Chloe and Bill Shorten: love, battles and our modern stepfamily
Seven years ago, Chloe Shorten remarried, bringing a stepfather – Labor leader Bill Shorten – and then a new baby, Clementine, into her children’s lives. The couple talks to Juliet Rieden about their wonderful and, at times tricky, brave new world.
Family is everywhere in Chloe and Bill Shorten’s home in leafy Moonee Ponds, a tram-ride from Melbourne. Paintings of daughters Georgette and Clementine sit side by side in Chloe’s study just inside the front door. In prime position on the living room wall is a rather ethereal black and white photograph of Chloe as a baby in her mother, Dame Quentin Bryce’s, arms with her older brother, a toddler, gazing up at them, while on the side table is a proud photo of a grown-up Bill with his beloved mum, Ann, who died in 2014. And as I sit down to chat to Chloe and Bill, their two slobbery, barrel-chested bulldogs, Theodore and Tilly, lumbering around to bid welcome, it’s clear that their family of five, now seven years together, is the cherished still point in their constantly turning world. It has, and continues to be, a work in progress, both admit, but it’s fuelled by love and laser-focused dedication.
Chloe’s son, Rupert, and daughter Georgette (known as Gigi) were seven and six when she and Bill married, and with baby Clementine on the way this new blended family was going to need sensitive navigation. Both Chloe and Bill had come out of divorces which, because of who they were – Bill then a well-known union leader turned Labor politician and Chloe the youngest daughter of the Governor-General – filled the newspapers, rudely thrusting Chloe’s children into the
spotlight. Though completely in love, Chloe was aware of the mountain her family was about to climb and says she wanted “to show myself, my family and even my former husband it would be okay”.
To start with, Chloe moved into a house a few streets away from the family home, so Rupert and Gigi were still close to their dad, architect Roger Parkin. “Living through that period was tough for all of us,” she says. “The pain, loss, disruption; the difficulty for the children; trying to live in two homes; the economic losses.” Social stigma and stereotypes surrounding divorce and stepfamilies also played their part and Chloe was determined to seek encouraging advice. Forty-three per cent of Australian children have lived in non-nuclear families – with stepparents, same-sex parents, sole or adoptive parents – so there had to be some positive role models out there.
Chloe scoured the library and bookstores. “My father says I’m such a girlie swot,” she says, laughing. “But I love research and evidence. I wanted to find the best possible advice. There were personal accounts of a stepfamily or a second family and then there was a lot of hard data, impenetrable research, but nothing that brought the two together.”
The lack of an accessible, authoritative guide inspired Chloe’s new – and first – book Take Heart: A Story For Modern Stepfamilies. It’s a fascinating read and insightful for all stepparents, digging down into the research and studies and interweaving this with her own experience at the coalface with her family. In the book,
Chloe says she owed it to her kids to get her “new marriage right” and from the get-go she and Bill visited a family counsellor every two weeks. With her ex-husband’s agreement, Chloe and Bill decided to move their new family to Melbourne, to Moonee Ponds, Bill’s constituency. She confesses that uprooting from Queensland to Victoria “felt like a migration” and says it’s entirely appropriate she felt wonderfully at home with the glorious new migrant neighbours, who opened their arms to their little family and whom she now calls her friends. “The removal truck arrived and, as the movers unpacked, the lady from the house across the road walked over to scold them about letting me lift anything because she could see I was pregnant. She introduced herself to me in thick Italian as Giusepina and went to get me some Italian bread.”
Building her community was key to their new life. “I’m more shy than my mum,” says Chloe. “She’s got this lovely confidence. I suppose that comes from a bush life … But my parents taught me to reach out and make connections and networks.
“We were very wonderfully lucky that the pond that we landed in here had these extraordinary people in it and I had to be a bit brave and to reach out over the fence like I’ve learned to do, and say, ‘Hello, would you like a cup of tea?’ ”
For Bill, the change was more elemental. He and his first wife, Debbie Beale, didn’t have children and now, almost overnight, “I went from zero to three”.
I ask Bill if he was nervous taking on two children he wasn’t biologically responsible for. “It wasn’t their paternity which made me nervous, it was my lack of experience,” he explains. “They’ve been good to me, all three of them,” he adds, quietly. There’s no question Bill adores his family, but as he talks more, it’s clear the road to respect, love and equilibrium has taken hard work.
Before they married and moved in together, Bill spent time getting to know Rupert and Georgette. “They’d been coming down for some months beforehand, so it was Clemmie who was the stranger in our world,” he says.
That world was about to be turned
upside down. “Have you ever seen Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice? His head spinning,” Bill says, laughing. “It was great. Clemmie, Rupert, Georgette, together at the end of 2010 ... it’s been an incredible learning curve and it’s still going on. Chloe is a very good guide and she’s full of good counsel.”
“It was all about the children,” explains Chloe. “It was all about coming at it from the child’s point of view. I suppose I was raised in a household where the rights of the child and the wellbeing of the child were an integral part of everything my parents did.”
Bill’s childhood was different. “Mum raised us effectively and Dad didn’t have a clue,” he says. “He was a good man, but from a different age. He grew up in the Depression, he was at sea for 20 years and worked on the waterfront.
“I’ve realised you shouldn’t always assume your childhood’s the best teacher of how you should be as a parent. There are lessons in it, but you’ve got to be careful you’re not importing all your own experiences.”
While Bill stresses that he treats all three of the children exactly the same and loves them equally, he confesses having his first baby was “… fantastic. It was the best thing I’ve ever done. Every day is a gift”.
For Chloe, Clemmie was “just a wonderful miracle and good luck”, but she was also concerned about Rupert and Gigi. “Eight years after my first child, Rupert, was born, I was more than 1500 kilometres away from him and his sister, having a baby in a new marriage and a new home in a new town,” she writes in the book. “I felt very brave, a little wild. I was also frightened. I wondered what the baby – whom the kids wanted to call Popcorn – would mean for the little ones and how we’d all adjust to yet another change none of us could have expected even a few years earlier.”
Fortunately, the siblings loved their new sister immediately “… and they have barely put her down in the last seven years,” writes Chloe.
Her research had taught her the first five years in a blended family are critical and for the new dynamic to have a chance, they needed to pay attention to every detail and really listen to their children. Bill was acutely aware Rupert and Georgette had a father and his role was to help parent them, not replace their dad. “For the older two, they call me Bill,” he says. “But the little one goes from calling you ‘Daddy’ to ‘Bill’ and she naturally started doing that,” adds Chloe.
“For me, all three have got to feel I love them, that’s the goal,” says Bill.
The couple has also ensured they maintain an amicable relationship with Chloe’s ex-husband. “From early on, we really started to understand how crucial that relationship was, the respect for that relationship. Sometimes the two dads will get on the phone together and have a bit of a chat, and catch up on things. I think the kids at first found that quite bemusing, didn’t they?” says Chloe.
“It’s all about making sure you put your kids’ best interests first and
he’s been a great fellow, so it’s good,” says Bill.
Rupert and Gigi see their father regularly, flying to Queensland for sleepovers and, recently, Clemmie has asked to go too, Chloe says, laughing. “The point is that you actually have to work at it and that also means working at that relationship. There have been some real turning points. Certainly, when Bill and their dad both brought out one of the kid’s birthday cakes together one afternoon, that was really [great] – now, not all stepfamilies can do that.”
The role of a stepdad is different to that of a father and Chloe was advised by family psychologists that to avoid disharmony and potential rejection, she needed to be the disciplinarian in the family, with Bill more as support. Chloe says Bill has become their champion. “As long as my kids feel loved and they feel secure, so long as they see more smiles from me than frowns, then I think I’m heading in the right direction as a parent. You’re just learning every day,” says Bill.
Thrown very much in the deep end, Bill has worked to develop his own relationships with his children. “When Rupe was little and they were heading out together, Rupert’s top button of his jeans broke off and they had no time to come back home. So, to make him feel more comfortable, Bill undid his top button, too. It was very sweet,” says Chloe.
“These are the small moments early on that made me go, ‘Oh, we’ll be all right’.”
Creating memories, shared family experiences and new rituals are the things that Chloe and Bill work on religiously. Over the years, Bill and Rupert have found their own “thing” in road trips. “It’s a good thing between us,” says Bill, smiling. “I drove with Rupert to our holiday place, about eight hours, so it was a 10-hour trip, just the two of us, and at last I could understand some of the music he was talking about, trapped in the car. I could see what he was getting at. He’s a pretty keen musician and talented.
“When you take the time with no other interruptions, I can understand why he likes the music he likes and that helped me like the music that he likes because he could explain it to me. That’s the value.
“I also have different and quality relationships with the girls. It’s just all about time, making time. It’s about not being impatient. It’s about listening. It’s getting your head into their space.”
As Leader of the Opposition, Bill’s job frequently encroaches on that time, which involves significant compromise. “We put a lot of store in eating together whenever we can,” says Chloe, “even if sometimes we have to change hours or times for Bill, who often works at night, so he will come home to have dinner and then go back out and work again after that.”
When he’s away, Bill says he misses his family terribly. “I love my job, for all the ups and downs of public life.
But the hardest thing about it is being away from Chloe and the kids. That’s the real downside of it.
“You don’t always get everything right when you’re a parent. I’ve formed a theory that while being a good parent might be in your DNA, you can always improve on it by learning. I reckon one of the things
I’ve learned is to ask more dads about their experiences of being dads.
“The journey for me with Chloe has meant that in the last seven years I know more now than I obviously did at the start, and if we were to speak again in another seven years’ time, I expect I’ll know more then than I do now.
But it’s taught me that function matters more than form. Loving your kids is more important than a whole lot of the other stuff which sometimes gets debated about families.”
Bill has to go. He’s heading out on some errands before picking up Clementine from school. In a couple of days, the whole family is driving to Ballarat – where The Weekly catches up with them for our photo shoot – to spend the weekend with Gigi who is in the area with her school. It’s a scene Bill couldn’t have conceived of seven years ago. “How has being a parent changed me? … It’s made me less selfish,” says Bill. “You realise that there are other people who depend upon you immediately – I’ve always been driven to help people, but these kids, they rely on you, the buck does stop with you. Kids teach you a lot about yourself.”