JULIA BAIRD on demanding better for women in power

The author and journalist writes that despite the gender gains we’ve made in recent years, now is the time for a revived call for change where women are safe and respected.

It can take a while to find your tribe. After I left school, I wandered through a host of industries – I waited tables, served banquets, checked coats, sold flowers, taught university history, and did paralegal work in a law firm. I also once worked in an American-style diner in London – every time the song Born to Hand Jive came on, all the staff had to rush to the dance floor and actually, excruciatingly, do the hand jive. But the less said of that the better. I met some fantastic people and made some lasting friendships. But I always felt odd, an alien of sorts.

It wasn’t until I walked into the newsroom of the Sydney Morning Herald that I knew I had met my people: a bunch of committed, hardworking, hard-living, half-mad and eccentric journalists and wordsmiths who cared about the world, abuse of power, corruption, history, the drowning out of marginalised voices and the need to tell untold stories. They were also just fun – raucous, unruly and generally untamed.

I was a cadet then, devoting weekends to the final gruelling stages of a PhD I was writing about female politicians and the way they had been framed by the media throughout Australia’s history.

Ever since women entered parliament they have been caricatured as housewives, cover girls, feisty feminists, saints and sluts. We have, in short, struggled to accept the idea of women exercising authority or wielding power – it seemed weird, unnatural, freakish, unbecoming, unwomanly (whatever that might be).

A doctor told me my hair would keep shedding from the stress until I finished the thesis. Once it was finally done, I spun on my heels and wrote a book laying out the roots of our contempt for women in power, and the reason so many high-profile female MPs had crashed and burned in the 1990s and 2000s: Carmen Lawrence, Natasha Stott Despoja, Cheryl Kernot and Bronwyn Bishop.

I interviewed many dozens of MPs and dug through reams of clippings files in libraries, pulling out photos of female MPs who had been asked to pose doing the washing, the cooking, the vacuuming, and then in ballgowns, bikinis, even bed sheets.

During my start as a cadet reporter, I was swotting up on the past, trying to document how we have treated women as temporary occupants or outsiders in a man’s world, without even providing toilets for them (the sheer symbolism!), and shaming them for the kinds of ambition, errors or flaws that men were getting away with.

My book about all this, Media Tarts, was published in 2004. As any author can attest, the feeling of pushing your very first book out into the world is uniquely nerve-wracking and exquisite. Finally, I was on my way to being a writer. But more importantly, I was finally able to tell the stories of women whose careers should have been longer, whose voices should have been louder, whose impact should have been even greater.

My tribe rallied; hours after the book was launched in Sydney’s Glebe by a delightful Carmen Lawrence (the former premier of Western Australia), we were still dancing in an inner-city bar. I have a vivid memory of a friend in a peppermint-coloured suit sliding down a pole before the lights turned off and we were turfed out.

Seventeen years later, in early 2021, I watched my 14-year-old daughter walk down the same streets under a banner reading: ‘Boys Will Be Boys held accountable as girls always are’. It was the March4Justice – an eruption of anger that followed the revelations of rape, bullying and sexual assault in Parliament House. Female MPs had been speaking for months about poor treatment, and about a macho culture that sidelined them, silenced them, refused to listen to their concerns and eventually forced some to leave.

And there she was, my teenager, with serious eyes and long straight hair, observing it all before asking if she could refuel at Starbucks.

I went home and started work on a revised, updated edition of my book – now more relevant than ever – in order to show the roots of all of this in history. To show that none of this is new.

Gains have been made since my girl was born, of course. We have had female premiers and a female governor-general. We’ve also had a female prime minister, although she was portrayed abominably, with a kind of hysteria that grew over the time she was governing. It was horrible to watch – and scarring.

But here we are. A new beginning, a revived call for change. Sometimes the point of starting again is reckoning with the past. And it’s only by truly understanding our history that we can confront our collective demons (like sexism) and hopefully shed them. So many women have marched and voted and written, been elected, promoted and made significant changes and contributions. They are far from passive, but there are still impediments in their path that men do not have. And we are all the poorer for it.

I did my best for my daughter, working towards an environment in which she could thrive and in which she could be safe and respected. But this world still needs to be rattled, the dust of history shaken off and the cultures of misogyny exposed. I am not done yet. And I am not alone.

Change will be wrested and it will be done by a chorus of voices, one that is currently being led by women of astonishing courage and clarity like Chanel Contos, Brittany Higgins and Grace Tame: young women my daughter is watching. It won’t be long before I’ll be walking behind her.

A revised and updated edition of Media Tarts: How the Australian Press Frames Female Politicians (HarperCollins) by Julia Baird, is out now.

“It’s only by truly understanding our history that we can confront our collective demons (like sexism) and hopefully shed them”

My father, who I was deeply attached to, suffered a stroke on the day he retired. He was 65. He lived for another four years, but he wasn’t healthy. And I have always had that in the back of my mind; we don’t have much time, we need to make the most of it. I’m 63 and that was one of the triggers for me in my decision to say “it’s time” and announce my departure from the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney. But there were other factors involved in deciding it was the right time to go. I celebrated my 20-year anniversary at the museum about six months before Covid hit and my contract is up in December.

I was also thinking about my family in Scotland; because of Covid I haven’t been to see them for two years and I feel really unconnected. It’s horrible. I’m desperate to see my mum, who’s 86, and my three siblings. I dread the phone call that might come.

I finish at the museum in October and the plan is that I’ll go to Scotland as soon as I can for three months. I’m itching to get on that plane. My partner, entrepreneur Peter Le Gras, will join me at the end of the year. I speak Italian and, depending on the Covid situation, we also want to spend time in Italy, stay for a while in middle Italy, Umbria or Abruzzo.

I’m looking backwards and forwards. Looking back, I feel that my legacy is the museum’s very existence. When I arrived, it was teetering. It didn’t have a solid financial base, there were problems of perception and it had terrible media coverage. Getting it back on its feet was the most important thing I did initially. I remember people saying to me: “Oh, you’ll never get people to accept a museum of contemporary art, this is Sydney, blah blah blah,” and the numbers told that story – they were below 100,000. But in 2019 we became the most visited museum of contemporary art in the world with one million visitors.

It has been an amazing opportunity to run this extraordinary institution. When I walk through the museum, I love to see the variety of people popping in to see what it’s like; not necessarily people who know much about art, but they still feel comfortable coming into the building, seeing something interesting or exciting, or even something they don’t like. And at least now they can get a decent cup of coffee and a nice view of the Opera House. I do like to think we’ve made a real difference to people’s lives by working with so many wonderful artists.

One of our young ambassadors told me recently: “I’ve grown up with the MCA, I came here as a child, it’s part of my life”. I love that kind of feedback, or when I see the faces of kids who might never have seen an artwork in a museum before their visit. The effect that contemporary art and artists can have on people, the engagement between the art and the audience, are the things I will cherish.

There have been so many exhibitions, not all curated by me, which have been highlights. For example, just after the new wing opened, I did a show with the British artist Anish Kapoor. I loved doing that exhibition and witnessing his work, his spirituality, his ability to transform materials and connect with an audience. And I can’t go past my swan song, the exhibition I did with the wonderful Lindy Lee, which opened in October 2020. Our friendship goes back a long way, but going into the curatorial mode with her and delving into her motivations was extraordinary, especially given the timing around Black Lives Matter. As an Asian Australian, Lindy has suffered from racism and her work brought us back to the stark reality of the kind of society we live in. But she has an ability to heal through her work.

Contemporary art could not be more important for the times ahead and for young people in particular. In the age of artificial intelligence they are going to need creativity, creative thinking, critical thinking, empathy and collaboration – all the things our team of artist/educators work with in our National Centre for Creative Learning.

I do think the way artists tell stories can actually go beyond what the media can do, or what politicians can do, or anyone else. Artists can tell stories, like Lindy telling the story of being a woman from two different backgrounds, Chinese and Australian. Artists can tell those stories in ways that engage us in a very different way on an emotional level, rather than necessarily on an intellectual level. They have an ability to cut through, which is why I think contemporary art is even more important now.

There are tons of things I’m going to miss – my team, the people I work with, the artists I’ve worked with – and I know I’m going to go through lots of teary moments. But I’m not going to be turning up at openings and hanging around and breathing down my successor Suzanne Cotter’s neck. I want to make a clean break psychologically.

Covid has caused us all to rethink our priorities. The other day I was talking to Jonathan Watkins, my successor at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery where I spent 10 years as director before coming to Sydney. I said: “I did these two jobs, back to back, with no breaks; it’s 30 years of constant pressure and responsibility.” I’m really looking forward to not doing that anymore.

Peter and I have a place on the mid-north coast of New South Wales and that’s going to be our base. I’m comfortable just coming and spending weekends in Sydney to see friends.

“I do think the way artists tell stories can actually go beyond what the media can do, or what politicians can do, or anyone else … They have an ability to cut through”

It’s exciting: I want to do something different, I want to have a different kind of lifestyle, rebalance my life. I have lots of hobbies: I love to cook – Italian food is my absolute favourite; I’m a big reader and have this enormous list of books that I’ve been dying to read, whether it’s about the planet or how we can end poverty, and I’m also a secret crime novel junkie.

My other thing is conservation: I was on the board of a conservation organisation called Flora and Fauna International Australia, have done a correspondence course in Australian native plants, and sometimes I joke that I’m going to run a wombat sanctuary. It’s one of the things I love about Australia – all the weird animals. I’d like to continue doing voluntary conservation-related work and I’m also on the board of the Sydney Swans Foundation – I love AFL – and UNICEF Australia.

Sometimes I wake up in the night and think, “Oh god, am I going to be bored?” and then I think of all the things I want to do, and think, “I’m not going to be bored.”