Hello and welcome back to Bob's News, a show about journalism. From Gadigal, Lansidney, I'm Tina Quinn. This week we return to our Improfinal Series, where we get to hear from those who make pretty significant contributions to our media industry, either here in Australia or abroad, about their lives, their careers, their experiences which have informed their work, and as a result, have informed us. Well, today's guest spent more than 30 years as a working journalist, and at her height was known as one of Australia's finest interviewers and broadcasters.
First, back to the Q and A. Lionel Murphy's fellow High Court judges today rejected his constitutional challenge to his conviction on a charge of victims who have emerged from South Africa over tomorrow's promised announcement of changes in apartheid. South Africa's Minister for Interracial Affairs, who has warned against unrealistic expectations over reform, now says whites will have to share power with other racial groups. Reports coming in from Beirut say at least nine people have been killed in more than 100 injured in big carbon explosions.
Such a huge... ...who faces further embarrassment tonight when perhaps three of his backbenchers vote against party policy on government amendments. To our Washington correspondent, Maxime McHugh, about the present mood in United States. The next one today was President Reagan, virtually bow to the inevitable in calling for a special prosecutor.
There's also something many see as a dangerous tendency in the Reagan administration. That's the tendency to run foreign policy from the basement of the White House. With her commentary on today's dramatic events, he is our chief political correspondent Maxime McHugh. It's now clear that Bob Hawke is psychologically refusing to accept that his party no longer wants him.
Hello and welcome to the Saturday edition of the Bottom Line. And today, what the week's jobs grow is telling us about the health of the economy, and in fact, it's not the problem that many men have simply not caught up with the changes of the past 20 years and they're feeling either lost or a bit resentful about it. And having worked for both Bob Hawke as a bureaucrat and now with Paul Keating as an advisor, what's the difference between them in terms of how they treat women? It's, again, a little early for me to join the conclusions here, Maxime.
Live from Sydney. ABC's, Meg Live. Here's Maxime McHugh. Welcome to the program.
And as we've just heard in the news two hours ago, John Howard delivered his most emphatic statement yet on the woman who's become Australia's most controversial politician, Pauline Hanson. Pauline Hanson, welcome to the Late Line. Thank you. You've heard obviously what the Prime Minister has said there.
What of his last point where he says you have no answers, the hence and cure would be worse than the disease? Well, I totally disagree with that. I have no answers to it. He's part of his arrogance at every stage.
Okay, gentlemen, come back to the issue of trade. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'll come back to some of these issues. Well, judging by the latest profit results, a decade of deregulation has been good news for our major banks.
Little wonder then that they and other financial players want even less control on the way they do business. Will the government listen? Tony Blair, welcome to Late Line. Thank you very much.
Madal Norebron, welcome to Late Line. Indeed to Australia. Good evening. Good morning.
Good evening. What day is the day now? In recent weeks, of course, the Slork have once again attempted to make life very, very difficult for you and your supporters. What is behind the latest crackdown, do you think?
Can I tell you how this looked at people beyond the bear pit of Parliament House? It looked like two bookheads who are more interested in taking a piece off each other than any issue of national interest. Welcome to the 7th of July. I've been joined now in the studio by the Prime Minister.
Thanks for joining us. Good to be back. Good to be back. Prime Minister, just before we do go to the changes.
They're all doing a first-class job. You don't just reshuffle for the sake of creating excitement for the force of state. Okay, let me ask you about the elevations in Tony Abbott. Obviously, he has a big job ahead of him moving into the workplace relationship.
Why do you think he's up to the challenge of that job? Well, he's very articulate, he's intelligent. Sorry, where is the balance? I mean, this is the equivalent of outsourcing the fate of human beings.
You are handing over complete control to another government. I mean, you don't do that in any other area of public policy. Remifications for other areas, except for... I don't think that's a lot of my security, sir.
Gentlemen, we are going to have to revisit the trials of a man of end zone on another occasion because we're out of time. I want to thank you for your presence here tonight, Tony Boog. Thanks very much. Thanks very much.
Thanks. Thanks for the program for tonight. We'll be back at the same time tomorrow. Maxing McEuss noted her career with the ABC in 1974 and would go on to work as a reporter on this date tonight nationwide and as a senior journalist and news reader with the Carlton Walsh report.
She then became the ABC's Washington correspondent, the first woman to be appointed by the ABC to a major overseas post and would report for them and later network 10 during a time of immense change in the United States, which would have rippling effects for geopolitics the world over. However, the high point of her journalistic career was as host of the ABC's late line during the 1990s and 2000s, but she decided to give it all up for a career in politics, achieving a somewhat mythic status by unseating then Prime Minister John Howard for the Labor Party in 2007. While her political career was short-lived, she's continued her passion for advocacy and equality through several board positions, including with respect to Victoria. And she's kind of agreed to join us.
Maxing, welcome to Fourth Estate. I'm just reeling from that trick down the time tunnel that you played. It's some extraordinary clips that many of them might certainly forgotten, but not the big names that were featured there. I mean, Tony Blair, Shimon Peres, Aung San Suu Kyi, Madal and Albright.
I remember in particular those interviews, but it's also a snapshot of history and media history. It is rare now for anyone anywhere to get those big names, but that's what badge late line and made it the distinctive program it did. It didn't just go after the commentators or the people in the middle-ring jobs, you know, it was the decision makers. It was the decision makers.
And actually, I remember we got Blair and Peres in the same week. Blair was just about to become Prime Minister. He was months away from the election, so he was the opposition leader, but there was no doubt he was on a roll, so he was a man with a momentum that went behind his back. We've got to be the party of ambition and achievement as well as the party of social justice.
But of course, at the other end of the spectrum, you also have said economists a few weeks ago, taking the point, the reason new labour is unstoppable is because it has turned Tory. And I suppose it's because of what you've just outlined in the last couple of minutes. I mean, this is a party now that embraces free market principles. Is it not the Tory part of the kind of face?
No, I mean, it isn't. Shimon Peres had just lost the election in Israel, so he was a man defeated. But of course, when you were writing your book not so long ago, you were so optimistic. I mean, in your epilogue, you said, we are ending a decades-long history dominated by war and embarking on an era in which the guns will stay silent while dreams flourish.
Do you think you were somewhat premature in that statement? No, I think that all told nobody has a better alternative. And in spite of all the difficulties, I think all parties will have to continue with the peace process and the return to the guns will be a terrible mistake. We have used them already five or six times.
They produced casualties, they killed many people, they didn't produce any hope or any result. Of course, keep in mind, this had been only a few years after the assassination of Rabin. And with that, when we look back, we can see that was probably the beginning of the end of the peace process, all the rest of it, all the momentum that Rabin had, signed accords with Egypt. But I remember Perez disappointed and defeated him saying, we don't have a, you know, for the career, but he said we are beset by enemies from without and from within.
And of course, what he meant by that was the extreme, right, the Jewish zealots. And of course, many of those people went on to be the settlers in the West Bank. So a very divided Israel is what he was pointing to in that interview. As it still is now, I have to say, doing these profiles, what I've continually found is it's phenomenal how little, you know, as much as things change, they stay the same sort of thing and how much history really does inform the present, which I know sounds very cliche.
And of course it does, as we all know, but that line of history is just incredible. And of course, you've bought witness to so much. Indeed, mind you, when I look back on some of them, when we had the interview with An San Suu Kyi, now this was at a time when she was a heroic figure. She was still under house imprisonment and all the rest of it.
And the interview reflected, if you like, the huge oil sentiment there was in favour of her at that time. And I remember asking her about how she would ever govern, if you like, in a multicultural manner and all the rest of it. Can there be a peaceful transition to democracy, do you think? I think we can bring about a peaceful transition, if all of us are interested enough in bringing about one.
What about the position of the Australian government? I'm interested in your view on that. Of course, our policy says that economic sanctions would not be effective against this law. And it maintains a policy of neither encouraging nor discouraging investment in Burma.
Does the neutrality of this position, worry you some more? Well, I think that sitting on the fence must be an extremely uncomfortable position. I myself have never been in favour of such a very precarious stand, or I should perhaps sit as it were. When I didn't ask for her attitudes towards throwing out, because years later, she was certainly marked down for not being far more protective.
No one can argue there are all issues around the military and the rest of it. But I look back on that now and think, yeah, there was the question that I didn't ask. Just how wide was her perspective and her tolerance? But there are things you don't know at the time?
There are other things you don't know? I have to say this one. It is a lesson in not going overboard and not being, not lionizing people. Because a lot of people always swept up my...
Just keeping the skeptical part of your mind in play. Are you ever bothered by the questions or were you ever bothered by the questions that you would sometimes either forget to ask or you would think of later? Did you ever walk away from interviews going, oh, well, there was a pro-law? I can't think of one of them.
But more than likely, absolutely. Or you have the French call the list, the scallop moment. I've got 20 minutes, why didn't I say that? Why didn't I come back at him?
I probably had more issues like that as a politician when I was on the other side, actually answering the questions. Someone got the rhetorical best of me and later on, I said that. I knew that. I mean, nobody would have been prepared for those interviews, those encounters having come from the other side of the desk.
Well, you would think so. But in fact, I actually think my communication skills went into decline in government. That's interesting. Yeah.
Is that because you felt... Why do you think? Well, it's something I talk about in the book that I wrote at the end of my intense but brief political career. I loved winning, but I hated losing.
So I tended to come to terms with it and, of course, write about what was an incredibly volatile and fratricidal period for the Labour Party in getting rid of a first-time Prime Minister had been so spectacularly successful. But I think part of it was the moving from having a lot of autonomy and being able to craft and choreograph my own interviews and not being restrained anyway, going exactly where the research took me to having to be a team player. Now I think I'd psychologically made that move and I thought for quite a long while about, do I really want to jump the fence here? Do I want to go from being a questioner to being on the other side?
And I really did. I wanted to play a role in policy. I wanted to try and come up with some of the answers. But by the time I got to Canberra, the whole thrust of communications, which was very, very centralized out of the PM's office and Deputy Prime Minister's office, was about reducing complex issues to often platitudes.
And I wasn't that good at that. The key performance indicators for our successful politician were around sticking to the script, getting on top of the Announceables, a shocking word in itself, the talking points, all this stuff quite frankly that I consider and a lot of other people have decided to grade politics. But I have to say that, now it's not that Labour invented it in 2007, but it was certainly kind of the norm. And I struggled with that.
I wasn't good at it. I couldn't remember the lines. I always wanted to go to an event where I had the early childhood portfolio, which I loved basically, but I'd often be at events with other ministers and all the rest of it. And the whole idea was to get in quick, say what you had to do and get out and hop in that Commonwealth car and get back to Parliament House and all the rest of it.
My inclination was to hang back with one or two of the journalists and explain this policy. Why wasn't we were introducing national standards? Why were insisting on lifting those standards right across the country so that any four-year-old whether they're in Brisbane or Broome would have an informed early learning experience? Well, that was not only frowned upon.
I was strictly put in my place until... Don't do that. So you can see now that was 2010, 2007, 2010. You can see where that is led us.
You can see where that has led us. Now, it's not to say that there aren't political interviews that I still think are worthwhile and where you will get something out of someone in Canberra. But everything conspires now against it. I can see why politicians hone their communications the way they do.
It's to stay out of trouble. It's not to be tomorrow's headline in a bad way. But being that strict about... They take much less risks.
It's not to be productive. Of course. The communications means that we see where it's led us. You have a community that is saying, well, why should we listen?
And you've got now the media call News of Women's. And I was about to ask, do you think that is what has caused that sort of news avoidance? People have switched off. They feel they're not going to glean anything particularly interesting or informative.
Either that or there is such overkill with some issues. And I'd cite the US election. The ABC sent a huge number of people, a mega army of people, to cover that. I'm saying this because just this week, I remember someone in Parliament House in Victoria from the ABC said, here we are scratching sometimes to cover state politics and all the key local issues we need to cover.
And look at the resources we're spending on that. Now I think a lot of people said, we know there's an election on here, but it's not an hour back. We're tuning out. It was overkill.
I'd cite another example. There was a question of whether or not Kevin Rudd would be able to stay as ambassador, given the disparaging comments he said about Donald Trump in the past. That question ended up being asked over and over and over again for a week of every single minister who appeared. I asked it once or twice or asked it at the Foreign Minister, fine.
But really, so I see there a problem with judgment and a problem whereby not enough producers or editors are saying, what are we expecting of our audience here? Do we really think that they want this question to be asked the 10th time of the 10th minister who appeared on a particular program this week? I'm with the audience. I can see why they are fracturing and why they are tuning out.
What were your thoughts on how the voice referendum, for instance, was covered last year by the media. I was not really aware of the question of both sides regardless of whether one was dealing in facts or not. I still find that hard because I'm still wrestling with it as well. What I did, I was certainly worried about the result.
I wasn't well, I was surprised by the extent of the rebuttal and the breadth of it. It was very, very, very comprehensive. That said, months before the referendum, I was in that camp and I wasn't alone. Of those people, certainly the labor movement, shall I say, who were looking at this thinking, we actually haven't done a good enough job of explaining this.
It wasn't, it was dismissed, this issue of, give us a bit more detail. In that, it was like to a lot of Australians that would have come across as a pretty arrogant. I think a lot of Australians would have gone in and said, well, I don't really understand this. Which was that effective argument from, again, the critics.
If you don't understand it, don't vote for it. If you don't know, vote no. That's right. If you don't know, a very effective line.
The other side needed to come up with an even more effective line. I remember the other side saying, if you don't know, find out. But maybe the point is that people should have had to go and find out. It should have been very clear to them.
A lot of means to the extent that we can talk about mainstream media, and that's another issue. Journalists went out of their way to give the yes campaigners an opportunity to point that out. I still puzzle over it. I listen to other social researchers, for instance, who will say, do not underestimate that there are deep fishes now in Australian, deep social fishes.
And resentment by some that, oh, if we do this for indigenous people, they're getting something more than we have this. All of that. That's right. I think there are layers and layers.
I do not want to reduce it just to that. And there was a lot of misinformation. There was, you know, I remember the campaigns about that this is, you know, indigenous people are going to sort of want your backyard, all of that sort of stuff. These are issues I mean that you've been engaged with for many, many years, not just for your political career, but your journalism.
And you've moved with some of these players. You've all witnessed it so much. And I know that- That makes me sound like a Methuselah. No, not quite.
I think quite what I was getting at. Sometimes we all just feel like that. I was just struck by a little girl in Brisbane who said she wanted a big life. Well, I certainly wanted a life beyond Brisbane.
At a very early age, I decided that Brisbane was a pretty small pond. Mind you, you know, it was very interesting. It was a small, it was still emerging from its kind of country's town status when I was growing up and when I was first in journalism in the state of the night. The Beelkipidesen National Party had this extraordinary, almost one party hold on the state.
It was a pretty repressive, dark place, actually. If you were certainly, if you're interested in civil liberties or if you're interested in diversity of any kind. So I must admit at a pretty early stage, and I was always a reader of newspapers at an early age. From the time I was about 12 or 13, I was reading newspapers.
And I started to read the Australian, actually, which was only- Did you just use to go out on a Saturday when you were a used to walk out and sanitation to the news agents? The news agent happened in Morvale and I would get to Saturday, Australia, which was a bumper issue. I think Murdoch started that in 64, something like that. So I would have been buying it in the mid-60s.
It had a fabulous arts section and I'm reading about plays in Sydney and Adelaide particularly. Adelaide in those days was Don Dunstan, was the Athens of the South, and look, you know, very beguiling. And again, a small provincial place, but its image to the rest of the world was anything about provincial, whereas Brisbane's image was deeply provincial. Mind you, again, later, many, many years later, I look back now and I think God, the writers and the artists that came out of Brisbane at the time.
I mean, Brisbane produced David Malof. I still regard him as our best writer ever. That wonderful book, John O., which is set in Brisbane, which captures so much of the times. What do you think, Gaby, your interest in news?
Was it your father? Was it your grandparents? Was it your daughter ideas? I was a curious kid.
And there was certainly nobody in my family who had gone into politics. My grandparents ran a corner store at Scarborough and I spent quite a bit of my childhood with them. I was a grandfather, I was always saying, in business, you know, to talk about politics or religion. Well, that's exactly what people talk about.
You know, and it was the time not long after the Catholics, the split in the Labour Party, and all the rest of it were Catholic family. I think, I tell you what I do remember, because I was talking about this recently. My grandparents had lots of copies, back copies of Life magazine, American Life magazine, and in its glory days, life had some of the best photographers in the world. And some of those photographers covered the post-war years.
And I'll tell you why I was thinking about it. I went to see the movie Lee, you know, but the million- Oh, yes, the million- Okay. And she and a Life magazine photographer, if you see the movie, the two of them are the only ones, the first ones who go into the camps. And of course, she tries to get her photographs published in British Vogue and they won't publish them.
She gets them published in American Vogue. The Life magazine photographer, of course, his photos of the camps are published almost straight away. But what I'm remembering from what I saw in my grandparents' collection, these Life magazines, and they would have been if she was after the war, they had these are the first photographs of Nagasaki and the after effects of dropping the A-bombs. But I would have been looking at these as, I don't know, a seven or eight-year-old.
And I was kind of barely aware, but they were such stark photographs. You could not look away. You'd keep going back to them, right? And I realized that was probably a political moment without you probably even realizing at the time.
And it was acting up the world to you. Yes, yes, probably. But I have to say, the key influences, the key influences the school I went to, I went to a terrific school. I was back there for a reunion mass, only a few weeks back, all hallows in Brisbane, which goes way back.
It was founded, you know, almost not long after the settlement of Mortenba in the 1850s. So quite an institution founded by the Sisters of Mercy. And most of the sisters, I have to say, who taught me were fantastic. There are a few who shouldn't have been allowed in front of children, right?
That was in primary school. But by the time I got to secondary school, the women who taught me both religious and lay were really interesting. They struck me as worldly. I mean, you know, inside the school gates, and all hallows is in the center of the city in the valley.
Outside the school gates, I thought it was very parochial. Now, I didn't know what parochial meant, but I kind of knew it was dull, right? Inside was the world of Keats and the world of, you know, Hardy and the music of Mozart. It was a very, you know, it was a terrific school in terms of the promotion of the arts.
We had a wonderful choir, wonderful orchestra. All hallows have been sending its students to the University of Queensland from the earliest days. And they were doing medicine, you know, things like that. So it was academically challenging.
And look, the attitude there was, you know, if you've got a talent, then we're going to work on trying to get it out of you. So, look, I have to say, there were women there, and I could even name four or five of them who were huge influences. And they just made me think of a world beyond my immediate horizons. And I thought, so I didn't know what I wanted to do.
I was as directional as just about everybody else, although I did have some friends in my group who were very focused, one in particular, who was determined to get into the Department of External Affairs. And that's exactly what she did. So I left school, went to the University of Queensland, but, you know, picked all the wrong subjects, dropped out, worked three jobs. And the only idea I had was, I've got to fly out of here.
I've got to get to London, right? A lot of people get to London. So, you know, say, what I could, got to London, and within a short time I got a job. I had one skill.
I got to type. I got to jump as a news type as the BBC's external services in London. And that's right, it's got a journalism. There were journalists there from Eastern Europe and South Africa and Canada.
It's like a U.N. of journalism, you know. That was terrific. I have fabulous.
And they're all blokes, of course, I've got to say. And all the women were typists. Gee, it was the 1970s. It was the 1970s.
So you and the Gals from the typing pool. As he's great. Did you see the thing, British working practices were pretty sloppy. And you could, you could just about, there was a lot of downtime, right?
I mean, there was, it was fast and furious coming up to bulletin and all the rest of it. But there was a lot of downtime. Well, there were the papers and magazines from all over the world. You could read the entire European press, the American press.
This happened to be at the time of the oil embargo. Richard Nixon is being impeached in Washington. So they got these big international stories. The government in the UK was on a knife angel wrist of it.
So I just read. And it was kind of like my university outside the university. And I have to say, all those blokes as blokey as they were. If you were interested in us questions, which I always did, they were happy to share what they knew.
There was a kind of rough, I wasn't, it's not a rough equality, but there was a kind of fraternal atmosphere that prevailed. But I thought it was terrific. And you decided to take some BBC letter pack for that. Yeah, that was my master's sproking.
My master's sproking. Before I left to go, you know, backpacking across Europe in the summer and I was probably headed home. I knew at some stage I really had to go home to get qualified. I thought I can't just, you know, ramble around here.
I picked up a piece of BBC letter here and I wrote an application to the ABC in Brisbane, actually, telling them what I've been doing and not embellishing, I have to say. And sure enough, at some stage I, you know, phoned home and my mother said, oh dear, there's a, you know, there's been a call from the ABC. They want to get home. They want to see you.
So there you go. Eventually got into what used to be called the talks department. Talks covered all of Metro Radio's specialist programming. And there was a lot of that in the non-Sydney Melbourne states, you know, I have to say.
So I worked in talks for a while on, I think, the morning program or whatever. And then shortly after that, a position came up on this day to night as a degrade, something like that. I applied for that and got that job. And that was the beginning of my calf life, your calf life.
Tell us about this day tonight. So is that the same for those who we mentioned it on this program a number of times, but it's pretty groundbreaking back then. Yes, it was. I guess, 76 or whatever.
And this was, yes, that's right. So 75 was the mega gear, obviously the year of the Whitlam dismissal, the Brisbane unit of this day tonight, which was spectacularly well resourced, by the way, as was Adelaide, Tasmania, all the rest of it. So these are terrific units to work on. You know, and if you got certainly Sydney and Melbourne always important, Sydney was the anchor, of course, but if you had good state based or if you got to run nationally, this sort of thing.
So Queensland was central because of material. That's right, because of, you know, the, the, the windlum, the alcapies and standoff, all the rest of it, the appointment of Vinske to the ambassadorial post, all these sort of things, you know. So it was a terrific place to work. The anchor when I joined was Andrew Ollie.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. I would speak like a chock rank and like Hamlin. So again, all blokes on the reporting team.
And the only other woman was the chief researcher and that was Patricia Baraklath, who became a political figure in the ABC and sadly died last year. She wanted to be Kerry O'Brien's producer on Lateline and then I think she was the last executive producer on Stateline. So it was very, here's an interesting story about the time. But again, the blokes are pretty good.
I was, I was, I was say, not fully evolved. There was a lot of testosterone in that office. Oh, yeah. Not fully evolved.
But, you know, pally enough again, they were, they'd size you up, but they took one look at me and Tricia been there a little while and they said these two won't get on. You know, the usual, you know, men sort of saying, well, the same women are getting on to the pigeon. Well, in fact, Tricia and I were very different. I mean, you know, Tricia looked like, you know, Marianne Faithful, you know, I looked like Peggy at a madman, you know, I mean, that was where we were, where it went.
But different archetypes. Well, we, we both discovered, you know, we both loved Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf and all the most of it. And then we got to a woman on the o waves. Yeah, well, I suppose I know where other women were.
I got, I was just going to say, just to the, in terms of the landscape at the time, Caroline Jones was the doyant. She was anchoring four corners at that stage. You had Helene Sheung in Melbourne, June Heffernan in Sydney. I just wanted to, and that was about it.
Kate Bailey, actually, I think was on commercials in Melbourne, but that was about it. And ABC character, his management was just starting, given month since 1975, which was the international international year of the women. It was a big UN conference. I forget where then that Margaret Wiggler was at and all the rest of it.
The ABC was just the, it's probably time. Yeah, it's just, just about right to have a woman in a Carrotifea's unit. Not two, not three. A woman.
You know, it was, it was totally, it's all over the board. No, no, no, no, that's right. That's right. In the same way that it took a very, very long time for news, Carrotifea's to start thinking about, you know, perhaps having reporters who have disabilities and can do reporting.
I mean, this is only quite recent, but I have to say, we'll credit to the ABC. They've been the first in those areas. So there you go. Margaret Thrasby was actually saying on this program because she was a mario course.
Margaret. She was an on television at that point, though. And when you started at TDT and she was talking about how in 1978, I mean, she was the first woman to read the television news for the ABC. That's right.
And she said, she felt the commercials were just sort of waiting for the ABC to take the lead. And then it's interesting, you know, 10 a point of Katrina lay months later in Sydney, the Unevent in Melbourne a year later. So that's right. Well, I have to start the plus side was I probably got a bit of attention because I was the only woman on here in Brisbane.
Far from having been put off by initial media over reaction, Ann Diverson was more than willing to talk about the importance and the implications of the commission's findings. Do we want to return to a situation or have a situation as exists in Queensland where women are still having backyard abortions under extremely dangerous conditions? Can I ask you if it's how many of the problem areas you dealt with in the report are bound up with what I suppose you could call the Ocker image, the way Australian men perceive themselves and their relationship to women? I think quite a lot.
And in that if you look at family violence, certainly you have a situation where it's essential to look at the relationship between men and women. The same with rape. Why do men feel that they are free to rape women or can beat them up within the four walls of their own home? Do you find out about the attitudes men have towards ownership of women?
Why do women not feel that they are able to leave? Why are they economically vulnerable? They can't have been too negative a reaction from the audience because I kept getting promoted and what she did, I have to say, everyone else has mentioned this to you, you just got an inordinate amount of attention on your clothes, your hair, your jewelry, all the dah dah dah dah dah. And this was both external and internal.
There were any number of executive producers who would say, I don't like that high gloss lipstick, you know? I don't make you particularly self-conscious? Did you start noticing that you became? No, no, no.
I kind of parked it. I have to say, there were a lot of things we parked that a generation of women that just would not pull up with, they would say, get lost or whatever. I said, that is a different story from late-line days though. I was very fond of the black jackets because it was so easy, one black jacket after another, but I'd try and spice it up with different jewelry, earrings, dah dah dah dah dah dah dah.
And I had a friend of mine who would help supply this, I think, and all the rest of it. Well, this became a bit of a talking point and I remember one letter from a bloke who said, Adam, I have to take issue with your baubles. My wife, every night as we are settling down and I am wanting to, how did he put it, you know, do my duty or something, your baubles are getting in the way of my lovemaking because my wife will sit up in bed and say, what are you wearing tonight? Oh my God.
I really wanted to wrap up and say, take the TV out of the bedroom. Can you believe people were, you know, I put this in print? No. Your response should have been, well, why is my wardrobe exciting?
I know more than you are. So, it's very good. Very good. I like it.
baubles. I mean, it's not even gems or, you know, I know. It makes you sound very showy. You and your gaudy baubles.
Yeah. That's right. Yeah. I want to go back to your TV, T-Dags because I understand and I thought this was so interesting.
I'm going to read something now from your book. I will be forever grateful to the executive producer who quite early in my career helped really suggested that I readjust my ambition and forget about being a current affairs interviewer presenter. Maxine, some haven't, some don't. You don't make the cut.
What a gift this was. So this point, I've been captive to a lot of fears and doubts. Everyone else seemed smarter and better connected. But all that vanished in an instant as I looked at the disheveled television executive in front of me, shut hanging out over a well-unched gut.
He was telling me in no uncertain terms to get back in my box, the iron entered my soul and I never looked back. That's a good bit of writing, isn't it? Quite good. You've got a bit of a turn of, you've got a good turn of friends, Maxine.
I don't know if anybody's ever mentioned something. Well, thank you. Pretty sure. No, no, I can, I really live that moment in all of its horror and enlightenment as you read that out.
Yeah. That's what I think is interesting. And that another one, I know other women who were diminished by those sort of judgments and it didn't fire them up. It crushed them for whatever reason.
We all have different temperaments. I don't know where it comes from. But if you tell me, I can't do something, guess what? I'm going, you know, which is why my parents were probably quite clear.
But they never ever said, you know, you should do X or they never even said, you know, you should get married. I mean, I didn't grow up. I have to say with, well, we were a very traditional family, conservative family, you know, masculine Catholics, all the rest of it. We kind of obeyed the rules.
But I actually never, as I've heard other women from my generation say, oh, well, it was absolutely make clear that we needed to be married by 23 or we should become librarians if we did arts degrees. You know, no one ever said you could go into finance or anything. Well, I actually never ever, they may have had certain, you know, ideas of what they thought would be nice for me to do. But they were never as explicit about that, which is a bit of a gift, you know.
So, so I was just like, you know, I get to this. And at the time, this EP had a fair bit of power in the organization as well. So I've always, yeah, he will remain nameless. I've always thought, and I, well, I know, I know there were women who had as much talent as I had, whose careers didn't take off.
And really these subjective, hypercritical judgments, because now keep in mind, these were days that say there are only a few women. There wasn't a critical mass. And there was a critical mass of blokes. So, you know, you had your competitors and all right, there was a big pool to choose from.
But then when there's only one or two, there was a tendency to think we want the right girl, the nice girl, you know, that kind of thing. It had to be a certain type. Now, it's just made me think of this, and this is the difference, I think, between women in my generation and the women I see on air now. I'm a huge fan of Sarah Ferguson, and I watched Sarah recently interviewing the Prime Minister or it could be any other night in the senior figures that she interviews.
What I really like about Sarah is she is always civil. She's always exceptionally well-researched. But she never seems to feel the need to play nice. There's nothing, nothing girly about her.
Now, I'm not saying I wasn't girly at all, but I would have thought this much. She doesn't perfect the screen. No, no, nothing like that. No, it's very professional.
And I know some, it doesn't go down well with other people, things that should be more light and shade. And she is absolutely right for the times, because it is hard, it's been harder and harder to interview figures of substance, people in politics or leading figures or whatever. I think she gets it just right most of the time. I do think it's the same.
This is the difference when I look back. I think probably, Mike, we want it to be liked. We want it to be authoritative. We want it to be taken seriously.
But I think we also want it to be liked. And certainly we were always aware, if it wasn't explicitly stated, you knew that the preference for you getting an on-air position or getting promotions or whatever was your likability. Now, that is critical on TV. You're coming into people's lounge rooms and all the rest of it.
And if you are a really polarizing figure, that doesn't necessarily bode well. But as I say, I have seen the shift in, I think, Sarah, I always get something out of her interviews. Now, it's not, as I say, it's become harder and harder to get answers from politicians, but it's the quality of her persistence and follow-up. You get the message anyway.
Do you think that affected your interviewing style, that sort of the preoccupation with being likable? Do you think it held you back at times? Well, I think that, Trey, I think by the time I got to the senior role, I think it held me back at times. I had developed a level of confidence that probably took a back seat.
But I have to say, the way I presented myself and whatever connection I was able to make with the audience, that is certainly what got me those jobs in the first place. So you won't get it trade away if you like some of that. I'm a naturally open person. I've got to smile like a watermelon.
So there's no hiding that. And I've got a very responsive face. I don't have a poker face in my next life. I think I like a poker face.
But anyway, I just don't have it. So they're handy sometimes. I don't possess it either, as people remind me. I didn't know.
I didn't model myself. I was always a huge fan of Caroline Jones. Caroline was just the doy-and-shoes up there. I came across an interview.
You went to Caroline? I did an interview with Caroline. She was a lovely writer herself. And she, a very private person, but she revealed just enough of her background.
And she in her book, and she talked about this and the end. She was actually quite not nervous, but she was bit wound up about it like a till when we were in makeup and that. And afterwards it was lovely. She wrote me a lovely note and she said, you honored me in that interview.
And I thought, can't I hear as if, wow, you know, you've achieved so much. But it still, it felt, it was important to her that her work and her position in the media was acknowledged in that way and acknowledged on what was then the preeminent program on the agency. When you were doing a couple of hours of radio every morning in City Extra, you were doing four corners, that must have been any minstiffer because none of it was seat of the pan's journalism. I found it tremendously hard work, Maxine.
I think I wasn't all that bright in a way. So I didn't come in. They didn't come at all these. It was a driven feeling.
You had to do the homework. You had to seek to understand the issues that you were talking about. I found it hard. I found it hard.
It burned me out really. I just put the harness on every day and got going. And it was necessary at the time. And this is a time of inner city corruption and a healthy branches and all of that.
You were exposing all of that. Yes. Well, I was one of the people. Yeah.
There are some words that keep recurring in your book. Grief, Milon Collea, loneliness. What was the nature of that loneliness? Just that.
Felt so alone. Weak and yet responsible for everything. It's such a perilous way in which to live. I think the death of my mother was a terrible blow to me.
And it was a grief that I carried for many years. Why? Because of guilt. Because one feels perhaps as a child, one is responsible.
And when a person dies in tragic circumstances, there are so many unanswered questions. And I suppose I carried those with me and needed some help to unpack that baggage. Was there a sense of, if only I had done this, perhaps she may not have... Yes, I think you have thoughts like that.
But you see, when I look back in the light of the cross, I think she gave me my life. My purpose, she gave me the desire to make whatever contribution I could to other people's search for meaning, to answer loneliness of others. And I'm quite sure that's what the search for meaning was all about. Was there also perhaps loneliness for or a longing, if you like, for us most of the companionship of one individual, the person who would listen to you at the end of the day?
Yes, possibly that's right. And yet when I had those opportunities, I always put them in a secondary position because I thought, now my job is to get on with what I'm doing. But what happens to relationships? And I don't want names and addresses or anything.
Come on, what about your love love? Your love love? Because you talk about love in your book. Oh, absolutely.
You scape a romantic love. Yes, well, it's more discreet to scape a romantic love. I'm struck by that interview in terms of, obviously, he were interviewing a luminary. And as you say, she was quite a private person.
She was nervous. Did you feel nervous? No, was I nervous? No, my modus aim, operating is this.
I work off a lot of internal stress. My gut gets churned up. But my preparation is vital to me. I never just turn up, whether it's to make a speech or whatever or to do an interview.
I do a fair bit of work. So if I'm confident that I've done that work and I work, I nearly always, certainly with those long interviews, I will work out a structure where I want it to go. But I'm always prepared to sort of throw that out if the interview takes it in interesting alternate direction or whatever. So I have to say, by the time I'm sitting there doing it, I'm actually not nervous.
But all of that, which is not to say what's come before it has been a lot of, okay, I've got, you know, whether it's writing a chapter for a book or whatever, that's where my nerves got my nervous energy goes into the preparation. So circling back again to TDT and the Bianchi Peterson is a very interesting period working in Queensland. As we've mentioned under that government, as you've said, it was quite an oppressive government. What was it like for journalists at that time?
What sort of pressure did the Bianchi Peterson government push on journalists at that time? It didn't strike me at the time. But when I look back and I have to say Tony Fitzgerald, the Royal Commissioner, made this point at the end of his inquiries into the corrupt state of Queensland. He said that the fourth estate had an incredibly important role in making government accountable.
It was at that time almost non-existent opposition. So maybe we drank in some of the inhibiting nature of the place. It is very interesting to look back now and think it was actually an outsider, Chris Masters, who years later, the moonlight state. And I remember, I was long gone from Queensland by then, but I remember local journalists that are thinking, oh, well, we knew all that.
Yeah, but you didn't put it all together. Chris pulled it all together. And as we know, he had extraordinary sources within the police force. There were people who were prepared to background him, who were the whistleblowers at the time and all the rest of it.
Sometimes perhaps it does take an outsider to put a searing search light on what I'll show you. But I think things are very different now. You've got accountability in place. Queensland was the one often that it didn't have the normal checks and balances.
It didn't have another house. The other house had been abolished in the 1920s. So you didn't have public accounts committee. You didn't have sort of upper house scrutiny of bills and you didn't have all the committees that go with other houses and other states, certainly the site of the Senate in Canberra.
So it was a bit of a position that living in opposition. That's right. It was a political aberration. Yeah, for a long time.
I think I'm talking about other people here. I probably did one too many fluffy stories. I was very young, I have to say. I did the house stuff.
But you know, I mean, was that also because you were a woman and you were often assigned the fluffy bit of that? The next thing got a Cloudland ballroom and got a... You've watched a lot of tapes. Maybe, as we were just talking about preparation.
But I was thinking... Very good. I was thinking some of your other contemporaries like Kerry O'Brien and George Niggas. They were both Brisbane guys.
They both worked on TVT during the 70s, during those years. And I was wondering whether there was something about reporting on such an oppressive government. Or whether that really informed not only the approach you will talk to your work, but maybe really drive your purpose in journalism. It sort of informs you about what I'm here to do.
They have no good questions. I think it must have. I think it must have. But you know, the other person I'm just remembering is you say that.
It was a critical moment at the... Towards the end of the life of the National Party, and I think it was Michael Hern, who was the last of the National Party leaders. And Wayne Goss was the coming man. And I remember an interview that Quentin Demster did with him.
And that would have been on the local state line programme, I think. And a really important question, because it was a question that the BLCPiers could never answer. Either would not answer or could not answer, because he had no idea of what the Westminster system was. But I remember Quentin saying to Wayne Goss, Wayne Goss, what do you understand by the separation of powers?
And it's just that this has been a key point in the Fitzgerald Commission, because we have seen that the police department were basically in arm of government for God's sake. So Wayne Goss, lawyer that he was, had no trouble in answering that question. But a really important point, separation of powers. And that had not been the case in Queensland.
So I guess we would have all come up observing that. And we talked about that. There was a question I didn't answer before. I wasn't particularly aware of direct intimidation, generalist, but I've got to tell you, there was certainly direct intimidation and planting of evidence on academics and other dissidents in Queensland in those days.
There were plenty of stories that you would hear of known dissidents, if you like, to the Queensland Coppers being stopped, drugs being planted in their cars, or them being harassed in all sorts of ways. It was a pretty nasty place. Now, TDT folded in 78, I think it was. And then, did you stay in Queensland long after that?
I worked with the commercials for a short while. I traveled a bit, rejoined Nationwide in Sydney. Right. And then Nationwide in Brisbane, and I got my first anchor job in Nationwide in Adelaide.
And I was co-anchoring with Dale Spindor. And that was a terrific time actually. That was sort of 83, 84, the Hawke Labour government is elected. And it was marvellous being in Adelaide because there were some very significant senior ministers there, Mick Young, Neil Bluit.
That was a high functioning unit. And what I remember about it is we did a lot of stories that ended up being shown on the national programme. It was really off the back of the work I did in Adelaide that I got posted back to Sydney. And in that time, briefly on the national, and then they got me onto the Carlton Walsh report with the late Max Walsh and Richard Carlton.
So, I mean, it's awful to get the staging life and think, oh, the people who met the most two at certain points of your life. There you go. So the first time you ever anchored a programme was Nationwide in Adelaide. Is that right?
Yeah, I had stood in as anchor on TDT a couple of times in Brisbane. But yes, my first anchor position was Adelaide. Good evening. A special programme for, as we always, fragile relationship between the mining companies and the unions in Broken Hill was bruised again today.
The mines are closed because of previous industrial action. Why didn't you admit that there were questions about the Premier? I didn't for so many questions about the Premier. And I wasn't particularly linked.
You must have seen this document. You must have seen this document. Of course I saw that document. Maxine, in the course of an ordinary 14-hour working day, and I work in about six and a half days a week, I see a lot of documents.
But, Morgan, what are those people who sincerely believe and who are, in fact, very worried about what they see is a link between mining uranium and the nuclear almonds industry. What do you say to them? Well, it's a very clever linkage. But I don't think it's valid.
So that EP, who had the passage you quoted before, who had said, well, guess what? The beauty of, as I say, well-funded current affairs units across the country was that there were other people who would have been, actually, I think she's pretty good. I sent them a tape. I didn't need to be on.
They said, yeah, we think you and Dale, which was actually two women together, two women. And I think we did week on, week off, something like that. And then there were times when we did joint hosting or whatever. Well, nobody else in the country was doing that.
Two women together. This was the early 80s. Oh, wow. This is why I said you're a child laser.
Did you really feel you were coming into your own by that point during the nation-wide years? I mean, that was, because that in itself was a pretty groundbreaking program and really set the agenda in a lot of ways. How is your level of confidence within yourself by that point? I'm not sure.
I think there was still quite a bit of, I won't say imposter syndrome because I never suffered from that. I always thought, now, I've got to write to be here. I've got just as much space as I like, but I was certainly judging myself against others. And I thought, oh, yeah, yeah, haven't done this, haven't done that.
And then I have to say, to reference someone who's been a lifelong friend and that's Geraldine Duke, Geraldine was discovered spectacularly in Western Australia. And she got the gig as a nation-wide host in Sydney. So I think that was by about 83, 84. And I certainly, all of us just looked and thought, wow, because Geraldine had, I have to say, and I've written about this.
I wrote her testimonial in the media all the same. She had an exceptional on-air presence. I mean, the rest of us, I would say that I was developing a persona and kept developing. Geraldine was, she was made for a camera to be put in front of her.
And she was definitely the same. She was exactly the same. She was exactly the same on air as she was walking down the corridor to the studio. So it was just that, yeah, yeah.
So I could see what she had. And so it wasn't jealousy envy. It was just awe, quite frankly. It was, wow.
And she did. I mean, it is, it's hard to, and this is still the days of mainstream media. Well-funded newsrooms. Australia was exploding with a lot of things, but celebrity culture was one thing.
You know, Yana doing extremely well on 60 minutes. But Geraldine's presence on nationwide with people like Richard Carlton and Canberra, and then Maxwell's doing finance and other national issues. It suddenly looked like a program with tremendous gravitas and it did. So then of course, 1985 and nationwide was sort of rested or it folded.
And the ABC decided to launch the national talk to me about your memories, half of the national. Well, I thought the national was a great idea. The whole, well, I was just going to say the whole, up until that point you'd had these state-based current affairs programs, state-based news programs. The idea was to have a national service with state input.
So everything would come out of Sydney and you would go, you would have a unified hour from 7 to 8 p.m. So Geraldine and Richard Morecroft were the co-anchors of that. Good evening and welcome to the National this Wednesday, the 23rd of January. In the news tonight, the unemployment figures going down, insurance premiums to rise, and the long-running Medicaid.
My job was the state anchor for New South Wales. Premier Nivel Rand took on extra responsibilities today when he was sworn in as Minister for ethnic affairs. Mr Rand has all his other oil commuters battled to work today, while the unions and the state and federal governments tried to work out a solution to the rail strike. And coming up, Botany Bay has to be cleaned up after yet another oil spill.
And then you had Canberra, all the rest of it. It was, God, so much history there. It was ridiculed largely by, he led it actually, my Carlton, at that stage, my Carlton had a cracker of a media column in the Sydney Morning Herald. Prime Real Estate once a week, everybody read my Carlton's.
Again, top writer, really a survey. I was about to say, so I was like, he put the boot in, he put the boot in from the word go. I think he referred to the, referred to it having the NTT, the nightly technical terrors, the night year, the NTTs. And it took off as a line.