The man, who was “as old as my grandfather”,
continued to call her for weeks, “making me feel
exceedingly uncomfortable, unable to enjoy work
and spending most of my time thinking of avoidance
strategies”.
She didn’t feel she could tell her boss who was
friends with this man and she was worried that a
complaint might lose her firm the client. At the
time there was no recourse to the Sex Discrimination
Act (SDA). Since its proclamation in 1984, sexual
harassment has been unlawful under the SDA—but
only if perpetrated by employers or co-workers.
(The SDA was later amended to cover harassment by
other people, such as clients and customers.)
Broderick did what many victims of sexual
harassment do: she enlisted the help of her
“girlfriends at work, concerned bystanders”. A plan
was hatched, she said as she recounted the story
in May last year at the release of the report Sexual
Harassment: Know Where the Line Is.
This was a strategy for raising awareness of sexual
harassment which she launched alongside ACTU
president Ged Kearney, and Kate Carnell, who had
just been appointed chief executive of the Australian
Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI). The
document explains what it is (many people are still
unsure) and isn’t (it doesn’t mean you can’t flirt
with or be attracted to someone). As Broderick put
it that day, it’s about the “power imbalance” when
another worker, customer or boss makes unwanted
overtures or uses offensive materials against them.
But back when she was a young lawyer, the
harassment was more direct, as was the remedy:
Broderick did what
many victims of sexual
harassment do: she
enlisted the help of her
“girlfriends at work,
concerned bystanders”.
“Every time he rang, someone would transfer him
to one of these courageous women who would tell
him that unfortunately I was not available,” she told
the audience. “After a week he stopped calling and I
went back to enjoying my work.”
An Australian Human Rights Commission (HRC)
survey in 2012 found that 33 per cent of women
and 9 per cent of men had experienced some form
of sexual harassment at work; around 20 per cent of
the complaints made under the SDA today relate to
sexual harassment.
“What a powerful tool it’s been in advancing the
status of women,” says Quentin Bryce of the SDA.
As well as being Australia’s first female Governor-
24
a transformative visit to the isolated Western
Australian settlement of Fitzroy Crossing.
She met over 1000 people in 90 separate events,
and engaged online with a further 39,612 people.
In keeping with her consultative style she remains
in contact with quite a few of them on various
issues. People welcomed the chance to engage and
responded to her warmth, and what one person
described as her “freshness”.
“There seems little that is rehearsed about
46-year-old Broderick,” wrote the Age in 2007
shortly after she’d been appointed.
She laid out three themes before these audiences:
economic independence for women, balancing work
and family across the life cycle, and freedom from
discrimination, harassment and violence. Anyone
who is familiar with the work of Liz—as she likes
to be called—Broderick will recognize these themes
as constants in virtually everything she has done in
her eight years in the job. They were, she said in an
interview, what she was brought up to believe in and
want. They were what her mother wanted for her
and her two sisters.
“That is also what I want for my daughter,” she
said. It was this listening tour that was “absolutely
fundamental to setting me up”, she says today.
“I could have just come in and built on the
research that had already been done, and there was
some great research,” she told me in our formal
interview, in a small conference room in the HRC’s
Sydney offices. “But I thought, I need to do more
than that, I need to get out and listen deeply to the
stories because I learn when I immerse myself in the
stories.”
Hearing women’s stories, and using them as
instruments for bringing about change, became
Broderick’s signature.
General from 2008 to 2014, Bryce served from 1988
to 1993 as Australia’s second Sex Discrimination
Commissioner. “It’s an empowering thing for
women to know there’s a law that says you can’t
discriminate, that there’s a remedy.”
Sheila left her barmaid job and filed a harassment
complaint under the SDA, stating that she had felt
humiliated and degraded by the way customers
treated her whenever they saw her till name. The
club agreed the incident had occurred, but denied it
was of a sexual nature and therefore was not sexual
harassment.
The HRC, which handles complaints made
under any of the sex, race, disability and age
discrimination acts, conciliated the matter, as it has
many hundreds of others.
Sheila received a private apology, $3000 in
compensation and a statement of service from the
club so she could find another job.
T
HE JOB HAD BEEN VACANT FOR eleven
months in September 2007 when AttorneyGeneral Philip Ruddock made the surprise
announcement that Elizabeth Broderick had been
appointed Sex Discrimination Commissioner
(SDC). There was relief that finally the position had
been filled but, given the Coalition’s long-standing
antipathy to the legislation and previous SDCs,
there were questions. Broderick had no background
in human rights or women’s policy. Few people
outside the law had heard of her.
Since the age of 34, Broderick had been a partner
at law firm Blake Dawson Waldron (now Ashurst),
where she’d established a ground-breaking online
practice and pioneered flexible work practices for
herself and other mothers. She was on the firm’s
board from 2003 to 2006, and had been 2001–02
NSW Telstra Businesswoman of the Year. She would
take a 50 per cent pay cut to become Australia’s
sixth Commissioner.
Broderick moved quickly to position herself,
announcing she would consult widely on a national
listening tour. From November 2007, she began a
trip that took her to all states, all major cities and
some regional and remote communities, including
I
N A JOB THAT HAS A TINY STAFF (two fulltime apart from Broderick herself, plus access to
legal and media officers), a miniscule budget, and
few remaining formal powers, the SDC’s role has
become principally one of advocacy. Broderick’s use
of women’s own accounts of their lived experiences
of oppression and discrimination—their stories—
25
as tools for her advocacy has had a powerful effect,
on her and on the people she makes listen to these
stories. They are morally potent, which makes them
politically effective.
“I can have the prevalence data, the research in
my head,” she told me, “but it’s the stories that
actually make me bold.”
Later, that boldness became evident when she
engaged with the men who control Australia’s most
powerful institutions and made them listen to some
of these stories. Her strategy would have profound
consequences.
But on 22 July 2008, when Broderick presented
the results of her listening tour before an invited
audience at a morning tea event at Sydney Girls
High School, she was still an unknown quantity.
There was a lot of goodwill in the room, as well as
anticipation. People, and I was one of them, wanted
to see what kind of stuff this new Commissioner
was made of.
She did not disappoint.
Some of the elements that would define her
tenure were evident that day. Typically, she released
a document, Gender equality: what matters to
Australian women and men, that laid out in direct and
simple language the issues that had to be dealt with
if Australia was going to achieve gender equality.
The event itself exemplified Broderick’s practical
approach to inclusion. Her presenters included
a schoolgirl, a captain of industry, a teacher and,
despite it being quite a small event, there was a
formal welcome to country performed by Millie
Ingram from the Wyanga Aboriginal Elders Group.
Her own two kids, at the time tweenagers, were
present that day as was her identical twin sister
Jane Latimer, who is a medical doctor. They
had each joined stages of the listening tour and
Broderick soon enlisted Latimer’s help to develop
what would become an internationally renowned
landmark project on foetal alcohol syndrome at
Fitzroy Crossing.
Later, Broderick would sometimes use her
daughter as a note-taker at meetings with ministers
in Canberra.
“If I can’t work in a way that allows me to
integrate work and family then what chance does
anyone else have?” she asks disarmingly.
This is a key Broderick way of working. Using
a combination of charm and reasonableness of
tone she has the ability to take the sting out
of propositions that might otherwise cause
consternation or certainly resistance.
The way Broderick argues it, how could you
possibly object to a ten-year-old being brought along
as a note-taker and needing to go to the toilet in
the middle of an important conversation with the
Attorney-General?
Another example was her debate in August 2010
with David Gonski, the consummate businessman
and company director. Gonski had recently begun
to advocate for more women on boards and argued
that evening he would do anything to make this
happen—except support the use of quotas.
Broderick argued that quotas were a sure-fire
means of ensuring that merit is actually recognized
and rewarded, unlike in the chummy boardrooms
of the time (the numbers have gone up quite
significantly in the past four years).
It is hard to think of a more polarizing topic in
business circles, yet Broderick won the debate with
her earnest and calm rationale. Gonski somehow
came across as unreasonable.
Call it charm and disarm.
However you describe Broderick’s style, when
combined with her ability to get on with just about
anyone, and her endless energy for making the
case for gender equality, Broderick’s powers of
persuasion are undoubtedly her most lethal weapon.
Underpinning these is an impressive ability to
network. She never forgets a name, or fails to return
a phone call or a text. She travels almost non-stop
and seems to know literally everyone in whatever
gathering she finds herself, be it in Canberra, Brussels
or New York. Her roles now include international
work, which, says Quentin Bryce, puts her in the
tradition of other renowned Australian women “from
Jessie Street and Elizabeth Reid to Elizabeth Evatt”
who have achieved on the world stage.
Broderick is Global Co-Chair of the Women’s
Empowerment Leadership Group at the United
26
Women’s Empowerment Principles Annual Event, New York, 10 March 2015, left to right: Elizabeth Broderick, CoChair Women’s Empowerment Principles Leadership Group; Georg Kell, Executive Director, UN Global Compact;
Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Under-Secretary-General and Executive Director, UN Women; H.E. Manuela Schwesig,
Federal Minister of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, Germany; H.E. Mr Ban Ki-moon, United
Nations Secretary-General; H.E. Zorana Mihajlović, Deputy Prime Minister, and Minister of Construction, Transport &
Infrastructure, Republic of Serbia; Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senator, and U.S. Secretary of State; H.E. Mary Robinson,
United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Change, United Nations; Joseph Keefe, President & Chief Executive Officer,
Pax World Management and Co-Chair Women’s Empowerment Principles Leadership Group.
Nations, in which capacity in March she conferred
honours on several CEOs for their work on
empowering women, earning a mention in a press
release issued by UN Secretary-General Ban KiMoon and Hillary Clinton (just days before she
announced her candidacy for the Democratic Party’s
nomination for US President).
Broderick also advises NATO, is a member of
the World Bank’s Advisory Council on Gender and
Development, and sits on a number of local boards
involving Indigenous issues and girls’ education.
Today you don’t hear too many people asking Liz
Who?
“What a huge difference she’s made,” says former
Senator Helen Coonan. “There is almost universally
a high regard for her.”
Notably for someone who juggles so much,
Broderick never seems to lose concentration or
focus. She is in constant touch with large numbers
of people who are her contact group on every issue
she is involved with. “She’s a naturally consultative
and collaborative person,” says Quentin Bryce. “She
brings people together.”
More than that, she gets them to do things they
might never have imagined themselves doing before
they met Liz Broderick. Just ask the Chief of the
Army and the CEOs of some of Australia’s largest
companies.
27
B
campaign against “the sex bill” by conservative and
religious groups and it was officially opposed by the
Coalition, although several members and senators
crossed the floor to vote for the legislation.
When John Howard came to power in 1996 he
accused the SDC, Sue Walpole, of being “a Labor
stooge”, thereby effectively forcing her resignation.
The position remained unfilled for fourteen months.
The government considered merging the SDC, the
Office of the Status of Women and the Affirmative
Action Agency (a version of which survives today
Y THE TIME SHE STEPS DOWN on
4 September, Broderick will have been in the
job for eight years, far longer than any previous
Sex Discrimination Commissioner, time enough to
redefine the role in some important ways.
“She has been pretty strategic in working out
where she can make the most difference,” says
a former Labor cabinet minister who observed
Broderick at work. “And she’s been able to make the
institution (the HRC) work for her.”
Broderick has served under four Prime Ministers
(five if you count Kevin Rudd twice) and five
Attorneys-General. She is the first SDC to have
enjoyed strong bipartisan support: she was
appointed by a Coalition government, reappointed
by Labor in 2012 and had her term extended,
in September last year, by the current Coalition
government. This is a marked departure from the
past when the position was invariably treated in a
ferociously partisan way, especially by the Coalition.
The Sex Discrimination Act was always Labor’s
baby. A version of it was a casualty of the Whitlam
dismissal in 1975. It resurfaced in 1981 when Susan
Ryan, Labor’s shadow minister for the status of
women, introduced a private senator’s bill. After
Labor won government, the Sex Discrimination Act,
proclaimed on 1 August 1984, became a landmark
achievement of the Hawke government. The
legislation made it unlawful to discriminate against
people on the grounds of their sex, marital status or
for being pregnant in employment, education or in
the provision of goods and services.
Thirty-one years on, the law sounds
unexceptional, tame even. It has been strengthened
and extended since. The government’s two
reservations—provision of a national paid
maternity leave scheme and or allowing women to
serve in combat or even combat-related roles in the
military—eventually went. As have many of the
initial exemptions that meant the law did not apply
to, among others things, clubs, superannuation
and insurance, sport, religious and charitable
organizations.
But even with all these caveats, the proposed
law was controversial. There was a large and noisy
It took some serious
lobbying by Liberal
women to save the
position ... They
saved the job, but the
powers were severely
weakened.
under the name of Women’s Gender Equality
Agency). It was a mad idea that could never work
but Howard and Attorney-General Daryl Williams
nevertheless did their utmost to get rid of the SDC
position.
It took some serious lobbying by Liberal women
to save the position. Senator Marise Payne, who
today is Minister for Human Services, said getting
rid of the position was first mooted in 1997.
“We were all furious,” she told me. She and
Helen Coonan lobbied Williams. They saved the
job, but the powers of HREOC, as the HRC was
then known, were severely weakened, with the
individual commissioners including the SDC losing
their complaint-handling powers. The Commission’s
budget was reduced by a staggering 40 per cent.
28
In 1998 the job went to Susan Halliday who, like
Broderick nine years later, was little known but
because of her business background it was assumed
by the government she’d be politically reliable.
How wrong they were. Halliday did the first
important review of pregnancy discrimination
and became a vocal critic of government policies,
including the continuing efforts to dilute the
Sex Discrimination Act. Her three-year term was
not renewed, attracting strong criticism of the
government from Sharan Burrow, then ACTU
president.
This time the government moved fast and within
two months of Halliday’s departure gave the job to
Pru Goward, who had run the Office of the Status of
Women (not very well, in the opinion of many) and
was judged to be a much safer pair of hands. She was
appointed for five years.
But in less than a year Goward infuriated the
Prime Minister by launching a discussion paper
advocating paid maternity leave. She described
current arrangements as “limited, haphazard
and fall[ing] significantly below what could be
considered a national system”.
Goward added fuel to the fire in December 2002
with A Time to Value, a report that laid out her
recommended option of a paid scheme that would
give women fourteen weeks’ leave capped at the
minimum weekly wage. Her proposal, which was
supported by women’s organizations and the ACTU,
was in direct conflict with Howard’s pet Baby Bonus
policy that would reward women for leaving the
workforce.
“We had to mobilize again to save the position
in 2003,” recalls Senator Payne, “when Pru put
her paid maternity leave proposal, which was very
contentious.”
Howard introduced legislation in March 2003
that sought to abolish the SDC and other specialist
Commissioner positions. The bill was buried in a
Senate committee and did not proceed, but Howard
was determined there would be no more pesky
SDCs. After Goward left in October 2006 to run
for a safe Liberal seat in the NSW Parliament, the
position remained vacant.
It might never have been filled had it not been for
yet further lobbying by Liberal women MPs. “Marise
and I went to see the AG and argued for the role not
to be folded into the HRC, and to make sure it was
not watered down or diluted,” Helen Coonan told me.
In September 2007, seemingly out of the blue,
and just two months before the federal election that
would see the Rudd Labor government brought to
power, Liz Broderick’s appointment was announced.
I
F THERE IS ONE ISSUE THAT CRYSTALLIZES
Broderick’s views on the barriers to women’s
equality it is parenthood or, more precisely,
motherhood. If we don’t solve this, what hope is
there for women to be able to “have it all”?
Ever since she found herself pregnant as a young
lawyer and wanting to stay at work, Broderick has
devoted considerable energy towards identifying
and ending the many ways in which women are
discriminated against while pregnant and when
they want to return to work. (And, following on
from Goward, giving strong support to what is now
called paid parental leave, which was finally adopted
by the Australian government in 2009.) Her most
recent report, Supporting Working Parents, released
last year, is a strong example of her conviction and a
further instance of her collaborative approach. She
involved the ACCI, the Australian Industry Group
and the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees
Association in the launch.
Susan Ryan, who is now the Age Discrimination
Commissioner and thus a colleague of Broderick’s,
says she was “deeply shocked” by the findings of
continued discrimination in this report.
“Pregnancy discrimination has been unlawful
since 1984!” she said.
But trying to end pregnancy discrimination is not
what Liz Broderick is principally known for.
Rather, it is the Male Champions of Change
(MCC) and her work with the Australian Defence
Force that have defined her—and earned her both
high praise and considerable criticism.
Both pieces of work are a million miles away from
the more piecemeal, issue-by-issue approach of her
predecessors and in their scope and status have
29
Male Champions of Change Group, November 2013. Back row: Stephen Roberts (Citi), Michael Rennie (McKinsey),
Simon Rothery (Goldman Sachs), Elmer Funke Kupper (ASX), Giam Swiegers (Deloitte), Glen Boreham (Non-Executive
Director), David Morrison (Army), Dr. Ian Watt (Former Secretary, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet), Stephen
Sedgwick (Australian Public Service Commission). Front row: Grant O’Brien (Woolworths), Dr. Martin Parkinson
(Former Secretary, Department of the Treasury), Andrew Stevens (Non-Executive Director), Alan Joyce (Qantas),
Elizabeth Broderick, Ian Narev (CBA), Mike Smith (ANZ), David Thodey (Telstra).
utterly transformed the SDC’s role and standing.
Broderick had already instituted a small version
of the MCC, with the initial group of eight members
growing to twelve by December 2010, when in April
2011 the Skype sex scandal broke at the Australian
Defence Force Academy (ADFA) and Defence
Minister Stephen Smith asked her to undertake a
major review of the treatment of women at ADFA
and in the military generally.
Technically, these two projects are totally
separate. In practice, and in terms of her career,
they have become inextricably linked. Both come
with significant financial and human resources—
funding from Defence and a levy paid by each of the
MCC organizations—a far cry from the SDC’s core
funding. There is some overlap in membership, with
the Chief of the Army, Lt General David Morrison
a MCC. And it was the Defence work that saved her
when Broderick’s job seemed to be in peril because
of the MCC exercise.
Broderick eventually delivered four reports on the
treatment of women in the military and, as a result,
was enlisted by the Department of Defence to advise
and guide them on a process of deep cultural reform.
Her work in defence has been almost universally
applauded.
“It was hard to do what she did,” says Marise
Payne. “It’s the first time in the world there’s been
a formal relationship between this HRC and the
military to change the status of women,” Quentin
Bryce told me.
This relationship was forged as a result of
Broderick’s intensive effort to understand the
military. She spoke to literally thousands of troops,
made 60 visits to bases in Australia, and visited
serving forces in the Middle East and other places
around the world where the Australian military
operates.
Bryce remembers being in Afghanistan for the
Dawn Service on Anzac Day in 2012. “Elizabeth was
30
“There was a bit of tension around the Male
Champions of Change strategy from the union
movement,” Broderick concedes. “They were quite
hostile.”
As her term neared its end in 2012, Kearney
argued to Attorney-General Nicola Roxon that
Broderick was not concerned enough with “real
women’s issues” and ought not be reappointed.
There has always been a certain frigidity between
the unions and the SDC, with the former wanting
sex discrimination to be addressed by unions and
industrial courts, currently Fair Work Australia,
rather than the HRC.
arriving as I was leaving. We passed each other on
the tarmac in our flak jackets,” she said, thinking to
herself, “There’s the SDC arriving with the Generals.”
I
N EARLY 2010 Broderick had rung several
business leaders to establish the initial eightmember MCC because, she told me, she “was
frustrated about the pace of change”.
“What I have started to understand,” she says,
“is that the closer women come to economic
and political power, the greater the forces of
exclusion are, so we needed to do something really
controversial and disruptive.”
The group’s first formal meeting was a breakfast
on 15 December 2010 in the Citi boardroom
in Sydney. Joining the initial group of Michael
Luscombe (Woolworths), Giam Swiegers (Deloitte),
Glen Boreham (IBM), Kevin McCann (Origin
Energy), David Thodey (Telstra), Stephen Fitzgerald
(Goldman Sachs), Gordon Cairns (non-executive
director), Alan Cransberg (Alcoa), Stephen Roberts
(Citi Australia) and Robert Elstone (ASX) were new
boys Alan Joyce (Qantas), Ralph Norris (CBA) and
David Peever (Rio Tinto).
The group pledged to advance gender equality
within their organizations and to act as public
advocates for the issue. Later the group expanded
to 25, and included public-sector leaders such as the
heads of the federal Treasury and the Department
of Prime Minister and Cabinet, and the University
of Sydney. Between them, these Male Champions
employ hundreds of thousands of people. If they
actually implemented their pledge, the working lives
of countless women would be vastly improved.
“The Male Champions is about men, powerful
men, because that’s where it is directed,” says
Broderick, “but it has to be done within a feminist
framework.”
Broderick also got them give an undertaking not
to appear on any conference panel or other event
where there was no female representation.
But women’s groups and many in the trade unions
were critical of the program. “Working women saw
her as just playing with a bunch of CEOs,” ACTU
president Ged Kearney told me.
The Male Champions
is about men, powerful
men ... but it has to be
done within a feminist
framework.
But there was little chance of this happening,
with the SDA being better known and seen as more
accessible for ordinary people. Just as there was no
chance that Broderick would not be reappointed,
as long as her very strong admirer, Stephen
Smith, was Defence Minister and Roxon could see
no performance reasons Broderick could not to
continue in the job.
But Broderick got the message that bridges needed
to be built and she and Kearney had what the ACTU
chief describes as “a very frank discussion about the
MCC and how the sisterhood did not like it”.
Since then Broderick has worked with the ACTU
on a number of working women’s issues and,
Kearney says, “In her second term she totally proved
herself in my eyes with her work in Defence and on
pregnancy.”
But Kearney and a number of other women,
31
including some in the business world, still criticize
the MCC. The complaint is that they are a talking
shop that has not achieved measurable change, and
whose organizations take contradictory positions
on issues such as EOWA gender reporting in gender
forums and business forums.
Broderick is undeterred in her championing of the
MCC model. She has applied the template to a range
of peak bodies and other organizations, including
the Property Council of Australia, and elite sport
and architecture bodies. There is a nineteen-member
group just established by Victorian Human Rights
Commissioner, Kate Jenkins, Broderick’s state
equivalent, whose members include leading CEOs
and, being Melbourne, the head of the AFL, Gillon
McLachlan.
Broderick has even exported the model. Kevin
McCann, now chairman of the Macquarie Group,
accompanied her to Tokyo last September to attend
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s World Assembly for
Women, which was designed to promote increased
workforce participation by Japanese women, and to
help set up Male Champions of Change Japan.
On 25 August, just two weeks before she leaves
the job, Broderick will showcase all 120 of the local
champions, plus the Japanese, at a huge lunch at
Sydney’s Westin Hotel.
The sceptics will most likely have their opposition
reinforced by this event, but for Broderick’s fans, the
individual MCCs included, the event will be proof
that she has made a difference.
“Liz is one of the few people I’ve met in my life
who has actually changed things,” says MCC Kevin
McCann. “She has a lot to offer this country.”
Monique Coleman (US star of the High School Musical
trilogy and UN Youth Champion) and Liz Broderick with
students at Granville South High School, 2011.
“Men’s violence against women is Australia’s most
significant gender equality issue,” is Broderick’s
remarkable and depressing conclusion reached
after almost eight years addressing every aspect
of women’s inequality. “It is both a cause and a
consequence of gender inequality.”
And so it could no longer be either ignored or
compartmentalized from other workplace equality
issues. It was necessary for the MCs to meet these
survivors, Broderick felt, because all too often the
violence and the women who experience it were
invisible.
“Most felt this was not an issue for us,” Kevin
McCann told me. “We felt it was social crusading.”
But their colleague David Thodey was coconvening the meeting in Telstra’s Sydney
boardroom. His involvement was an important
signal to the others that their agenda was about to
expand in a direction none of them had anticipated
when they signed on as Champions.
Batty and McKellar spent nearly three hours
trying to explain to the MCs what it is like to hold
down a job when you’re in an abusive relationship.
O
N 17 NOVEMBER LAST YEAR, Broderick got
the Male Champions together for a special, and
unusual, meeting. Not all of them were happy that
they were going to be sitting down with domestic
violence survivors Rosie Batty and Kristy McKellar.
Rosie Batty was not yet Australian of the Year, but
she was close to being a household name for the
way she had urged Australians to bring the issue of
family violence out into the open after her son Luke
had been murdered earlier in the year by his father.
32
With Alex Shehadie, Director of the Review into the Treatment of Women in the ADF, in Tarinkot, Afghanistan,
ANZAC Day 2012.
McKellar, in her early thirties, was running support
programs in the welfare sector. She had nine direct
reports and managed a team of 100 volunteers. She
told the men how her husband used to saw the heels
off her shoes because he didn’t like the fact she was
a bit taller than him and that trying to find a pair of
shoes for work was often a problem.
She told them how, one day at work, where
she was sharing an office with another woman,
her husband rang and was horrendously abusive.
The other woman heard the “you effing c” coming
down the line and after McKellar had hung up said,
“They shouldn’t make us take calls like that from
customers, that’s outrageous.”
“That was no customer—that was my husband,”
McKellar said. The woman turned away.
The story was meant to bring home to the Male
Champions how hard it is to admit to being a victim
of violence, and how especially difficult it is to
disclose at work. The lesson for the CEOs was that
violence is not just a social issue, it is a workplace one.
Two years earlier, Broderick had done a similar
thing when she’d persuaded Army chief Lt General
David Morrison to sit down, out of uniform, and
listen to the stories of abuse suffered by three of his
female soldiers at the hands of their colleagues or
supervisors.
The conversations left Morrison a changed man.
“This was not the Army that I had loved and
thought I knew,” he said afterwards.
Broderick decided it was necessary for a similar
exercise, to “take the case for change from the head
to the heart”, as she puts it.
“The way that I did it with the Male Champions
and domestic violence was to get them to listen to
Rosie and Kristy,” Broderick told me.
Before Luke’s death, no one wanted to hear
my story of living with violence, Batty told the
Champions. “Now everyone does.”
And Batty gave it to them straight.
“So the men, they heard from Rosie that Greg’s
violence against their son was not directed at Luke,”
Broderick tells me. “It was actually a direct act of
violence against Rosie. And she really took them
through it, how that violence never leaves you.”
To say the Male Champions were stunned would
be an understatement.
“They were unbelievable,” recounts Broderick. “I
33
O
F HER EIGHT YEARS AS Australia’s Sex
Discrimination Commissioner, Liz Broderick
nominates two things that make her most proud.
Getting those three young soldiers, whom
Broderick describes as “some of the most
disenfranchised and vulnerable women, but in many
senses the most courageous women” to be able to
connect “directly with the hearts and minds of the
most powerful man in the organization”, the Chief
of the Army, is one of them.
The other is being able to support women who
have fought back against domestic abuse.
One such woman was Catherine Smith, who was
tried for the attempted murder of the husband who
had subjected her for seventeen years to what has
been described as one of the worst cases of domestic
abuse that Australia has ever known. Her former
husband had used cattle prods, red-hot pokers,
knives and guns to torture her and force her to have
sex with him.
“When I knew she was in court,” Broderick tells
me, “I just used to text her and remind her that the
skirts of the sisterhood were wrapped around you
and holding you tight and women all across this
nation who are today living in domestic violent
relationships thank you for your bravery.”
Smith broke down in tears during a 2011 ABC-TV
Australian Story account of her horrific story when
she recalled receiving Broderick’s texts.
“So it’s small things like that,” says Broderick,
referring to how she felt hearing Smith mention the
texts. “And when I see that come back in an email
from someone, or even when she talked about it on
this episode, I think, you know what, that actually
did make a bit of a difference.”
Jane Latimer (Broderick’s twin sister), June Oscar AO, Liz
Broderick and Emily Carter at Fitzroy Crossing, WA.
saw the flurry of activity in all their organizations in
a way that I had never seen before.”
A week later, on 25 November, White Ribbon Day,
Telstra announced it was following the example
of companies such as NAB, Ikea, McDonald’s and
Virgin Australia with a policy of domestic violence
leave, enabling any of its 34,000 employees who
might be affected by such violence to be eligible for
up to ten days’ paid leave.
The policy has been in the pipeline for some time
but the stories the women told that day underscored
just how necessary it was. In the first weeks after
the policy was announced, a number of women
working for Telstra applied for the leave. It was
immediately clear that the need was very real.
Lt General David Morrison says the meeting
ended with the Champions committing to
recognizing their responsibility and accountability
to try to do something about domestic violence in
Australian workplaces.
Kevin McCann was not present on the day but
he heard from his colleagues of the huge impact the
“very emotional presentation” had on them.
“We realize now that we have a duty to our
people.”
SHARE
MEET LIZ BRODERICK
Anne Summers will be in conversation with Elizabeth
Broderick on 7 May at the City Recital Hall, Sydney. Male
Champions of Change Alan Joyce and Kevin McCann will
join them for part of the conversation.
BOOK ONLINE at www.cityrecitalhall
34
AnneSummersConversations presents
Elizabeth
Broderick
IN CONVERSATION
WITH ANNE SUMMERS
WITH AUDIENCE Q&A
What needs to change so women can enjoy true equality
As she nears the end of her eight years as Sex Discrimination
Commissioner, Elizabeth Broderick and I will talk about what still needs
to be done for Australian women to enjoy full gender equality.
During her term, Elizabeth has been a strong advocate for paid parental
leave; she has spoken against sexual harassment and domestic violence,
has championed the rights of working women, has revealed the extent of
pregnancy discrimination in Australian workplaces and reported on the
abuse of women in the Australian Defence Force.
Elizabeth created the Male Champions of Change, a group of 25 leading
CEOs who have pledged to bring gender equality in their organisations.
Two of these champions will join us on stage for part of the conversation.
Elizabeth has also championed gender equality on the international stage,
working with the World Bank, NATO and the United Nations. She was
recently recognised for this work by Hillary Clinton in New York.
Elizabeth and I will talk frankly about how to overcome the remaining
barriers to full equality. Our conversation will be wide-ranging and I expect
it to cover many key issues, including the gender pay gap, why women still
face workplace discrimination and the current domestic violence crisis.
The evening will also be an opportunity for us to express our gratitude
and appreciation to Elizabeth Broderick for all the work she has done
for Australian women during her eight years as our longest serving Sex
Discrimination Commissioner.
ANNE SUMMERS Editor and Publisher, Anne Summers Reports
WITH THANKS TO
OUR MAJOR SPONSORS
ONE NIGHT
ONLY
THURSDAY
7 MAY
6.30–8pm
CITY
RECITAL
HALL
ANGEL PLACE,
SYDNEY
Tickets $20–$30
REDDEST
STATE
Is “the Texas miracle” a sustainable economic
template for the future, or just a convenient cover
for legislating the most conservative social and
other policies in the United States? David Hay
reports from the Lone Star state.
E
VERYTHING STILL FEELS BIGGER
in Texas. The twelve-lane freeways,
the trucks and SUVs in the lane next
to you and a sense of state pride that
remains as unabashed as ever. Who
can forget the scene in the film Boyhood, where
immediately after pledging allegiance to the United
States, the school kids then loudly assert their fealty
to Texas?
Now another loud boast can been heard coming
from America’s second largest state: Texas is where
America’s conservatives are having their greatest
success. If other states are red, Texas is even
redder—and they’re proud of it.
A wide swathe of states across the middle and
south of the United States are “Red States” with
an increasingly right-wing Republican party in
power. At the November 2014 elections, the party
took control of both the governor’s office and the
legislature in 24 states. They are in the majority in
36
Texas is the biggest US state and its
gross domestic product—over $1.3
trillion—rivals that of Australia.
66 of 99 state legislative
chambers nationwide. And
the number of states under
total Democratic control, 14
before last November, is now only
seven, the lowest number since the Civil War.
But nowhere in Red State USA is their grasp on
power as strong or as entrenched as in Texas, a state
whose population is now 26.5 million. In Kansas, for
instance, far right Governor Sam Brownback only
narrowly won re-election in November 2014, and
because his state is nearly bankrupt, he faces stiff
opposition to his budget-cutting polices.
In Wisconsin, presidential contender Governor
Scott Walker had to fight off opponents in both
a recall election and a close-fought re-election to
remain in power. In Ohio, the Republican Governor
John Kasich confronts continual opposition from
Democrats, including one of the most liberal
members of the Senate, Sherrod Brown.
In Texas, however, such voices of opposition
are few and far between. The last Democrat to
hold major office was Ann Richards, who left the
Governor’s office twenty years ago, beaten by
then neophyte politician, George W. Bush. Until
November last year, the state was governed by
perennial presidential hopeful Rick Perry, aided by
Republican majorities in both state houses.
Their grip on state government has been aided by
a buoyant economy Republicans
have dubbed “the Texas Miracle”.
Between the onset of the global
financial crisis in 2008 and the
beginning of 2015, Texas added 1.45
million jobs, a 13.3 per cent increase, a
performance that outstripped all other
states except energy-rich North Dakota.
Furthermore the state’s population has been
growing at a phenomenal pace. Since 2001, it has
increased a whopping 24 per cent, double that of the
country as a whole.
Given their stranglehold on power and the
economic benefits they claim as the result of their
policies, Republicans argue that if anywhere in the
US can be seen as the model for what conservatives
want for America, it is Texas.
B
UT WHILE THE TEXAS MIRACLE has
been responsible for an extraordinary jobs
explosion, the state is falling behind in many other
respects. According to a 2013 report published
by the Texas Legislative Study Group, an official
caucus of the state legislature in Austin that advises
liberal-leaning members, the state “ranks 50th
in percentage of high school graduates among its
populace, first in amount of carbon emissions, first
in hazardous waste produced, last in voter turnout,
first in percentage of people without
37
Rick Perry promoted Texas in a series of ads called “New Jobs” in 2010.
health insurance, and second in percentage of
uninsured kids”.
Over 22 per cent or 5.8 million Texans have
no health insurance, the highest proportion
of uninsured citizens of any American state.
(Unsurprisingly, the Republican administration
in Austin refused to sign on to the section of
the Affordable Care Act that allows the federal
government to offer Medicaid, or free health
insurance, to poorer citizens. In this case, nearly 2
million Texans.)
And for critics, this is only the beginning of what’s
wrong with the “Miracle” in Texas.
Texas’s Republican leadership continually points
to an array of statistics as proof of the effectiveness
of their low tax and regulation approach to the
economy. In March 2015 new Republican Governor
Greg Abbott wrote a guest post for Forbes magazine,
bragging that Texas is “the best state for job growth”
in the country, and predicting jobs would increase by
2.7 per cent, and unemployment could fall below its
current 5.2 per cent.
“Texas attracted more capital investment than
any other state, 689 new capital projects alone in
2014,” wrote Abbott.
Former Governor Rick Perry was similarly fond
of tossing off numbers claiming, for instance, that
“Texas was named the best state to do business for
nine years in a row in a survey of more than 700
CEOs conducted by Chief Executive magazine”.
Perry was famous for promoting the benefits of
the “Texas Miracle” in other states, telling them
and their governors—often Democrats—they
were falling behind Texas, and boasting how many
Americans were moving there.
Indeed 21 per cent of the population growth has
come from other states, although almost none from
blue states in the northeast.
Critics accuse Abbott and Perry of exaggerating
their figures, but there is no denying job growth has
been exceptional. What is less often highlighted is
that most new jobs are at the low end of the pay
scale—Texas has more minimum-wage jobs than
any other state in the nation, with only Mississippi
ahead in the number of low-wage jobs per capita.
Republicans attribute the growth to Texas’s low-
38
Voters in Denton, a town of 123,000 northwest of Dallas, banned horizontal, hydraulic oil and gas fracking.
tax provisions: there is no state income tax, only
sales and property taxes, and in his inauguration
speech last January, Governor Abbott called for
business taxes to be lowered even further.
“If you’re not rich, Texas is not actually a lowtax state,” points out Alex Pareene, one of many
reporters investigating the myths behind the “Texas
Miracle” in Salon. “Texans in the bottom 60 per cent
of income distribution all pay higher effective tax
rates than their Californian counterparts. Texas’s
top one-per cent are the ones enjoying the supposed
low-tax utopia, paying an effective rate of 3.2 per
cent. The rate for the lowest 20 per cent is 12.6 per
cent.”
The real stimuli behind Texas’s startling growth
came from the massive jump in oil and natural
gas production, since the mid-2000s, especially
from fracking, combined with the unprecedented
population growth. But with oil prices cratering,
layoffs in the petrochemical industries are now
threatening the miracle.
Texas Republicans love to tout their efforts to
“free” businesses from economic regulation. A
case in point is the state’s booming hydro-fracking
industry, by far the largest in the US. Currently
over 6000 of these wells are in operation and the
industry produced upwards of 60,000 new jobs in
the boom years of 2007 to 2012. This growth has
If you’re not rich,
Texas is not actually
a low-tax state ...
transformed many small towns into boomtowns.
But questions remain about the environmental
and health consequences of fracking. Many wells
have been placed inside town and city limits,
potentially exposing residents to leaking methane
gas, which is ten times more harmful than carbon
dioxide.
According to a study of the Eagle Ford shale
formation, one of the largest fracking sites in Texas,
commissioned by the Center of Public Integrity
and the Weather Channel, “Texas’s air-monitoring
system is so flawed that the state knows almost
nothing about the extent of its pollution. Only
five permanent air monitors are installed in the
20,000-square-mile region, and all are at the fringes
of the shale play, far from the heavy drilling areas
where emissions are highest.”
Another concern is fracking’s need for enormous
39
amounts of water in a state beset by drought. Nearly
50 billion gallons have so far been devoured to
support the industry, and The Guardian’s Suzanne
Goldberg reported “a number of small communities
in Texas oil and gas country have already run out
of water or are in danger of running out of water
in days, pushed to the brink by a combination of
drought and high demand for water for fracking.
Many reservoirs in west Texas are at only 25 per
cent capacity”.
Of further concern are frackquakes, which occur
as a result of waste water produced by the drilling
being pushed back underground. While in Texas
their occurrence has now begun to be documented,
in neighbouring Oklahoma, incidents of these major
geological disturbances are rising at a dramatic rate.
Some Texan cities are taking on the industry. Late
in 2013, Dallas voted to ban fracking within 1500
feet (457 metres) of a home, church or school. Last
year the small college town of Denton (population
160,000) voted to ban fracking within city limits.
Republican legislators in Austin recently overturned
this ban, and in doing so took away the power of any
city in Texas to regulate the oil and gas industry.
The University of Texas in Austin parades what is known as
“The World’s Largest Texas Flag” before football games.
But the ascendance of Evangelicals has been most
critical in the party’s policies towards women. Once,
the Republican Party might have railed against
abortion to appease the conservative wing but, as
with Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W.
Bush, took few policy steps to stop it in practice.
Not so today’s Texan Republicans, where such
pure libertarianism is scorned. For these politicians,
limiting the freedom of women by severely reducing
access to abortion is every bit as important a part of
the Texas Miracle as reducing taxes and getting rid
of government regulations.
They have been very successful.
In July 2013, Rick Perry signed into law House
Bill 2 (HB2), which bans abortions after 20 weeks of
pregnancy, and also requires abortion clinics to have
the same standards as hospitals. Further, doctors
must have admitting privileges at a hospital within
30 miles (48 km) of the facility where he or she
performs abortions. Many hospitals in Texas often
refuse to grant these privileges because hospitals
have a religious affiliation or rules that require
doctors to admit many more patients per year than
an abortion provider would normally see.
Although this law is currently being appealed in
the Federal Court, Texas has begun enforcing it. The
number of facilities offering abortions to Texas’s
12.5 million women decreased from 36 to eight,
and the abortion rate has declined by 13 per cent,
according to research conducted by the Texas Policy
T
EXAN REPUBLICANISM IS NOT JUST a
libertarian economic philosophy. It is also
beholden to the beliefs of Evangelical Christianity;
most offices within the Texas party are occupied by
Evangelical Christians. In July 2011 Governor Rick
Perry conducted a giant “prayer rally” for the nation
in Houston’s football stadium. The new lieutenant
Governor, Dan Patrick, authored a book urging
people to buy and read the Bible.
Showing off your Christian credentials is also
good politics in a state where religious affiliation is
higher than in the rest of America. There are twice
as many Baptists, for instance.
This power wielded by Evangelical Republicans
has led the government in Austin to adopt some
radical social, education and environmental policies.
The US constitutional requirement that there be
separation between church and state does not exist
in Texas, where textbooks now have to champion
the Christian influences of the Founding Fathers.
40
opponent of President Obama’s healthcare reforms,
famously described his job as “I go into the office
in the morning, I sue Barack Obama, and then I go
home”. In June 2005 he took a case to the Supreme
Court arguing that Texas be allowed to erect a
monument to the Ten Commandments on the
grounds of the State Capitol. (He won.)
So when Abbott pledged further cuts in women’s
health programs, including cancer screening,
targeting providers such as Planned Parenthood, he
was simply offering Texans more of the same Texas
Miracle. The new Governor also signalled he would
further reduce business taxes and government
regulations. Given the absence of an effective
opposition, he has no reason to fail.
The Democratic Party has failed to mount
anything resembling a credible state-wide
campaign for more than two decades, and their
lack of pushback has meant a free ride for the Texas
Miracle. (The Democrats have had more success in
the state’s three largest cities, Dallas, Houston and
San Antonio, which have Democratic mayors.)
Their most recent gubernatorial candidate
was Wendy Davis, the state senator who won
international attention in 2013 for her dramatic
eleven-hour filibuster that stalled the passage of
HB2. Despite her initial popularity, her campaign
was a disaster: Davis lost the race by the widest
margin in sixteen years. Her campaign’s lack of
Latino outreach was seen as one major reason for
the loss.
The case for the Ten Commandments monument outside
the Texas State Capitol in Austin was argued by Governor
Greg Abbott, when he was Attorney-General.
Evaluation Project, a research group that evaluates
the impact of reproductive health law changes.
Melaney Linton, President of the Planned
Parenthood’s Gulf Coast branch in Houston, told
ASR of a young girl who drove 150 miles (240
km) to their clinic. (Planned Parenthood is a
privately funded national women’s health services
organization that offers sex education and cancer
screening as well as performs abortions.)
“It turned out she could not get more than a day
off work”, Linton said, “so we ended up not being
able to give her the procedure.”
Texas Republicans, emboldened by what they
perceive as the success of HB2, now intend to
impose even further restrictions on women’s
reproductive rights.
“We must govern with the purpose to defend
life,” said incoming party president Tom Melcher in
March, and he promised to stand up to the federal
government to “protect our state’s sovereignty”.
When visiting the state legislature, representatives
from Planned Parenthood were confronted with a “
” sign above the name on the door of a Republican
member.
Such efforts are part of an ongoing strategy to
move Texas still further to the right, with new
Governor Greg Abbott leading this charge. Back
when he was Attorney-General, Abbott, a strident
F
OR YEARS LIBERALS AND DEMOCRATS in
Texas have argued that the natural affinity
of the rapidly growing Latino population for the
Democratic party would see Texas turn Blue.
It was this theory that inspired a small group of
former Obama campaign staffers to set themselves
up in Fort Worth in 2013. “Battleground Texas”
aimed to register new, especially Latino, voters. But
despite raising US$9 million and enlisting 34,000
volunteers for the November 2014 election, they
failed—badly.
“They were not able to move the needle far on
Latino voters, who made up 17 per cent of the voter
41
Greg Abbott campaigns with his wife Cecilia, the granddaughter of Mexican immigrants, and daughter Audrey.
For them the single issue of abortion was not
enough to turn a majority of them away from the
Republican Party. Many were further turned off by
Davis’s own admission of having had an abortion,
personalizing the issue in a way many Texans were
uncomfortable with.)
But Texas Republicans have also pursued a
counter-strategy, by making it as hard as possible
for Latinos, already markedly underrepresented in
voter turnout in Texas, to vote.
Since the federal Voting Rights Act in 1975, Texas
has initiated over 200 pieces of legislation to restrict
these rights, all of which were deemed illegal by
the Federal Court. But in June 2013 in the case of
Shelby County vs. Holder, the current Roberts court
severely diluted the original statute.
Within two hours, then Attorney General Abbott
announced SB14, a law requiring potential voters
present an ID card, effective immediately. Among
the seven approved forms of ID is a birth certificate,
which many immigrant citizens may not have or can
easily obtain from their country of origin. For the
Texan-born the $50 cost to obtain one is a hurdle
turnout, about the same as in 2010,” reported the
Houston Chronicle.
Texas Republicans have adopted a two-part
strategy to deal with the rising Latino voter
population. First, they reached out to them with
former Governor Rick Perry signing a version of
the “Dream Act”, which allows the children of illegal
immigrants, previously prohibited from attending
state-run universities to now enrol—as long as they
paid US$15,000 in tuition fees. For anyone else born
in Texas, attendance at the University of Texas costs
a third of this. But US$15,000 a year is cheap for
college, where US35,000 for just tuition is the norm
at other nationally recognized schools. And a degree
from the prestigious University of Texas confers a
sense of legitimacy and pride to teenagers whose
parents live under the daily threat of deportation.
Abbott campaigned hard in the Latino parts
of the state, playing up his marriage to a Latina,
Cecilia, during the 2014 gubernatorial campaign.
He beat Davis, receiving 44 per cent of the Hispanic
vote, as well as 54 per cent of the women’s vote.
(Women here are conservative and religious, too.
42
Texas was the
Republican establishment
and it was owned by
the Bush family.
comparable to a
modern day “poll
tax”. It was estimated that
as many as 1.2 million out
of 13.6 million eligible
voters could be turned
away, including up to
555,000 Latino voters.
Republicans have further
helped ensure their electoral
success by gerrymandering
the state’s electoral map,
ensuring that Latinos and AfricanAfricans fall into the same districts, and
thus pitting them against each other for the seat.
The new electoral maps kept white voters, nearly 70
per cent of whom vote Republican, apart from other
groups. (These same Texans also vote; their turnout,
in a state where only 33 per cent of those eligible
actually voted in the 2014 state election, was double
that of minority Texans.)
Their extraordinary electoral success not only
emboldened Republicans in Texas, it has spurred
them to export the Texas Miracle to the rest of the
country. In August 2011, Governor Rick Perry, fresh
from his starring role in the “Miracle commercials”,
announced he would run for President. He briefly
became the Republican Party’s favorite for the
nomination in August, ahead of Mitt Romney. But
he proved to be an ineffectual debater, and withdrew
from the race after four months.
Texas Republicans are now pinning their hopes
on another standard-bearer for the “Texas Miracle”:
first-term senator, Ted Cruz. Born to a Cuban
father, this Harvard-educated, Tea Party-loving
lawyer from Houston was the first
to officially declare his candidacy
for the Republication nomination.
A far cry from such Texas old
boys as Lyndon Johnson, former
Senator Lloyd Bentsen, or even Rick
Perry, Cruz, like current Governor
Greg Abbott, boasts of his evangelical
credentials and his unwillingness to
compromise his conservative principles.
At the time the 44-year-old declared his
candidacy at Liberty University in March, both he
and the Texas state party were regarded very much
as outliers on the national political scene. When
Republicans thought of Texas, they thought only
of the two former Bush Presidents, the emerging
candidacy of the Texas-born and educated Jeb
Bush and perhaps even Jeb’s son, George P. Bush,
now Texas Land Commissioner. Texas was the
Republican establishment and it was owned by the
Bush family.
But two weeks into his campaign, Cruz shocked
the political world by declaring that he had already
raised US$31 million, a strong signal that neither the
Texas Republicans’ philosophy nor their mouthpiece
will be so easily silenced this time around. Rick Perry
may have failed, but the Cruz campaign seems likely
to be a serious and well-financed effort to get the rest
of the country to embrace the philosophy behind the
“Texas Miracle”.
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43
Ripple
Effect
Right from the start, the Royal Commission
established by the Gillard government to report on
and redress the horrifyingly extensive sexual abuse of
children in the care of churches and other institutions,
knew it would need to provide counselling to those
who testified-as well as those who had to hear the
stories. Juliette Saly reports.
44
G
UY LAMOND WAS A YOUNG
student at Knox Grammar, a
prestigious private boys’ school on
Sydney’s North Shore in the mid1980s, when he was preyed upon and
suffered sexual abuse at the hands of two teachers.
Lamond made a complaint to the NSW Police in
2009, which helped ensure the conviction of five
former teachers. In February this year he testified
publicly about the abuse at the Royal Commission
into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
Any elation or catharsis the 41-year-old chef may
have felt from telling his story in public was short
lived. He likens the downer he experienced to how
much of Australia felt at the Sydney Olympics’ end
in 2000—after all the build-up, the pats on the back,
the hype of being in the spotlight—he was back to
his normal life.
What was ‘normal’ though? The depression and
anxiety he’d suffered for so long started to recur.
The Royal Commission hearing into Knox
Grammar learnt of a decades’ long culture of coverup. The revelations of systematic sexual abuse
shocked the Australian public and reignited the
traumatic experiences of its victims. Not only did
those in power at Knox turn a blind eye to the
abuse, but the school even erected a memorial to
one of the predatory teachers after his death.
“He touched us all”, read the sign on the
memorial, on the school gates. It has since been
removed.
Lamond told the Royal Commission about the
abuse he suffered from teachers Barrie Stewart and
Craig Treloar, and how Treloar’s sentencing in 2009
to just two years imprisonment was “a joke of the
most serious proportions”.
He told ASR that reliving his abuse was traumatic
and the experience has had a huge impact on his
whole life. “My first sexual experience was with a
man, as a child—and from a teacher who you are
supposed to say yes to to everything.”
Lamond and the thousands of other Australians
who have so far testified at the Commission
either publicly or privately have had the support
of ongoing counselling which was made a priority
Knox Grammar preparatory school.
“He touched us all”,
read the sign on the
memorial, on the
school gates. It has
since been removed.
at the time the Commission was established.
Almost one-tenth of the Federal government’s
initial allocation of $434.1 million for the Royal
Commission was set aside for counselling.
For Lamond, accepting the offer of free
counselling was a no-brainer. “[The] anxiety doesn’t
just stop when the hearing stops,” he told ASR. “You
see the benefits of talking to someone … They’ve
[the Royal Commission counsellors] obviously been
trained very well, they are just incredibly good at
letting you talk.”
Lamond says he was also given a range of support
material and phone numbers to call should he
require further help in the future.
Testifying to the Commission triggered a range
45
“I’d like to say it was a shock [that so many people
sought help] but unfortunately it wasn’t,” Willis told
ASR. “Our organization has been working with adult
survivors of child sexual assault for the last 40 years,
from the day we first started answering the phones,
so the sort of issues we have been presented with
[from the Commission] is day-to-day work for us.”
Even before the Royal Commission handed down
its first report in March 2014, the effects of the
hearings were being felt around the country. Nightly
news reports of children being abused while in
the care of churches, the Salvation Army, schools,
Aboriginal communities and foster homes were
shocking for television viewers. For many, reading
about and watching the media reports triggered
their own memories of abuse.
“[We work with] people who may interact directly
with the Royal Commission but also people who
may simply hear news coming out of the Royal
Commission and find that their own trauma
histories are exacerbated by hearing that situation,”
Jackie Burke, the Clinical Director of R&DVSA,
told ASR.
Hearing the testimonies of those abused can
also be disturbing for those working to bring
perpetrators to justice. The NSW Department of
Justice and Attorney General’s 2010 Report of
the Child Pornography Working Party found police
officers, detectives and investigators working to
convict those who sexually abuse children can also
experience trauma. The report recommended police
limit their exposure to child pornography images
while investigating those accused of abuse, and that
as a matter of health and safety anyone else working
on the cases, such as court staff, also have limited
exposure to confronting material.
Similarly, the Royal Commission itself has
ensured from the outset that the six Commissioners
themselves, as well as investigators and court staff
were rotated on a regular basis.
of traumatic memories that also required “Jason”
to take advantage of the professional help on offer.
Aged 44, Jason lives in Sydney and testified in a
private hearing in 2014 about being consistently
abused sexually while living in a series of foster
homes in the 1970s and 1980s.
“I had about seven or eight different foster
families, and probably about three of them were
abusive,” he told ASR. “There was a lady [at the
private hearing] who said to me that if I needed
anything [further] to get in touch … and [the Royal
Commission] got in touch with me a week later,”
Jason says.
More than 30,000 Australians came forward with
For many, reading
about and watching
the media reports
triggered their own
memories of abuse.
information when the Royal Commission was first
established in 2013. They included victims, family
and friends of those who had been abused, and
members of the public who felt they had something
to report. As of March 2015, 3096 child sexual
abuse victims had testified in a private hearing to
one of the Commissioners, and 380 victims at a
public hearing, after first recounting their abuse
to a Commission investigator. All who testified
were offered counselling, with the Commission
confirming to ASR that around 90 per cent—some
2700 people—have taken up the offer.
Karen Willis, Executive Officer of Rape and
Domestic Violence Services Australia (R&DVSA),
formerly the NSW Rape Crisis Centre, says there
was never any doubt in her mind that the need for
trauma counselling would be vast.
R
IGHT FROM THE MOMENT the Royal
Commission was established in 2013 by
the Gillard government, it was acknowledged
there would be a strong requirement for trauma
46
counselling, and not just for abuse victims.
“The Australian Government understands the
importance of ensuring that survivors of child
sexual abuse and affected family members are
supported to participate in the Royal Commission,”
the Minister for Families, Community Services and
Indigenous Affairs Jenny Macklin, who had carriage
of setting up the Royal Commission, said at the
time. “It is vital there is support available to them
before, during and after their engagement with the
Commission.”
The Australian government was determined
to learn from the mistakes of a government-led
Commission in Ireland. The Ryan Commission
sat from 2000 until its final report in May 2009,
hearing institutional child sexual abuse allegations
stemming from 1936 until the present day. While it
eventually offered a national counselling service to
victims, a number of child protection services such
as Barnados and the Rape Crisis Network Ireland
were concerned that not nearly enough had been
done to protect the mental health of the victims.
One survivor of clerical sexual abuse, Michael
O’Brien, told Irish TV program Questions and
Answers in 2009 that he was so traumatized by his
five days in the witness box at the Ryan Commission
that he attempted suicide.
Eight of those child protection services produced
Saving Childhood Ryan, a 2010 report that called
on the Irish government to implement key policy
changes that were promised in the final Ryan
Report. The services’ report argued that lip-service
to more counselling wasn’t good enough— it was
imperative the Irish government fund the promised
support services.
“The scars of their [child abuse victims’] past
will take a long time to heal and having to endure
waiting lists to access [counselling] services is
unacceptable,” Ellen O’Malley-Dunlop from the
Dublin Rape Crisis Centre said at the time.
In Australia, counselling was made a priority
from the outset. The $45 million set aside for
counselling services was for external services which
tendered for and won contracts; in addition the
Royal Commission hired counsellors to work with its
Michael O’Brien was so traumatized by giving evidence at
the Ryan Commission that he considered suicide.
own staff and those testifying, who are offered the
choice of counselling before, during and after their
testimonies. All who make a submission speak to an
investigator about whether they should testify in a
private or public hearing.
So far, the Commission has heard over 3000
private submissions, many in rural and remote
areas. In each hearing, the Commissioner and victim
are joined by a legal worker and a support member
of the victim’s choosing. If the Royal Commission
staff remains concerned about their mental health,
they refer them to one of the external support
services.
Jason received such support after testifying in
private, and told ASR his use of Twitter has also seen
him receive additional help. He regularly tweets to
the Commission (@CARoyalCommission), and says
Commission staff and others have responded to him
via social media to check that he is OK.
“I’ve just recently met a woman through Twitter
who’s from CLAN [the Care Leavers Australia
Network, a support network for Australians who
grew up in orphanages, foster homes and other
care], and she’s been in touch with me about all the
support that they can offer,” he says.
Commission staff strongly encourage those like
Jason to come forward and testify in private, or
47
The counsellors
The Royal Commission refers victims, their family
and friends, and members of the public to these
support agencies. The Commission refers people to
the 24-hour national hotline telephone counselling
service 1800 RESPECT which was established
in 2010 as part of The National Plan To Reduce
Violence Against Women and their Children.
It also uses the following specialist counselling
facilities, including face-to-face services.
Rape & Domestic Violence Services Australia
received $2.9 million in federal government
funding after an open tender process, in which 41
organizations around Australia won resources to
provide for those affected by the Royal Commission.
It used the funds for its hotline, 1800 211 028,
which is staffed by trained counsellors from 8 a.m.
to 11 p.m. AEST every day. Those working on the
hotline must have a minimum three years’ work
experience in trauma counselling plus tertiary
qualifications.
R&DVSA switches its hotline to 1800 RESPECT
between 11 p.m. and 8 a.m. AEST. Although based
in NSW, the R&DVSA hotline is available to anyone,
nationwide.
In NSW, the tender for face-to-face counselling
was won and shared by three separate
organizations: R&DVSA, Relationships Australia
and Interrelate.
There are also specialized services for children
with a disability, those from non-English speaking
backgrounds, people of different religious faiths
as well as Aboriginal crisis centres, including for
those who were members of the Stolen Generation.
Medibank Health Solutions won the tender to
work with Commission staff.
Who counsels the counsellors?
The in-house counsellors employed by the Royal
Commission undergo the same mental health
checks as their colleagues, and are rotated
regularly. R&DVSA counsellors are restricted in
the number of hours per day they can take calls,
and are also required to take regular mental health
checks.
use a pseudonym if attending a public hearing to
minimize the chance of their experience triggering
more trauma. There is a concern that being
recognized, seeing their stories in the media or
having strangers bring up their testimonies in the
future can further exacerbate their suffering.
Those like Guy Lamond who testify at the
public hearings using their full names are also well
supported. The Commission provides a counsellor to
liaise with them before their testimony, and follow
up after their claims go public.
Lamond says he had professional help before
testifying at the Commission and, he told ASR, a
month after his testimony he was still receiving
follow-up phone calls from Commission staff.
“I have never been involved in something more
amazing than the support we got,” he said.
L
EARNING FROM SOME OF THE FAILURES
of the Irish Royal Commission, every two
months all staff working on the Royal Commission
undergo compulsory checks, either on the phone
or in person. Even back-office staff, such as those
working on payroll, are required to take part in case
they have been traumatized by media reports or the
Commission’s findings. Trained counsellors check in
with them, and they can be referred to a GP or any
of the specialized services.
Those who work one-on-one with the victims
in the public and private hearings are monitored
48
more closely. The six Commissioners are rotated
regularly, and cannot attend private hearings for
more than two weeks at a time. A spokesperson for
the Royal Commission told ASR the nature of what
is divulged in a private hearing is often far more
graphic and upsetting than what the public hears, in
part because it is the first time the abused is reliving
their trauma.
The Royal Commission hearings have also been
deeply distressing for some members of the public.
Anyone can attend a public hearing, and the
hearings are also streamed on the Commission’s
website; they are flagged with a warning that the
content can be upsetting
A toolkit for media reporting on the Commission’s
findings provides guidelines for sensitive reporting
of the issue, particularly on social media, and
recommends that contact details of support services
such as Lifeline be included in all media reports.
The Commission’s website reminds journalists that
victims’ trauma can be exacerbated by seeing their
abuse stories played out in the media, and to be
mindful of the upsetting nature of the hearings and
the impact that can have on the public.
Seasoned Channel 9 reporter Damian Ryan has
covered war zones, and told ASR that covering the
Knox Grammar inquiry was extremely disturbing;
even before the victims were identified, he said, you
could pick them out due to their distressed state.
Ryan says it was only natural as a human being to
be upset by some of the hearings but that “what was
more distressing was that nothing was done about it
[for so long]”.
Traditionally journalism has had a macho culture
of denying that reporters might themselves be
affected by covering traumatic events but the
Commission, offers support for journalists should
they require it.
HE ROYAL COMMISSION IS EXPECTED to
conclude its hearings by December 2017. It is
currently seeking submissions for a national redress,
expected to be similar to the recommendations in
Ireland’s final Ryan Report, and include measures
designed to alleviate the suffering of those abused.
Nine News reporter Damian Ryan found the Commission
hearings distressing.
What is divulged in a
private hearing is often
far more graphic and
upsetting than what the
public hears.
The redress was expected to include a request for
formal apologies from the institutions involved,
ongoing counselling and support for victims and
a compensation scheme. However, the proposed
$4.3 billion single compensation scheme for victims
was dealt a blow in late March, when the Abbott
government failed to send a representative to the
public hearing and rejected the compensation
proposal as “too complex, time consuming and
costly”. The Royal Commission has described this
response as “disappointing”.
T
SHARE
49
12
Muses
Love Bites:
Caricatures by
James Gillray
Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford,
26 March–21
June 2015
Up close and
extremely
personal
The themes depicted in these
works by the father of political
cartooning are very relevant
today, even if the subjects are
two centuries old, as Paula
Weideger reports from Oxford.
P Y L A D E S A N D O R E S T E S , 1 7 9 7 . C O L O U R E D E T C H I N G . A L L I M A G E S © C O U R T E S Y O F T H E WA R D E N A N D S C H O L A R S O F N E W C O L L E G E , O X F O R D / B R I D G E M A N I M A G E S
Muses / Anne Summers Reports
T
HE MEN WEAR BREECHES and buckled
shoes, the women floor-dusting skirts and
ostrich- plumed hats. Yet the handcoloured engravings created by James
Gillray (1756–1815) remain among the most
ferocious and artistically powerful political
caricatures we have. The cast has changed and their
get-up with it, but their relevance often has not.
Take, for example, his 1797 reverse-take on Midas,
the legendary ancient king who turned everything
he touched into gold. This is not an entirely random
choice: the caricature is one of almost 60 on view in
“Love Bites” at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford,
a show marking the two-hundredth anniversary of
the London-born political cartoonist’s death. Prime
Minister William Pitt, pointy-nosed and weakchinned, sits spread-eagled on the Bank of England, a
prettily upholstered commode. Pitt’s enormous torso
is swollen with so many gold coins that they push
into his mouth where he vomits them out. As they fly
into the air, the gold pieces turn into paper money, as
do the ones he shits out below. We are no longer on
the gold standard, yet what a clear explanation this is
of post-2007 quantitative easing.
Although many of his caricatures are densely
detailed, Gillray worked fast. He produced about a
thousand etchings and some 400 drawings. Many
of the latter, done towards the end of his life, are
hair-raising, both for their wildness and beauty.
Three of them are standouts in “British Drawings”, a
companion exhibition at the Ashmolean.
“Love Bites” is displayed in a single large space
with a tall divider down the middle providing more
hanging space. Vertical surfaces are painted in such
sweet colours favoured by the Georgians as raspberry
pink and robin’s egg blue. The framed caricatures
are clustered together according to themes chosen
by curator Todd Porterfield, among them “Kisses”,
“Courting” and “Marriage”.
To say this is misleading understates. For
Gillray the personal was political centuries before
feminists made this their credo, but in his case this
was because everything was political. He targets
love, marriage and motherhood; grandmothers
and kids, too. In one etching (not on view) French
V E R Y S L I P P Y W E AT H E R , 1 8 0 8 . H A N D - C O L O U R E D E T C H I N G
Revolutionary grandmas roast babies on spits
while tykes on the floor gorge on the entrails of the
recently killed. He ridiculed the French Revolution
and Napoleon, but also the King and Queen of
England and the country’s leading politicians.
So, too, were fashion victims, adulterers and art
collectors—including, in Very Slippy Weather (1808),
buyers of his work.
Given the recent tragic killings in France and
Denmark, it should be noted that with all this,
religion was practically ignored—blasphemy was
against the law. Gillray’s The Presentation—or The
Wise Men’s Offering (1796), a rare exception, nearly
had him up on charges. What with that title, it was
not a stretch to connect the baby whose bottom is
51
A SPHERE PROJECTING AGAINST A PLANE, 1792. HAND-COLOURED ETCHING
Gillray is sometimes
called a man without
a conscience.
being kissed with the infant Jesus. This could not be
allowed.
Even a quick look at a Gillray’s work makes it clear
that while he cared greatly about its conception
and execution—as well as sales—he otherwise
did not give a damn. But wouldn’t you know, that
contributed to his fame and fortune. The Prince
52
T H E G O U T, 1 7 9 9 . H A N D - C O L O U R E D S O F T G R O U N D E T C H I N G
into that sore. An attack on the indulgent rich, this
is also a portrait of the artist. Gillray is sometimes
called a man without a conscience; it may be more
accurate to say that he possessed (and was possessed
by) an abundance of anger and seemingly unlimited
contempt. This did not blur his vision; it made it
more acute.
There are few biographical facts. His father,
who lost an arm as a solider, joined the Moravian
Brethren and sent James, age four, to board at
their strictly run school. Later he apprenticed as
an engraver, then studied art at the Royal Academy
schools. Gillray practised his craft fitfully until 1779,
when he finally found his métier.
Mrs Humphries (single to the end), an already
successful Mayfair printer/publisher, accepted his
of Wales and leading politicians were frequent
customers at the shop of Mrs Humphries, his
printer/publisher exclusively. The powerful, it seems,
were thrilled to be attacked. Indeed, a young and
ambitious George Canning (later Prime Minister),
hounded Gillray, asking to be included in his
cartoons, since it was a signal that he was important
enough to be torn apart.
The Gout (1799), with its lush green silk backdrop
and cheery yellow cushion in the foreground, creates
a shocking contrast with its subject. A large, closeup of a man’s foot shows him to have a huge, red
swelling at the base of his big toe—a small, mean
furry grey creature with a devilishly pointed tail,
claws digging deep in as it makes its way up over the
foot, the better to sink its sharp, pointed teeth deep
53
BANDELURES, 1791. ETCHING
cartoonists revere and steal from him, saluting him
as the father of them all.
Gillray had predecessors, William Hogarth among
them. But he was the first to make a living creating
political caricatures. And what amazing works they
are: technically sophisticated, wildly imaginative
and thrillingly beautiful in execution.
Two hundred years after he died, his offspring have
yet to surpass him.
work. Gillray moved in above the shop. Were Mr
Gillray and Mrs Humphries lovers? Did he have
others elsewhere? In place of answers there is only
gossip. What is clear is that the pair were lifelong,
devoted companions.
As for his character: he drank—a lot—and
eventually went mad. He died delusional at home in
1815, looked after by Mrs Humphries.
Since his death, Gillray’s work has been in and
out of vogue. Ignored during the buttoned-up
reign of Queen Victoria, it is prized today. Political
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54
Books A random assortment of good books
chosen by the ASR team and friends
Reflections on a
premiership
Politics is tough enough but when
you throw in catastrophic floods,
a cyclone, an electorate bent
on revenge and then a bout of
cancer you have to wonder how
Anna Bligh keep smiling.
Reviewed by Jane Goodall
F
ORMER QUEENSLAND PREMIER Anna Bligh
is back in the public eye, undertaking a round
of engagements to launch her memoir, Through
the Wall (Harper Collins). The title is drawn from
Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay for the film Moneyball
(2011), in which the new manager of a major league
baseball game, played by Brad Pitt, is warned that
any innovative approach will come at a personal
cost. ‘The first guy through the wall, he always gets
bloody. Always.’
The violence of the image makes it an unexpected choice for a female political leader, but it is
a reminder that in politics as in sport, the fight to
introduce change can be brutal. Bligh knows the realities of this, and wants to acknowledge them. “I’ve
always been bloody-minded about walls,” she writes,
and she has knocked down a few. As the first woman
Premier of Queensland, and the first Australian female premier to win a state election, she has made
a major impact on gender politics, but she can also
claim significant break-throughs in policy.
Her political journey was in many ways an assault
course. As a student activist in the Bjelke-Petersen
era, she was in demonstrations that drew violent police response. From early on, she showed a willingness to front up to angry communities, sometimes
Through the Wall
Anna Bligh, Sydney, HarperCollins , 2015
326 pp
at considerable personal risk. As Deputy Premier
during the droughts of 2005, she was trapped with
an angry mob of some 2,000 people who had gathered in a large hot shed to express their opposition
to a proposed new dam. It was, she says, “a knifeedge situation,” defused over five hours of rigorous
questions and answers. She ran foul of the trades
unions in her bid to privatize government utilities
following the GFC. Queensland railworkers facing
job losses set up a cry of ‘Bliar Bliar’ at a demonstration in Ipswich in July 2009, a term of abuse that
found its way into countless tabloid headlines.
Then there were the floods in early 2011, a rolling
sequence of disasters that amounted to a six-week
reign of terror by natural forces. Bligh’s account is
the most authoritative and compelling of the many
that have been published. On the most dramatic
day, 10 January, she woke from a night of hammer-
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Anna Bligh struggled to maintain composure as she gave a press conference about the Queensland flood in 2011.
ing rain to take stock of the situation at emergency
headquarters.
With the Balonne and Mary Rivers in south-east
Queensland in flood, several towns were already under immediate threat. Ipswich and Brisbane were
now added to the list, as the Brisbane and Bremer
rivers became swollen torrents. Bligh was preparing to front the cameras when she was given a hasty
briefing about an unfolding situation in Toowoomba, a city with a population of over a million, situated high up on the dividing range 120 kilometers east
of Brisbane. Local television stations were broadcasting amateur footage of cars being swept off the
roads in a massive flash flood. By the end of that day,
the flash flood had become an inland tsunami in the
Lockyer Valley below, where the torrents smashed
through houses and residents were stranded on their
roofs as darkness fell.
In dialogue with deputy federal opposition leader
Tanya Plibersek before a packed lecture hall at the
Australian National University on 30 March, Bligh
reflected on the question, “How do we get strong?”.
She has important things to say about the psychological ordeals underlying the very public challenges
of leadership, and her narrative reveals the integral
relationship between her capacities as a state leader
and her formative experiences as a child.
By the time she was five years old, she had three
younger siblings. She tells the story of being asked
to make a cup of tea for the first time when she was
five years old. Bligh recalls feeling intense gratification at managing the dangerous process of pouring
56
boiling water, followed by the delicate balancing act
Deputy Premier in the Beattie government, her portof transporting the cup across to where her mother
folio included finance, treasury, infrastructure and
was feeding the baby.
state development, and she had oversight of some of
But she also recollects the child’s frustration
the largest construction projects in the country.
in situations where she was powerless to prevent
In what was surely her defining moment as Presuffering or head off trouble: as when her alcoholic
mier, Bligh spoke from emergency headquarters of
father stormed off from the family dinner table,
the ever-spreading floods crisis. Extensive areas of
hurling his plate against the wall, or when her
the Brisbane CBD were flooded, Rockhampton was
younger brother was caned in front of the school
in chaos and Cyclone Yasi was yet to come. She strugassembly just for using a set of swings reserved for
gled with a sudden loss of emotional control as she
older children.
spoke the words: “We are Queenslanders… the peo“Watching that injustice and humiliation and beple they breed tough north of the border. We’re the
ing unable to do anything about it, I
ones that they knock down and they
learned what it feels like to be weak,”
get up again.”
she told Plibersek, who suggested
She emerges as a stoic personality.
We are
that the experience of watching her
Her gift to the state was a capacity to
Queenslanders…
brother subjected to unjust punishcall out the stoicism in others during
the people they
ment might underlie her later coma crisis.
breed tough north
mitment to the Forde Inquiry into
During the 2011 floods, there was
of the border. We’re
child abuse. This was established afno controlling the natural forces makthe ones that they
ter Bligh met with a group of former
ing their assault from all directions.
knock down and
residents of the Neerkol children’s
Bligh and her disaster management
they get up again.
home, and listened to their accounts
team did their utmost with what was
of beatings, rapes and vindictive
in their power: information, resourcpunishment regimes. “Some things,
es, planning and co-ordination. But
once heard, can never be unheard,” she writes.
what are the limits of anyone’s power, in extreme cirIn the Preface, Bligh quotes Anaïs Nin: “‘We write
cumstances? Leadership, Bligh says, emerges when
to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospecthe rulebook runs out, and this case the rule book
tion.”’ But some moments burn themselves on the
was swept away by natural forces.
memory because they take us to the limits of what
In her vote of thanks for Bligh’s Canberra preswe can withstand, and tasting such moments again
entation, former Governor of Queensland Penelope
requires courage.
Wensley quoted from Leonard Cohen, one of Bligh’s
Bligh was educated by the Sisters of Mercy, “fierce
favourite singer-songwriters:
strong women” who encouraged their pupils to strive
“How can I begin anything new with all of yesterand excel at a time when not much was expected of
day in me?”
girls. In adolescence, she thought of taking the veil.
Bligh’s message in her current round of appearInstead, her image came to be associated with the
ances is all about renewal. She has recently emerged
hard hat and the Akubra. Before entering politics
from successful chemotherapy treatment for a tushe worked for the Trade Union Training Authority
mour in the parotid gland, and seems ready to take
training workers in negotiating the industrial relaon whatever the future will bring.
tions system. This took her to every BHP coalmine
in Queensland, with trips down the shaft routine. As
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57
Books A random assortment of good books
chosen by the ASR team and friends
The Matriarch’s
Old Straw
Two very different memoirs of
their mothers by their daughters
underscore with great poignancy
the thwarted possibilities
experienced by women of earlier
generations.
Reviewed by Mandy Sayer
C
HILDREN INHERIT MANY characteristics
from their parents, including desire, which can
accrue great interest through the decades if that desire
remains largely unfulfilled. The daily experiences of
Australian women in the early and mid-twentieth
century left a great deal to be desired: most female
students were discouraged from finishing high
school; those who did matriculate were funnelled
into two tolerated professions, nursing or teaching,
which paid half the wages of an equally qualified
man; and if a female teacher or nurse chose to marry
she was forced to resign from her job permanently.
There was no childcare available if a wife wished
to work; no refuges if she and her children needed
to escape violence; no designated low-cost housing
if she chose to live apart from her spouse.
These two very different memoirs by daughters
about their mothers highlight the crushing lack of
choices of our female ancestors, and the legacies
such privations create.
Biff Ward grew up with a mother suffering from
what we would now call schizophrenia, triggered
by the birth of her first daughter and subsequent
post-natal depression; Kate Grenville was born to a
working-class mother who had a poet’s soul but was
forced to become a pharmacist’s apprentice during
In My Mother’s Hands
Biff Ward, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards,
2015, 268 pp.
the Depression to help support her struggling family. Both are written with keen political eyes, widening the narratives beyond the domestic into the
hypocrisy of the Communist Party, the complacency
of suburban life, and the limitations of the medical
profession.
The title of Ward’s book is ironic. What is traditionally rendered as warm, caring, and ministering
in the memories of children is inverted into a booklength expression of fear and horror.
Ward, the child born directly to Margaret and her
historian husband Russel after the mysterious death
of her first-born sister, Alison, grows up believing
that Alison had accidentally drowned in the bath at
the age of four months, after their mother had suddenly feinted. That is the story she is told, over and
over, until the child is old enough to begin gathering
her own evidence.
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Biff Ward and her parents in 1943.
Here, we are treated to a detailed account of what
She becomes more and more paranoid, fearing
doctors then termed “a nervous breakdown” by “an
nightly intruders, and shoves teaspoons beneath all
hysterical woman”. No matter that on the day she
the doors of the house to prevent an invasion. She
married in 1939 she had only two more months of
vanishes mentally, forgetting how to do her femalestudy in order to complete her three-year nursing
sanctioned duties of shopping and cooking, retreatdegree. No matter that a
ing to a kitchen table to
nursing degree was usechain-smoke and stare
less once a woman marout the window.
She will go on to wear gloves for
ried, because a wife was
One night the daughthe next forty years to disguise
banned from “taking a
ter–narrator is awakthe extent of her ongoing selfjob from a man”. No matened by her mother
mutilation
ter that her husband was
attempting to choke
a serial womaniser who
her, and fights her
ignored her in company and who dismissed her as beoff. In the basement Margaret eats rat poison in a
ing “mad”.
desperate suicide attempt. She develops an obsesAs the years pass, Margaret’s behaviour grows
sion with her hands, gouging them deeply with
more erratic and uncontrollable. She begins turnscissors and files—so much so that she will go on
ing up to the local police station to confess to the
to wear gloves for the next forty years to
drowning of her first daughter, in spite of the corodisguise the extent of her ongoing self-mutilation.
ner’s report stating that it was an accident.
Meanwhile, her long-suffering husband, Russel,
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a Communist who would go on to write one of the
twentieth-century’s most influential reinterpretations of Australian identity, The Australian Legend,
assumes most of the household duties, including
raising Ward and her younger brother.
Russel, adept at public denials of his wife’s mental
state, ricochets between the roles of loving father,
resentful husband and ambitious academic. The
equally perplexed doctors and psychiatrists are not
much help, because Russel either suspends or withholds residential treatment for his wife, possibly
to keep her embarrassing condition a secret and to
confine it within the walls of the family home.
Also, the medication available in the mid-twentieth century for “nervous breakdowns” was woefully inadequate, with the so-called cures often being
more deleterious than the illnesses.
In My Mother’s Hands is a coruscating and unsentimental account of an ordinary family beset by extraordinary circumstances, conveyed with love but
never self-pity.
K
ATE GRENVILLE is one of Australia’s most
successful and respected novelists, most
famous for her Booker-shortlisted The Secret River,
a work of fiction inspired by her settler ancestors
on the Hawkesbury River. In her foreword to One
Life, Grenville explains that her mother, Nance, had
always intended to write an autobiography, but only
got as far as jotting down fragments and unfinished
accounts. After Nance’s death in 2002, Grenville
inherited her papers and a deep, primal yearning to
tell her story.
Gifted with a vivacious subject, Grenville uses
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Ken and Nance Grenville with baby Christopher in 1941.
her considerable craft as a fiction writer and as an
elegant prose stylist to narrate the life of a woman
struggling against early-twentieth century indifference, discrimination and misogyny. After completing a grueling three-year apprenticeship in pharmacy during the Depression, Nance takes up smoking,
card-playing and poetry-reading with gusto. Through
her socialist friends the naïve working-class girl becomes politically astute and radicalised.
Like Ward’s father, the Grenville patriarch is a
womanizing Communist—or, rather, a promiscuous Trotskyist—and embodies a myriad of complex
contradictions, while Nance’s mother, Dolly, shares
many traits with Ward’s mentally ill mother: “(Dolly) ... wasn’t a woman of rational mind at all. She
used to get into these fearful rages. I think she was
always a little bit funny.”
It this exact same adjective, “funny”, that Ward
uses as a child to explain to her schoolfriends the
behaviour of her psychotic mother. Only fifty or
sixty years ago, we had no language, no descriptors,
to define female imbalance.
Fans of Grenville’s fiction will delight in spotting the real-life antecedents to some of her novels.
Through a family tree printed in the front of One
Life, we see that Nance is the great granddaughter of
One Life
Kate Grenville, Text, Melbourne, 2015, 260 pp.
Soloman Wiseman, on whom one of the main characters in Grenville’s The Secret River is based.
Pre-marriage, mother Nance used to visit the Domain every Sunday afternoon and listen intently to
Bea Miles (another “funny” woman of the twentieth
century), wearing a man’s overcoat and tennis eyeshade, reciting Shakespeare to the masses.
Little did Nance know that in telling her daughter
tales about Miles, she would help inspire Grenville’s
first novel, Lilian’s Story, which won the Vogel Award
in 1984.
As daughters, we inherit not just gender and genetics from our mothers, we also grow up internalizing their exasperations, their compromises, their
thwarted potentialities. These two memoirs are
poignant reminders of how much has been gained
in the course of a generation, and how a matriarch’s
old straw can be spun into gold.
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An Insistent
Presence
Despite being spurned by the
monocled commanders of the
Australian Army in World War I,
women doctors used their skills
to save lives and pave the way for
women in the military.
Reviewed by Naomi Parry
I
N THE MEAT GRINDER of World War I, military
commanders realized that part of the art of war
was maintaining the bodies of fighting forces. Every
casualty and illness reduced the strength of the
frontline, so doctors were essential to keep soldiers
both fighting fit and numerous.
Socially elite and professionally trained to take
command, doctors stepped into field hospitals as
officers. War service tested their talent, skills and
leadership. It was a test that the monocular commanders of the Australian Army assumed women
would fail, so when doctors such as Agnes Bennett
tried to join the Australian Army Medical Services
(AAMC) they were told to “go home and knit”.
Yet Australian women doctors had fought hard
for their training, wanted to use it, and were not inclined to take no for an answer. Bennett headed to
Alexandria, where she joined the New Zealand Medical Corps and became the first woman surgeon appointed in any Army service of the British Empire. A
total of seventeen of the 129 registered Australian
women doctors made their own way to the theatres
of the Great War, serving alongside women doctors,
nurses, drivers and orderlies from across the Empire. They were a tiny but insistent presence, and the
harbingers of change in wartime and at home.
In Not for Glory Susan Neuhaus and Sharon Mas-
Not for Glory: A Century of Service by
Medical Women to the Australian Army
and its Allies
Susan J Neuhaus and Sharon Mascall-Dare,
Boolarong Press, Salisbury, 2014, 322pp.
This is not just a book for Army
buffs or militarists ... This is
a book about women driving
change from below.
call-Dare alert us to the presence and achievements
of military medical women in all the major conflicts,
peace-keeping and rescue missions in which the
Australian Army has served. Neuhaus is a surgeon
who served for twenty years as a clinician and commander in the Australian Army, while Mascall-Dare
is a Military Public Affairs Officer in the Australian
Army Reserve, and an experienced journalist. Their
collaboration reveals the ways women doctors and
allied health professionals have achieved profes-
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sional recognition in military medicine, despite being routinely denied the privileges of rank or the
recognition afforded by citations.
I was particularly affected by the story of Captain
Thi Thanh Tam Tran CSM, who was a Vietnamese
refugee and took a Defence scholarship to help finance her medical degree. As the officer-in-charge of
a unit helping refugee Kurds in Iraq, she had cause
HIS IS NOT JUST A BOOK For Army buffs or
to reflect on the parallels with her childhood and the
militarists. The authors have drawn on published
pointlessness of war. The book ends by celebrating
material, archives and interviews with surviving
the fact women now fill command roles in the Royal
women medics to craft a stimulating account of
Australian Army Medical Corps, bringing unique
determined and resourceful women exercising their
perspectives and new
talents and skills under
ways of working to the
great duress.
benefit of the Army and
It’s also a fine medical
the broader community.
history, about women
A few questions recobbling together clinics
main. Although sexism
out of nothing and conis frequently discussed,
ducting research into
there’s no mention of
field-hospital
setups,
sexual harassment and
gas gangrene, malaria
I wonder how truthful
and burns treatments,
that is. A bigger quesradiology and physition — and one that I
otherapy.
don’t think can be adIt makes the case that
dressed yet, given the
women should be on the
sensitivities about milifrontline because they
tary information—is
want to apply their talColonel Susan Neuhaus in Afghanistan, 2009.
why the Army let woments and skills like every
S O U R C E : C A P TA I N L A C H L A N S I M O N D / U N I V E R S I T Y O F A D E L A I D E
en in. This is a book
serving man does, and
about women driving
because they are uniquechange from below, but it is no small thing for men
ly sensitive to the care needs of the women and chilto vacate any space in favour of a woman.
dren caught in conflict zones and disaster areas.
I would love to know more about what those
The women in this book are diverse. The pioneers
Army men were thinking, even as I wonder if any
were women of high social standing—the first womhave thought about it as clearly as Lt General David
an commissioned to the Australian Army Medical
Morrison, who wrote the book’s foreword.
Corps, Dr Winifred Mackenzie, was titled, and the
That I am left with questions is no reflection on
eminent malaria researcher Major Mabel Josephine
the authors, but an indication that this is a fertile
(Jo) Mackerras’ advice to women about “How to
field deserving of more attention. Not for Glory is
Keep Husband and Job” was to employ staff.
a book about women doing the things they want to
But as society changed over time, so did the Army.
do. You might want the young women and men in
Neuhaus and Mascall-Dare interview single mothyour life—and a few male leaders—to read it.
ers, middle-aged women and a pathology technician
who, at eighteen and 153 cm tall, learned to wield a
114 cm gun.
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YouTube star Kat Lazo: “The internet was my The Feminist Mystique.”
Everyone’s a star
YouTube offers teenagers the chance to learn, perform,
campaign or just show off, writes Samantha Trenoweth.
I
T’S 2015, YOUTUBE HAS BEEN around for ten
years, but already one wonders what a canny,
creative teenager did on a slow suburban
weekend before it came along. In the meantime,
parents still panic about the Internet, fretting about
stalkers and pornography and bullying, worried their
kids will be brainwashed by fundamentalists —or, in
our house, that their impressionable minds will be
filled with fairy floss.
After what must have been a thousand hours of
viewing, my sixteen-year-old daughter can apply
liquid eyeliner in one deft sweep, unearth new music
more swiftly than the A&R department at EMI,
whip up a wholesome chia and granola pudding for
breakfast and bake Christmas cake pops in the shape
of reindeers.
Her father reckons she is frittering away her teenage
years on stuff and nonsense, but I’m not so sure.
For teenagers, YouTube is an extraordinary,
democratic, libertarian medium. It’s a community of
64
peers, much like the
Los Angeles. They’ve
underground press was in
lived the dream that’s
the 1970s, but without an
cherished by many of the
editor. It’s a free platform
creators of the 300 hours
on which artists, actors,
of video that are uploaded
activists, the makers of cake
to YouTube every minute of
pops and the knitters of onesies
every day.
can exhibit their work.
The BBC has a YouTube channel.
All aspiring vloggers (video bloggers)
So do Giorgio Armani, the British
Hopeful astronaut Abigail
need is an iPhone or a digital camera
Harrison, above, depressive monarchy, Russell Brand and the CIA.
Scarlett Curtis, below.
with video capability, and a simple edit
YouTube has more than a billion
program like iMovie. Uploading a video
monthly active users; that’s roughly
to YouTube is as easy as attaching a document to
one in seven people on earth. The same number
an email. The results might be approbation, love,
of people watched the London Olympics Opening
sponsorship or the warm glow that comes from
Ceremony across all platforms. People watch
making even a tiny contribution to a better world.
hundreds of millions of hours of this stuff every day
Take 5 Seconds of Summer, the stuff of YouTube
in 75 countries and 61 languages.
legend. These
There’s a whole
four lads from
lot of mainstream
Riverstone in
programming on
Sydney’s far
there, and a whole
northwest spent
lot of rubbish. But
their weekends
there are obscure,
busking outside
brilliant, quirky
the local shopping centre and uploading cover
gems too, and finding them offers membership to
versions to the web, and became a hit when a bunch
those in-the-know clubs that teenagers (and even
of teenage girls stumbled upon their channel.
adults) get a kick out of.
Word spread. Towards the end of 2011, there was
Abigail Harrison (Astronaut Abby) doesn’t want
an all-ages show at the Annandale Hotel in inner
to shoot to stardom—she wants to shoot into space.
Sydney. It was the first time any of the band had
“I was probably four or five years old when I first
been to a gig, let alone played one.
went outside at night, looked up at the stars and
The music industry caught on belatedly. By then
thought, ‘I want to go there some day,’” says Abby,
the band’s following had snowballed. They sold out
now seventeen, in her final year of high school
their second show in five minutes flat. An EP
in Minnesota and determined to be the first
and a support spot on One Direction’s
astronaut on Mars.
world tour followed. Since then
Harrison now has a
the pop punk quartet has hit
comprehensive website and a
number one in Australia,
YouTube channel where she
New Zealand, Ireland
reports—largely to other
and the UK (they made
aspiring astronauts and
number two in the US)
space enthusiasts—on
and headlined shows
science and spacearound the world,
related issues.
including their own
“There’s this
wacky festival in
incredible space
YouTube has more than a billion
monthly active users; that’s roughly
one in seven people on earth.
65
community on social media,” she explains to ASR,
and the ability to talk directly to real astronauts and
engineers “just makes the whole thing feel more real
and achievable”.
Teenagers constantly refer to this notion of
community when talking about YouTube. Scarlett
Curtis is a British blogger, writer, student, baker and
knitter. She struggled throughout her teens with
chronic pain from a spinal operation and consequent
depression. She dropped out of school and lost touch
with friends but she attributes her
slow, sure recovery to the community
of YouTubers who kept her company
through long and sleepless nights.
Her favourites were Louise Pentland
(Sprinkle of Glitter) and Tanya Burr.
“These women talked to me,” Curtis
wrote last December in the Guardian.
“They talked in a way that most people
had become too scared to, and for
the first time in years I began to feel
like a teenage girl again. When they
laughed I felt happy, when they cried I
felt sad, when they talked about their
boyfriends, parents or new favourite
lipgloss, I felt like I had a friend again.”
Pentland and Burr are two of
Britain’s star vloggers. They post
intimate chats, bringing their cameras
(and thus their viewers) along on
reassuringly ordinary days as well
as special occasions, sharing tips on
make-up, boyfriends, cooking, selfesteem.
reassuring. American vlogger Tyler Oakley also
has a coming out video and is a vocal advocate and
celebrity fundraiser for the Trevor Project, a US
crisis intervention and suicide prevention service
for LGBTIQ youth. Ashley Mardell is young, kooky,
outspoken and bisexual, and her YouTube channel
features advice on everything from proposing to your
girlfriend to debunking LGBTIQ stereotypes and
surviving the habanero chilli challenge.
The entertainment magazine Variety reports
the most popular vloggers now have
substantially bigger teenage fan bases
than mainstream celebrities. Many
young vloggers are using their YouTube
fame to rally support for causes and
charities. After reading John Green’s
bestselling novel The Fault in Our Stars,
Troye Sivan wrote a song about young
people living with cancer and donated
the proceeds to the Princess Margaret
Hospital in Western Australia.
British lads living the dream, Jack’s
Gap, were also moved to fundraise for
teens with cancer. They rode across India
in a tuk-tuk for the Teenage Cancer
Trust and they’ve recently become
advocates for greater understanding
about mental health, a huge trend right
across social media. British YouTube star,
Zoella (whose channel has almost eight
million subscribers), has shared her own
struggle with anxiety and shared coping
strategies.
Sprinkle of Glitter isn’t all fairy
Friends with attitude:
lights and cupcakes either. She’s posted
Ashley Mardell,
an informative big-sister chat about
HE SKILL, EFFORT AND
Troye Sivan
self-harm. And Sarah Hawkinson is a
intelligence that goes into
Goth fashion and beauty vlogger who also studies
making a person feel as if they are not alone,” says
psychology, speaks out against stigma and posts
Curtis, “as if they are hanging out with a friend, as if
considered discussions of mental health.
they are safe, is immense.”
There have been trolliNG and death threats and
Which is perhaps why YouTube has become such
every shade of anti-woman activity on social media
a valuable resource in the LGBTIQ community.
but third-wave feminism has also been an immense
Australian musician and vlogger Troye Sivan’s
force, particularly on YouTube. Laci Green, a sex
coming out video has been viewed more than five
education activist (who now has her own MTV
million times and it is honest, hopeful, moving and
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66
show), provides the
Sydney-based media
most comprehensive,
and arts production
upbeat guides for
student who posts
teenagers to topics such
short horror films and
as consent (“it’s not only
“Lovecraftian LEGO”
hot, it’s mandatory”), and
animations.
“freaky labia” (“Hey, guess
For sixteen-year-old Didda,
what? Labias come in all different
YouTube is all about creative
shapes and sizes”). There is no better
expression. Her whimsical, beautiful,
Budding filmmaker Didda,
five-minute introduction to feminism
above, and insanely popular funny films mix the hyper-reality of
PewDiePie, below.
than her “Why I’m a Feminist … *gasp*”.
Icelandic (and sometimes Norwegian)
Younger women have followed. British
landscapes with quirky DIY animation
geek-girl Tyrannosauruslexxx mashes a Harry Potter
and special effects. Her world is a little like a hipster
obsession with a fondness for bath products and
Narnia (without the preachiness).
some serious feminist and human rights concerns.
“I mostly make my videos to entertain people
Her £100 Billion is funny to boot.
and make them laugh,” she tells ASR, and she
Kat Lazo is a New Yorker who grew up in a
attributes her sense of humour to watching too
Columbian/Peruvian
many Donald Duck
family and looked
cartoons growing up.
to the internet
Didda is convinced
for answers to her
that YouTube means
questions about
the end of mainstream
“machismo”. She
television, and to some
stumbled upon
extent she’s probably
sites like Feministing, Rookie, F Bomb, The Crunk
right, at least for the teenage demographic.
Feminist Collective and began watching Laci Green.
YouTube’s most popular star, the Swedish gamer,
“The internet,” she says, “was my The Feminist
PewDiePie, has more than 30 million subscribers and
Mystique … and I realised that I could be the change I
his most popular video has clocked up around
wanted to see in the world.”
60 million views.
Lazo’s Thee Kat’s Meoww addresses gender, race
By comparison, 7.99 million “legitimate viewers”
and sexuality. She posts prolifically on truth in
watched the record-breaking fifth season premiere
advertising and body image and last year posted
of Game of Thrones and roughly 1.5 million tuned
a clip of herself walking naked along a New York
into the 2015 MTV Movie Awards. Traditional TV
street to prove it was possible to feel comfortable
stations, managed by lumbering hierarchies,
in one’s own skin. She believes that
simply can’t compete with YouTube’s
“online feminism is the future of
immediacy and intimacy.
feminism”.
“I often feel isolated, living
Many young YouTubers
in Iceland,” says Didda, “and
see the platform more
YouTube is more personal
as a medium for selfthan television. It helps
expression than
me connect with the
advocacy. It has been a
world’.”
boon for young artists
like Andre Brimo, a
SHARE
nineteen-year-old
I mostly make my videos
to entertain people
and make them laugh.
67
12
Explore
T H E
M A G N I F I C E N T
This miraculous Chilean city defies gravity, geography and history, writes Lee Tulloch.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY TONY AMOS
Explore / Anne Summers Reports
‘I
F WE WALK UP AND DOWN all of Valparaiso’s
stairs, we will have made a trip around the earth,”
so wrote Pablo Neruda, Chile’s great twentiethcentury poet, of the romantic, raffish city that
hangs above Chile’s Pacific coast, winding around forty-five
steep hills and defying gravity, geography and history.
Valpo, as everyone calls it, is a bit of a miracle, a cascade
of corrugated iron shanties, Italianate mansions, French
manors, balconied townhouses, timber cottages, crumbling
fortresses and abandoned warehouses, the splendid and
the very poor, clinging together in a tenuous grip on the
landscape in one of the most earthquake-prone regions
on earth.
In April 2014, a massive fire, probably started by a
downed powerline sparking dry brush in a ravine, raged
through the rubbish-strewn gullies of the poorer parts of
the city, burning 1000 hectares of land, destroying almost
3000 homes and damaging 12,000 more. Many of the
homes obliterated in the flames were shacks and makeshift
structures that had sprung up over recent decades as Valpo
expanded rapidly, even as its economy as a port faltered.
“Poverty spills over its hills like a waterfall,” Neruda
wrote back in the 1960s, when he moved there to live.
Nothing much has changed.
The last really devastating earthquake was in 1906, but
the scars of a century of tremors and upheavals are still on
the buildings, some with façades so cracked they look like
crazed china, others no more a pile of collapsed timber like
69
strewn matchsticks. This time round the fire spared the historic heart of
the city, as it has been spared many times before.
Somehow, Valpo goes on, magnificently. People struggle here, as
evidenced by the hundreds of street hawkers who lay out their meagre
possessions for sale on the streets of downtown, known as El Plano (the
flat). But there’s also a wonderful defiance of mortality everywhere, not
least in the exuberant colours of the murals that cover almost every
available surface. Corrugated iron and stone alike are treated with
coatings of luscious colour—lime, cobalt, peach, turquoise, mandarin,
wisteria—and every second building, it seems, is covered in art, proof
that bewitching Valpo has for
decades lured artists and poets.
The mural painting started
in the late 1960s, when
students from the Art Institute
of the Catholic University of
Valparaiso began painting walls
in the old neighbourhoods
of Cerro Bellavista and Cerra
Concepción with the ambition
to turn the city into an openair museum, a cielo abierto.
After Allende’s assassination in
1973, the brutal Pinochet junta
gave orders to cover the walls
with grey. But after the fall of
the regime in 1990, Valpo’s
walls once again became the
canvas for political messages
and street art. These days, the
murals are the city’s major
tourist attraction. In 2002
UNESCO bestowed a World
Heritage listing on the oldest
neighbourhoods and that
injection of money and clout
Luscious colour is used on stone
and corrugated iron alike.
has created the impetus for the
restoration of many buildings
and the flourishing of small hotels, restaurants and bars.
Most tourists come to Valparaiso via cruise ship these days, but it was
once the commercial centre of the whole Pacific coast of the Americas,
a hub for trade from Africa, Asia and Europe, until the opening of the
Panama Canal in 1914 removed the need for merchant ships to navigate
treacherous Cape Horn. The city became quickly impoverished. Now it
has a population of 300,000 and, since 1990, has been Chile’s legislative
70
STAY
CASA HIGUERAS
Overlooking Valparaiso’s
busy working harbour, this
old mansion sits on a hill
in a neighbourhood where
wealthy German and English
immigrants built beautiful
homes and gardens in the
1920s. The big house is now
converted into a small hotel of
20 guestrooms with a garden
terrace and pool.
www.casahigueras.cl
HOTEL 17
This funky, iron-clad, modern
hotel of 10 rooms hangs off
the cliff with views not only
of the harbour but also of
the washing hanging off the
nearby houses. Most rooms
have balconies.
www.hotel17.cl
EAT
PASTA E VINO
Gnocchi lovers will adore
this charming restaurant that
offers homemade pasta heavy
on dishes such as gnocchi
made with eggplant in goat’s
cheese, pumpkin, zucchini,
corn or crab. There are ravioli,
spaghetti, risotti and lighter
dishes, too, such as white
clams grilled with ginger
and lime. Dessert? Quince
crumble with caramel sauce.
www.pastaevinoristorante.cl/
71
capital. The Chilean navy is based there.
Most of the cruise passengers are whisked past El Plano en route
to Santiago. It looks dangerous, even by day, with its rough port
bars, shuttered nightclubs and crumbling markets and warehouses.
(Walking through the old port we were stopped many times and
warned to hide our cameras.) The main thoroughfare is covered
with a blanket of vendors selling ratty old clothing, videotapes and
the world’s largest collection of old phone chargers. Dogs roam
everywhere. Even the vintage trolley buses from 1948 look down on
their luck. But look up and it’s a fascinating city, especially if your taste
turns to gloriously dilapidated architecture.
The hills are off-putting at first (how on earth does one get around?)
but the city is not as difficult to navigate as one might imagine. If you
stay on the UNESCO Heritage Cerro Alegre (“Happy Hill”) or Cerro
Concepción it’s only a short stroll down to the port, with the 1883
Concepción funicular railway taking you back up the hill in less than
five minutes. There are thirty-two funicular railways in Valpo, but
only five are still operational. Little more than a wooden or metal box
on rails, they’re great rattling fun and absurdly inexpensive. If you’re
going further afield, there are taxis or sensible collectivos, taxi services
that collect passengers from specific routes.
The scenery distracts from the effort of getting up the hills. Each
building features some interesting mural or architectural detail (even if
72
EAT
CAFÉ VINILO
Fabulous conversion of an
old butcher’s shop into a hip
resto-bar, with the butcher’s
marble slab turned into a
communal dining table.
Chef Gonzalo Lara, below,
serves up inventive takes on
traditional Chilean cuisine,
working wherever possible
with machopo (indigenous)
farmers.
Almirante Montt 448
Valpo is a bit of a miracle: a
mashup of the splendid and the
poor, and an extra-sensory feast
for all the senses.
it’s just some extraordinarily shabby façade) and soon you
are so enchanted you don’t notice the climb. On one street,
for example, you might observe some simple single-storey
row houses but round the next corner and look back and
you’ll see they are hanging off a cliff and are five stories tall
at the rear. Some of these houses are patched together with
bits of corrugated iron and timber, exactly like bandaids.
But the bandaids must work—one of these buildings was
dated 1922. It has hung on for that long.
In the mix are some extraordinarily beautiful mansions
and villas with little rhyme or reason to how they are
distributed; a beaux arts building with a fine roof might
share a street with a shack that is made from little more
than rusted iron and a row of terraces with pretty wroughtiron balconies.
We visited one summer, when a romantic fog rolled in
each morning and didn’t lift until midday. (It’s a bit San
Francisco in this respect.) Chile’s capital, Santiago, is about
a 90-minute drive away and Santiago’s residents regularly
come to Valpo for the cooler air in summer. There are eight
beaches, but they’re not great. (Neighbouring coastal
resort Vina del Mar is Chile’s Benidorm—avoid.)
The other attraction is the nightlife. Valpo has always
been a party town and the nightclubs down on the port
73
MELBOURNE CAFÉ
This is the place for your
caffeine hit, if you must.
(Chilean coffee is awful.) It’s
inspired by the coffee served
in Melbourne, so it must be
good.
www.melbournecafe.cl
SHOP
MERCARDO MODERNO
Wonderful little boutique
showcasing the work of local
fashion, jewellery and interior
designers. We snaffled a
floral coat and some striking
jewellery that used one of
Chile’s major exports, copper.
Calle Lautaro Rosas 450
spring to life around midnight. We were woken at 3 one Saturday
morning by riotous sounds from the port: dogs barking, car alarms
going off, people shouting and the numbing doof-doof of House music.
It’s wild down there on weekends, although it’s almost bucolic
up in the hills.
There are a number of really good small hotels in Valpo now. We
stayed at the Casa Higueras, a manor house from 1916 that has been
carefully restored by architects Carlos Urquiza and Carlos Seisdedos,
turning the gracious, dark-wooded family home into a 20-room hotel
with a landscaped swimming pool, terrace restaurant and fabulous
rooftop patio. Its five floors are built into the hillside with leafy views of
the port. The same architects are responsible for the Hotel 17, an ultramodern ten-room hotel behind a preserved 1850s iron façade, built
dizzyingly into a cliff above the port, with heart-stopping views from its
six ocean-facing rooms. The hotel was named for the seventeen children
the three Chilean owners have between them.
The emphasis here is on personal service and flexibility (breakfast
whenever you like, for instance). While this is not such a big deal
elsewhere in the world, boutique hotels and five-star service are
relatively new concepts in Chile. Valpo is setting the pace.
Strolling around the streets near these two hotels can happily occupy
a couple of days. They wind sinuously and you’re never quite sure what
74
GETTING THERE
Qantas operates four return
non-stop return services
between Sydney and Santiago
each week, the only non-stop
route between Australia and
South America. Flying time to
Santiago is an easy 13 hours
with slightly longer flight times
on the return. On this route
Qantas will operate a Boeing
747 reconfigured with new
Airbus A380 interiors. Qantas
also codeshares with LAN on
its six-times-a-week service
from Auckland, connecting to
six destinations across South
America, including Rio de
Janeiro, Sao Paulo and Lima.
Valparaiso is a 90-minute
drive from the capital.
www.qantas.com.au
you’ll come across; perhaps a passage covered in murals, an old jail
turned into a strangely deserted modern art museum, a cascade of
shacks falling into a gully, an interesting fashion boutique, a cute bakery,
the wedding-cake façade of a beautiful house or (as we did) a group of
builders barbecuing their lunch of pork cutlets in the street.
There are art galleries showcasing some really good local artists as
well as street stalls selling ponchos and alpaca knits. Valpo seems more
cultured and stylish than Santiago, perhaps because so much interesting
stuff is crammed into a relatively small neighbourhood.
You won’t have a problem finding somewhere good to eat. There are
plenty of cheap bodegas down by the port, and some really excellent
restaurants offering modern takes on
Chilean cuisine and Pacific fusion up in
the hills. It’s mandatory to eat at Pasta e
Vino, a hip café famous for its handmade
pasta. We also loved Café Vinilo, which
is housed in an atmospheric converted
butcher’s shop (the butcher’s marble
slab is now the bar). Chef Gonzalo Lara
is quite a character and offers both
cooking classes and a daily “anti-tour”
of Valparaiso that he says uncovers wild
places way off the tourist trail. We wish
we’d known about it before we’d planned
the trip. Next time.
There are dozens of charming cafés,
including the shabby chic Café del Jardin, but don’t order coffee. It’s
almost impossible to find good coffee, even OK coffee, in Valpo—or all of
Chile, I suspect. Happily, we stumbled across the Melbourne Café on the
Plaza Sotomayor down by the port. Owners Daniel Fellandler and Jorge
Fajardo come from the Valpo region and knew each other at school, but
they met up again in Melbourne when both were there in 2007, Daniel
working for a Chilean wine importer and Jorge there while his wife was
studying at university. Back in Valpo, they lamented the lack of good
coffee and so set up a modest little café specializing in coffee the way it
is made in Melbourne. I venture to say it is the best coffee in Chile, and
Australians are welcomed with open arms.
It’s almost
impossible
to find good
coffee, even
OK coffee, in
Valpo—or
all of Chile,
I suspect.
SHARE
Discover more beautiful photographs and travel
features by Tony Amos and Lee Tulloch by visiting their
free travel magazine www.mrandmrsamos.com
75
Gao Yu
JAILED FOR
SEVEN YEARS
Pictured: Chinese journalis
t Gao Yu,
photographed on 5 Februa
ry 2007 at
the International PEN Asia
and Pacific
regional conference in Ho
ng Kong
According to PEN International, Beijing-based veteran dissident journalist Gao Yu was convicted of “leaking
state secrets abroad” and sentenced to seven years in prison on 17 April 2015. During her trial, which began
behind closed doors on 21 November 2014, only the prosecutors, Gao’s lawyers, the judges and court staff and
a few court police were present because of the nature of the charges laid against her. Gao Yu is expected to
appeal the conviction, according to an interview with her lawyer published in Deutsche Welle.
READ
GAO YU
The PEN Report:
Creativity and
Constraint in Today’s
China
WHEN I MET GAO YU
I met Gao Yu at the International PEN Asia and
Pacific Regional Conference, organized by Hong
Kong Chinese-speaking PEN, Independent Chinese
PEN and Sydney PEN and held in Hong Kong from
2–5 February 2007. It was the first International
PEN meeting ever to be held in China. It was a big
deal and there was immense interest from PEN
members across the region in coming to Hong
Kong to be part of it.
Gao Yu was present at a special women’s session that was part of the conference. It was held in
a classroom—the whole conference was at a college far away from Hong Kong Island—and we all
squeezed ourselves into student desk chairs as we
tried, with very few common languages, to have a
halting conversation about women and PEN.
I remember Gao Yu very clearly, her wide face
and searching eyes. I remember being impressed
by her dignity and by her eagerness to engage.
She had someone with her who was able to do
some interpreting so it was possible to at least
partially overcome the hurdles of language. She,
like the rest of us, was trying to make connections
with women from different countries, all of whom
wanted to fight for freedom of expression, in all its
forms.
Gao Yu was one of 15 mainlander Chinese who
managed to attend the conference; another 20
were denied permits or were sufficiently intimidated to stop going. Their absence was a chilling
reminder that the issues the conference had been
convened to address were far from academic.
The presence of Gao Yu and others for whom
simply being there was both an enormous political
achievement and an expression of great personal
courage was a clear and present reminder of what
can be at stake when we pursue free expression.
Anne Summers
Editor and publisher, Anne Summers Reports
For more about Gao Yu and for what you can do to campaign for her release please go to the following sites:
PEN International
Independent Chinese
PEN Centre
Amnesty International
Human Rights Watch
An Egyptian spring?
The deliberate sexual attacks
on female protestors and
journalists in Tahrir Square in
early 2011 cast a pall on what
was supposed to be Egypt’s
revolution but has now had
an unexpected and promising
outcome, with a new law
criminalizing such assaults.
By Mona Eltahawy
I have been a little bit
bemused by those colleagues
in the newspapers who have admitted
that I have suffered more pressure
as a result of my gender than other
prime ministers in the past, but then
concluded that it had zero effect on my
political position or the political position
of the Labor Party. It doesn’t explain
everything, it doesn’t explain nothing, it
explains some things. And
it is for the nation to think in
a sophisticated way about
those shades of grey.
W
HEN THE REVOLUTION BEGAN, women
marched alongside men, women fought
police across the country and in Cairo, and women
resolutely stood their ground in Tahrir Square,
refusing to leave despite Mubarak’s snipers, police,
and plainclothes thugs. Those first eighteen days
offered a utopian vision of what Egypt could be.
Many female protesters spent the night outside,
in the square, violating the family-imposed curfews
that controlled their daily lives. Not everyone could
overcome their family’s rules, but for those who did,
it was an unprecedented break with a code very few
had challenged until then.
Many of my friends who spent nights out in the
square told me they did not experience any kind of
harassment, that men treated them with a respect
and regard for their personal space and integrity
that was unheard of on Egyptian streets before
those 18 days in Tahrir. One activist, however, told
me he’d heard a few stories that challenged that
idyllic image, but said that no one wanted to ruin
the image of the revolution. I was not in Egypt
during those 18 days and cannot verify either case.
Whatever utopia existed in Tahrir, it was
Julia Gillard Statement upon leaving
the Prime Ministership, 26 June 2013
ASR welcomes contributions to Those Shades of Grey
articles that explore or reflect on the role of gender in our
society. Please keep articles as short as possible. Send
to annesummersreports@gmail.com with Some Shades of
Grey in the subject line.
77
Egyptian activist and journalist, Mona Elthaway.
upended with a series of horrific sexual assaults
that began on 11 February 2011, the day Mubarak
was forced to step down and the day the South
African television news correspondent Lara Logan,
who reports for the US network CBS, was sexually
assaulted by a mob. Ever more audacious assaults
followed, with impunity for the predators and
bewilderingly little public outrage. On 8 March
2011, there was a small but determined protest
demanding that Egyptian women have a voice
in building the country’s future—including the
right to be president. Despite, or perhaps precisely
because of, their active role in the revolution, the
200 women who formed the protest (together
with some male supporters) were optimistic. But
they were met with opposition from men in Tahrir
Square, according to The Christian Science Monitor,
and were set upon by men from outside the square
who yelled at and in some cases groped and sexually
assaulted several of the women and a few of the
male protesters.
“Go home, go wash clothes,” yelled some of the
men. “You are not married; go find a husband.”
The next day, 9 March 2011, soldiers cleared
Tahrir Square of those who had returned to protest
the slow pace of change under the military junta
that had taken over after Mubarak’s ouster. The
military arrested hundreds of demonstrators and
threw them in military jails where many were
tortured and beaten. According to human rights
78
out of our revolution: one hand united and working
groups, 17 female demonstrators were beaten,
against women, one hand that groped or beat
prodded with electric shock batons, subjected to
women and tried to terrorize them out of public
strip searches, forced to submit to “virginity tests”,
space, one hand that found it perfectly acceptable to
and threatened with prostitution charges.
force two fingers into a woman’s vagina.
Less than a month after Mubarak had stepped
Those women had risked their lives to liberate
down, the military junta that replaced him,
Egypt, and yet their violation was met with silence.
ostensibly to “protect the revolution”, had officers
That silence points to a truth: the regime oppressed
stick their fingers into the vaginal openings of
everybody, but society particularly oppresses
female revolutionaries—women who should have
women. The regime knows it can violate women
been our heroes—ostensibly in search of a hymen,
because society subjects women to the same
ostensibly to protect the military from accusations
violations; it knows that society will
of rape by the detainees (because only
not speak out for its own women.
virgins can be raped, of course). In
In return for unaccountability for
other words, the Egyptian military
its oppressions, the regime turns a
sexually assaulted Egyptian women
According to
blind eye to society’s abuses, tacitly
so that they could not “falsely” accuse
human rights
condoning harassment and assault.
the officers of sexual assault. Samira
groups, 17 female
Ibrahim, one of the women subjected
demonstrators
to sexual assault, sued, but a military
GYPT’S CURRENT PRESIDENT,
were beaten,
court exonerated a military doctor
el-Sisi, approved of the March
prodded with
she had accused of conducting the
2011 “virginity tests”. Since July 2013,
electric shock
tests, despite the admission by several
batons, subjected when el-Sisi overthrew President
members of the ruling military junta,
to strip searches, Mohamed Morsi, who came from
the Supreme Council of the Armed
forced to submit the Muslim Brotherhood movement,
Forces, that the tests took place.
women who are affiliated with the
to “virginity
Ibrahim told an online newspaper:
Brotherhood—which has since been
tests”, and
“The person that conducted the
threatened with outlawed as a “terrorist group”—
test was an officer, not a doctor. He
have also said they were subjected to
prostitution
had his hand stuck in me for about
“virginity tests” in detention. So it
charges.
five minutes. He made me lose my
does not matter where you stand on
virginity. Every time I think of this,
Egypt’s political spectrum: if you are a
I don’t know what to tell you, I feel
woman, your body is not safe.
awful. I know that to violate a woman in that way is
In the years between Mubarak’s downfall and the
considered rape. I felt like I had been raped.”
inauguration of el-Sisi, street sexual harassment,
It should have been our moment of reckoning.
after being left unchecked for years, morphed
It should have sparked another revolution. Yet
into especially vicious mob sexual assaults against
nothing happened. In fact, Salwa el-Hosseiny, the
women at protests and public celebrations.
first woman to reveal the “virginity tests”, was
Egyptian human rights groups documented 250
called a liar and vilified for trying to turn people
cases of mob attacks against women in Cairo’s
against the mantra “The army and the people are
Tahrir Square and the vicinity between November
one hand”, which was popular when the military
2012 and January 2014.
seemed to be siding with the people in the final days
Egypt is an important case study in how state and
of Mubarak’s decline.
street work in tandem to push women out of public
Perhaps “The army and the people are one hand”
space. It also demonstrates how regimes, regardless
was one of the most honest statements to come
of ideology, have proved unwilling or fundamentally
E
79
often raises more questions and dilemmas than it
unable to address what Human Rights Watch has
answers, one of the five men was sentenced to life
described as “an epidemic of sexual violence”. One
on separate charges of attacking a woman as she
of the ways in which regimes and their supporters
celebrated the anniversary of the 2011 revolt that
brushed aside and belittled concerns over women’s
toppled autocratic president Hosni Mubarak. Are
bodily integrity was to blame their opponents for
our police just rounding up the usual suspects?
attacking women. As each group busily defended
El-Sisi’s security forces must be held accountable
its men against such accusations, the women, who
for their assaults on female protesters. Until
should have been their main concern, were left out
they are, their actions should be considered the
of the conversation.
height of hypocrisy. El-Sisi’s interior
It took mob sexual assaults,
minister has promised to create a
including a gang rape in Tahrir Square
new department to combat violence,
during the inauguration of el-Sisi in
including the sexual assault and
June 2014, to finally force an Egyptian
Flourishes
harassment of women. But how will
president to speak about sexual
of words and
a police force that has harassed and
violence against women. El-Sisi paid
chivalry are
assaulted women combat violence
a visit to the victim of that gang rape,
one thing. How
against women? How will that police
who was recovering in a hospital, and
those translate
force know how to act and what to
apologized to her. He vowed to take
into concrete
“very decisive measures” to combat
mechanisms that do in cases of sexual assault and rape
when it has no training in treating
sexual violence and, addressing Egypt’s
protect girls
such crimes? Flourishes of words and
judges, said, “Our honour is being
and women and
chivalry are one thing. How those
violated on the streets, and that is not
ensure justice is
translate into concrete mechanisms
right.” Yet it is women’s bodies that are
another thing
that protect girls and women and
being violated, not Egypt’s “honour”.
altogether.
ensure justice is another thing
altogether.
HANKS TO THE TIRELESS
In a dire irony, the extreme sexual violence has
efforts of women’s rights groups and small
forced Egypt to pull ahead of other Arab nations
but incredibly courageous initiatives launched to
in breaking the taboo of publicly discussing street
combat growing street sexual violence, including
assaults. Egypt’s brave activists have begun the
HarassMap, Tahrir Bodyguard, and I Saw
difficult and necessary task of deflecting the shame
Harassment, in 2014 the state finally acknowledged
from our bodies onto those who insist on violating
the problem and seemed to act on it, criminalizing
them.
the physical and verbal harassment of women and
setting unprecedented penalties for such crimes.
SHARE
In July, five men were jailed for life for attacking
and harassing women during celebrations of el-Sisi’s
inauguration in June. Reuters news agency reported
that another defendant, aged 16, was jailed for 20
Mona Eltahawy is an award-winning columnist and
years, and a 19-year-old was given two 20-year jail
international public speaker on Arab and Muslim
terms, though it was not immediately clear if these
issues and global feminism. She is based in Cairo and
would run concurrently or consecutively.
New York City. Extracted with permission.
All seven were convicted of sexual harassment,
Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle
under the new law, and of attempted rape,
East needs a sexual revolution
attempted murder, and torture.
Mona Eltahawy, Hachette, Sydney, 2015, 240 pp.
In a reminder of how our criminal justice system
T
80
Happiness
is a sad Dane
81
A modern-day homage to the iconic 1888 painting of the Danish middle class: Hip, Hip, Hurrah!, by PS Krøyer. S O U R C E : V I S I T C O P E N H A G E N . D K
Happiness
The country deemed the world’s official happiest two years
running is not such a cheery place after all, reports
Jeni Porter from Copenhagen.
A
T THE ENTRANCE TO Copenhagen’s
Frederiksberg Gardens there’s a statue of
King Frederik VI who so loved the palace
park that in about 1800 he transformed it
into English-style romantic gardens of lakes, canals,
and groves of trees. The king enjoyed walking in the
park and being rowed around the canals in a gondola
saluting at those of his subjects who were allowed in.
“Here he felt happy in the midst of loyal people,” says
the inscription at the base of the statue.
His legacy is a popular park where everybody
seems to feel happy. On sunny days it’s full of
picnicking families celebrating birthdays with cakes
decorated with Danish flags and an inordinate
number of stylish young mothers with strollers.
But all may not be as it seems. For the Danish writer
Dorthe Nors the park is where you “exhibit your
happiness” rather than feel it.
“I was in Copenhagen last week for three days,”
says Nors, who moved from the Danish capital to its
wild, west coast last year. “I walked in Frederiksberg
Gardens and it really hit me how severe it is: these
young women, they’re super dressed, everything is
super around them, but they’ve got that sadness in
their eyes. I think it’s because it’s hard to be a mother
but apparently we can’t talk about the darker side of
life. We can’t talk about the painful situations that
we’re in, we constantly stress the successful part of it
and we call it happiness, which is, pardon my French,
bullshit.”
Nors says Danes are not brought up to accept that
things can be difficult and the mantra about being
the happiest people in the world is a “self-made hell”.
Frederiksberg Palace in Frederiksberg Garden.
It’s hard being unhappy in a happy society and
especially in one as small and tribal as Denmark,
where everyone seems to know everyone else or be
connected in some way.
The happiness story starts as soon as you touch
down at Copenhagen Airport. “Welcome to the
world’s happiest nation,” says a billboard in the
arrivals hall. It’s actually an advertisement for
Carlsberg, happiness being as good a reason as any
to have a beer. The refrain is pretty much relentless
from then on. “Welcome to Denmark—the happiest
place on Earth!” says the official tourism guide, Visit
Denmark. There are mugs, cards, T-shirts, plates
82
These young women, they’re super dressed,
everything is super around them, but they’ve got
that sadness in their eyes.
an industry in itself. The Earth Institute calls its
research part of the “new science of happiness” and
identifies six characteristics which, it says, explain
75 per cent of the international differences: GDP
per capita, years of healthy life expectancy, social
support or having someone to count on in times
of trouble, perceptions of corruption, prevalence
of generosity based on charitable donations, and
freedom to make life choices.
The UN is pushing for countries to include
happiness as a way of measuring progress rather
than relying on dreary economic data. It’s one
reason why there’s so much attention on “little
Denmark” (this is how most Danes, with a mixture
of pride and humility, refer to their country). The
American political scientist and commentator
even, crowing about how Danes by various measures
are the happiest people in the world.
While Denmark has topped various European
surveys of sentiment for decades, it achieved
global acclaim in 2012 when the “first ever” global
happiness report, the World Happiness Report,
produced by Columbia University’s Earth Institute
for the United Nations, crowned it world champion.
The report collated various surveys to produce a
country ranking based on how people evaluated
their lives—how happy and how satisfied they were.
Denmark retained the top spot in the second report,
which was released in September 2013, but dropped
to fourth in this year’s report, which is just out.
(Statistically, it is not particularly significant.)
Defining and measuring happiness has become
83
flexible meetings are rarely held after 3 p.m. so that
Francis Fukuyama talks about “getting to Denmark”
one or the other parent can collect the kids from
although more in the sense of an imagined
school. Bosses trust their workers to get a job done
prosperous and happy country and researchers
rather than monitor how much time they spend in
worldwide are trying to understand the so-called
the office.
“Danish effect”.
Wiking’s institute rates that work/life balance as
Denmark has its very own Happiness Research
crucial to Danish happiness. It also identifies the
Institute, an independent think-tank run by Meik
security that comes from living in a welfare state,
Wiking, whose surname is pronounced Viking.
high levels of prosperity (per capita income is above
Danes have the highest level of trust in the world,
the OECD average), personal freedom, social
says Wiking, both of political institutions and of
cohesion (there’s lot of volunteers), and
strangers. His favourite hobby is “spotting
a well-functioning democracy. Plus, if
the manifestations” of trust.
PROS
you live in Copenhagen, as do almost
“The classic one is the kids in
Work/life balance
a quarter of Denmark’s 5.6 million
prams parked outside the cafés and
Welfare state
people, you enjoy the benefits of a
the shops when their parents are
High prosperity
city that feels like it’s been designed
running errands or having coffee,”
Personal
freedom
for people, not cars, and is run
he told ASR. It’s a wonderful way
Social cohesion
by a progressive council which,
of showing how we feel that we’re
Democracy
among other things, has set 2015 as
surrounded by people who don’t bear
a deadline to create enough new city
any ill will to each other, he says.
parks to ensure that everyone can walk
Another manifestation of trust, which
CONS
to a park or the beach in less than 15
would horrify Australians, is that you
minutes.
Post-GFC loss
rarely meet a Dane who resents paying
of confidence
If it all sounds too perfect
tax. They trust their governments—
Proprty price crash
(we’ll mention the weather later),
national and local—to spend their
High debt-to-income
that’s right—and it isn’t. British
money well on free healthcare,
writer Michael Booth had lived in
education, generous pensions and
High use of
anti-depressants
Denmark on and off for years and was
infrastructure. Danes have the highest
bemused that the Danes he interacted
tax burden in the OECD—in 2013
with daily seemed to be travelling on
total tax revenue as a percentage of GDP
something other than what he calls “the
was 48.6 per cent versus an average of 34
Danish happiness bandwagon”. Having set out to
(Australia clocks in around 27). By some estimates
understand his fellow adopted countrymen in his
Danes hand over more than two-thirds of what they
book The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the myth
earn in various taxes—the top marginal tax rate is
of the Scandinavian Utopia, Booth also investigated
56 per cent, there’s a 25 per cent consumption tax,
Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland, all of which
plus property and capital gains taxes.
score highly in the happiness stakes.
Booth’s trite answer to the question of why Danes
T DOES RAISE THE QUESTION of how people
are so happy is: “They’re good looking, they’re rich
can afford to live, let alone dine at acclaimed
and they don’t work very much.” (Two of which he
new Nordic restaurants or fill their homes with
backs up with OECD stats.)
desirable Danish-designed furniture and objects.
But he thinks they’re heading for a fall. Gallup
Most households have two incomes. There’s a
polls show dramatic drops in the number of Danes
high proportion of working mothers thanks to a
who believe they are “thriving” since the global
generous parental leave scheme, guaranteed access
financial crisis when unemployment rose, property
to childcare, and working conditions that are so
I
84
The light timbers, white walls, superior light fittings, and
candles that are synonymous with Danish style derive from
this desire to make the home a haven.
But Booth is increasingly convinced happiness
surveys are “spurious and unscientific”, encouraging
a self-satisfaction and contentedness that make
Danes feel removed and immune from the world’s
problems.
Nors, too, is sceptical. “Danes are extremely good
at checking out what the trend is and what we are
supposed to express right now. We know that it’s a
successful thing to say that we are happy but we still
kill ourselves during the winter.”
Experiencing Copenhagen in January, after all the
Christmas cheer has blown away, it’s hard to believe
that anyone could be even moderately happy, let
alone world champions. The sun rises about 8.30 a.m.
and sets about 4 p.m. and in between it’s fifty shades
of grey, heavy clouds—torture in anyone’s language.
prices crashed and the gap between rich and poor
widened. “Money makes you happy after all,” says
Booth, “the Danes were stinking rich and now they’re
not so much.”
Two of his favourite stats are IMF estimates that
Danish households have the highest ratio of debtto-income in the Western world and that Danes
are Europe’s second highest consumers of antidepressants—behind Iceland.
B
OOTH’S BOOK HAS SOLD WELL in the UK,
Canada, US and Sweden. There are editions
in Danish, Finnish and Norwegian and it’s being
translated into Chinese, Polish, Korean, Taiwanese
and Japanese. So he’s having a good ride on the
happiness bandwagon.
85
For Nors, hygge, at its best, is a lovely side of
This January was better than January 2014, when
Danish life but otherwise “it’s a scary thing”, a way of
there were 17 hours of sunshine in the whole month.
controlling social structures and interactions.
Researchers from the University of Copenhagen
“You can’t say anything unpleasant, you can’t
estimate that more than 15 per cent of
say you’re sad or upset, you can’t start crying and
Copenhageners suffer from seasonal affective
you don’t bring anything that smells like a conflict
disorder (SAD), which is basically winter depression.
to the table,” she says. She’s saved a newspaper
As well as anti-depressants, Danes consume
report of a murder where they ask the man why he
vitamin D in bulk and many start their day in front
murdered his female companion. “He said, ‘Well we
of lamps that give off a bright light, which mimics
were just sitting on the couch and we were hygging
natural outdoor light and supposedly restores
and then suddenly I killed her,’ so what
circadian rhythms.
the fuck happened from being cosy to
There’s a massive effort to create a cosy
HYGGE
actually strangling her? There must
atmosphere at home. The light timbers,
Tourism Board
definition
be something underneath that hygge
white walls, superior light fittings and
that wasn’t right.”
candles that are synonymous with
Creating a warm
atmosphere
While Nors gets inspiration for
Danish style derive from this desire
her dark, short stories from the
to make the home a haven during the
Enjoying the good
things in life
contradictions between Danes’
dark months.
Friends and family
proclaimed happiness and the reality
When I suggested to chef and
she sees, Wiking’s institute writes
restaurateur Bo Bech that I thought
reports about “happiness as a brand”. The
Danes were much less materialistic than
HYGGE
former bureaucrat, who loves his job
Australians, he laughed. “I actually
According to
so much he gives me an interview
think that we are some of the most
Michael Booth
while he’s packing for a trip to
materialistic people in the world in
Tyrannical, relentless
Mexico, is probably that brand’s best
terms of how much we spend on
drive towards
middle-ground
advertisement.
our apartments,” he told ASR. “So
consensus
“I really, really enjoy my work,” he
we are creating a comfort zone at
Normative to the point
says. “For me, it’s part of being joyful
home and then we can’t afford to go
of coercive
to have meaningful work.”
out.” He thinks this has made his fellow
Is he worried about the wheels falling
countrymen insular although he sees a
off the happiness bandwagon if Denmark
big change in the younger generation.
drops in the world rankings? “I’m sure we’ll be doing
The Danes have a word for that comfort zone:
fine. It will only be covered here in the press if we
hygge. Pronounced hooga, it roughly translates to
don’t get first place—we’ve grown accustomed to
cosiness but it’s more encompassing. “In essence,
being first place.”
hygge means creating a warm atmosphere and
enjoying the good things in life with good people,”
See also Engaging with jihadists, page 7.
says Visit Denmark. “The warm glow of candlelight
is hygge. Friends and family, that’s hygge too. Danish
SHARE
winters are long and dark and so the Danes fight the
Karate Chop & Minna Needs Rehearsal Space
darkness with their best weapon: hygge.”
Dorthe Nors, trans. Martin Aitken, Misha Hoekstra.
Booth writes that he’s come to detest hygge. He
Faber Factory, Pushkin, London, 2015.
describes it as a “tyrannical, relentless drive towards
The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the
middle-ground consensus” and cites a British
myth of the Scandinavian Utopia
anthropologist who says it’s “normative to the point
Michael Booth, Vintage, London, 2014.
of coercive.”
86
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UN Commission on the Status of
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My Lai: Hersh
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Getting it wrong
Rolling Stone story of a rape
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Issue of the year Violence
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US Medicare to cover gender
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US Executive order banning LGBT
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Feedback
Letters
only woman doctor) to receive a Military Medal
(for services on the Western Front during WWI),
Australia’s only women ever to be awarded a Medal
for Gallantry (earned during the Kibheo massacre
in Rwanda) and many many other women who have
served with distinction in non-nursing roles while
contending with the prejudices of society, the Army
and the profession.
I am a tremendous admirer of your work and I
hope, if you get the opportunity, you will enjoy
reading the narratives of some truly exceptional
Australian women.
With warmest regards
Susan Neuhaus
Dear Anne, I read with great interest your article
about “The Education of David Morrison”. I have
known him over many years, both professionally
and personally, and I think you captured his
passion and personality extraordinarily well.
I do need to correct one small issue as the author
of Not for Glory: A Century of Service by medical
women to the Australian Army and its Allies. First,
my name, and secondly, the fact that the book is
exclusively NOT about the Nursing Corps.
As you would be aware, nursing narratives
dominate the female experience of war, both here
and elsewhere. Not for Glory is dedicated to the
women of the medical (non-nursing) professions,
that is, the female doctors, battlefield surgeons,
physiotherapists, medical scientists etc whose
stories are far less recognized, but nonetheless have
made a very significant contribution to our nation’s
military history over the last 100 years.
Among these women are the first Australian (and
Editor’s note: I take full responsibility for, and sincerely
regret, these two inexcusable errors. We have corrected
the article so please download the latest version. My
apologies to the two authors of this important book.
Please see our review of Not for Glory on page 62.
Our evenings with Lt. General David
Morrison and Adam Goodes
I
events in their own right, and the events add to
the Australian story. By holding conversations with
people who have important things to say, we can also
learn more about ourselves and about who we are as
a people. Both of my recent guests were exceptional
in this respect.
General David Morrison, the Chief of the
Australian Army, told us about how he came to make
the video address in which he told his soldiers who
HAVE BEEN PRIVILEGED RECENTLY to host
conversation events with two outstanding
Australian men. Held within just weeks of each
other, both were spell-binding occasions, to judge by
audience reactions on the night and the feedback we
have had since.
The purpose of these events is to raise funds to
enable the continued publication of ASR, but they
are more than that. They have become worthwhile
90
could not conform to Army standards of behaviour
towards women to “get out”. This video is now
on YouTube and has been viewed more than 1.5
million times. As I described in my ASR profile
of General Morrison, he subsequently met oneon-one with three young women who had been
severely mistreated by the Army. Their stories “are
imprinted on my psyche and will remain there for
the rest of my life”, he told the Sydney audience.
It is rare to hear any leader speak so frankly
about the shortcomings of his organization, and
to hear the head of the Army do so was especially
startling. The fact that he had betrayed the trust of
the soldier and her mother left an “indelible mark”
on him, he told me. “She did trust me with her
daughter and I let her daughter down,” he said.
The audience included a number of former and
aspiring soldiers, including a schoolgirl who hopes
to join the Australian Defence Force Academy
General David Morrison was a lively and passionate guest.
next year. The video of our conversation is now
available on my website and has already been viewed
one thousand times. I am sure you will find it as
compelling as did the audience on the night.
91
Adam Goodes admitted he was so shy when he joined the Sydney Swans at 17 he “couldnt look anyone in the eye”.
O
N 7 APRIL AT THE CITY RECITAL HALL, Adam
Goodes, Sydney Swans champion footballer and
2014 Australian of the Year, amazed us all. When he
first joined the Swans at the age of seventeen he was
already an Aboriginal role model but, he told us, “I
didn’t know what it meant to be Aboriginal”.
It took many years of study, friendship and
mentoring by that other Swans legend and
Indigenous leader, Michael O’Loughlin, for Adam to
come to terms with who he is.
Adam talked frankly and, at times, emotionally
about “the baggage we carry around as Aboriginal
people”. It’s always there, he said. He described his
“hurt” when a young girl called him an “ape” from
the sidelines during an Indigenous round match
in Melbourne in 2013, and how he felt when he
was booed during football matches while he was
Australian of the Year.
It was inspiring to hear Adam talk about what
moved him to become a White Ribbon Ambassador,
and to do everything in his power to make women
safe from violence. At the end of our talk, the
audience was on its feet, cheering Adam. You could
feel the admiration—and the love. It was the first
standing ovation we have had since my very first
conversation with former Prime Minister Julia
Gillard in September 2013.You can watch the video
of my conversation with Adam on our website.
Finally, I am able to bring you the video of my
conversation with double Academy Award winner
92
Above: General Morrison with colleagues from the
Male Champions of Change, Simon Rothery, CEO
of Goldman Sachs Australia, and Cochlear NonExecutive Director Glen Boreham; and with girls from
MLC School, below.
When the audience rose to its feet at the end of his conversation
with Anne Summers, Adam Goodes was surprised and humbled.
Adam’s fans included Professor Gillian
Triggs and Anna Bligh, at left with Anne
Summers. Above: Adam with former
Swans team-mate, mentor and cousin,
Michael O’Loughlin. Below: Audience
questions were frequently affectionate.
93
Don’t feel you’ve missed out: videos of past conversations are now available on www.annesummers.com.au.
Cate Blanchett last June. I apologize for the delay but
am also so pleased that we now have a website that
can host all of these wonderful conversations.
Please make sure you visit the site towards the end
of May to catch up with the video of the conversation
with my next conversation guest, Australia’s Sex
Discrimination Commissioner, Elizabeth Broderick.
I will be talking with her in Sydney on 7 May. If you
can, you might want to be there. Tickets are still
available.
I am proud of these conversation events and look
forward to hosting more of them—and bringing
them via video to those of you who were not able to
be present in person.
Team movements
We say goodbye to Ricky Onsman, our digital
director, and thank him for his great work
in helping develop ASR and, before that,
Anne’s various websites. We welcome our
new digital producer, Jay Cooper, who has
designed our fabulous new website. www.
annesummers.com.au
And farewell to Helen Johnstone, our
partnerships manager, whose last day with
us was 17 April and whose new baby is due
in just a couple of weeks. Helen has done
an extraordinary job bringing in sponsors
and partners to help give ASR and our
Conversation events a firmer financial footing.
We are very grateful for all her efforts.
ANNE SUMMERS
94
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95
Contributors
Tony Amos’s career as a
professional photographer spans 25
years and three continents.
With partner Lee Tulloch,
he founded travel website
mrandmrsamos.com.
Juliette Saly is a journalist working across
TV, radio, online and print. She has reported
for every major Australian radio and television
network, as well as Bloomberg, Al-Jazeera,
CNBC and Fox News.
Mandy Sayer’s most recent book
is The Poet’s Wife: A Memoir.
Cressida Campbell’s unique
artworks are a combination of
woodblock printing and layered
watercolour painting. Highly
valued by collectors, she recently
produced a line of gift cards available at
good bookstores and her website, www.
cressidacampbell.com
Matthew Thompson is the author
of two books of literary journalism,
Running with the Blood God and
My Colombian Death.
Paola Totaro is an award-winning journalist
and former Europe correspondent for the
Sydney Morning Herald/Age. She now lives
and works in the UK and is President of the
Foreign Press Association in London.
Hazel Flynn is an author, feature writer and
editor who has previously been a publisher and
radio broadcaster/producer.
Samantha Trenoweth is a
journalist, author and editor
who writes about the arts, the
environment, history, religion
and politics. She has written five
books and edited three anthologies; the most
recent is Fury: Women Write About Sex,
Power and Violence.
Jane Goodall is the author of three detective
novels: The Walker, The Visitor and The Calling,
all published by Hachette. She is co-editor of
Trauma and Public Memory, a collection of
essays forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan.
David Hay is a New York-based playwright
and journalist. His recent Off-Broadway
productions include A Perfect Future
(available on Amazon.com) and The Maddening
Truth. As a cultural critic, he contributes to the
New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and
New York.
Lee Tulloch is the author of the
cult novel Fabulous Nobodies, a
collection of essays, Perfect Pink
Polish, and four other novels—
Wraith, Two Shanes, The Cutting
and The Woman in the Lobby.
She is the founding editor of Harper’s Bazaar
Australia and mrandmrsamos.com and has
written extensively for Vogue, Elle, Harper’s
Bazaar and New York.
Naomi Parry is an Australian
historian who is currently based at
Sydney University as the project
coordinator of the NSW Centenary
of Anzac Book project.
Paula Weideger, a New Yorker based in
London, writes regularly about art for The
Economist and other journals.
Jeni Porter is a Copenhagen-based
writer and editor. Before moving
to Europe she lived in Sydney and
edited the AFR Magazine.
96
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Meet change champion, Elizabeth Broderick

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