Not just good girls in public life

The announcement in March 2008 that Quentin Bryce, Governor of Queensland, was to be appointed Governor-General of Australia was thrilling news for scores of Queensland women. To have our woman as the first since Federation to hold the highest non-elected position in Australian public life felt like sweet vindication. Those years where Queenslanders felt defensive or apologetic may now end. Queensland can now dress in designer clothes and strut down the national catwalk without even the shadow of a cringe.

Nowhere had the perceived backwardness of Queensland been more obvious than in its treatment of women. They were invisible in the public sphere attained much earlier by women elsewhere. Some impediments were probably mythological, but during the 1970s and 1980s, everyone in Australia knew that if Joh Bjelke-Petersen needed policy advice in relation to women, he turned to his wife Flo. We also knew that Mayor Rex Pilbeam of Rockhampton sacked his female staff when they got married.

Now its public stage is comparatively strewn with women. Although women occupy fewer than half the seats in Parliament, they are there in numbers unimaginable even 20 years ago.

Women were permitted to stand for Parliament in Queensland in 1915, yet until 1989 only eleven had made it through the doors. The first, Irene Longman, a member of the Progressive Nationals, was elected in 1929. Thirty-seven years later, in 1966, the next arrived: Vi Jordan, the ALP Member for Ipswich. For eight years she sat alone, mostly silent. In the election in 1974 she lost her seat, but Vicky Kippin was elected as a National Party member, and Rosemary Kyburz as a Liberal member. By the time Goss lost government in 1996, there were two female Cabinet ministers and two female directors-general of departments.

During this time women, in steadily increasing albeit comparatively minute numbers, filled positions of great importance. Liberal Party activist Sallyanne Atkinson became the first woman Lord Mayor of Brisbane in 1985, a position she held until 1991. Joan Sheldon was elected as the member for Landsborough, north of Brisbane, in 1990, and the following year became the first woman to lead a political party in Queensland and the first female leader of a Liberal Party in Australia. In 1996, she became Treasurer - the first time a woman had filled this position in any state.

Women in public life in Queensland experienced criticism and ridicule that was sharper and more personal than that directed to their male counterparts. They were often said to have abandoned their rightful roles as wives and mothers, were accused of being too noisy, too silent, too dumb, too much of a smarty pants.

Often, women venturing into this male-dominated public world were outrageously and quite cruelly portrayed by cartoonists, journalists and their political opponents, including those within their own parties. A former member of the Canberra Press Gallery said that entering politics was like a female social circumcision - “women had to cut off their most sensitive parts to fit in”.

Queensland women were not only missing in action from the Parliament, but few made it to the Bench or to senior positions in the law. There were some women in the senior executive of the public service, and just one woman Director General of a government department in 1990. The culture strongly rejected women in positions of public responsibility, although there were a few, singular exceptions. From the National Party, Flo Bjelke-Petersen and Yvonne “Call me Mum!” Chapman were careful to maintain a super-housewife/mum image, banging on about making pumpkin scones or carefully constructing a hapless female message.

But look at us now. In 2008, Queensland is the only state with a woman Premier. Anna Bligh, who has led the Labor Party to an election and won, is at centre stage. She was assiduously groomed by her predecessor, Peter Beattie, who ensured she had opportunities to “act” as Premier in his absence, and ensured her amazingly smooth transition to the top role. We hardly noticed the change. This was in stark contrast to Victoria and Western Australia, where 15 years earlier women had been handed the leadership of tired and chaotic governments destined to lose office. Both Joan Kirner and Carmen Lawrence paid a high personal price for taking on the top job at a difficult time.

Now a third of the Members of the Queensland Parliament are women. Women are no longer confined to token “female” portfolios, but are in charge of some of the most substantial. Queensland Justice Susan Kiefel was appointed to the High Court, only the third woman on that Bench. Queensland has had a woman Chief Magistrate, Attorney-General, Director of Public Prosecutions and currently both the Chief Judge of the District Court and the President of the Court of Appeal are female.

The change is dramatic and has been caused by the happy coincidence of circumstances. People living outside the state during the Bjelke-Petersen days found it hard to imagine life in Queensland for those with ambition and verve, but not of the National caste. Many left, including Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Premier Anna Bligh. There was a view, expressed by Rudd on a number of occasions, that the best and brightest departed. There was an implication that those who “chose” to stay were dullards.

During these times, and well into this current century, Queenslanders travelling south for ministerial meetings and conferences experienced the cool breeze of condescension. “You knew as soon as you said you were the Queensland delegate that a small smile would play on their lips, a crack would be made about Joh, and later Pauline Hanson, and they would settle into not regarding your contribution,” said a senior bureaucrat. It didn’t help being a woman. When I took up a senior position in Victoria I was warned by a friend not to wear colourful clothes. “They’ll pick you in an instant,” she explained. “You can tell when those yellow and pink jackets come into the room where those women have come from … Queensland!” Therese Rein, a Queenslander and wife of the Prime Minister, has felt the southern opprobrium of the style police.

The key is to understand that Queensland was, and is, a frontier. It is still emerging, experiencing late maturity - anything still seems possible. It has allowed women to emerge in numbers and in ways that are not found elsewhere in the country. As influential men left the state for jobs elsewhere, they freed up positions of power for those in the “out” group, allowing the conniving, the cheesy, the off-centre and the truly talented to take their places. As more women have moved on to the public stage, the way has become easier for the next wave.

The place of women in the law in Queensland is instructive. The Courier-Mail, announcing news of Quentin Bryce’s admission in 1963, reported: “Two judges’ associates, a magistrate, a Deputy Registrar in Bankruptcy … and a woman, were admitted as barristers by the Full Court.” A current Supreme Court Justice, Kate Holmes, “recalls being told when she applied to join the Queensland public service in 1977 that, as a married woman, she could not expect employment which might be at the expense of a male applicant with a family to support.”

The rise of women in public life in Queensland, whilst notably illustrative of issues of gender, is also a story about class credentials. It helps - indeed, may even be essential - to have come from a “good family”, to be Anglo-Saxon, middle class and the graduate of a private school. Those who failed to hold on to power - and there are a number of stunning examples - literally lacked class.

A critical factor in the rise of women in public life has been the importance of patronage. Bligh was mentored by Beattie; Leneen Forde, who was the state’s governor from 1992-97, says she was prepared for the position by Goss and Jim Soorley. It would be hard to find a senior woman who cannot point to a male colleague whose help was essential to her rise. Married women are particular beneficiaries. In a gossipy culture, mentoring coffee meetings are less subject to conjecture if the participants are known to be married.

I first met Leneen Forde in 1976. She is the no-nonsense daughter-in-law of Frank Forde, who was prime minister for eight days in 1945. Canadian by birth, she is friendly and clever. In that year I was working at the first women’s shelter, established with funds from the Whitlam government and then defunded by Fraser. We gave mainstream women’s organisations very short shrift. I was nominated by more militant sisters to approach the Brisbane Zonta Club, of which Forde was president, to ask for money to keep the shelter open. The state government was not considered an option.

The Zonta meeting was vibrant and strident. Many of the businesswomen attending had not heard of domestic violence, and were deeply offended when asked to support a service they believed either contributed to family breakdown or did not insist that women never return to the contemptible cowards who battered them. Arguments flowed. As I was leaving, discussion continued. Leneen Forde leaned over to me and said: “Don’t worry, honey. You’ll get your money.” We did.

In 1983, Quentin Bryce arrived in Nambour as chair of the Prime Minister’s Women’s Advisory Council to sell the Sex Discrimination Bill. I was working there and involved with a local women’s information and support group. We had invited her to speak at a public meeting at the Nambour Civic Centre.

Letters to the Editor of the Sunshine Coast Daily captured some of the local anxiety about the possible effects of the proposed legislation. They were colourful and fantastic. Unisex toilets would become the norm; the United Nations, described by one correspondent as “Satanic”, would control workplaces and families. Lyrics of songs (Stand by Your Man) would be censored to remove offending “sexist” intentions. In the August 24, 1983 edition of the Daily, the President of the Caloundra Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Graeme Haycroft, remarked hotly: “The general thrust of the legislation could … have the effect of undermining the traditional nuclear family values … and would ignore the reality of free-enterprise commerce … I will always prefer to have a female secretary, if for no other reason than I find women prettier than men.”

Bryce had a tough time in regional Queensland. Her public meetings attracted a mixed crowd of supporters, feminists, the religious right and the slightly crazy. She handled the hugely rowdy meeting in Nambour with charm, insouciance and wit.

Bryce and Forde are superb illustrations of a particular genre of successful Queensland woman in public life over the past two decades. It is no coincidence that they were both governors of Queensland, though five years apart. They are both lawyers, married with five children each. They lived near each other for many years in the same leafy Brisbane suburb, and both come from relatively privileged backgrounds. They are feminists, risk-takers, unique and unforgettable women who cultivate and participate in numerous networks of women friends, with a strong focus on legal circles. Most importantly, both women have a touch of the different. They are characters.

Both have attracted attention for not being “serious enough”. Bryce’s impeccable dress sense has been dissected and criticised. Forde’s down-home plainness, her disinterest in fashionableness, drew its own regular comment.

If the body politic in Queensland is a white male, then the entry of women into its being is best compared to an invasion by a foreign body, like an infection - even causing the production of a mutant being. As with biological processes, some “foreigners” are absorbed and integrated, as long as they are not too numerous, and especially if they remain benign in nature. An increasing number of women fit this category. They look and sound like appropriate and well-behaved women. They are married; they have children. They are facilitators rather than negotiators. They follow the paths assigned and they have learned well from other women in public life in Queensland. Spectacular “Fallers from Grace” are often not well behaved, well dressed or well rehearsed. These women who have violated the script have sometimes been expunged like a foreign body - banished, excised or surgically removed.

At least three female politicians from Queensland have been jailed in the past fifteen years: Pauline Hanson, and two former ministers - Labor’s Merri Rose and the Nationals’ Leisha Harvey. The former chief magistrate, Di Fingleton, went to prison for ostensibly, but not actually, over-stepping her role boundaries. Cheryl Kernot went down in a blaze of ignominy. A number of lesser known lights, many of them talented, simply left exhausted, alienated and frustrated. The unifying factor was some inability to fit in to an assigned position description. “A good, quiet, girl,” a bitter friend remarked. “That’s what they wanted.”

The third group comprises Julia Baird’s “steel sheilas”: tough girls with balls, trying to be seen as men. There are a growing number of them, anxious not to go the way of their apparently more vulnerable predecessors.

Having women on the public stage in Queensland is now much more common, and infinitely more acceptable. It is undoubtedly popular for political parties to run female candidates, whether in the city or in the bush. Peter Beattie understood this very well and capitalised on these populist sentiments. Women pull votes here, so let’s put ’em up! The public view is that women can be effective in public life because we have seen them there, and they work. Queenslanders are voting for woman candidates in increasing numbers.

In all areas of experience particular to women, such as equal pay, childcare decisions and services, opportunities for betterment in the workforce, rates of teenage pregnancy and domestic violence, as well as structural areas such as appointment to boards and positions of power, Queensland women are not doing any better than women from other Australian states. In many cases, we are still worse off, but we are no longer invisible or excluded.