Q&A with Mary Delahunty
Bronte Coates talks with journalist Mary Delahunty about her inside account of Julia Gillard’s tenure as Prime Minister.
Gravity draws from your time following former Prime Minister Julia Gillard through the last year of her term. When did you realise this experience would become a book?
When I bumped into the PM on Mugga Way in Canberra. Where else in the world can you just stroll along a bush boulevard in the nation’s capital and nearly trip over a Prime Minister casually walking her dog? We chatted that spring day about the project of me following her around, up close and personal for twelve months, and the way history might treat her.
The Australian writer, Rose Scott, got it right when she said that the good that men do is captured in history books, while the good that women do is interred with their bones. Julia Gillard’s history as PM was being written every day in the newspapers and online, drafts that would cling to the database and no doubt fuel the impressions of historians down the generations. What were we seeing? Almost a political caricature mired in a cacophony of angry voices and relentless opinion. As a journalist I could see that Julia Gillard was ‘defying political gravity’. For three years and three days she walked a political tightrope as our first female PM, leading a minority government, both corroded by internal undermining. As a politician though, from a much smaller pond, I wondered how she kept it all together.
I wanted to understand the woman behind the cartoons and hysterical headlines, why she seemed shrouded, unexplained. I wanted to be a witness to the real story of Australia’s first female Prime Minister. Julia Gillard took a punt on me and never asked to vet anything I wrote.
Julia Gillard PM always seemed slightly veiled, opaque behind her own restraint and the roar of the critics. In the job she was ubiquitous on the national political stage. Every day she was there. Every night she was filtered into our lounge rooms. As the seasons changed from the optimism of spring, delusion of summer, treachery of autumn to the end in winter, I watched closely backstage, from the wings, in the shadows, trying to lift the scrim on this woman prime minister, the first in our history.
In March 2013 I was in her private suite the day of the bizarre leadership spill when the challenger Rudd squibbed the contest and again in June when the axe fell. I was the only journalist or writer to speak with Julia Gillard that day and the morning after.
With unique access and Gillard’s personal frankness I thought a book about the intersection between the personal and the political could be a cracker
Several recent books on Gillard’s tenure as Prime Minister have called into question the role of sexism and misogyny in Australia societies. Did you find yourself asking similar questions?
Oh yes. From the very beginning Julia Gillard PM was threatened with eviction. But it was the language and imagery of this political assault that astonished me. She was a bitch a witch. She was a shrew, a mistake. She had to go they cried.
By 2010 Australians were uncharacteristically lacking in generosity, to each other and to outsiders. A coarseness crept in. The unexpected coming of a woman prime minister in the winter of that year and the reaction to it were mixed in a nasty cocktail that was left unchecked and unchallenged. Australian politics was reduced to quick, nasty swipes that obscured the big picture. A woman trying to run the place was always going to have a hard time. But what shocked me was the crude sexism, powered by the internet and fostered by political opponents, that seeped into public debate like spilt wine on a tablecloth. Neither challenged nor apologised for, the stain spread.
There was sound and fury swirling around this prime minister, a roughness to her treatment. I wanted to discover whether she was an Anne Boleyn figure, mysterious in her power and hounded to the end, or a political Athena, warrior woman, who gave as good as she got. She had to be tough; she faced two opponents, the leader of the Opposition and the man she beat for the top job without requiring a vote in the party room. Australian politics was toxic in the reverberating aftermath of that June night. I wanted to understand the prime minister’s double-defence strategy and the resilience to keep going.
You also work as a journalist and have done so for several years – a career that has been greatly impacted by changing technology and lifestyles. How do you view the current state of journalism in Australia?
I weep over the creeping destruction of the Fourth estate! With a few courageous exceptions business constraints have overtaken independent editorial. Journalists seemed hemmed in by constant demands to file for multiple ‘platforms’ little time for research and the insidious call for ‘comment’. Never has the ABC been more crucial to the free flow of information and fair debate. The light in this grim tunnel is the brave stable of independent magazines and book publishers who foster long-form essays and reportage
Are there any works that influenced you when writing this book?
The enduring influence, the book that took me into journalism, is Interview with History by Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, one the most original and effective interviewers even to take to the pen and recorder. She demonstrated that power is also personal. I’ve never forgotten that. In Gravity I wanted to explore where the personal meets the political that unmediated space where private values form the arc of public policy.
