DOING GOOD:
Australia’s next Vice Regal couple are here to help
Shortly after General David Hurley was announced as Governor of NSW, back in 2014, he was invited to an audience with the Queen. “I was really quite emotional,” he remembers, even now a little misty eyed. “We were with her for about 25 minutes, and when we walked out, I said to Linda, ‘Who would have thought that two little kids, growing up in Warrawong and Hurstville, would come one day to have a private audience with Her Majesty the Queen? How did that happen?”
How indeed? On the eve of his investiture as Australia’s Head of State, General and Mrs Hurley invite The Weekly to join them for a pot of very strong tea and a chat about the love, faith and hard work that have brought them here.
The Governor General designate grew up near Wollongong, south of Sydney. “It was booming in those days,” he says. “The steelworks provided jobs, there was a big multicultural community, young families, lots of activities. My father worked for the Commonwealth Rolling Mills, which made corrugated and colorbond metals. My mother was a shop assistant in a grocery store.
“I had a great childhood. We just roamed on the weekends. Saturday morning, you’d say goodbye to Mum and if you didn’t have sport on, you’d disappear. We’d walk around Lake Illawarra and catch fish, go down the beach and scramble over rocks, kicking around, having adventures.”
Young David Hurley liked school. “He was born old,” Mrs Hurley says with a smile. “I think he was responsible when he was eight.” And he looked like a little man, always well turned out. “Mum made sure my clothes were ironed, my hair was
done. She taught me to iron so
I would survive in the army.”
Linda McMartin, meanwhile, was “a shy little girl” growing up just an hour to the north, in Hurstville. She loved school but not the rough and tumble of the playground. “Mum and Dad always went to church,” she says. They were devoted Presbyterians and that rubbed off. “Later I taught Sunday School.”
In the mid 1970s, at the height of the moratorium movement, a studious young David Hurley decided to go to military college. It was a pragmatic choice – the surest route he could imagine out of that steel town and into a larger life.
“I didn’t go to Duntroon because of any sense of patriotic duty,” he confesses. “I did my sums down at Port Kembla and I didn’t think I could sustain myself at university. I knew that, if I went to Duntroon, I could get my tertiary education, stay on for my return of service period – after college, you have to serve a certain number of years – and if I didn’t like it, I could leave. So that was the plan. Then, I found that I just liked the life. It was a great life. I look back at Duntroon as a positive period. I learnt a lot, I grew a lot. I did a degree in Arts majoring in Government and Mathematics.
I made lifelong friends.”
A year out of military college, in a jazz club in Sydney, Lieutenant David Hurley met the woman with whom he would spend the rest of his life. Linda, a young teacher, and her neighbour were settled in a corner listening to a band called Galapagos Duck.
“As soon as we walked in,” General Hurley says, “we saw these girls … Having been to university in Wagga, Linda was a little bit wary of army boys. So I asked the girls if they would like a drink, but they said no. I asked if we could sit with them. Linda said, ‘I suppose you can.’ Then I used my 100 per cent perfect pick-up line. [He has only used it once but it worked 100 per cent perfectly that time]: ‘Would you mind my cardigan while I go and get a drink?’” It was a sky-blue cardigan, for those, like The Weekly, who are interested in the details.
The Hurleys met on August 21, 1976 and were married the following March.
“David was stationed in Townsville, so when we married, we’d only seen each other five times,” Mrs Hurley confesses. “It was a little bit like marrying a stranger. I guess he swept me off my feet … A journalist once asked what drew me to David and I said, ‘I’d been out with boys but he was the first man I’d been out with.’ And he was.”
What’s kept them together, the Governor-General designate insists, is that “we love each other, though it hasn’t always been easy. Our marriage has seen a lot of movement, a lot of challenges, a lot of separations.”
With three children (Caitlin, now 34, Marcus, 32, and Amelia, 28), they have lived in England, Germany, Malaysia, the United States and all over Australia. Government House is the Hurley’s 27th home in 42 years
“It was a little bit like marrying a stranger … he swept me off my feet.”
of marriage. En route, General Hurley has become a Companion of the Order of Australia and earned a Distinguished Service Cross for leadership in Operation SOLACE in Somalia in 1993, but there have also been costs.
“When I was a senior military officer, we didn’t have a lot of time together,” he admits. “I would come home from work and Linda would say, ‘I need five minutes of your time,’ and she would have prepared five questions. So that was pretty hard on her. But in this position, the fact that we can do nearly everything together is an amazing thing. She spent the first 30 years of our marriage saying ‘talk to me’ and now I think she wonders where my off button is … I couldn’t do this job effectively without Linda. She has a certain ability to relate to people in a way that I don’t.”
The volunteer work Mrs Hurley has done as a pastoral carer in hospitals and hospices has influenced the way she relates to people and prepared her for this job.
“I was always a good listener,” she says, “but it made me more aware of listening – doing something that’s not about you. Pastoral care had never been on my radar. A friend of mine did a course and said, ‘I think you’d really like this’. All denominations can do it. You can be a pastoral carer and be an atheist. It’s not about forcing religion on people; it’s about listening and supporting people if you can. So I signed up for the six-month course, which was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. That first day was scary – that first patient I met … But my supervisor said, ‘Once you’ve worked at the hospice, you won’t want to work anywhere else.’ So I did that, and working at the hospice was very special.”
One of the greatest challenges the Governor-General designate has confronted was, no doubt, the horrific Skype sex scandal that erupted in the military in 2011, during his time as Chief of the Defence Force. His response was to introduce a program of deep-seated cultural change.
“We had to have a good look at ourselves as an organisation,” he explains. “We had to hear what people were saying and what people had experienced. We had clear direction from government that this needed to be sorted out. So we took a deep breath and went in and started to sort it out.
“We provided means for women, if they were abused, harassed or assaulted, to report that, and we tried to take away the stigma. Sometimes we made errors, but on the whole I think we were right. We introduced a world-leading system. We also looked at the attitudes and behaviours that we needed to work on. We realised that alcohol was behind 99 per cent of those incidents, so we had to look at that problem as well. Cultural change has to be deep, it has to be long-term and you have to work at it.”
He also began the process to remove restrictions on women in combat roles and introduced a raft of changes to address inequality in the military.
“It was an opportune time to do it,” he says, “to create equality for women in the services, to look at the way we were promoting women, the way we were doing our business. There were naysayers but the women would push back and say, this isn’t just for us, it’s for everybody. So when we talk about flexible working conditions, men can benefit from that too. It’s all one ship here … And now we are seeing more women generals, admirals, air marshals coming up through the
system. This has taken time but it’s happening.”
At the back of Government House, The Weekly spies a huddle of manyhued bee hives. General Hurley became interested in beekeeping while travelling through rural Australia as Governor of NSW. His honey is called ‘Isabella’, after the first ship to bring European honey bees to Australia. Some of his honey is used in the kitchens at Government House, some raises money at charity auctions and, he says, “any Isabellas we meet, from babies to elderly ladies, get a jar of honey. It’s amazing how many women change their name to Isabella when they meet me.”
In her spare time (of which, it must be said, there is little), Mrs Hurley sings and writes songs. Before the couple moved out of Government House in Sydney, family and staff came together to perform an entire musical that she had written about her time there. She has sung in church and military choirs, reintroduced an annual Christmas carol recital at Government House and insists The Weekly joins her in a couple of rounds of You Are My Sunshine before we leave. “I want everyone to sing,” she says. “I believe that everyone can sing. The more you sing, the better you get at singing. It doesn’t have to be perfect. I believe singing is one of the most joyous things you can do.”
Moreover, singing is a space in which she can be, not the wife of a Governor or a Governor General, but Linda Hurley, herself.
“As the wife of the Governor – as the wife of anyone – you have to blaze your own path. Well, I do. When David was in the army, I was either a mother or I was working, so I had my own thing … I don’t want to just be [an accessory]. So I have my own passions and David has his passions and we support each other. I think he was a bit sus’ about the singing in the beginning, but he’s embraced it.”
Mrs Hurley is also passionate about fitness and works out with a hula hoop most mornings. The Weekly has read that she hula hoops while reading devotional texts and she laughs and admits it’s true. “It makes the hula hooping time go really quickly,” she says.
As they prepare for their move to Canberra, General Hurley confesses that he was “shocked” when he was approached to be Governor General, but now, they are both beginning to think about the good they can do in their roles.
“We know what the constitutional requirements are,” he says. “We know what the ceremonial requirements are. The blank piece of paper is the community engagement. That’s where you can write your own program and we really love that.”
So what might we see appearing on that sheet of paper?
“Keeping in mind these roles are apolitical,” says General Hurley, “I believe what is happening with our Aboriginal communities is important and the journey we’re on there together is important. Youth leadership is important. We mentor a few youngsters. Young people are worth investing in. Millennials get a hard time but give them a cause they’re passionate about and they’re terriers.
“From the environmental perspective, Linda is very concerned with the grassroots, with recycling and packaging. And we will continue to support our regional and rural communities, not just because they’ve been doing it tough in the drought, but because the sustainability of that long-term is something we need to be looking at.
“So we will be thinking about how we can get out there and support people, acknowledge what they do and keep spirits up. If we can do that, then I think we can be helpful.”