A Femocrat’s Story, 1970s Style
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 28: Still the Lucky Country?
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Sara Dowse
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Sara Dowse's biography and other articles by this writer
In April 1973, five months after Gough Whitlam was elected prime minister, a woman I admired for the talks she gave on women's liberation became his women's adviser. Elizabeth Reid had been one of ten on the short list. The others, including Susan Ryan, Anne Summers, Eva Cox and Lyndall Ryan, would become some of Australia's most accomplished women, but the publicity leading up to Reid's appointment was a farce. It would take decades before the media could handle issues concerning women with maturity, about the same time it took for Reid's significance to sink in.
Oddly, Reid did not see herself as a reformer, but believed that government action would be integral to a longer, more significant revolution in attitudes. In the beginning she sought advice from a small informal circle of public servants, several of whom had been appointed to senior positions never before occupied by women. Most were bone-hard pragmatists, but this was tempered by Reid's presence, and, raw as it was, my own. The others guided us on what might actually be achieved in government and advised which people we needed to get on side. Thus developed the strange amalgam of hard political thinking and socialist-feminist analysis that was to characterise Australian feminist involvement in government for years to come.
Soon after Reid's appointment I received a phone call from a man who introduced himself as Clyde Cameron, the minister for labour and immigration. The call was so improbable I took it for a joke, and would have hung up, but the caller persisted, suggesting that I might have seen him on the news. ‘What I believe in is wage indexation. A system of wage indexation would act as a brake on inflation. It would prevent the unions leapfrogging one another in their awards...' I said that I understood, but couldn't quite grasp why he was telling me.
It transpired that he was offering me a job – a temporary one, but the pay was double what I was getting and the work infinitely more worthwhile. A newly separated mother of four, I was in my first full-time job as a low-ranking journalist in the Australian Information Service. Cameron had a vacancy that the union wouldn't let him fill immediately, but he could use it to second me. There were three important amendments to the ALP platform of direct concern to his portfolio; I was to write the policy speeches.
The request for my secondment went to the AIS director that morning. His surprise, to put it mildly, was considerable. I was his most junior officer, had never worked on a daily newspaper, had shown a singular lack of interest in any of my duties unless they had to do with women, and then would insert the most outrageous assertions about female discontent into the copy. The secondment seemed even more preposterous when Cameron himself was taken into account. A tough ex-shearer, he had tangled with the right wing of the Australian Workers Union and the left of the Victorian ALP. It seemed scarcely less likely for him to hire a women's libber than it was for me to join his staff.
The news travelled fast. Although Cameron had explained that I was not to be his press secretary, and was only seconded to write those speeches, not a single journalist in Parliament House believed it. There were very few women spin doctors then, less than half a dozen in all twenty-seven ministerial offices. There was only one female press secretary and she had created a sensation by appearing unaccompanied in the heavily male non-member's bar. After that it was almost de rigueur for women staffers to go there, if only to assert the right, but it was still a searing experience. In the 1960s I had been bold enough to march up to the bar at the Manly Rugby Union Club and though I was the first female to do so, no one made much of it except the other women who cheered and quickly followed suit. But journalists, I was to learn, could be far more brutal than footballers. None of them could fathom my appointment, or view it as anything but Cameron's further revenge on one of their most respected colleagues. What Cameron neglected to tell me was that he had sacked his previous press secretary – an act that had sent tremors through the press gallery.
John Edwards is a noted economist today but then he was a journalist specialising in labour issues, a natural for Cameron's press officer. In the years before Labor's election, strong attachments had grown between young journalists, academics, political activists and the older shadow ministers. The relationship between Cameron and Edwards was particularly intense, so much so that people often observed that to the childless Cameron, Edwards was like a son. I learned the whole story after sending a memo to Cameron requesting a government phone card and some subscriptions to magazines that Edwards said I was entitled to and would be necessary in the job. I was surprised that Edwards should take such an interest, but his generosity seemed in sharp contrast to the hostility I'd encountered from other members of the gallery, and I thanked him for the advice. But not long after, Milton Cockburn, Cameron's private secretary, sat me down and told me what was up. The very same phone card and subscriptions had been the substance of the irreconcilable difference between Cameron and Edwards. They had argued bitterly – Edwards maintaining that it was no more than coalition staff had helped themselves to, Cameron insisting that Labor ministers and their staff were socialists and didn't abuse the privilege. Edwards wouldn't give in, so Cameron let him go.
I felt a bit foolish for being set up so easily, as I would never have asked for the phone card or the subscription if Edwards hadn't made my entitlement seem such a vital union issue, so the memo was torn up before it reached the minister. But that wasn't the end of it. In the weeks to follow, wherever I went Edwards would be there – eating at the next table in a restaurant, in the seat behind me on a plane – popping up like Alfred E Newman in an issue of Mad Magazine. I confided in friends but they didn't believe me; it was painful to discover how little credibility I had. The one exception was Cameron's secretary, Peg Lee, who told me how heartbroken the minister had been and how torn apart Edwards was as well. Later Edwards apologised, but I had long forgiven him, and had actually come to like him for caring as much as he did. So many other people in that place had shut down their feelings, never understanding what piranhas they'd become.
Peg Lee was known as the office mum and she was certainly that to me, making time in her madcap schedule to teach me in those pre-computer days the all-important art of dictation. Seeing how green I was, woman-to-woman she provided me with the skills and confidence to get on with the job. My relationship with Cameron was strained somewhat when I twigged that he'd mistaken me for someone else when he hired me, though I knew Reid had recommended me – he'd said so in that telephone interview. Nor was he above the kind of sexual teasing that went on in those days, what would be taken for sexual harassment now. In this he was no different from the bulk of his colleagues, except that he was exceptionally laboured and awkward with it, as if he knew it was expected but didn't have the heart for it, and only did it to test and shock. I swallowed my pride and soldiered on.
My most important speech outlined the history of the basic wage, how it had entrenched unequal wage rates, and proposed its final dismantling as an essential step in bringing pay equity to women. Months later, the Women's Electoral Lobby would join the government in arguing the case before the arbitration commission. WEL's Edna Ryan had done the work that Cameron's department wouldn't, sifting through the federal awards to demonstrate that extending the adult minimum wage to women wouldn't cost employers anything like what they argued. The Commission agreed, ending nearly seven decades of institutionalised wage discrimination.
