SA’s Frances Adamson tossed up whether to be a winemaker or an economist – and instead became the first woman to run Australian diplomacy
WITH Australia’s relations with China in a ditch, our top diplomat Frances Adamson is in the hot seat – but the South Australian with a reputation for being unflappable is right in her element.
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WHEN Frances Adamson joined the University of Adelaide boat club back in the early 1980s, freshly returned from a backpacking tour of Europe, it seemed like a fun way to get fit as she eased her way back into studying economics.
What could be better than gliding along Torrens Lake, one powerful stroke after another?
It was nothing like that.
“I got into a four with three other rank beginners like me, and we went through the absolute torture of four people trying to do the same thing at once when they have absolutely no idea how to do it,” recalls the woman who is now Australia’s most senior diplomat.“I remember we almost killed ourselves in our first races. We’d put in a huge amount of effort, for not much progress.”
But Adamson was not one for giving up. Soon the two or three training sessions a week became a dozen, and the petite student found she was fitter than she’d ever been on the way to state and national championships. She was also busy behind the scenes, working on committees learning how to take minutes, do budgets – and win support.
It paid off. In 1984 she won a tight election to become the first female captain of the boat club in its 103 year history. She was excited. “Of course I was,” Adamson says, as we sit looking out at her old training run, from the shade of Jolley’s Boathouse restaurant.
“You don’t think it’s so much about you. You just think, I’m of an age and a generation, and the world is changing, it’s a natural thing. I didn’t think I’d broken a tradition. It seemed perfectly normal at the time.”
A trend for firsts was set. Adamson, now 57, went on to become Australia’s first female ambassador to China in 2011 – and then, almost two years ago, the first to become Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
It’s a massive job, interpreting the globe for Australia’s leaders, pushing our diplomacy and exports into capitals around the planet, always being ready for that midnight crisis call that somewhere in the world, Australian citizens are in trouble.
“She’s very calm, very considered and measured. She doesn’t panic when things go wrong. She can be very firm when she needs to be, she’s very consultative,” says Dennis Richardson, who has been head of DFAT, as well as the Department of Defence and ASIO.
“I’ve often said to people, ‘There’s only one thing you need to know about Frances, and that is she’s the first female president of the rowing club at Adelaide University. And … any person who manages to pull that off is someone who’s perfectly capable of taking on the toughest jobs around.”
Especially when her other job was mother of four children.
Adamson is a proud, sixth-generation South Australian. She’s given few interviews, but sat down with SAWeekend to reflect on her career and the challenges ahead. She is engaging, thoughtful, but always in control – knowing precisely what she wants to say before she opens her mouth.
She was raised in Adelaide’s eastern suburbs by her dad Ian Adamson, a manager at Hills Industries, and her mother Jennifer Adamson – later Cashmore, her maiden name, after she remarried – who started working life as a copygirl on The Advertiser and later became a minister in the Tonkin Liberal Government.
It’s from her mother that Adamson attributes her belief in the value of public service – that “we’d had the benefit of a pretty good education and there was not an unreasonable expectation that at a certain point we’d give something back”.
It seems to have been a lesson learned. Her sister Christine is a NSW Supreme Court Judge and brother, Stuart, is an Anglican chaplain.
Adamson can’t be sure when she decided she wanted a life in the diplomatic corps. She does recall being excited by her grandmother’s tales of exotic places on annual ship journeys back to Britain. “I grew up hearing about all sorts of exotic places, Dubrovnik, Port Said, Singapore, Colombo, and I’d listened to these stories and somewhere deep in my mind I guess there was a sense of that.”
With that seed already planted, she was also keen after her schooling at Walford to go on a student exchange program that saw her spend a year in The Netherlands.
Once there she was drawn into the drama of the time when Europe was seized with fears of growing East-West tensions and the possibility of nuclear war. Suddenly, the big picture was right in front of her, and she returned with strong memories.
But competing for Adamson’s future was another suitor. After she completed her economics degree, she was tempted to head to Roseworthy Agricultural College and begin a Bachelor of Applied Sciences and Oenology and become a winemaker. It was a fork in the road, and she almost took it.
“While I was at university I had a part-time job at The Cork and Cleaver in Glenunga,” she says. “Some of the restaurant customers, if they had some wine in the bottle after they finished, they’d say ‘here you try this’, and occasionally it would be a bottle of Grange Hermitage. And very occasionally … I remember in 1983 or 4 I made $15 in tips at lunchtime – a lot of money – and that allowed me to buy from the bottle shop on Pulteney St a bottle of Grange Hermitage.
“I did some formal wine tasting classes … I just got interested in wine. I worked part-time at a winery in the Barossa at the weekend. When I moved to Canberra I had 48 tasting glasses, and six dozen bottles of wine; and by the end of my first year they were all drunk by my trainee course and colleagues.”
Economics won out thanks to a newspaper advertisement she still has at home. It was 1984, and the Hawke-Keating government had been tearing up Australia’s economic playbook, floating the dollar, allowing in foreign banks. For economists it was an exciting time – and the government was keen to hire graduates in Canberra.
Adamson was wooed by Treasury and Foreign Affairs. She took the latter and within a year was learning how to speak Chinese (Mandarin) as she prepared to head off to Hong Kong, with a brief to keep an eye on economic developments in China.
Asia hadn’t been her first choice. She’d put in for Paris and missed out. But she came to quickly see Asia was exciting, and the surprises started even before she reached Hong Kong.
“I stopped in Singapore on the way,” she recalls. “It was amazing to see this Asian city and to have my first mango. They didn’t come down to South Australia from Queensland in those days. And in the beginning I didn’t know what it was. And then I got to Hong Kong and the deputy consul general took me to lunch on my first day at a Sichuan restaurant, so I had spicy food I’d never encountered before. I was told to watch out for the chillies, but I thought chillies were bright red, saw this black thing and the roof of my mouth was blown off.”
From Hong Kong she watched the rise of China’s economy – and in 1989, the dramatic events at the doomed democracy uprising at Tiananmen Square. But China wasn’t the only thing on her mind.
In Hong Kong she met and fell in love with British diplomat Rod Bunten. But their decision to marry carried the prospect of trouble, since they worked for different countries – albeit it two that were historically close, and shared intelligence information. Adamson says her department was relaxed about the impending nuptials. “I got a message back six months before the wedding, ‘congratulations, by all means, get on with it’,” she says. “But Rod had to have intervention from the Governor of Hong Kong the week before the wedding to actually get approval to do it. It was a fine run thing from his side. And then we had to manage joint careers.”
When you speak with Adamson about her life and career it’s obvious that one of her strengths is discipline and planning. There’s just no way she could have fitted everything in otherwise. “We had a plan as part of the negotiations – you could say the pre-nuptial agreement – on how we do this,” she says.
They wanted to have it all – twin careers and kids. “Rod would take leave and come with me to Australia for a year; I’d then try to get a posting in the UK and he’d try to get a posting in Australia; we’d both try to get a posting in a third country,” she says. “There was never any certainty it would work.”
They managed it, with maternity leave and help from the Australian department with part-time work for her. But at times, she admits, “I felt like I was staring into the abyss. There were times when it was very hard, you were exhausted, getting up in the middle of the night to feed the baby and wondering how it was all going to work.”
Somehow it did. A British nanny, Victoria, was found, and she’s still a firm family friend. Without her, she muses, they may have stopped at two children rather than four – Claire (who worked until recently for Port Adelaide football club on its engagement with China), Matthew, Katherine and Sophie.
“But being an economist, there’s a break-even point,” she says. “Once you had three children you were definitely in the black as far as a nanny versus any other form of childcare was concerned. And then I started thinking about economies of scale. If you’ve got four, the older ones can look after the younger ones. It just worked for us, it wouldn’t work for everyone.”
Adamson says a lot of women don’t realise that if they are valued at work, they’ve got the leverage to set out the conditions before taking a job. In her case, when Labor’s foreign and later defence minister Stephen Smith asked her to become his chief of staff in 2009, she agreed. But only if she didn’t have to travel often to his Perth electorate or overseas – and could be out of the office by 7pm when parliament wasn’t sitting, so she could be home with her family for dinner.
“I thought I’d really like to do this, but I’ve got four children, six to 16, and heavy responsibilities,” she says. “I wanted to know what would make it possible. I went through them and he agreed and stuck with it.
“Of course it’s a problem unless you find a way of dealing with it,” she says of work-life balance struggles. “I pretty quickly came to the conclusion that it wasn’t going to help anyone – certainly not me – if I felt guilty about home when I was at work, and worried about work when I was at home.
“You’ve got to be reasonably organised. But there’s nothing like knowing there’s a young child waiting for you at home to concentrate the mind to get through the most important things. I breastfed each of the children for good long periods of time and in my mind that was probably the thing: I’m doing what’s best for them.”
At times, doing that has meant putting the kids first – even when she was Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s foreign policy adviser. Yes, she confirms, there was a time when one of her daughters rang and she had to interrupt Turnbull: “Sorry Prime Minister, but my daughter is on the phone.” She says she can’t remember which daughter it was, but they “all take credit”.
Smith first became aware of her talents when she was deputy High Commissioner in the UK. He was so impressed he thought she could become the next High Commissioner – but she told him she’d been in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and “I’m really keen on China”.
The job of ambassador to China needed prime ministerial approval – from Kevin Rudd, himself a Mandarin speaker and former junior diplomat in Beijing.
Smith recounts what happened next: “Kevin says ‘yep, it all looks fine, Frances looks fine. I don’t know her but I know of her reputation. I just want to satisfy myself the language is okay so Stephen, get her to come around’. I say to Frances, ‘you’ve got to go around and see the prime minister’. She says ‘yes, okay fine’. I say, ‘Frances, this is a conversation that will be conducted wholly in Mandarin’. She says, ‘I understand’.
“I said, ‘Frances, do me, and yourself, a favour’. She says, ‘Minister what’s that?’ I said, ‘At some stage Frances, could you just make a deliberate mistake that Kevin could correct? And with a knowing look she says, ‘Yes minister, I understand’.”
Smith laughs. “So, one had to have first class Mandarin, but not necessarily as good as the prime minister. The fact she went on to advise Turnbull showed she was a classic impartial, objective, professional, frank and fearless commonwealth officer.”
Adamson says the job means you’ve got to be calm under pressure, quick witted, and be able communicate quickly and accurately. You need stamina, resilience and the ability to see things from multiple points of view.
“You’ve got to be very, very calm,” she says. “I mean, I don’t lose my cool. And I’d probably regard it as a failing if I ever did. You’ve always got to read a situation, respond to it. Things go wrong; of course they go wrong from time to time. You acknowledge it, you get on with it; you fix it. It can be very demanding and rugged; you also build, over the years, resilience. You have to. And, at the end of the day, I’m lucky to go home to a family who are hugely supportive of what I do and even if I can’t talk about what I’ve been doing, they will rally around.”
The world changed in the 1980s, with new laws on sex discrimination and quality, which helped talented women like Adamson to make their mark.
Now there’s more change afoot, and again she is in the thick of it as the diplomat in charge of a department that employs more than 6000 people, about half of them in 115 posts around the world.
This time the change is geopolitical, and China is the driver. On that point, Adamson is well placed, with 13 years from her 33 in the job reporting there – in Hong Kong from 1986-90, Taiwan 2001-2005 and Beijing 2011-15.
Adamson sees a challenging time ahead. She oversaw a White Paper on foreign policy, released last November, setting out an assessment of the risks and opportunities over the next decade. She hopes it will be what she’s most proud of – but it’s too early to tell.
The transformation it analyses is enormous. China is forecast to double its economic output to more than $40 trillion by 2030, dwarfing the US on $24t. India and Indonesia will more than double to almost $21t, and $5.5t, respectively. Indonesia may be in the world’s top 10 economies by 2030 (and top four by 2050). By comparison, Australia will grow by less than a third to $1.7t in 2030.
Adamson can recall the time when China was just stirring as an economic giant.
“I first went to Beijing in 1987 and the memories of that time … are vast numbers of people on bicycles, very few cars, and sameness in colours, navies, khakis, black; piles of cabbages on street corners; coal- burning stoves; dusty,” she says.
“And just extraordinary achievements since then – lifting literally hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, the changes to the Shanghai skyline, all down the coast, absolutely remarkable. The advance of high-speed trains across the country. So that’s been truly remarkable. So is the impact of Chinese on the world. Not so common to see Chinese travelling independently in the world in those days, now 120m Chinese a year are travelling internationally, and 200m by 2020.”
But there are less obvious changes too, as China seeks to sway others to its advantage.
The Sam Dastyari affair raised the issue of attempts to influence Australian politics, while Adamson herself provoked the ire of Beijing with her public call on Chinese university students here to stop spreading propaganda and gagging views they disagreed with.
Now China’s president Xi Jinping, who runs the military, the communist party, and the country, has managed to secure the removal of a two-term limit on his presidency. Australia now faces the challenge of balancing relations between its biggest economic partner China (which has ambitions to become the biggest military power in Asia), while maintaining strong support for the US (our key but currently unpredictable security partner) at a time when the two are often at loggerheads from trade to military issues.
Adamson has met Xi eight or nine times. He’s got a “slightly avuncular style, comfortable in his own skin, and he gives the appearance of calm and interest, but absolutely across his brief,” she says.
Despite the current troubles, she believes relations will work out well in the end, even though she recently felt Beijing’s cold shoulder, when it “deferred” – others have said cancelled – two trips she’d planned there.
“I’ve always been pretty much of an optimist,” she says of China’s growth. “I can certainly see a way in which this could all work extremely well. There are others who are perhaps less optimistic. I think there’s a huge amount of what we have in common, what the Chinese would call mutual interest and mutual benefit.”
She says the White Paper forecasts changes in our region in the next decade. “There’s uncertainty, there’s shifting economic weight from west to east, and shifting strategic weight too. What we most want is a peaceful, stable region, which is also prosperous, and the two things go hand-in-hand.”
China’s approach sets the tone. It’s already building military bases on islands to claim more control over important shipping lanes.
As it grows, “it’s also taking on a bigger role, it’s growing in power, and big powers have the potential to influence smaller countries,” she says. Australia is already concerned about that influence among the South Pacific nations.
One thing that the White Paper and Adamson worry about is “coercion” by bigger powers like China to bend lesser nations to their will.
“It’s not just the peaceful region we’re interested in, it’s the character of the peace of the region,” she says. “And what we most want is for China to emerge into the region in a way that actually increases security and prosperity. There’s a question around that you know the next decade, in particular, will help us answer.”
On the upside, the trade and tourism opportunities are going to be huge, as the region becomes home to 60 per cent of the world’s middle class, or 2.8b people by 2025.
But the rising wealth of our neighbours also means their capacity to buy more sophisticated military equipment that diminishes Australia’s longstanding technological edge also grows.
As a medium-sized power Australia can’t influence world affairs to any great degree. We want a world governed by rules which make conflict less likely, support free and fair trade, and settle disputes by international law.
Can Australia influence China’s approach? Adamson says we’re a strong partner and we “want to continue a conversation with the Chinese because we want to both encourage them, but I think it’s also incumbent on us to be quite open, as we have been in the White Paper, about what it’s going to take for that (security and prosperity) to happen. And that means if there are disputes in the region, then we want them to be settled peacefully and in accord with international law …”
And the biggest danger for Australia in the uncertain times ahead? Is it that we’ll be dwarfed by the growing economies to our north? No, says Secretary Adamson.
“It’s that we fail to recognise and take advantage of the opportunities.”
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