Lord Mayor of Adelaide Jane Lomax-Smith shares with SA Weekend on her life-defining moment

Jane Lomax-Smith shares the moment her life changed forever, revealing how she was brought up to believe that if there was a problem in life, there was also a solution.

Lord Mayor of Adelaide, Jane Lomax-Smith poses for a photograph at Adelaide Town Hall, Adelaide. NCA NewsWire / David Mariuz

Adelaide Lord Mayor Jane Lomax-Smith was aged 27 when she moved from London to Australia for a job. Despite initial reluctance due to having never heard of Adelaide, she was eventually persuaded by its cultural and environmental aspects.

I always knew I wanted to be a pathologist.

I grew up in the East End of London and attended a very competitive grammar school. It was a time when very few people went to university, but I got a place in medical school.

I went to the London Hospital, in Whitechapel – that’s in the middle of the Jack the Ripper territory and Call the Midwife area. I went there because it was the only hospital I had heard of, basically.

I used to earn extra money teaching embryology and histology, so I was clearly fascinated by anatomy. I’d been doing pathology training for a few years when a man, who’d become a Professor of Pathology at Adelaide University, came to the London Hospital and said he needed some professors to teach. He knew I’d taught and offered me a job.

I’d never heard of Adelaide. And of course, I grew up in London, so the thought of leaving London was almost unthinkable.

I spoke to my mother and she said she thought Adelaide was somewhere between Melbourne and Sydney, it was maybe in South Australia, which was a better idea than I had.

I said ‘no’. I really wasn’t interested.

He said, ‘Actually Jane, you wouldn’t like Australia, it’s a terrible redneck country but Adelaide is different. It’s the Renaissance capital of the Southern Hemisphere’.

He said there’s a man there called Don Dunstan and he listed environmental protection, planning laws, social change, the festival, culture, restaurants and wine. He actually made it sound like the Renaissance capital. And I thought, ‘It sounds OK, they’re paying my fare. Why not?’

And it changed my life, coming here.

Lord Mayor Candidate Jane Lomax-Smith shares with SA Weekend her life-defining moments. Picture: Morgan Sette

I was initially a little upset about the weather, because I arrived in November and I only had summer clothes and strappy sandals. It rained for three weeks. I almost got trench foot.

I was constantly wet and grumpy. I thought they lied about the weather, but then it turned around and it was just heaven.

The deal was to stay for at least a year or pay the airfare back. It was a festival year in Adelaide and the festival was so rich and so tantalising, I soon realised that there was actually more happening here than you could feasibly manage in one year. There was so much going on. There was no shortage of cultural life, the landscapes, the vistas, the beaches and the opportunity to play sport.

The university gave me every opportunity, it was most generous and conscious of expanding my experience.

I did a lot of teaching, but they gave me the opportunity to do research in anything I wanted to do. I had the opportunity of keeping my hand in Clinical Pathology.

Over time, they allowed me to do a PhD, and they sponsored me to go to Boston, in the US. They were incredibly tremendous to me. They were very good employers.

I’ve actually changed continents six times, butby the time I was married and I had children, I realised this was the best place in the world to bring up children.

It never occurred to me that I would go into politics. I had always been involved in public life, my mother had been very committed to community service. She was forever volunteering to do things. It was always made clear that, because I had skills, I should give back. So I used to teach swimming at the local orphanage and help make lunches for pensioners. If I moaned about anything ... you were never allowed to say ‘someone should sort this out’. It was always ‘well, why don’t you?’

I was brought up to think that if there was a problem you should have a go at solving it.

With SA politician Mike Rann back in 2022, Lomax-Smith admits to changing careers many times over her life.

I’ve changed careers many times – I’ve gone from being a clinical pathologist, to research, running a laboratory, teaching, running my own practice and getting into local government.

What’s really interesting about doing these things is you pick up different skills. By being a teacher in a university, it meant when I went into local government and had to speak publicly, I was never scared.

I had 20 contact hours a week, speaking to 120 medical students, and you learn to read the room and work out when they’ve stopped listening. And that’s a core skill.

I spent 30 years as a pathologist. I only stopped when I went into parliament and, for me, science has really been integral in public life.

You have to understand facts, numbers, statistics and data, because unless you are driven by data and evidence, you waste other people’s money. That’s helped me in public life.

In terms of local government, I was fascinated by nerdy things like landfill, water contamination, stormwater management and planning rules. I also learned a lot about budgeting. Even though I’d ran small departments in England, it wasn’t until I became involved in local government that I really understood budgeting, cash flow and asset management.

So then, when I started my own business, I was actually helped by that experience. So each of the weird things I’ve done have helped me in my next activities. I’ve been blessed.