Sallyanne Atkinson: Former lord mayor releases autobiography
THERE were several people, including her ex husband, who were rather nervous when former Brisbane lord mayor Sallyanne Atkinson said her long-awaited autobiography was about to be released.
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The first question to ask former Brisbane lord mayor Sallyanne Atkinson about her highly anticipated autobiography is in the realm of the bleeding obvious. Did she write it? Often with celebrity and political autobiographies (she prefers that genre term) or memoirs there is a ghost writer, sometimes an uncredited one. Did Atkinson, like late English author Barbara Cartland, simply recline on a divan and dictate her life story?
Not at all. No Job For A Woman, published by University of Queensland Press (UQP) and out on Wednesday, is all her own work, with a little help from her editors. As a former journalist Atkinson, 74, was determined her story would be, well, hers. “People keep asking me if I wrote it,” she says with a touch of frustration. “The answer is, yes, of course, but I make no great claims about it. It’s not a great work of literature. It’s just the story of my life.”
Sallyanne Atkinson, who was lord mayor of Brisbane from 1985 to 1991 after six years as an alderman, is a Queensland icon, right up there with Wally Lewis, Stefan and the Big Pineapple. In what was once regarded as a backward state she has been a relatively progressive figure, a woman who broke the glass ceiling and championed grassroots causes. She would have made a great Labor figure except for the fact that, well, she’s a Tory. But as a Liberal, she is more to the centre than the right.
Now, after a brilliant career in and out of politics, Atkinson, who is still busy (she’s chairman of the Museum of Brisbane and is on several other boards), has taken the time to reflect, at length, although her book could have been longer. No Job For A Woman (something her grandfather said when she announced she wanted to be a journalist) was judiciously edited from a hefty manuscript. Once Atkinson got writing she was on a roll, enjoying herself, and constantly finding correspondence or historical material to add along the way. She was a little miffed that so much was cut out but explains that, as a former journalist, she understands.
“Unfortunately the first editor cut out many of my ancestors,” Atkinson says. “There was a lot more there and there’s a lot more to come.” She hints that more books may be in the pipeline, books that may deal in more depth with certain aspects of her story – her ancestry, the colonial childhood in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), her time in City Hall – as there’s plenty of material that has only been touched on in her book. The next question people will want to ask before reading it is how much dirt is in the book? One can imagine enemies (she must have some) and friends alike combing the index to see if they made the cut and, if they did, what she has had to say about them. Such memoirs often contain sensational revelations, but Atkinson shakes her head and says she hasn’t dished the dirt for a very good reason.
“There’s too much dirt to dish,” she jokes as we wiggle into a booth at Brisbane’s Shingle Inn City Hall.
We’re in familiar surroundings here, although things are somewhat askew. The interior of the historic cafe is intact but the location is new. The Shingle Inn used to be in Edward St, of course, and it’s a place that Atkinson frequented. It’s one of her nostalgic touchstones and was almost the scene of the birth of her first child, Nicola. On a hot February day in 1965, a heavily pregnant Atkinson had gone to lunch at the Shingle Inn with her then-husband Leigh’s mother, Edna, and grandmother.
So I went into town, all dressed up. Those were the days when being married meant you always wore a hat and gloves to town. I must have been clutching the table in pain because Mrs Atkinson said, ‘You’re in labour’, and whisked me out the door, into a taxi, and up to the doctor at Wickham Terrace (in Spring Hill). Then it was straight over to the Mater Mothers’ (South Brisbane) with Leigh’s mother shrieking at the taxi driver, ‘If this girl gives birth in this cab it’ll be your fault’.
She arrived at the hospital still dressed for lunch and everything worked out for the best with Nicola, who is now 51, being born six hours later.
Her ex-husband Leigh Atkinson (they were divorced in 1995), a respected surgeon, is one of the main characters in the book and he’s one of several people who were apparently nervous when news got out she was writing a memoir.
“We don’t speak but we do nod politely at family gatherings,” Atkinson says. “I think he was concerned about the book but I have been kind to him.”
After all, they have five children together – Nicola, Damien, 50, Eloise, 49, Genevieve, 46, Stephanie, 42 – and there are 14 grandchildren, so cordiality is sensible.
But though Atkinson doesn’t dish the dirt, she does reveal things in the book we didn’t previously know … things about her personal and public life. And she does write quite candidly about her divorce.
One of the major differences between Leigh and me was what has served us well in our careers – I was a risk-taker, and he was not, as befits a neurosurgeon. For each of us the other was not the person we most enjoyed being with. We were disconnected, and I don’t believe we even really liked each other.
Atkinson has had other relationships since then, although she is not in one now, and Leigh Atkinson remarried some years ago.
As far as revelations go, that’s probably as racy as it gets although there are other interesting scoops, including the fact her catastrophic electoral defeat, when she was tossed out of office by Jim Soorley in 1991, could have been avoided.
“I have written in the book about wanting to stand down the year before,” Atkinson says. “That has never been spoken of in public before. Nobody knew. I could have saved myself a lot of grief.” She and her husband were reconciled at the time after an earlier split. It was 1990, and she wanted to try to get her marriage to work, so decided to step down as lord mayor.
I typed a statement of my intention to stand down. I said I felt I had made the changes needed for the good government of the city and put in train the necessary reforms for the future. I called my media advisers into my office in City Hall on a weekend to discuss the best ways of making an announcement, and also told my plan to Phil Denman, the deputy mayor, and Bill Everingham, the Liberal Party state president. They reacted very differently. Phil, who was almost at retirement age, said he would be ready to run himself. Bill was aghast at the suggestion of my leaving and said without me there we would lose City Hall.
She stayed, they lost, and the rest is, as they say, history.
For wonks, there’s interesting political content in the book but told in a colourful, conversational style because she “didn’t want to write a political memoir”. Atkinson says she wanted to show a life lived in politics but also wanted to write a story that set the record straight, a book about a woman making it in a man’s world.
Autobiography is a tricky business, unless one has had an interesting life. Luckily Atkinson has. Her early years, when she was still Sallyanne Kerr, one of four daughters to Ruth and Terry Kerr, the family lived in Ceylon and that episode makes for fascinating reading. In fact some of the initial passages are like something from a novel by W. Somerset Maugham, tales of slow boats to Ceylon and of the privileged life of a colonial in the days of empire.
When we arrived in Colombo we moved straight into the Grand Oriental Hotel, known as the GOH. Bella Sidney Woolf, sister of Leonard, had observed in 1905, ‘If you waited long enough in the hall of the GOH, as it is known throughout the world, you would meet everyone worth meeting’. The hotel looked over Colombo Harbour, then one of the busiest in the world …
Eventually the family relocated to the Gold Coast in 1956 and Atkinson’s finishing school was St Hilda’s, an Anglican Church school at Southport. Her teenage years were marked by a great tragedy – the death of her brother Charles in 1958, who died after choking on a toy in his cot. (Another brother had died in infancy many years before.) He was 15 months old at the time and Kerr was on the cusp of turning 16. She writes movingly about his final hours:
I sat on the wall beside the beach across the road and prayed, ‘God, if you let Charles live, I’ll become a nun’. For years afterwards I felt guilty about that, but surely God knew I would never have become a nun.
A sense of place is important in Atkinson’s book, which she describes as “very much a portrait of a city”. She means Brisbane, but Ceylon, the Gold Coast, Scotland and other foreign and Australian settings are included. She has also lived in Paris, where she served as a senior trade commissioner from 1994 to 1997, a job that helped her get over losing City Hall. It’s all in the book, or most of it is. It would have all been there if Atkinson hadn’t been reined in, ever so nicely, by judicious editing. But she was a journo, so she gets it.
She started out in journalism on The Telegraph in Brisbane and credits her time there with giving her a seminal experience that helped her later in life.
As a cadet I … had to learn shorthand, which I did in company with the cadets of The Courier-Mail. This was how I learned to have boys as friends. I became best friends with Hugh Lunn, who later wrote a book called Head Over Heels about being in love with me. Though I could tell he liked me, I was just pleased to have a very good friend who was a boy. And he never did ask me out, although he thought he did.
As we chat over scones and tea, there’s another question that comes to mind. Why now? “Well, Madonna Duffy, the publisher at UQP, had been on at me, in a nice way, about doing a book ever since my days as chairman of the Brisbane Writers Festival when we were on the board together,” Atkinson recalls. “When the Campbell Newman book controversy blew up, I rang her to say, ‘don’t worry, it will pass’. She had knocked back his book but said ... ‘so, why don’t you give me yours?’ ”
It was reported at the time, in February 2015, that UQP had rejected a tell-all book by Newman because of decisions his government had made and as a protest against its author, former LNP MP Gavin King. Duffy rejects the notion of political bias and says Atkinson was simply much more interesting.
“I have been approaching her frequently for a few years because she’s a significant Queenslander and I thought it was time for her to tell her story,” Duffy says. “I had always said to her she should write about it all one day. I would say that every time I saw her socially.”
Duffy says that like any other book, it went through the normal committee appraisal before it was accepted. “She said she could finish it by the end of 2015 and, like a true journalist, she did.” Duffy acknowledges that Atkinson has known success but has also had some knocks, including the death of her brother, her marriage breakdown, losing City Hall and the disaster of ABC Learning. Atkinson took up the chairmanship of that initially highly successful company in 2000 and it went belly-up in 2009. She writes that it was an experience that taught her … some tough lessons, very expensive ones in terms of time and money but also about trust and direct dealing … I often wished I had learned them earlier when I could have put them to good use.
This is not the first book Atkinson has been involved in. She previously has written two herself, city guide books – Around Brisbane and Sallyanne’s Brisbane Guide.
Academic Joe Siracusa wrote a book about her that was published by Jacaranda Press in 1987 – Sallyanne: Portrait of a Lord Mayor. That book was way too early, according to Atkinson in her memoir. But Siracusa, now Professor of Human Security and Diplomacy at RMIT University (formerly Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), says he could see something special in Atkinson, felt she would win City Hall and wanted to write about her and her campaign.
“I thought she would go on to state or federal politics,” Siracusa says. “Her husband had political ambitions too. I think she did what he secretly wanted to do. And I think she did a pretty good job. She took Brisbane kicking and screaming into a new era. Before she came along, you couldn’t even eat outside. Everyone loved her. What amazed me about her was that she would go to a function at the art gallery, there would be 500 people there and she knew them all by name.”
Siracusa says Atkinson was also able to charm the crusty old blokes in power. “In my book I asked – what’s a nice girl doing in this council chamber?” Siracusa recalls, and in her own book Atkinson writes about the rough and tumble of public life and the sexism that came with it.
One day, when she was an opposition alderman, she was heckled by fellow alderman Ian Brusasco, “one of the more intelligent on the Labor side”, who called out: “Are you pregnant, Alderman Atkinson, or just fat?” As it happens, she wasn’t pregnant.
There are plenty more stories like that in No Job For A Woman and there’s no end of name-dropping because as lord mayor Atkinson met popes, royalty, leaders of all political persuasions, and was involved in the big events of her day, including World Expo ’88 and that famous failed bid for the 1992 Olympic Games.
Through all the ups and downs, her warmth and humour shine through. ■
No Job For A Woman by Sallyanne Atkinson, UQP, $32.99
Readers can hear more from the author at an Evening with Sallyanne Atkinson at the Queensland Art Gallery lecture theatre on Thursday, September 29. For bookings; qagoma.qld.gov.au
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