Joan

By Graeme Johnstone

Joan Child led a remarkable life. A genuine trailblazer, she carved a path for young women across the nation. The widowed, sole parent and mother of five sons supported them by cleaning other people’s houses and working as a hospital cook before she rose to become Labor’s first woman Member of the House of Representatives, Australia’s first woman Speaker of the House and Australia’s Permanent Delegate to the European Parliament. At the same time she managed to care for her frail and elderly parents who lived with her!
Joan Child entered Parliament in 1974, midway through the boisterous times of the Whitlam Government - sitting in the House on the day of infamous Dismissal - and left as Paul Keating was challenging Bob Hawke for the Prime Ministership.
She gained an astonishing 9% swing at her first tilt at the Liberal-held seat of Henty, missing out by a handful of votes. She then won it, lost it, and won it again, ultimately turning it into a safe ALP seat. Her empathy and understanding of the needs of her constituents endeared her to her community and her sharp political brain out manoeuvred her opposition.
Tiny and soft-spoken, dogged and feisty, Joan Child was an acknowledged women’s rights activist, a resolute anti-Vietnam campaigner and a staunch supporter of the ‘refuseniks’ - citizens blocked from seeking to leave the USSR.
She met all men as equals, bowing low to none.
From her early days growing up in rural Beechworth to her retirement in bayside Melbourne and dying, aged 91 in 2013, it was an eventful, roller-coaster ride; an inspirational, history-making journey.
She was ‘Joan’.

• Language: English
• Publisher: G. & E. Johnstone
• Release date: Jun 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9780992505943

Book preview

The story of Joan Child is awash with triumph, tragedy, humour, sadness and success, all stirred through with lots of hard work. She reached the top, a place where few women of her time were allowed to go, and she did it by dint of vision, common sense, determination and never being satisfied with ‘no’ as an answer. At the same time, as a young widow she brought up five sons and cared for her elderly parents. Joan was an amazing woman of her time who paved the way for all women in her wake.

I began this book in 2010 when Joan was in her late 80s, still involved, energetic and enthusiastic and still an important mentor for young Labor hopefuls. Depending on her availability, we met in her bayside home once a week over many, many months, trawling through memories and tapping into her thoughts, ideas, comments and anecdotes before I set to writing.

The first draft was solid, noble, worthy and just a teensy bit dull. Well, pretty dull, actually. Written in the third person - Joan did this, someone did that, Joan said this, and then someone left the room - it might well have captured her life and times, but it had one serious element missing. Joan’s voice. Her sparky character was not evident. It had been submerged in the traditional biographical historical detail constructed to embroider the scenario.

Before we could determine what to do next, events began to take things out of our hands. Joan began to struggle with her health and I instinctively knew that it was best not to burden her as she faced her final journey.

Joan’s amazing life ended on February 23, 2013. She was 91.

The week before, she sent me the message that gave me permission to do with the book whatever I liked. In the post-Joan vacuum I let the manuscript sit while I pondered my options. Then it came to me. Let Joan have her voice. Let her tell her story as she saw it. She always lived her life her way, so why shouldn’t she tell it her way?

Inspired, I launched into a total re-write converting my noble drudge into a first-person memoir - Joan’s story as she tells it in her inimitable, charming, cheeky and very honest way.

I loved re-creating this version with Joan in my ear as her words flowed onto the pages.

I hope you do too.

– Graeme Johnstone.

ONE

To call my father politically conservative would be an understatement, a miscarriage of justice. He thought Sir Robert Menzies was a pinko, not right wing enough to be a decent Prime Minister. In all the years I stood for Parliament, Dad never once voted for me. Me! Joan Child, his own daughter. He always cast his vote in support of my Liberal opponent. Not only that, he took great pride in telling me that. And everybody else within shouting distance.

Warren Arthur Liles Olle came straight out of the Western District squattocracy and although he never actually worked on the land in his adult years, he maintained the wealthy grazier’s sense of proprietary and self-belief until his dying day. His father, also named Warren, and mother Sarah arrived in Australia from England when Victoria was still establishing itself as a colony. I can only relate what I was told but apparently, in those days, you could go to the highest point in a district and take up all the land that you could see. That was the law. You wonder, how could they have created a system like that? Aside from the sheer greed of it, what about the simple technicalities? How do you work it out? You know where the land starts, but where exactly does it end?

Warren and Sarah settled at Mount Rouse and finished up owning three big properties, one of which was called Lovely Banks. They established a typical Western District farming and grazing operation, sticking to many of the traditions of the Mother Country including the naming of their six sons and one daughter. One boy was christened Clarence Baden Powell Olle while in one of the other boy’s names Sarah was keen to include Kitchener.

The family name Olle is thought to have its origins in Brittany, France. We believe it used to be D’Olle but that somewhere along the line the ‘D’ somehow got dropped off. On the other hand, Sarah’s maiden name was written as Liles, but she always insisted it was actually De L’Isle, the same as the British peerage title, one of whom, Viscount De L’Isle, became Governor-General of Australia in 1961. My view, not shared by everybody in the family, is that an ancestor probably worked on a De L’Isle property in England and due to the old master-servant relationships of those days, that’s where the name Liles came from.

Sarah’s daughter, my Aunty Rene, was also very social minded and as her husband was high up in tennis circles they got invited to all sorts of functions. They used to frame the invitations and hang them on the wall. At one event, Viscount De L’Isle and his wife were also guests, so Rene bowled up to them and told them that her mother’s family name was De L’Isle, the same as theirs, and that they were related. The Governor-General’s wife was very kind, pleasant and diplomatic. She didn’t say that they were not related. She didn’t say they were, either.

Ironically, the De L’Isle peerage is based in Penshurst in the County of Kent while the land Warren and Sarah took up was near Penshurst in western Victoria. They were so successful at working it that they built a large home at Lovely Banks as well as two smaller houses on the other properties. The extended family also finished up owning the Penshurst bakery and a butcher’s shop. My father was very proud of the land his parents owned, regularly pointing out what a magnificent house they had built on the main property. But on the quiet my Mum used to say that it wasn’t an especially showy house, rather it was a large but very ordinary homestead with a big veranda around three sides.

Grandpa Warren was a lovely, gentle man who died very young, while Grandma Sarah was the redoubtable family matriarch. Diminutive, tough and thrifty, she ruled the roost and called the shots. They may have been big landowners in the English tradition but she was certainly not one for spending money on butlers or maids or cooks or anything like that. She did all her own work around the house including making soap out of fat rather than buying it from the local store. When you went and stayed there and had a shower or a bath, you could never get a lather out of it.

Mum used to say that there was plenty of money around but she never saw any of it because Grandma kept a very tight hand on the purse strings. They might have had money, they might have mixed with money, but they never handed any money out.

The properties were sited on rich volcanic soil that did not need much in the way of superphosphate or other fertilizers so grazing sheep and growing crops came easily. They were one of the many successful farms that helped Australia ride to prosperity on the sheep’s back. But this typical Western District dynasty came unstuck when the three oldest boys reached maturity and wanted to take over a property each. Being the oldest my father would get the pick of the farms.

Although Grandma was happy with that, she added that she would still direct them and tell them how to run each place. Of course they weren’t going to look after a property if they were going to be told when they should do this or how they should do that. When they informed her that they were not happy with the proposed arrangement, she fumed that it was either her way or no way, and that they could either work on the properties under her direction or they could not work on them at all. So they said, ‘Well, we won’t.’ And the three of them left her to it in Penshurst and headed for Melbourne. All three signed on with the Postmaster-General’s Department and my father was working in the Post Office at Maldon when he first met my mother.

Mum - Hilda Mary Seedsman - also had English connections but came from a completely different background to that of the Olle family. Her father, James Seedsman, had come from England, worked on the gold mines around Castlemaine and Maldon and helped found the miners’ union. His wife, Sarah Whittaker, signed the first petition being passed around Melbourne proposing that women should be given the vote. Perhaps that’s where my drive and ambition came from.

James was a very popular man who owned some property around Maldon but no one is exactly sure what he did before he left England. One of my aunts told me she believed he had worked on the land, tying in with his name Seedsman. She reckoned that he would have been a gardener of some kind, following the tradition of a man or his forebears being given a name that described his occupation. Presumably he or his ancestors had been into grain or cropping at some point.

Mum only ever talked about the mining. There was a lot of digging for gold around Castlemaine and Maldon in those days and her father used to tell Mum that there was still plenty left. He would tell how when he first arrived people were virtually picking gold up off the ground. How, when the mining began, it was still at a very shallow depth and they didn’t have to dig that far down, only six to eight feet. And how, when those days passed, there was still plenty left down there but anyone keen enough to try was going to have to dig much deeper for it and it would be a very expensive process. There is probably a lot still down there.

So you can see that I came out of two clashing cultures - the conservative, born-to-rule squattocracy of my father’s side and the unionist, votes-for-women of my mother’s. My mother’s genes proved stronger.

Despite their differences or maybe because of them Warren Arthur Liles Olle and Hilda Mary Seedsman were wed and settled down to married life, with Dad working diligently in the Post Office. He was ambitious and used various country appointments to climb the ladder while Mum created a home for us three kids as we came along - Sarah in 1914, Warren Junior a year after that and me six years later, on August 3, 1921.

I was born in Yackandandah in Victoria’s northeast and while everyone knows me as Joan my first name is actually Gloria. I was christened Gloria Joan Liles Olle, with Gloria being my father’s choice. He was a great fan of the Hollywood actress Gloria Swanson, a star of the times, who he thought was absolutely wonderful.

Joan was Mum’s choice and typically it got relegated to second spot while Liles, Grandma Sarah’s maiden name, was given to each of us three children. She would have preferred the more aristocratic De L’Isle.

But no one ever called me Gloria. I was always Joan to everyone, right from when I was little. Maybe that sparked my love/hate relationship with my father. That he was not happy because his selection got sidelined.

My name only became something of an issue for me much later when I was regularly standing for election. By that stage I was Gloria Joan Liles Child. One day, after a couple of campaigns, I looked at the proofs of a How To Vote card and it read G. J. L. Child. I thought it was too much, too complicated, not really saying who I was. I resorted to the simpler Joan Child and it has worked for me ever since.

I don’t remember much about Yackandandah but my fondest childhood memories come from the time Dad was appointed Postmaster at nearby Beechworth. We moved into the big Post Office building in the middle of town that was regarded as a masterpiece of rural administrative architecture then, and still is today. It’s two-story, Italianate, with a large square tower that has a clock and bell. In those days the PMG ran both the Post Office and Telephone Exchange so they fronted the streets on the corner site.

The family living quarters at the back were huge. We had large bedrooms, a spacious lounge, a separate dining room and a big kitchen. All the rooms had the lofty ceilings that you don’t see these days. Many had fireplaces, and the whole thing was centred on an ornate cedar staircase.

The laundry was a huge wooden building and tucked away outside was a separate room that presumably had been for a maid. That’s how important the local Postmaster had been when the place was built in 1870. By the time we got there, the days of having someone in service at your beck and call were long gone. Had we had one, my father would have been in heaven.

I have been back to visit and on two occasions the resident Postmaster has let me look through the old place. It brought back plenty of fond memories and the only thing I resented was that the cedar staircase had been painted. A beautiful staircase like that, painted over in white. I can’t believe anyone would do such a thing.

I adored the old gold mining town. I loved every stick and stone of it. If I shut my eyes I can still see the stone buildings, Victoria Park and where our fresh water came from - a clear natural lake that welled up from underground. And of course I remember the granite walls of the prison, which was an important part of Beechworth’s landscape and growth. But while I loved the town, our home and the local primary school, the foundations to the strained relationship with my father were being laid.

Dad would be best described as a Tory. He believed in the concept of born to rule and ran the Post Office like it was his kingdom. It was always, ‘Do as I say, not do as I do.’ This was especially so for the poor old linesmen fixing the telephone wires between Beechworth and the small surrounding towns like Yackandandah and Stanley. They used to be out in all sorts of weather day and night, doing a great job, particularly during storms when strong winds and falling trees had brought lines down. But I used to hear Dad talking at them; I wouldn’t say talking with them. He was very, very tough on them.

In some ways Dad was a product of his times. A lot of managers saw their role as a master-servant relationship in those days. But I think his inability to tolerate the slightest sign of weakness or inefficiency also stemmed from the fact that he was a very smart, very capable person. He was intelligent, well read, a quick thinker, a rapid decision-maker and never backward in giving his opinion.

He was also a good writer and contributed articles to magazines. I don’t know what he wrote about, but Mum used to often talk about it and there was always a pile of magazines in a cupboard that was my special hiding spot. If I was called to do something, or was in a spot of bother, I was so tiny I used to be able to sneak inside, pull the door shut and no one could find me. Mum would eventually work out what I had been up to, because while I was in there I would often dislodge the neatly stacked magazines and later on she would say, ‘You’ve been hiding in that cupboard again! I told you before to keep out of it.’

Dad was also a very good sportsman. He played golf off scratch, was a top local tennis player and an excellent shot with a rifle. He played football in the winter, swam in the summer and did a lot of fishing in the Murray and Ovens rivers. Combining his skills and ambition he rose through the PMG ranks, taking every offer of promotion he could, finishing his career running Camberwell Post Office which ranked only behind the Melbourne GPO in seniority in those days. So he didn’t too badly. But the people who worked for him didn’t like his modus operandi much. There is a time to be tough but there is also a time when you should just shut your eyes and let things happen. Dad could never do that.

This attitude was also applied to how the family was run and that put him and me on the collision course that was to shape our relationship. I was always in trouble for what I said, what I did and especially for standing up to him, often in defence of Mum. He was always complaining about how things were run in the house, especially the amount of money Mum spent on food. So one night when I was only about ten he was going on and on about the food bills and telling Mum how wasteful she was and I couldn’t stand it anymore.

I jumped in and said, ‘Mum’s not wasteful, Dad. She’s very careful with what she buys. And in any case, you eat three quarters of it. We don’t get chops for dinner, and we don’t get bacon or anything like that, but you do.’

It was true, too. He always got the best and most of what had been prepared while Mum used to surreptitiously give us a bowl of soup before he came down for dinner to fill us up.

He glared at me and said, ‘Leave the table.’

And I thought, ‘All right, I will leave the table.’ So I did, which only aggravated him more.

As I was walking out I heard him say to Mum, ‘Attend to that girl, she’s getting too smart for herself. Just attend to it.’

After dinner Mum came to me and said, ‘Joan, why can’t you just be quiet and not start fights like that?’

‘Mum,’ I said, ‘he always gets away with it. Of the money you spend on food he eats nearly all of it. I know that’s why you give us the soup before dinner, so at least we get something filling in our tummies.’

I was not alone. My sister Sarah stood up to him too. She was seven years older than me and fought him like a tiger and never backed down. So over the years Dad realised the best target to pick on was our bother, Warren Junior. He was the middle one of us three and a very sickly child. Dad had wanted a son who could play golf and tennis and who would go shooting and fishing with him. A real man’s man. But Warren turned out to be like my grandfather Seedsman - small, quiet and not in the least interested in sport and the outdoors. He was a gentle, loving boy who become a gentle, loving man.

This disappointed Dad and he was always on his back, to the point of never calling him by his proper name but addressing him as Boy. It was demeaning, particularly as he got older and went into adulthood. It was only after Warren got married that Dad was pulled up on it. Warren’s wife Betty was a wonderful woman who was very strong in her own right and who never warmed to my father. Whenever she spoke to Dad she would not call him anything personal or endearing, but would address him only as Mr Olle. One day she had had enough of Dad’s demeaning approach and snapped, ‘Mr Olle, my husband’s name is Warren, and you will be calling him Warren from now on! I am not happy with him being called Boy.’

Dad was going to remonstrate in his usual style and we all thought a mighty blue was about to erupt. But before he could saying anything, Betty added, ‘No, that’s it! There is nothing more to be said. I’m not having any argument about it.’ And that was that. For one of the very few times in his life Dad backed down and from that point on he called his son by his given name.

Dad’s attempts to control the family even extended as to how we should vote. He used to triumphantly declare that when we kids eventually reached the then voting age of twenty-one he would be a man with five votes - one coming from himself, one from his wife and one from each of his three children - all, of course, going to the party of his choice.

What he didn’t know was that Mum never voted his way anyway. Around the house she poured oil on troubled waters and tried to appease him to make things as peaceful as possible, but when it came to elections she ignored him and in the privacy of the polling booth voted the way she wanted to. As did the rest of us. So although he didn’t know it, Dad only had one vote going to the conservatives. We all voted Labor in the family except for him.

Despite the family conflict I loved Beechworth and could see myself growing up there, finishing school and settling down. But when I was eleven my dreams exploded overnight. We suddenly shifted to Melbourne.

When a crisis arrives, parents often do funny things in a misguided attempt to protect their children or ease their pain. Knowing how much I loved Beechworth they decided not tell me we were leaving for good. Instead they tried to soften the blow by telling me we were going on a holiday to Black Rock. That was fine by me because each year we would rent half a house down there and enjoy the seaside for a week or so. But this time instead of going to Black Rock we moved into a house in East St Kilda and we never went back. Rather than spending a week at the beach I ended up spending a year at Elwood Primary School.

We lived in Loch Avenue, East St Kilda, and I used to walk down Glen Eira Road and across Brighton Road to the school in Scott Street. It was hard to make the break and as I couldn’t believe I was not going back to Beechworth I found it difficult to settle in. I struggled along for a year there until I was old enough to go to secondary school. Nobody told me that we were leaving for good and it took me a long time to recover from that.

After all these years, and despite all I have done and achieved, it still hurts that I didn’t get to live in Beechworth. It has been the greatest grief for me. I thought I was always going to live there. I thought I was going to school there. I thought I was going to learn to cook there. Beechworth was very go-ahead in those days, with a cooking school for children right in the town. I thought I would master the art of cooking, get a job, get married and live in Beechworth for the rest of my life.

Years later as my Parliamentary career was ending I decided that I would return and rekindle my love of the town that had once meant so much to me. I went back several times with my sister Sarah and her husband Bill and after looking around I actually bought a house, a place I used to walk by every morning on the way to school. I used to say to it, ‘I’m going to live in you one day.’ However on the drive back home to Melbourne after I signed up for it, Sarah began talking to me about what I had done.

‘You are crazy,’ she said. ‘Your family are not going to drive three and a half hours up from Melbourne every week to come and see you. And you’ll have no friends. And the closest Labor party branch is in Yackandandah. It’s twenty-three kilometres downhill and you’ll never get there in the winter because of the fog. It sits in a valley and you’ll be sitting up on a hill. You have done a very foolish thing. You can’t relive a dream.’

She convinced me and I got out of the deal within the cooling off period. Later I phoned her, telling her she was right. I wanted to go back my Beechworth and live a dream, and I would never be able to do it. The Beechworth of now bears no relation to the Beechworth I knew and loved. Life has moved on.

But the original decision to shift to Melbourne still rankles. To this day, I reckon I got robbed. I worked out later that Mum was trying to protect me from something about her and Dad that I did not know - the fact that their marriage was falling apart. Although I can understand her good intentions, I think she should have told me what was really going on.

Luckily when I finished my brief stay at Elwood I moved onto secondary school and that opened up a whole new world for me.

TWO

Camberwell Girls Grammar School was sedate, dignified, churchy and nestled in the leafy avenues of one of Melbourne’s most exclusive, conservative suburbs. Probably not the sort of learning centre one would expect to produce a Labor politician but that is where I ended up. Trouble was, everyone there had everything, except me.

I had a scholarship, which I had sat for and won, even though I had had such an unsettled year before at Elwood. And I had the brains. Everyone acknowledged that I was smart. But the other girls had beach houses where they enjoyed the seaside in summer, and snowfield chalets where they went to ski in winter. I didn’t.

I had a difficult enough time having the right uniform and was always in trouble because I didn’t have exactly the right clothes. They used to flip your skirt up as you walked into the school to check whether you had the correct navy blue pants on or not. I was lucky I had pants to wear, let alone navy blue ones.

My family’s lack of money was partly due to the difficult economic times everyone was facing. It was the early 1930s and the Depression was biting. But it was also because shortly after I