Thank you for being the first…

Posted on 20 August, 2014

Although our former Prime Minister, Julia Gillard received her fair share of criticism by both the public and the media masses, Mary Delahunty’s political biography Gravity is moving with its insight into the final year of our first female leader before her fall from grace. An interesting read from cover to cover, I tried to write this review like any other but decided it wouldn’t do the book justice considering its significance, and so instead have decided to pen a letter…to Julia.

Dear Julia,

Thank you for being the first.

Yours is a legacy that these times cannot fully understand. No doubt, you have thought about it all – what went wrong, what went right, what is still yet to be realised.

We, too, seem to grapple with the echoes of the past few years and the meaning of all that drama, all that cruelty, self-interest and sexism.

I think its right that we all take a good hard look at ourselves.

Something’s not right when the very people we elect to take forward our collective interest seem more intent on realising their own.

Some blame the media – the pursuit of reality style politics, all personality and sensationalism over the truth.

Some blame the internet and rise of uninformed opinion, unfetted murmurings and mistruths that find a home in our feeds and with our followers.

Or maybe it is those with influence or power fuelling the fires of public opinion first with kindling and then with pointed blowtorches.

We are all to blame.

We endorsed the media frame every time we bought a paper or clicked on a link or laughed at a cartoon.

We let the rumours run amok every time we retweeted and shared a half truth or cruel observation.

We let fires burn too, through our ignorance.

I thought we were better than that. Maybe you thought that too. You always seemed to offer hope and strive through hard work to forge a purpose for us all through the fray.

As a woman I should have done more to help you. As an Australian, I am ashamed.

You presided over one of the great moments for women in positions of power and influence – it seemed we had made it and it felt good.

You may not have seen it but women walked a little taller in their jobs, communities and at home.

And just like that … it was gone.

I have been in a kind of unspoken mourning, still rattled and scathed, trying like the many editorials and political books that have followed in your wake to put the pieces back together.

What happened to you; happened to the country and it has revealed an ugly truth about women and politics.

Australians are ambivalent about women and power, and you…you were the lightening rod for this public unease.

This is at the very heart of the biography Gravity that Mary Delahunty has penned about your last year as Prime Minister.

It is with great foresight and bravery that you let Mary into your inner sanctum and confidence so that she might account for us what was really happening to the woman who was our first.

While mine is a life in the shadows rather than the spotlight, I find Mary’s account of this past year of your life deeply personal.  It illuminates and amplifies things I have felt, seen and experienced in my own life.

Mary recalls that on one occasion you cited that when a man becomes Prime Minister they ask ‘What kind of leader will he be?’ but when a women becomes Prime Minister they ask ‘Can she lead?’.

Any woman who has held a position of some form of power has seen this question in the eyes of her colleagues.

She also reminded us of the cruel attacks toward you including the June 12 Liberal Party fundraiser where the menu included ‘Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail – Small Breast, Huge Thighs.’

Whether or not we agreed with your policies or voted for your party – no women deserves to be humiliated and disrespected in the home or in their job – let alone publicly.

Mary has written of how you struggled to cut through with the public and the way that most people saw your power was through the prism of our television screens where you were often framed by the agendas of others.

To be resilient in the face of such judgment speaks to a strong sense of self, the seedlings of which could have only been sown by the great love and wisdom of your family. They must have been proud not only of what you achieved but of what you withstood.

I hope you know you touched more lives that you will ever know. You touched mine long before you were in The Lodge.

It was 2005 and I was a young woman in a big corporate and you were then in opposition. We were to take you on a tour of a factory in your electorate. You won’t remember but you and I were the only women in a contingent of eight men. I shook your hand.

You made eye contact and let that great smile beam. You lifted me for a moment.  And then I walked at the back of the pack, watching how you skilfully conversed letting forth your wit at just the right moments – almost catching the fellas off guard. You knew the workers and there was a bond and a respect for you. It was admirable.

Many will write biographies about you and it will be tough to read what others have to say. We are, like you, making sense of it all, perhaps prematurely.

What you have set in train will take so much longer to be understood.

We are lucky that you let Mary write Gravity – it is a book that I want the women in my life to read. I want my daughter to read it too. But I want the men I know and love, to read it too.

We need to confront the ugly underbelly that is stopping us from being the inclusive country that we say we are.

We need to be collectively wiser about how a political fuse is lit and fed in the service of self-interest.

And that is why when I met Mary at the launch of this important book I asked her to dedicate her biography of you to my five-year old daughter.

She wrote “Best wishes for a future where female leaders are respected.”

To that I say hear, hear.

Thank you for being the first. We will not forget you.

Gravity written by Gold Walkley Award winning journalist and ABC TV presenter Mary Delahunty is a glimpse inside the former Prime Minister’s office during her last year and final days. The political biography is available from all good book retailers.