Allison had always been anxious, even as a little girl. But she had been happier. She had talent and she worked hard. She had made her mum and dad proud.
Before she became a Baden-Clay, Allison Dickie had grown up in a working-class dark brick home in the working class suburb of Redbank.
At 10, she earned a much-coveted place on the Australian Youth Ballet. She was elected deputy head girl in her final year at Ipswich Girls Grammar.
She laughed a lot. Kept her hurts to herself. She never seemed cross. Never angry.
She never talked about herself. Allison was a listener. She asked lots of questions. She cared about people.
After high school she took a Rotary exchange trip to Denmark. Good with languages, she came back speaking Danish and Swedish. She learnt French, German and Japanese while studying psychology at the University of Queensland.
At 25 she entered the 1993 Miss Australia Awards. She was crowned Miss Brisbane. She had landed a job with Flight Centre by then. She impressed her bosses as she had always impressed. They promoted her to store manager. Eventually they would promote her to global human resources manager, responsible for 3000 employees in six countries.
Successful, smart and beautiful, Allison Dickie was a catch for any man.
She needed a hand with her computer one day at work. She could run an international HR operation but was terrible with technology. Her colleague Gerard Baden-Clay wasn’t. He offered to help.
GERARD Baden-Clay was born to lead. To do great things. It was in his DNA. The reminders were all around him. And he was quick to remind others of his distinguished bloodline.
Lord Robert Baden-Powell fought four wars for the British Army in the late 19th century. He spent part of his military career posing as a travelling butterfly collector. He created intricate sketches of the insects, hiding plans of military installations in their wings.
He impressed his superiors. Won promotion after promotion. In the second Boer War he held a town under siege from enemy fire for 217 days, using a series of cunning tricks to convince advancing troops they were surrounded by landmines and barbed wire.
When the food ran out, he ordered his men to eat their horses.
Baden-Powell returned home a national hero. He wrote books on military scouting. Training manuals for boys. He used skills learned fighting battles on foreign shores to educate young boys. It was how the Scouting movement was founded.
It started with a camp of 20 boys, mostly the offspring of his friends. When Baden-Powell retired in the 1930s, there were more than three million Scouts globally.
Some historians would later speculate Baden-Powell, who admired the male form and developed close relationships with military colleagues, was a repressed homosexual. He married in 1912 and went on to raise three children. His youngest, Betty, married a man named Gervas Clay.
Nigel Clay was their third child. He was raised in Zimbabwe, which was then Rhodesia, where his grandfather had spent years spreading the word of the Scouts.
Lord Baden-Powell, invested by King Edward VII as a companion of the Order of the Bath, was 30 years dead when Nigel and Elaine Clay brought their son Gerard into the world.
Gerard spent his first years in Zimbabwe where he, his sister Olivia and brother Adam, lived in the shadow of their great grandfather’s insurmountable legacy.
He was 10 when Nigel moved the family to Australia.
There is a hotel in Melbourne named after Gerard’s great grandfather. There are five Australian streets with his name. Three in Brisbane. One in Melbourne. Another in Maroochydore. Baden-Powell Scouting Park sits on 23ha in Samford Valley, complete with accommodation, heated pool and an abseiling tower.
But with a name like Clay, nobody would link Nigel’s family to the war hero who founded the Scouts.
So they came to Australia as the Baden-Clays, legally adding a link to Nigel’s famed grandfather with the signing of some official paperwork.
They settled in Toowoomba and Gerard graduated with a respectable tertiary entrance score of 900. He played hockey. Waited tables. Picked strawberries and potatoes for extra pocket money.
He spent five years earning a Bachelor of Business, majoring in accounting and computing. It was during these years he'd make friends he would keep for life, successful businessmen he'd lean on to keep his own business afloat. He finished his degree and worked as an accountant for a few years before taking a job at Flight Centre.
He never failed to mention his heritage. He was a proud man. He liked to take charge. Later it would be heading his local chamber of commerce and the school parents and citizens’ association.
As a parent he would demand routine and discipline in his house. He would use "field signals" to give his daughters instructions, touching a certain part of his body to issue a command. A touch on the leg from dad meant it was adult talking time. The children were not to interrupt.
He’d use his famous Baden-Powell bloodline to spruik his skills in real estate...
Gerard’s personal philosophies of ethical excellence and team loyalty, derived from his lineage as the great-grandson of international Scouts founder Baden-Powell, have found their perfect landing spot in the field of real estate”
...he boasted on a blog linked to his property business.
Here’s what you can expect with tomorrow’s Parramatta weather
As spring moves into summer what can locals expect tomorrow? We have the latest word from the Weather Bureau.
Here’s what you can expect with tomorrow’s Parramatta weather
As spring moves into summer what can locals expect tomorrow? We have the latest word from the Weather Bureau.