Boyer Lectures 2013: Back to Grassroots

By Quentin Bryce

Her Excellency, The Honourable Quentin Bryce AC CVO, Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia, shares her thoughts on contemporary Australia.
Her Excellency's lecture series, 'Back to Grassroots', will comprise four 30 minute lectures titled: Joining the neighbourhood: a personal story of equal rights advocacy; Watching the women: the powerful role of Australian women; Australians at their best: courage, compassion and resilience in everyday life; and Advance Australia Fair: looking to the future of Australian citizenship. "I am delighted to be giving the 2013 Boyer Lectures, contributing to a national conversation that has been hosted by the ABC for more than half a century now," said Her Excellency. "Like the best sort of conversation it has taken Australians down countless paths-enthralling, challenging, unworn paths. My hope is to open up yet another pathway: one that speaks to the importance of human rights in building neighbourhood, community and citizenship.""It is an honour to have the Governor-General present this year's Boyer Lecture series. Her distinguished and multifaceted career as an academic, lawyer, community and human rights advocate and vice-regal representative in Australia will provide for diverse and insightful content, and I am sure I can speak for all Australians in saying that we very much look forward to her sharing her thoughts on contemporary Australia."Each year the ABC invites a prominent Australian to present the result of his or her work and thinking on major social, scientific or cultural issues in a series of radio talks in November known as the Boyer Lectures.the annual Boyer Lecture series began in 1959 and is named after the late Sir Richard Boyer, a former Chairman of the ABC. Over the years featured speakers have come from a very broad range of disciplines and interests. Previous Boyer Lecturers include former Reserve Bank Governor Ian Macfarlane, Archbishop Dr Peter Jensen, international affairs expert Owen Harries, historian Professor Geoffrey Blainey, author David Malouf, former Prime Minister (then head of the ACtU) Bob Hawke, Aboriginal leader and lawyer Noel Pearson, Professor Graeme Clark AC, prominent business leader Rupert Murdoch AC, General Peter Cosgrove, AC MC (Retd), Professor Glyn Davis AC, Pulitzer-prize winning author and journalist Geraldine Brooks, and Professor Marcia Langton, Professor of Australian Indigenous Studies at the University of Melbourne.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Dec 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781460700921

Quentin Bryce

Her Excellency, The Honourable Quentin Bryce AC CVO, Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia, was sworn in as Australia’s 25th Governor-General on 5 September 2008. Her illustrious career includes roles such as Director of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Queensland (1987-1988); Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner (1988-1993); founding Chair and CEO, National Childcare Accreditation Council (1993-1996); Principal and CEO of The Women's College.

Book preview

ONE

JOINING THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

A PERSONAL STORY OF EQUAL RIGHTS ADVOCACY

As I get older and see our children caring for their families, working in their careers, and watch our grandchildren developing, I think more and more about the sort of life and nation we are delivering to them. And as I come to the end of my term as Governor-General, I’m grateful for the opportunity in this Boyer lecture series to share some of those thoughts with you.

Growing up in the dry heart of central western Queensland in the 1940s meant that I was a kid from the bush. It’s sheep and cattle country out there, and it goes on forever. The grey-brown soils are the eroded remnants of the bed of a vast inland sea. Fine arteries sculpt the almost flat landscape, carrying scarce water and thirsting for rain. Huge expanses of Mitchell Grass nourish what was then a thriving wool industry. Only stands of Gidgee interrupt a penetrating, mesmerising horizon.

At the end of a day, I would often visit my father at his work. I’d sit in his office soaking up his world, imbibing the smell of lanolin. Over the grind and roar of machinery, I would listen to him talk to the men who worked with him. My dad was the manager of the district’s wool scour. He was a great storyteller and chatted easily with all sorts of people.

The big, faraway world was filtered to me through books, letters, radio, and a steady flow of conversation. Naturally, I was curious about what lay beyond our little town.

I learned later that women then made up only around 22 per cent of the Australian workforce, and only 3 per cent of those were married.¹ The basic female wage was 75 per cent of the male wage. There were only two women in the Federal Parliament.² This was the way it was.

The leading feminists of the time – Jessie Street, Bessie Rischbieth and Muriel Matters – were hailing a ‘coming of age’ for women in the post-war years,³ but very few of us really had any idea that women’s participation in Australian life would change so dramatically across the next five decades. I feel so lucky to have been part of them.

I have found during my term that I’ve often gone back to earlier working life and experiences, the people I’ve learned from along the way, to make sense of what I see now.

Each Governor-General gathers a fortune of insights from across Australian life. We see the most courageous, compassionate and resilient of human effort; and, wherever we go, a deep fondness for this country. So much of this role is about listening to people’s stories and doing our best to echo them around the nation. Personal stories of struggle and overcoming. The ideas and questions and provocations they put in front of us. How they help our understanding of human disadvantage and suffering, and our formal recognition of human rights. Real-life stories that, once heard, we can never walk away from.

These lectures are essentially about those stories; or, more precisely, the critical part stories and their telling play in building neighbourhoods, practising good leadership and citizenship, and participating in a democracy.

As teenagers at a girls’ boarding school in the mid-’50s, on a Sunday my friends and I would lie around on rugs under the huge camphor laurel trees reading much-loved books about the World War Two nurses – Betty Jeffrey, Vivian Bullwinkel – our favourite was White Coolies. We pored over newspaper clippings of the female athletes we idolised. It was around the time of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, the first ever to be held in the southern hemisphere. And television had arrived. Melbourne was a long way from our school and dormitories in outer bayside Brisbane, but that did nothing to quell our excitement and feeling of being right there with the athletes.

They were Australia’s home-grown heroines competing on home soil: Betty Cuthbert, Shirley Strickland de la Hunty, Norma Croker, Fleur Mellor, Marlene Matthews and Norma Thrower.

The press officially crowned eighteen-year-old Cuthbert the ‘Golden Girl’ of the games. She even got the ‘Blonde Bombshell’, which I believe she found embarrassing. No matter the colour of their hair, they were all golden girls to us.

For sure, we loved to see them win; that gold-studded 4 × 100-metre relay was a heart and nation stopper. These were gutsy young women, with extraordinary talent and drive. We admired their superbly fit bodies and minds. We admired what they’d achieved