‘I’m here with my mate’: The night Sussan Ley pulled a gun on a menacing man

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley has revealed she pulled out a semi-automatic rifle as a man threatened her while she was camping on a dark country road years ago.

In a glossy magazine profile in The Australian Women’s Weekly that touches on her youth and personal life, Ley also spoke about her late grandfather’s battle with bipolar disorder and how it created a difficult childhood for her mother, who went on to become a mental health nurse.

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley in the August issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.Credit: Alana Landsberry

Ley’s willingness to speak about her past contrasts with previous Liberal Party leader Peter Dutton, who guarded his family’s privacy closely, which allowed his opponents to define his political image.

Ley said the incident when she was threatened by a motorbike rider happened while she was moving to become an aerial stock musterer. She was driving from her Sydney flat to Thargomindah – a town about 1000 kilometres inland from Brisbane.

On the road between Nyngan and Narromine in central NSW, Ley had pulled over for the night and set up her swag before a motorbike drove over.

“The person lifted the visor on their helmet and said, ‘Ah, you’re here all by yourself, are you?’ ” she said.

Ley said she then pulled out a semi-automatic rifle, bought legally from a Queanbeyan gun shop just outside Canberra, and told the rider: “I’m here with my tall skinny mate,” attributing the line to an unidentified movie from US action star Clint Eastwood.

While the gun was not loaded, Ley said it was a successful deterrent.

“The gun was literally lying down the side of the sleeping bag, so I was able to pick it up and wave it in the general direction of this individual. I think my hands were shaking so badly,” she said.

“He was gone like that.”

Ley said she drove non-stop to Thargomindah with her “heart pounding” after the incident.

Ley spoke about understanding the pain of coercive control that women have experienced and pledged to fight domestic violence during her first address to the National Press Club in June.

Also in the magazine profile, Ley said her mother, Angela Braybrooks, who died just after Ley became opposition leader in May, grew up with a father who was an English country vicar and suffered from bipolar disorder.

“Nobody knew that’s what it was, so she had a very difficult childhood,” she said.

Ley’s grandmother tried to leave her husband twice, but he threatened suicide, so she came back. As Braybrooks grew up and became a mental health nurse, she realised how unwell her father had been.

“She sort of forgave him,” Ley said of her mother.

Ley said that when she contested for the Liberal leadership after the party’s election defeat, she had hardly slept because of her mother’s ill health. The opposition leader said she had a video call with her mother about running for the position.

“I was able to have that final conversation with her,” she said. “I thought it might be my last – it pretty much was the last one where she was able to really hear what I was saying. And she couldn’t really talk, but she heard what I said.

“I hadn’t really had any sleep because of my Mum … I’d woken up and the cumulative toll of my mother’s illness and the intensity of the campaign, and then putting your hand up for leadership – obviously, it was fairly intense.”

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