‘It’s a mountain to climb’: Jennifer Westacott continues fight against anti-Semitism
The University of Western Sydney chancellor is making up for fear as a child to use her position and her voice to eradicate ‘an abhorrent thing happening on our watch’.
Jennifer Westacott remembers the Christmases. The bad Christmases. The bad birthdays.
The University of Western Sydney chancellor knows there must have been happy celebrations when she was a kid but when you have survived a violent father and a poor home, it’s the bad memories that stick.
Like the fear of being bullied. Like the feeling of never being good enough.
Westacott is one of our most competent leaders – the former Business Council of Australia CEO has an impressive CV in the public and private sectors – but growing up in a dysfunctional family has left an indelible mark.
“I don’t want to overstate that violence, because it’s not like this would happen every night,” she tells The Australian in an exclusive interview.
“It’s not like what I’ve seen (in) families that I dealt with when I was a public servant, when it was a daily escalating occurrence motivated by alcohol. That wasn’t the case, but it was severe. It was sporadic. It was degrading. It was humiliating.
“Poverty is a tremendously humiliating journey. I’m not talking about abject poverty but relative poverty. That sense of never getting ahead is a tremendously humiliating thing to grow up with.”
Yet it’s that past that has prompted Westacott’s decision to take a public stance on one of the most confronting issues of our time – anti-Semitism – to use her position and her voice in a way she was too frightened to do as a child and young person.
Last week Westacott delivered a searing indictment of the hatred of Jews, which has developed since October 7, 2023.
In a speech to the not-for-profit Dor Foundation, she explicitly linked her personal journey as a gay woman with a father who “hated Aboriginal people, hated Jewish people, just had this toxic view about people” to her stand against anti-Semitism.
It’s not the first time the 65-year-old Westacott has spoken of her childhood in public housing near Gosford on the NSW central coast, but the Gaza conflict, and the fallout at her university and across the community, have increased her determination to no longer stay silent on “the deep-seated nature of anti-Semitism and the scale and horror of the Holocaust”.
Her decision is particularly striking because her university serves an area with many students from a Middle Eastern or Muslim background. She acknowledges the challenge: “You certainly have to reflect on it. I’m very conscious of that demographic (at UWS) but I’m also conscious of the principle. I think this is part of the policy confusion, the community confusion. This is not about taking a side, it’s about moral clarity and moral consistency.
“Anti-Semitism is something you just cannot tolerate in the same way that we would not tolerate Islamophobia or homophobia. You either believe in the dignity of people and their right to peaceful lives, or you don’t.”
UWS had “certainly not been immune” from pro-Palestinian protests on campus but “we took the view that people can protest, but we’re not going to allow people to put up anti-Semitic placards or have anti-Semitic chants. By and large, our protests have been very peaceful and very respectful, but we set the rules very clearly upfront”.
The university stopped some protests and suspended students and disciplined staff when complaints were proven, she says.
Westacott won’t comment on the role of the Prime Minister in addressing the issues and argues Australia has seen a collective failure.
“I just think as a collective country, we just didn’t do enough,” she says. “It’s easy to point to one person or one thing, but I think, as a collective, with some notable exceptions – (NSW) Premier (Chris) Minns has been one of those notable exceptions – we didn’t take it seriously enough.
“We didn’t see it getting the momentum. Leaders didn’t get on the same page, universities didn’t get on the same page and operate around a principle that this is an abhorrent thing happening on our watch. We have to think how we can push this to the edge: even if you can’t eradicate these things entirely, it’s still an ambition to have.”
She’s hopeful we’re getting the message, but warns: “It’s a mountain to climb. This is an ancient hatred. This is something that is very, very deep-seated. There’s a tremendous amount of work to do. Look at the Islamophobia report. There’s a lot of work to do there. There’s a broader set of issues about civility, about what kind of culture we’re in.”
Westacott fears we may miss our chance to look below the surface at the reasons why people hate Jews.
“These are bigger issues than Islamophobia and anti-Semitism,” she says. “We’ve lost the capacity for civility, we’ve lost the capacity to disagree respectfully, we’ve lost the capacity to separate one issue from a broader set of issues (and) that’s leading to very toxic public culture. When something like this happens, it gets seriously amplified by that toxic culture.
“I’m nervous that we’ve seen a kind of lull, but that we haven’t done the seriously systemic work about how you prevent this from happening again, and how you take action across our society to make sure people aren’t subject to persecution and intimidation.”
Careless racism
In her speech, Westacott recalled her father seeing a TV image of two people in striped prison clothing, hanging by their necks in a street, and his words of attempted reassurance: “Don’t worry, that only happens to the Jews.”
It was the kind of careless racism that was arguably common in Australian 50 or 60 years ago, when Jews were often thought of as “the other”.
“Certainly for my father, there was a particular thing about Jewish people,” Westacott says. “He was a deeply resentful person, he hadn’t done a tertiary qualification, he didn’t have a career. He was actually quite intelligent and I think that really amplified resentment and hatred. When you’ve got capability, but you’ve not had opportunity, that brings resentment. You’re looking for targets and Jewish people are an obvious target. He vented on gays, poofs he called them. He hated Aboriginal people, hated Jewish people, just had this toxic view about people.”
She still regrets not speaking out as a kid.
“All my life I have questioned my own morality of not challenging his views … My fear and my own lack of understanding meant even as I got older, I was afraid to or incapable of saying anything,” she told the Dor audience.
Her father left the family as she was doing her HSC and before she came out as gay: “I think his reaction to that would have been beyond explosive, it would have been just shocking.”
She was a “serious Christian” as a child, her mother a devout High Church Anglican, and the young Jennifer thought seriously about becoming a nun.
Instead, her grandmother – a key influence in her life – urged her to go to university first.
Poverty and violence
Westacott’s father was not a drinker but his resentment at the cards that life had dealt him led to “moments of incredible violence” against his wife and children.
It prompted her lifetime fight for economic equality. She saw first-hand how poverty turned events such as Christmas into a nightmare. Her parents would put some gifts on hire purchase and then worry about how they could make the repayments.
“You don’t want your memory to distort things (and suggest) you never had a happy Christmas,” she says. “ I don’t think that’s true, but I do remember a lot of unhappy Christmases. I remember a lot of unhappy birthdays, because if you are struggling to pay bills and put food on the table … that day is a terrible day.”
She recalls other days with nothing to do, when there was no petrol in the car to go to the beach: “That is the kind of environment that, for a person with a violent temper, is fertile ground for something to happen.”
The family first lived in Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, where Westacott’s father worked as a barman, before moving to Springfield, a public housing estate in Gosford when her father had a succession of jobs, including as a delivery man and in a car spare parts shop.
“Most people (in Springfield) worked, but it was a very stigmatised thing,” she says. “There was no bus on a Sunday, there was nowhere to go. On a hot day, you would just be sitting at home.”
She had four siblings but was “a different kind of kid, a massively introverted kid, super shy, barely spoke, didn’t like school, nervous”.
Teachers, an uncle who took her fishing at weekends, and a grandmother who was a voracious reader, were circuit-breakers.
So too was sport (“I’d go to the squash courts every night, go and play hockey”), but her father’s outbursts left her with “a timidity and nervousness that just sits with you as a kind of deep-seated undercurrent”.
Family pride
Westacott built a different life as an adult and praises her partner, Tess Shannon: “I’ve been really blessed to be in one relationship for a long period of time, for 40 years. When people talk about being gay as a lifestyle choice, I always push back really hard and say: ‘Well, I would have picked Tess a million times, but I would not have chosen the lifestyle because it was isolating, ostracising and lonely’.
“(Tess) has been the most important thing that’s ever happened in my life, and that has given me a chance to build a life around that relationship, build a life around her, and have a fantastic coexistence with her. I wouldn’t say we were particularly open in the early days, because I was working in the public service, but, increasingly, it’s become a very public part of my life.”
Central to the couple’s life in the past decade has been their relationship with Afghan asylum-seeker Zahra Khavari and her 16-year-old son, Amir Rezaie, whom Westacott calls her grandson. They met when Zahra attended literacy classes run by the couple and became part of their family.
“We use the word grandson because that’s how we see them,” says Westacott. “They have been in our lives for a long period of time.”
She is not keen to talk about Zahra and Amir’s lives at this stage, but in her speech noted her “grandson … an Afghan asylum-seeker”, was with her in Sydney’s Domain on October 9, 2023, when “the hatred in that crowd was visceral. People with children in strollers holding anti-Semitic placards … the sense of celebration of this loss of life shook me to the core”.
She says she mentioned Amir, who is from an Islamic tradition, to show the personal approach she and Shannon took to such issues.
“I care about people and when I see an opportunity to help, I act,” she says. “And I love this boy, and I love his mother. He’s been a joy in my life. I would walk in front of a bus for him, and it was really to make that point that this is not about the simplistic stuff people talk about. “This is in my DNA.”
Role of education
Westacott says she’s not sure why our universities became the source of much anti-Semitism. “Universities are a natural place of context of ideas and protests, but I think one of the things we want to do is get underneath (and ask) ‘why did that happen in universities?’. Why did it happen with such hatred (rather than as) legitimate protests about the actions of nation states?”
She is worried too about attitudes being formed in schools: “We’ve got a lot of work to do in the way we teach teachers. There’s a lot of work to do in schools around democracy and civility and giving kids that kind of agency for good citizenship, which I think is the top priority in our schools.
“Part of anti-Semitism (is about) a broader set of issues like our loss of the Judeo-Christian culture, our loss of history. The Holocaust is not seen as a core part of understanding the world. Part of that is the unravelling of history in our schools and fundamentals in our schools.”
She says the Holocaust should be taught not just as history, but as a way of “understanding the world and understanding how dark forces, terrible forces, can get a stranglehold very fast”.
And she notes the events that affect other people too.
“What happened to the Hazara people in Afghanistan is absolutely shocking, and I don’t know that the world really understands that. I don’t think the world is on top of what’s happening to women in Afghanistan,” she says. “It’s not the Holocaust, they’re very different things, but they’re things that we should know about and understand.”
Gosford seems like another world, but Westacott says: “It never leaves you. This is my point about violence. People talk about it statistically (but) I always say ‘when you have seen it, when you’ve experienced it, it’s a form of degrading people’. It’s a physical assault, but when you see your mother being hit like that, it’s the degrading nature of it that people really talk about.”
Westacott is realistic about how vulnerable she is now because of her public stance on anti-Semitism, but says she never wants to have that “lingering sense ever again that I didn’t do stuff”.
“I’ve spoken out about Islamophobia and about homophobia. If you don’t do that, what kind of morality have you got? What does it say about your life?”
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