Dame Quentin Bryce
Wrote about 50 letters a week as Governor-General. Now she has collected her favourite correspondence to share
You wouldn’t expect a governor-general of Australia to receive letters from a pole dancer. Leslie “Bunny” Glover is an unlikely candidate for a pole dancer, though. He’s a World War II veteran and author of The Boy from Bowen: Diary of a Sandakan POW. Dame Quentin Bryce met Glover and his mate Russ Ewin in Borneo when she was serving as Governor-General from 2008 to 2014. Both men survived the infamous Sandakan death marches. Dame Quentin, now 74, became friends with them and had a regular correspondence with Glover.
In one letter, reproduced in Dear Quentin: Letters of a GovernorGeneral, Glover writes of his health problems in old age: “My health is slipping backwards now as I am on the verge of getting old. My main problem is vertigo – bad balance problems. I will have to give up pole dancing as I am slipping off the poles now.”
I quote the pole-dancing line to her as we chat in Dame Quentin’s office in the chancellery building at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. Her face lights up at the mention.
“He’s the most adorable man,” Dame Quentin says. “He’s the bravest Australian I have ever met. His book is a must-read.”
In her book, as well as the letters, there are little potted stories of the places she has visited and the people she has met and written to, from nonagenarians to primary-schoolers. She has always been an ardent letter writer.
On quiet weekends at Government House in Canberra, she and her husband Michael Bryce would relish time to themselves. It would give her a chance to sit at her large Indian teak desk and catch up on correspondence. Dame Quentin, who spent her first seven years at Ilfracombe, near Longreach, later went to boarding school at Moreton Bay College, in Brisbane’s east, where she discovered her love of letter-writing. She has relished it, enjoying the almost meditative process of sitting down with a pen in hand – a little Mont Blanc fountain pen nowadays – ever since.
During her years in Canberra, writing letters was a weekend escape from official duties. “There would be nobody around but us and the security guys,” she says. “I loved those days. I would go for long walks through the gardens – I know every blade of grass on that wonderful property – and then I would go to my office, turn on opera music quite loud, attend to the boxes full of work I had to finish. And then I would write letters.”
She has always been a keen correspondent but when she was Governor of Queensland from 2003 to 2008 “something marvellous began to happen”, as she writes in her book. “Letters poured in: advice, ideas, remembrances, photos from long-lost cousins,” she says. “Many were handwritten, occasionally in that distinct, frail script of the very aged. I was deeply touched.”
After then-prime minister Kevin Rudd announced her as the country’s 25th governor-general, the first woman to hold the position, the correspondence increased.
Now, a selection of the letters she received and wrote is between the covers of a handsome hardback. The Miegunyah Press, an imprint of Melbourne University Publishing (MUP), is known for producing beautiful art books and this gorgeous production features artwork by Dame Quentin’s favourite painter, Queenslander William Robinson, adorning the end pages.
There are photos from her busy life as governor-general and of some of the people with whom she corresponded, as well as reproductions of letters from her rich archive.
None of the letters were written with a view to publication and they might never have seen the light of day. But her former official secretary Stephen Brady, 57, now the Australian ambassador to France, had an idea – and it turned out to be a good one.
“So often when Stephen would come into my room I would be