Being Julia: The story behind the PM in waiting

PUNCTUATION, politics and the knack of catching tadpoles . . . Julia Gillard reveals what she learnt during her childhood in Adelaide.

PUNCTUATION, politics and the knack of catching tadpoles . . . Julia Gillard reveals what she learnt during her childhood in Adelaide.

JULIA Gillard is a grammar obsessive. A serious nut. What else can you say about someone who has her own grammar chant? Or someone who draws cats with hats on correspondence with grammatical errors?

Maybe it's an insight into the kind of well-ordered mind that it takes to become the nation's first female Deputy Prime Minister and perhaps the best-performed member of the first Federal Labor Government in 11 years.

Of course, she could just be a little strange.

The nation can thank Mitcham Primary School and a teacher called Mr Crowe for the Deputy Prime Minister's and Minister for Education's predilection for apostrophes.

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The story of the 47-year-old Gillard does not begin and will probably not end in Adelaide, but a signifi cant portion of her formative years and experiences were in South Australia. Her desire to take on the education portfolio is partly driven by her experiences at Mitcham Primary and Unley High schools. Her interest in industrial relations started with her unionist parents.

Gillard's ascent started with the Student Representative Council at Unley High and then student politics at the University of Adelaide. She has lived in Melbourne since moving there at age 20 to become vice-president of the Australian Union of Students, but says Adelaide still feels like home. Her parents, sister, niece and nephew live here.

It's been a remarkable journey and one that still shocks her sister Alison. Julia was "quiet and timid" when growing up, says her older sibling, No longer.

The once-shy red-haired girl in pigtails has a different demeanour today. She loves a stoush and says girls are just as ready for the argy-bargy of politics as blokes. But the memories of Adelaide schooldays and the lessons learnt remain strong and their influence is obvious.

She lists her pet grammar hates with a certain relish.

"I am a complete apostrophe nut. The misplacement of commas. The modern need to put a comma before the word and in every sentence. What is going on with that? Dashes. Why does one need dashes in a properly constructed sentence? Sentences that start with and. An inability to work out how to use its and it's."

It gets worse. Working for Melbourne law firm Slater & Gordon she instituted a grammar chant. "I used to have them all chanting 'one cat's hat, two cats' hats.

Where do the apostrophes go?' "If I got a letter with it done wrong I would draw a cat with a hat at the bottom in the hope it would come back right the next time. They all thought I was kind of strange." Indeed.

If there is something of the obsessive in Gillard it's probably not surprising. She has one of the largest workloads in government as minister for both education and industrial relations. If that isn't enough, she was acting Prime Minister for 80 days in 2008 while Kevin Rudd was overseas or on leave.

The day we meet she faces up to a morning press conference fielding questions about the Israeli-Hamas conflict, credit card fraud in the Defence Forces, Aboriginal literacy, youth drinking, union dissatisfaction with new industrial relations laws and the carbon pollution reduction scheme.

She assures me this is a quiet day.

The amount of information the Gillard brain has to process each day is staggering. Briefings, cabinet papers, meeting notes. It's a mountain of paper.

Every morning she will also have to absorb the Government's "Round the World" briefing which has an explanation and suggested answer for every question she is likely to face.

In the past year Gillard has shepherded through parliament massive changes in both education and industrial relations and done it in a style that marked her as one of the government's most formidable performers.

She clearly loves the theatre of question time.

There is often a broad smile when she approaches the despatch box to rip into some real or imagined Liberal calumny. And she knows how to strike deep.

Her closing performance in Question Time last year was emblematic. Stirring the Opposition with news of a Batman remake starring Malcolm Turnbull as Bruce Wayne, Christopher Pyne as the Boy Wonder and Julie Bishop as Catwoman, it was the kind of rabblerousing performance that backbenchers love.

But, as with most of Gillard's work, it involved preparation.

Her office developed the scenario for the best part of a week before it was delivered in the chamber on the last sitting day of the year.

It is with undisguised fondness that Gillard recalls her Adelaide childhood. We meet for lunch at Stamps restaurant in Mitcham, not far from where she grew up. Nearby is the family home in Kingswood, her primary and high schools, and Brown Hill Creek where Gillard would spend whole days in the holidays.

Brown Hill Creek is clearly a special spot, and the place she nominates to have her picture taken for SA Weekend.

Gillard grew up in a close and loving family unit, as might be expected from British migrants who arrived in Adelaide knowing only two other people - and they were fellow passengers they met on the boat coming over. The Gillards were part of a great wave of postWorld War II migrants. They were among the million "ten pound Poms" who arrived in Australia between 1945 and 1972 to help populate a vast continent and help build its future.

Gillard was born in the town of Barry in south Wales but the family left because the young Julia suffered bronchial pneumonia and in the cold and wet climate of Wales risked regular chest infections.

Her first memories are as a four year old in the migrant hostel at Pennington, where she and her parents, John and Moira, and older sister Alison, arrived in May, 1966.

Gillard marvels at the bravery of her parents in taking such a decision: setting out for an unknown land, deserting family and friends and familiarity to start again.

The Gillards' new home was never meant to be Adelaide, either. Melbourne was first choice until a chance meeting aboard the ship with an Adelaide couple from Wales changed their destiny.

"So they changed their destination to Adelaide," Gillard says. "They were just picking names off a map, they didn't really have any image of what the individual cities would be like."

It's kind of fun to imagine young Julia in Adelaide, making sandwiches with her sister, packing a bag and setting out for a day exploring in Brown Hill Creek to catch tadpoles with Alison and friends Helen and Angela.

The four would often walk from the Gillards' Truro Ave home and be gone for the day. "You look back on it now and think there is no way in the world you would let four young girls that age go to a park that distant from home for a whole day," she says.

"We never had any trouble, not once. We got caught in this really bad thunderstorm once, we clambered to this hill just behind Brown Hill Creek ... and we got muddy and wet and cold and all the rest of it. This man said 'do you girls need a lift home?' We said 'oh yeah', and of course he dropped us off home. I'm not too sure how all that adds up in the city of the Beaumont children (the three disappeared without trace on Australia Day, 1966, from Glenelg), but it was a more innocent age."

It's from this time Gillard formed her basic values and can be seen most obviously in how she wants to shape the nation's education system. Truro Ave was the centre of a life that spread out to the nearby Mitcham Demonstration School (now Mitcham Primary) and then Unley High.

"I liked school," she says. "I was a quiet kid, a good kid, a well-behaved kid. So much of life has changed.

You were bloody terrified of your teachers when I was growing up. The concept of being routinely naughty is not something that would have occurred to you. Terror was instilled into our hearts by teachers in those days."

What Gillard takes from her schooldays is the value of getting a basic education. There's a slightly messianic zeal in her voice when discussing what needs to change. Yet, perversely, as Federal Education Minister she probably wields less power than some of her state counterparts, or even some state teachers' unions, who run the system. But she has one big advantage: a big bucket of money.

"We went to state schools. I think they were very vigorous in teaching the basics to people. I am not romanticising the past, I am not suggesting no one failed, or no one got stigmatised, or excluded for the wrong reasons," she says. "I do think our teachers were very rigorous in making sure kids succeeded in the basics.

I think we have lost some of that rigour and I think it's important that some of that rigour is there."

The Rudd Government will bring in a national curriculum, focusing on the building blocks of education, which will be written by independent experts. It has mandated greater transparency in the education system, requiring the states to publish comparable results for schools.

It's strongly opposed by some teachers and state ministers, but Gillard says "shining a light on a problem is the best way to get it solved".

"I am really strong on people getting a good grounding in basic education. If you can't write, you can't spell, you can't count, you can't multiply then it's just fantasyland to think you are going to get the world of higher learning." Gillard says hers was not an overtly political household. Her parents were not members of the Labor Party but they "barracked for Labor". They also instilled a sense of social justice and an interest in current affairs. Her father John, a shift-working psychiatric nurse, was "outraged" by the dismissal of Gough Whitlam's Labor government in 1975. A year later, just 15, Gillard joined the ALP.

Sister Alison is still surprised at the way things turned out. Julia was "quiet and timid" and the "last person in the universe" she thought would go into politics. Julia must have inherited her father's love of it, she thinks.

"The three of us would be in the lounge room watching the television; he would sit in the kitchen, never watching television," Alison says. "He would always have parliament on the radio. He loved Australian politics and was involved in his union. I don't know whether she absorbed it by osmosis; she never seemed that interested in it around the home."

Gillard believes it is from her father that she inherited the inner strength to cope with life at the top of the political tree. He is still an active presence in her political life.

"Dad loves a chat about politics so whenever I ring them I get the value of his opinions," she says. "One of the many great things about family is that they have known you too long for you to be anything other than just you.

I think that works for you in the best of times and probably works for you in the worst of times as well."

Listening to Gillard talk about her parents you sense where some of her individuality and toughness originates.

One example is how they ended up in Kingswood.

"They are quite canny people," she says. "The whole system was kind of geared up to funnel people to Elizabeth, trying to develop that as a satellite city, and Mum and Dad thought to themselves 'if they are herding people one way it actually makes sense to go the other'. Go against the flow."

Gillard was elected at the "GST election" of 1998 when Kim Beazley lost to John Howard. She took the Melbourne seat of Lalor, succeeding former Hawke government minister and quiz show king Barry Jones.

Her rise through the ALP was swift. She won her first shadow cabinet position (population and immigration spokeswoman) in 2001, was shadow minister for health for three years, and then took on education and industrial relations. She emerged strongly from a period of chaos and uncertainty in the ALP which put up Simon Crean, Mark Latham and Kim Beazley as leaders before Rudd took control.

Gillard has been painted by her opponents as a raging leftie, a heartless ideologue who's out of touch with Australia because she is childless and never married.

There also are a few in Labor who believe that. She has worn more than most in the mud-slinging that political battle routinely brings. Then there is that voice and that hair. Both seemed for a while to become almost a national obsession. She admits with some relief that the interest in her hair has receded.

Over lunch a different Gillard emerges. She laughs a lot, particularly at herself, and seems driven to be more than just a cardboard cut-out of a politician. Even that famous sandpaper voice seems a little softer. She retains a sense of herself amid the madness that her life entails, and brushes off the attack from Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan that she was unfit to lead the nation because she was "deliberately barren". Heffernan later apologised. Gillard says the controversy had no effect on her.

"I think obviously people are interested in you, and the fact I haven't got kids. I don't get the sense it interests them in an adverse way. The Bill Heffernan 'barren stuff' I didn't worry about one way or the other.

"People can be very generous during those times.

I was walking in (the Melbourne suburb of) Altona, a woman went past and wound her window down in the car and yelled out 'if you need kids you can have mine'.

She had a back seat full of kids. I think she meant for keeps as well.

"It can only hurt you privately if you let it. I have always been really clear in my head that you can't let the media perception of who you are define your perception of who you are."

One of the things that can rub her up the wrong way is any suggestion women can't be just as competitive and bloody-minded as men in politics. "Certainly five or 10 years ago people would have the view 'if only there were more women in politics somehow it would be a less adversarial, more caring and sharing environment'.

I have always thought that was bloody nonsense. One of the things I have always wanted to show is that it doesn't matter whether you are a man or a woman, you can thrive in an adversarial environment. This kind of image that somehow we are too gentle for it, I resent that."

Eventually, she believes, it will be totally unremarkable whether a politician is female or male and the only thing that matters is how well they can do the job. Gillard says politicians are fair game regardless of gender. Australians, she says, have a healthy lack of deference when it comes to their political leaders.

"The quintessential example," she recalls. "At a shopping centre in Hopper's Crossing (I was) handing out stuff. I am standing next to a clapperboard with my korflute (an election poster) on it with a studio shot, handing out stuff. This old guy comes out of the supermarket, looks at me, looks at the korflute, looks at me, looks at the korflute, then turns back to me and says:

'taken on a good day wasn't it love?' "I said, 'and you'd be bloody Robert Redford would you mate?' He goes, 'Oh, I vote for you', and I said, 'you'd bloody better after that'."

All this helps keep a sense of reality in what can be an unreal world. Parliament House in Canberra exists as its own universe. Reality has to fight its way in. In some ways it must help that partner Tim Mathieson, by trade a hairdresser, comes from a completely different background. But partners, no matter the background, soon get sucked into the political whirlpool and Gillard says last year's mini-storm surrounding Mathieson's appointment as a volunteer men's health ambassador was perplexing.

"Even some of the media professionals we have in and around government were a bit surprised by how big that story got for a position that is an honorary position," she says.

But what it does do is reinforce the sanctity of the couple's private time. Gillard estimates she would spend two nights a week in her own bed.

"One of the things about being in the public eye is that your private space becomes even more precious. Tim is happy to hang out in Altona and we'll watch a film, just ordinary things, to get a bit of time together."

The likelihood is that time together will be further squeezed as the 2010 election looms. But Gillard is not looking too far ahead. She calmly deflects a question about whether she would ever be interested in the top position, insisting deputy is "a very, very good job".

Anyway, she already has a future planned out with her true calling at its centre: grammar.

"I am going to be the kind of 80-year-old who gets the newspaper and dashes off a letter to the editor 'in respect of the misuse of an apostrophe in the third line of your lead story'. And they will go, 'there's that nutty lady who writes in all the time'. I am going to be one of those. I can feel it coming on."