Former judge, coroner Linda Dessau provides insight into her eight-year reign as Governor
Linda Dessau has told all about her eight-year reign as Governor – from receiving desperate letters urging her to sack Dan Andrews to meeting the King and hosting the now US president at home.
Victoria
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Everyone wanted to know about King Charles. What was he like? What did he say?
Departing governor Linda Dessau recently held 70 official engagements over three weeks in Europe and Asia.
There was Gallipoli in Turkey – “looking at the terrain and realising they didn’t really have a chance”. And trade discussions in Israel and Singapore.
Yet all anyone asked about was the King’s Coronation – and the bathroom arrangements.
Dessau, like all the other important guests, had to be seated at Westminster Abbey hours before the King arrived. The day started at 7am, for a service which was to end about 1pm.
Dessau had a plan. She observed guests who slugged cups of tea and glasses of water when she arrived at the abbey. “Silly people” she thought.
She would rather risk dehydration. So she did, in a day she describes as physically demanding, as much for being “on” and out for so long as the (misplaced) fear of an intemperate bladder.
Dessau calls it an “out-of-body experience” of being “ringside of history”. She describes fairyland wonder at the pageantry, and lots of people-spotting. There’s the French king. Here are the Danish royals.
It followed a meeting with the King last October, at Balmoral Castle, in Scotland where Dessau had been observing offshore wind energy, which is set to be a cornerstone of Victoria’s power future.
So, what was King Charles like? Extraordinarily knowledgeable, she says. Eloquent on mainstream issues, such as sustainability and environment, which once cast him as slightly wacky when he used to talk about them before the world caught up. Genuinely interested – just as his mother had been.
At the end of this month, Dessau and husband (and former County Court judge) Tony Howard vacate the belltower and the gardens of Government House, which they have called “home” for eight years.
She compares the end to leaving a party while you’re still having a great time. And she will miss the privilege.
Yet the former coroner and Family Court judge, like many successful people, chooses to look forwards rather than back. She will have a little rest, then embark on something else. She isn’t sure what.
Dessau might return to writing novels, of which three lie unfinished, although she assumes – as with the other times she started writing – that something will come along to disrupt such escapist pleasures.
The next governor, the 30th, is Margaret Gardner, the vice chancellor of Monash University who declared her republican sentiments back in 2005. As with every governor replacement, Gardner will be suitably different to the last, Dessau argues, and will bring her own personality, style and priorities.
Dessau long served on the judicial bench and is an adherent to the idea that judges should contain themselves only to issues of politics or policy as they apply in a court room.
Offstage, you suspect, private opinions must flourish in the hosting of heads of state as well as the victims of tragedy. Yet no one knows how Dessau feels about republicanism, say, or the Voice, because she has never said so in public.
At her farewell dinner, at the State Library last week, she allowed herself one tiny indulgence to her hard rule.
She described the unique access that her role allowed (the Sultan of Brunei popped in this week), and promoted her abiding sense that the lofty trappings of the position of the King’s representative, and its property, be made as accessible as possible to Victorians.
“One moment,” she said in her speech, she was “meeting with the good and ever so practical women of the CWA, the glue of so many communities”. The next moment, she was hosting (now President) Joe Biden as a guest in her home.
She met “doers”, such as a go-kart champion, destined for Formula One, then the Rats of Tobruk. She went to the Brownlow Medal on the Monday, then served in the St Vincent DePaul Soup Van on the Tuesday.
There were funny times. The guide dog puppy who urinated on her in front of hundreds of people. The hosts who welcomed her and “Judge Howard” who was, in fact, a 25-year-old aide.
Dessau also offered her takeaway view – that a governor “should never have skin in the game”.
It was critical that the head of state-of-state is apolitical.
“It is the very existence of an apolitical Head of State that underpins our system by denying absolute power to any one person or part of it,” she said.
“It is why, in the event that it is determined in the future to change our nation’s system of governance, it would be my hope that a head of state would be appointed and not elected.”
A FEW days later, Dessau is sitting beneath Rupert Bunny paintings, on loan from the National Gallery of Victoria, in the Government House Morning Room.
Tony Howard hovers nearby, itching for a coffee and an off-the-record chat, a practised veteran of the “lifted eyebrow” which only his wife can see.
Outside lie the manicured gardens which host the Peace and Prosperity Kitchen Garden, for migrant women as well as special needs kids, to which Dessau donated a “substantial” amount of her governor salary.
Inside, Dessau is a conversationalist, even under her apolitical armour, whether it’s footy (Go Bombers), arts, equality, domestic violence, Victorian “cleverness”, or the fact that some judges write well and others write “concrete”.
Today she throws backwards, in part because she does not know what lies ahead. She sought to educate Victorians through hard times, such as the pandemic, from whence she believes we are still recovering.
She embraced the frustration and fears that so many Victorians expressed through what she called a “bloody difficult” time.
Petitions would turn up at Government House. Sack Premier Daniel Andrews went the recurring gist, though of course she had no powers to do so. Most of the correspondence was bathed in “genuine distress and anxiety”. Every letter was answered.
Among the most poignant moments was the dawn service on Anzac Day, 2020. Crowds were banned. Dessau stood with a single guard, a lonely representative for all the thousands who otherwise should and would have been there.
Less public moments may stick with her just as long. As patron of the 10th anniversary of Black Saturday, she and Howard toured affected areas. The pain still flared, she found. Children still struggled with emotional issues in towns which were still rebuilding.
At the one-year memorial service for the victims of the Bourke St tragedy, she met the parents of the Japanese student, Yosuke Kanno, killed in the rampage.
She visited hospitals and accommodation centres in the weeks after bushfires or floods. She calls it the “long tail” – the unseen suffering which blazes after the caravan of attention and media coverage has moved on.
“In this role, I’ve always tried to look at the long tail,” she says. “I think we can often have too short a memory and I really learned just how long the tail of these disasters and tragedies can be.”
Victoria would have evolved, regardless of a pandemic, since 2015. Yet ask Dessau about the priorities, and she responds with the same response she offered in 2015 – domestic violence and child protection.
“I think people around the world are worried right now about war and sustainability and the environment and clean energy and the economy,” she says.
“I think they’re worried in the aftermath of the pandemic. These are universal problems, which doesn’t mean we don’t need to address them here, but does give a context – that we really do need to solve them collectively.”
This plays to Victoria’s greatest strength, she says – cleverness. Advanced manufacturing, whether it be geospatial mapping or pharmacological expertise, will replace the loss of traditional manufacturing. Cleverness, and the stability for sustained collaboration, will more than compensate for the natural resources which other states boast.
We will pivot, she says. Much as she herself is about to, from one role into another. For it’s time, she says.
Royals or republicans, we must underscore “the continuing continuity of these public roles”.
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