Anne Summers Reports - The Looking Glass

Anne 

Summers 

Reports 

Sane Factual Relevant 

PRIMARY 

SOURCES 

Rousing speeches, top videos 

New York 

starchitects 

sunk by 

Sandy 

Number 1 Nov. 2012 

FREE 

US ELECTIONS 

Reagan era 

finally over 

ROYAL COMMISSION 

The sexual abuse 

of the stolen 

generations 

GET 

GONSKI 

MEET THE MAN BEHIND THE 

SCHOOLS REPORT 

1

ISSUE 

NO. 

1 




Welcome to 

the premier 

issue of ASR. 

2 

PHOTO OF ANNE SUMMERS: CARLEY WRIGHT 

Anne Summers is an awardwinning 

journalist and 

author with a long career in 

the media in Australia and 

the United States. 

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Welcome to our first issue. 

ANNE SUMMERS 

EDITOR

PREMIER ISSUE / NOVEMBER 2012 

Contents 

REPORTS 

12 Stolen, then abused First 

they were taken from their 

mothers, then they were 

sexually violated. Royal 

Commission take note. 

Honni van Rijswijk 

+ Extend the Royal 

Commission terms 

16 Giving a Gonski 

Who is David Gonski, the 

investment banker whose 

report advocated equity in 

our education system? 

Anne Summers 

DETAILS 

5 News US elections: 

tax rises, the death 

penalty and other major 

shifts; EOWA: the 

legislation we had to 

have; digital activism; 

abortion in Australia: 

so you thought it was 

legal? Scorecard: the 

chromosome factor. 

MUSES 

27 Books: staff picks 

28 Uncrowned heir 

30 Sandywhacked 

Famous New Yorkers 

can’t go home to their 

iconic buildings since 

Hurricane Sandy. 

David Hay 

3 

LINKS 

34 Primary sources 

The Go-To Place for 

the words that define 

us, here and around the 

world 

35 Hillarious Our take 

on the Texts From 

Hillary meme 

Subscribe 

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EDITOR 


ART DIRECTOR 

Stephen Clark 

COPY EDITOR 

Foong Ling Kong 

ASSOCIATE EDITOR 

Ashley Hogan 

ART & DESIGN 

CONTRIBUTOR 

Paula Weideger 

NEW YORK 

CORRESPONDENT 

David Hay 

DIGITAL DEVELOPER 

Ricky Onsman 

Write 

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YES … IT'S US! 

INTRODUCING A BRAND NEW DIGITAL 

MAGAZINE THAT COVERS POLITICS, SOCIETY, 

CULTURE AND ANYTHING ELSE WE THINK 

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Primary 

SourceS 

Rousing speeches, top videos 

New York 

starchitects 

sunk by 

Sandy 

2 Support 

get 

gonski 

Meet the Man behind the 

schools report 

We are relying on you, our readers, to 

finance us. If you possibly can, please make 

a donation using our secure PayPal function. 

If you want to make a regular donation, 

we can handle that. If you want to make a 

substantial gift please contact Anne Summers 

at annesummersreports@gmail.com and she 

will arrange a meeting 

Number 1 Nov. 2012 

FREE 

US ELECTIONS 

Californians 

increase taxes 

ROyaL COmmISSION 

The sexual abuse 

of the stolen 

generations 

SANE 

FACTUAL 

RELEVANT 

STORIES 

YOU WON’T 

READ 

ELSEWHERE 

TOP 

WRITERS 

AND 

ARTISTS 

1

IMAGE: SIMON LETCH 




Details 

A digest of newsy 

items on our radar 

US ELECTION 

REFORMS 

26 It wasn’t only 

marijuana and 

marriage equality. 

WORKPLACE: 

NEW LAWS 

26 Gender equality 

reforms finally pass 

Federal Parliament. 

POLITICS ON 

THE MOVE 

26 Hand-held devices 

are reshaping the 

democratic process. 

SCORECARD 

26 Keeping track of 

who’s making it in 

the art world. 

Abortion laws It’s worse than you think … State-by-state Roundup

6 



Reports Details 

Taxing times 

in the US 

As Californians voted 

to increase taxes, the 

Reagan era looks like 

it’s finally over. 

THE SWEEPING return to a 

second term in the White House 

for President Barack Obama has 

tended to obscure a number of 

other results at state levels, which 

are indicative of significant changes 

in American political culture. It 

seems that the self-styled “taxpayers’ 

revolt” of 1978, widely embraced 

by conservatives throughout 

the Western world, is coming 

to an end. Perhaps the Reagan era 

is finally over. 

In the US, property taxes are 

the usual means for local and state 

governments to finance essential 

services, including education. The 

current woeful state of California’s 

public finances can be traced back 

to the short-sighted selfishness of 

those who argued for the notorious 

Proposition 13 in 1978, which 

placed severe limits on raising 

property taxes in California and 

other parts of the United States. 

It was a law that favoured the 

wealthy and well situated at the 

expense of the poor, the young and 

the newly arrived. 

On 6 November 2012, after 

an enthusiastic campaign led by 

California Governor Jerry Brown, 

Proposition 30, which reversed the 

worst excesses of Proposition 13, 

passed comfortably. Its passage 

gives the state government in Sacramento 

an estimated US$6 billion 

in extra annual revenue. 

Governor Brown has made clear 

that Proposition 30’s passage is no 

panacea for his state’s structural 

financial problems. 

“The governor’s plan will increase 

the state sales tax by a quarter-cent 

for four years and raise 

levies on high earners by one to 

three percentage points for seven 

years,” The Los Angeles Times reported 

on 11 November. “Passage 

of Proposition 30 prevents billions 

of dollars in education cuts and 

gives the state an opportunity to 

Ever since Gary Gilmore 

was executed in 1977 

capital punishment has 

been a litmus issue for 

conservative politicians. 

end the fiscal year without a deficit 

for the first time in five years.” 

Nonetheless, the appalling 

state of California’s state 

finances is best illustrated by the 

fact that this money has already 

been allocated in the current budget, 

in anticipation that Proposition 

30 would carry. 

It seems Americans will now 

support tax increases where there 

is a clear need and where the 

money is specifically allocated for 

essential services and infrastructure. 

Along with plugging a hole 

in the budget, Proposition 30 

enables the state to fund its public 

schools. In Arkansas, a much more 

conservative part of the US, voters 

endorsed a proposal to provide for 

a modest sales tax increase to fund 

local highways. 

John Kenneth Galbraith 

warned in The Affluent Society 

(1958) of the dangers of contrasting 

“private affluence” against 

“public squalor”. Proposition 13’s 

carriage in 1978 appeared to open 

the door wide to this. This door 

may be closing, at last. 

Elsewhere in America, referendum 

proposals were carried 

which appeared to undermine the 

hypothesis most comprehensively 

advanced by Economist writers 

John Micklethwait and Adrian 

Wooldridge in The Right Nation: 

Conservative Power in America 

(2005). They saw an America so 

comprehensively dominated by 

conservative politics that the New 

Deal was everywhere in retreat, 

and the liberalism of the Republic 

overwhelmed by a resurgent Republican 

Party. 

But the high-water mark of 

Republican electoral triumphs in 

2004, when President George W 

Bush defeated Senator John Kerry 

for the presidency, was achieved 

in part by referendum questions 

designed to mobilise conservative 

voters. Propositions to oppose gay 

marriage were prominent. 

The radical extent of the 

changes occurring today is reflected 

in the fact that four states 

— Maryland, Maine, Minnesota 

and Washington — have now all 

endorsed gay marriage. There were

IMAGE: CHARIS TSEVIS: OBAMA PORTRAIT PROJECT. WWW.TSEVIS.COM 

even more striking referendum 

results in Colorado and Washington, 

where the legalisation of 

recreational marijuana has been 

endorsed, and in Massachusetts, 

where the use of medical marijuana 

also passed. Results such as 

these were almost impossible to 

envisage just seven years ago when 

Micklethwait and Wooldridge published 

The Right Nation. 

And in California, there was a 

determined effort to roll back the 

conservative tide of a generation 

ago, encapsulated in Proposition 

34, which moved to end the death 

penalty. While the proposition 

narrowly failed (52.7 per cent to 

47.3 per cent), the closeness of 

the result demonstrates how far 

opinion has shifted since 1976 

when the US Supreme Court reintroduced 

the death penalty, finding 

that it did not constitute “cruel 

and unusual punishment”. 

Ever since Gary Gilmore was 

executed by firing squad in Utah 

in early 1977, capital punishment 

has been a litmus issue for 

conservative politicians in the 

US. It reached a razor’s edge in 

campaigning during the 1988 

Presidential campaign when the 

Republicans ran the Willie Horton 

commercials against Democratic 

candidate Michael Dukakis, former 

governor of Massachusetts. 

The premise was simple: Vice-President 

George HW Bush supported 

capital punishment. Dukakis did 

not, and was blamed when a violent 

criminal named Willie Horton 

was released on leave, as part of a 

Massachusetts furlough program, 

during which time he committed 

further horrific crimes. 

In 2012, the Californian vote on 

capital punishment seems to 

suggest strongly that the death 

penalty is undergoing very serious 

review. With Proposition 36, voters 

also softened California’s Three 

Strikes Law, whereby a mandatory 

life sentence is imposed on an 

offender on the individual’s third 

felony conviction. Proposition 

36 holds that only when the new 

felony is “serious or violent” will 

the court impose a life sentence. 

None of these results at the ballot 

box should lead to the conclusion 

that the United States has 

become a social democracy on the 

European model. But it does suggest 

that the conservative tide has 

not gone out in just the Presidential 

and Senate races. As a consequence 

of the ballot results of 6 

November 2012, America is a little 

more a nation of the centre. 

Stephen Loosley 

7

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The long hard 

road to reverse 

Howard’s law 

Laws to encourage 

equality in the 

workplace finally pass. 

IT TOOK FIVE YEARS, and three 

different ministers, but late on the 

evening of 22 November 2012 the 

Senate finally passed the Equal 

Opportunity for Women in the 

Workplace Amendment Bill 2012, 

legislation intended to drive gender 

equality in the workplace. 

The federal government 

has been frustratingly slow in 

reversing the evisceration by the 

Howard government of the Hawke 

government’s 1986 landmark 

affirmative action laws. It was 

not until September 2009, after 

almost two years in government, 

that then Minister for the Status 

of Women Tanya Plibersek 

announced a KPMG review of the 

Equal Opportunity for Women in 

the Workplace Agency (EOWA) 

and its legislation. Two years of 

consultations and deferrals passed 

before legislation was finally 

introduced into the House of 

Representatives earlier this year. 

The media largely ignored the 

behind-the-scenes tussle over the 

legislation. It was not reported, 

for instance, that late in 2011 the 

legislation was drastically watered 

down after the intervention of 

the Business Council of Australia’s 

CEO Jennifer Westacott and then 

head of the Australian Industry 

Group Heather Ridout. They 

successfully made representations 

to Finance Minister Penny Wong 

(rather than Minister for the 

Status of Women Julie Collins) 

that the reporting requirements of 

the draft legislation entailed too 

much “red tape”. 

The original legislation required 

organizations employing more 

than 100 people to report annually 

to the EOWA the gender composition 

of their workforce, to report 

on stipulated gender inequality 

indicators including pay and flexible 

working arrangements, and 

that a certificate of compliance 

Late in 2011 the 

legislation was 

drastically watered down 

after the intervention of 

Jennifer Westacott and 

Heather Ridout. 

with the legislation was needed to 

access government funding and 

contracts. 

A briefing note on the legislation 

prepared for clients by law 

firm Freehills partner Justine 

Turnbull in April 2011 had concluded 

that “the cost to business 

of compliance with the EOWA 

reforms, especially publicly listed 

Australian businesses, will not be 

significant”. She also noted that 

the reforms conformed with other 

existing requirements, including 

the ASX corporate governance 

reporting requirements on gender 

for all listed companies. 

Nevertheless, the government 

buckled under employer pressure. 

The draft bill was amended to remove 

the specifics of the reporting 

required, the so-called benchmarks 

against which companies would 

report, placing these at the discretion 

of the minister and to be 

enacted in accompanying instruments, 

and the contract compliance 

provisions were struck out. 

A bruising battle ensued, with 

women’s organizations and the 

ACTU weighing in and informing 

the government they regarded the 

watered-down bill as being even 

weaker than the Howard legislation 

it was intended to replace. 

Specifically, these groups objected 

to the removal of the benchmarks 

and of contract compliance, and 

to the fact that the preamble now 

contained no reference to women’s 

employment equality. Instead, the 

purpose of the bill had become 

to improve productivity and to 

reduce red tape. 

As a result of these representations, 

and a threat to go 

public against the legislation, the 

government restored the equality 

objectives to the preamble and 

gave assurances that the ministerial 

instruments would require 

meaningful reporting. The bill was 

then introduced into the House 

of Representatives and passed in 

March this year. 

When it reached the Senate, 

however, it stalled. The bill was 

not given priority by the government 

in the autumn session and 

when parliament resumed after 

the winter break it was not listed.

Abortion 

Are the 

bad old 

days still 

with us? 

The ABC-TV drama Dangerous Remedy, which 

screened on 4 November, was a powerful reminder 

of the grim days of illegal abortion in Australia. It’s 

not like that any more — or is it? Abortion is still 

prohibited by the Criminal Code Act in Queensland 

and the NSW Crimes Act, and every state and 

territory has restrictions of some kind. 

For state-by-state guide to Australia’s abortion laws, 

go to Children by Choice. 

Vigorous representations by the 

same women’s groups and the 

ACTU finally got the bill back onto 

the legislative calendar. There 

were still numerous delays, with 

the risk that it would not pass this 

year and that the Minister would 

not therefore be able to issue the 

instruments in time for companies 

to meet the first reporting deadline 

on 1 April 2013. Although the bill 

had the support of the Greens and 

Independent Senator Nick Xenophon, 

the government appeared reluctant 

to guillotine the bill in the 

face of coalition opposition. 

Liberal Senator Helen Kroger 

attacked the bill for being “heavy- 

handed” and for “the increase in 

red tape”. Status of women spokesperson 

Senator Michaela Cash proposed 

amendments but when the 

vote came after 9 p.m., she did not 

call for a division and the legislation 

passed. 

Once it receives royal assent, 

EOWA will become the Workplace 

Gender Equality Agency and the 

agency’s director, Helen Conway, 

says the data collected “will put 

Australia at the international cutting 

edge for analyzing progress on 

workplace gender equality”. 


Have phone, 

will agitate 

Using our phones 

and tablets for social 

interaction is leading to 

whole new avenues of 

political activism. 

IN THE RECENT US Presidential 

election, 66 per cent of social 

media users — or 39 per cent 

of American adults — used 

social media for civic or political 

activities, and 21 per cent belong 

to a social networking group 

with others who support their 

cause, according to the Pew 

Research Center‘s latest studies 

on the role of the Net and social 

networking. Seventeen per cent 

of Americans said social media 

platforms such Facebook, Twitter 

and YouTube were regular sources 

of information about the election 

campaign, and 36 per cent said the 

same thing about the internet as a 

whole. 

Thirty per cent of registered 

voters had been encouraged to 

vote a particular way by family and 

friends via social media; and over 

half of all registered voters had 

watched political videos online, 

with 52 per cent saying that such 

videos had been recommended 

to them, often through socialnetworking 

sites. 

In Australia, the picture is 

similar. The March 2011 Nielsen 

White Paper The Australian Online 

Consumer Landscape found that 

89 per cent of Australians had 

9

10 




a home internet connection, 

with more than a third owning 

a smartphone and half having 

accessed the internet with a mobile 

device, and 60 per cent saying they 

had simultaneously watched TV 

and used the internet. In May that 

year, the Sensis Social Media Report 

found 62 per cent of internet users 

used social-networking sites. 

More than half of all American 

adults “have used their 

phones recently for engagement, 

diversion, or interaction with 

other people while watching TV”, 

according to Pew’s The Rise of the 

“Connected Viewer”. Those activities 

included staving off boredom 

during commercial breaks, factchecking 

information and communicating 

with others about the 

show. Sixteen per cent of Americans 

— and 19 per cent of those 

between 16 and 29 — read at least 

one ebook last year, with 47 per 

cent of younger Americans reading 

long-form e-content such as 

books, magazines (like the one 

you’re reading now) and newspapers 

— through platforms increasingly 

designed to facilitate social 

‘sharing’. 

Internet-surfing is now a social 

activity; journalist and writer 

Brigid Delaney recently described 

her experience of net-enabled 

quarantine. Publishers of computer 

games are recognizing that 

integrating social interaction into 

their single-player games is the 

future of their industry. 

When Robert Putnam set out 

to document the collapse of social 

capital and community in America 

in his 2000 book Bowling Alone, 

he identified the growth of solitary 

leisure activities — television, 

computer games, and internetsurfing 

— as a key element in the 

decline of group participation and 

social activities. 

Twelve years later, Bowling Alone 

is one of the millions of books 

available on Amazon’s multi-platform 

Kindle reader — raising the 

ironic possibility of a multi-screen, 

multi-tasking reader sharing a 

choice quote from Bowling Alone 

through Kindle’s social-network 

More than half of all 

American adults have 

used their phones 

recently for engagement, 

diversion, or interaction 

with other people while 

watching TV. 

share function during the commercial 

break of their favourite show 

before turning their attention — 

and their smartphone or tablet 

— back to online chatting, instant 

messaging or text messaging other 

viewers of the same program. 

We are reading, watching, 

surfing and playing alone, 

together. And since 2008, when 

more Internet access devices were 

mobile rather than desktop, we are 

increasingly carrying our electronic 

social networks with us. 

However, there are still key 

questions of democratic access. 

Social and geographical digital 

divides, with internet access varying 

by wealth and location, are 

becoming more pressing problems 

as internet use increases as a key 

part of developing social and cultural 

capital. Anita Harris questioned 

the gender dimensions of 

internet engagement in her 2008 

article ‘Young women, late modern 

politics, and the participatory possibilities 

on online cultures’, while 

Meagan Tyler recently wrote about 

how cyber misogyny can exclude 

women from online participation. 

There are some tantalizing indications 

of developing online social 

interactivity on political engagement. 

In the 2012 US presidential 

election, youth turnout in battleground 

states rose from 52 per 

cent in 2008 to 58 per cent. In 

Australia in September, a Twitter 

and Facebook campaign against 

broadcaster Alan Jones cost 

Macquarie Radio Network more 

than $1 million in lost advertising 

revenue, and has evolved into a 

broader campaign against sexism. 

Tauel Harper, who lectures in 

communication studies at the 

University of Western Australia, 

last year assessed Australian 

political parties engagement with 

the new connectivity and found 

them wanting. As Australia approaches 

the next federal election, 

a key question is: will Australians’ 

political engagement follow the US 

example and, if so, will it favour 

one party over the other? 

Ashley Hogan

2011 Visual 

Arts degree 

graduates 

Artists exhibiting in Artists 

exhibiting in Contemporary Art 

Organization Spaces publicly 

funded artspaces 2011 

Male Female Male Female 

Artists showing in a selection of contemporary 

art commercial galleries nationally 

Male 

Scorecard 

Keeping track of 

where we’re at 

Female 

Collaborations 

Gender balance of artists chosen for Biennale of Sydney 

over ten-year-period 

Male 

Female 

98 00 02 04 06 08 

75 % 

50 % 

25 % 

Elvis Richardson is 

a Melbourne-based artist 

with over 20 years’ 

experience primarily 

exhibiting, as well as 

curating and writing about 

contemporary visual art. 

(www.elvisrichardson. 

com) Her blog project 

CoUNTess continues her 

collecting and archiving 

methodology in her art 

practice. CoUNTess has 

been invited to speak 

most recently by the 

Cruthers Collection of 

Women’s Art at the 

University of WA, and 

Performance Space in 

conjunction with Sexes 

exhibition program. 

“I started my blog 

because I was sick 

of complaining 

privately 

about gender 

representation 

in the art world 

while numbers of 

talented and hardworking 

women 

artists seem to be 

getting ignored.” 

For further information see 

Elvis’s blog CoUNTess 

17th Biennale 

of Sydney 2010 

81 

MEN 

45 

WOMEN 

6 

COLLABORATIONS 

Kaldor Collection 

AGNSW 2011 

127 

MEN 

11 

WOMEN 

3 

COLLABORATIONS 

11

12 

Reports / Anne Summers Reports 

First they were taken 

from their families, then 

all too often they were 

subjected to relentless 

sexual abuse by those 

entrusted with their care. 

Honni van Rijswijk 

reports on an issue that 

cannot be ignored by the 

Royal Commission into 

Child Abuse. 

A double tragedy 

Sexual abuse of the 

Stolen Children 

MARJORIE WOODROW was two years old 

when she was taken from her mother at 

Menindee Mission in far west New South 

Wales. At thirteen, she was sent to Cootamundra 

Girls Home. Now aged 86, Marjorie still remembers 

hearing the girls crying at night. They were sent out 

to nearby homes to work as servants, where many 

were sexually abused: 

The men, you know, molested them, and all that, 

where they were working, and they had to come 

back into Cootamundra Girls Home … some of them 

was pregnant, you know … and they were twelve, 

thirteen years old. 

Marjorie was so unhappy at Cootamundra that 

she ran away with four other girls, and when she was 

caught, was sent to Parramatta Girls Home, which 

she describes as a “pure jail”. There, along with other 

children, she suffered ongoing sexual abuse from the 

staff: 

Marjorie Woodrow 

Born 1926 

Near Murrin Bridge 

in Central NSW 

Removed 1928 

In 1939 sent to the 

Cootamundra Girls’ 

Home, NSW 

I could hear them coming up the stairs, and I’d jump 

out and put the pillows in the bed and lock myself 

up in the cupboard so they’d think I was asleep, they 

wouldn’t touch you, they’d go to the next bed and take 

the next child if it moved out from there, like take it 

downstairs. So I was lucky some nights … 

The sexual abuse suffered by members of the Stolen 

Generations was often connected to the children 

being exploited for their labour, which was unpaid or 

very lowly paid, and involved little training, supervision 

or oversight. 

VALERIE LINNOW was taken to Bomaderry Children’s 

Home as a toddler, and then transferred 

to Cootamundra Girls Home when she was nine. At 

fifteen, her formal education ceased and she was sent 

out to work as a domestic servant on a nearby property. 

Now 70, Linnow is still tortured by the events 

that occurred there, while she was a ward of the state. 

One morning, her employer ordered her into his

Valerie and her sister Pat 

at Cootamundra Girls’ Home 

children’s bedroom, threw her on a bed, and raped 

her. The misery continued: 

That night … when he came home I was shaking and 

I dropped the, I dropped the plate and cup when he— 

when I saw him. The next minute he gets the fence 

wire and he belts me all over my legs. I was trying to 

double up to try and protect myself … He was still 

belting me, and his wife was there. And the daughter 

was there, and she was saying, give it to the nigger, 

mummy, give it to the nigger. 

The abuse continued for six months. Then Linnow 

ran away, in the middle of winter, and slept in 

a wooden box. The police were notified, and Linnow 

was returned to Cootamundra. In the car driving back 

to the Home, the matron said to her, “Now Valerie … 

don’t mention and tell any of the girls what has happened 

to you. And when tomorrow comes I shall buy 

you a new dress.” 

WOODROW’S and Linnow’s stories were 

told as part of the first round of The Stolen 

Generations’ Testimonies project, an initiative of the 

Stolen Generations’ Testimonies Foundation. The 

Foundation filmed the personal testimonies of more 

than 30 members of Australia’s Stolen Generations 

Survivors in 2009 and published them online this 

year. These testimonies, following on from Bringing 

Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the 

Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander 

Children From Their Families (Sydney: HREOC, 1997), 

Valerie Linnow 

Born 1941 

Crown Street Women’s 

Hospital, Sydney 

Removed 1944 

Sent to Bomaderry 

Children’s Home. In 1950 

sent to the Cootamundra 

Girls’ Home 

Anne Summers Reports / Reports 

are a reminder that the suffering of the Stolen 

Generations was in many instances two-fold: caused 

first by the children’s removal, and then by the 

subsequent abuse experienced by so many children. 

These survivors are contemporaries of those who 

suffered sexual abuse at the hands of members of the 

Catholic Church and other institutions, whose stories 

will be told as part of the federal royal commission 

into child sexual abuse announced by Prime Minister 

Julia Gillard on 12 November. 

Gillard has indicated that the terms of reference 

for the royal commission into institutional responses 

to child abuse will not be limited to the Catholic 

Church, but will extend to a range of religious institutions, 

as well as secular bodies. Gillard said: 

We will work on the specific terms of reference 

but this is about children who were in the care of 

religious organizations—so that’s all religious 

organizations—it’s about children who were in state 

care, it’s about children who were in the care of notfor-profit 

bodies other than religious organizations, it 

will therefore go as well to the response of children’s 

services agencies, and the response of 

the police. 

For the full experiences of Stolen Generation survivors 

of sexual abuse to be understood, the terms 

of reference need to include the responsibilities of 

the state in the context of its child-removal policies. 

Here, the state’s failures included not only the acts 

of removal but also subsequent failures to safeguard 

13

14 

Reports / Anne Summers Reports 

removed children in institutions, work placements and 

in foster care. Testimonies recount the extensive abuse 

that took place in many situations, and the failures of 

the authorities to carry out basic checks and safeguards 

to ensure the wellbeing of removed children. 

Evidence has also been brought out in the courts 

through individual cases. In 2002, Linnow was awarded 

$35,000 by the NSW Victims of Crime Compensation 

Tribunal for the harm she suffered. Linnow’s 

compensation came with its own stress and trauma: 

initially her claim failed because the Assessor found 

that she would not have experienced the emotional 

harm she suffered if the sexual assaults had occurred 

while she was living in a loving family environment; 

it was the removal and institutionalization that had 

caused the harm. 

In other words, through a shocking irony, the Tribunal 

found that Linnow’s removal from her family 

negated the significance of the trauma she endured by 

being raped and beaten by her employer while a ward 

of the state. 

This decision was reversed on appeal, but similar 

traumas of litigation could be prevented by ensuring 

that the sexual abuse of survivors of the Stolen Generations 

is understood in the context of the state’s 

removal policies—a context that can be provided 

through the royal commission’s inquiry. This understanding 

is needed for a proper account of state responsibility. 

DEBRA HOCKING was removed from her mother 

and placed with a family in Hobart when she was 

two, on the grounds that Hocking’s mother neglected 

her. When Hocking’s file was reviewed as part of The 

National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal 

and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, 

Bringing Them Home, no evidence of neglect was 

found. 

Hocking, now 53, speaks of the terrible irony of being 

removed from a loving family on the false grounds 

of neglect, and being placed with a family who were 

socially powerful but deeply abusive: “You know 

they’d go to church on Sunday and then rape you on 

Monday.” 

Hocking sums up, with some bitterness, the cruel 

reality of the multiple failings of the state: 

Well what were the expectations of welfare? What were 

the expectations? What made a good family? What 

made a good family, you know—here you were, removed 

from your love, the love from your family. You were 

placed with what welfare considered to be a “better” 

family that actually belted you and raped you. 

The testimonies provide evidence of the continuing 

toll on Stolen Generations members—the enduring 

emotional pain of separation and the ongoing effects 

of traumatic experiences of abuse. These effects 

include an inability to trust other people, to trust life 

itself, because of a fear that the shock of separation 

may happen again, or because of intrusive memories 

“You know they’d go to church on 

Sunday and then rape you on Monday.” 

regarding the sexual abuse and exploitation suffered 

after removal. 

The pain has never left Valerie Linnow, who has had 

suicidal periods, and will be on anti-depressants for 

the rest of her life. Linnow was a ward of the state during 

the time of her abuse, and holds the state responsible 

for the trauma she suffered: 

They should have checked these people out before 

they put Aborigine kids in these properties … 

I wasn’t the first one that was raped and abused. 

It happened, widely spread among Aborigine girls 

and Aboriginal boys. 

These testimonies have been given by people who 

are our contemporaries, and who are suffering now. 

They attest to experiences that happened in the very 

recent past. For Australia to assume a full sense of 

responsibility for what happened to the Stolen Generations, 

the royal commission’s investigation needs 

to take full account of the sexual abuse of so many of 

these children.

Extend the terms of the Royal Commission 

Anne Summers Reports / Reports 

Former Federal Court Judge Rod Madgwick and Jean Edwards, a medical practitioner 

experienced in dealing with sexual abuse, argue that the Royal Commission into Child Abuse 

should, given this once-in-a-generation opportunity, confront the extent and causes of this evil. 

THE AUSTRALIAN government 

and all MPs deserve 

congratulations for agreeing to 

the Royal Commission into institutional 

cover-up of sexual abuse 

of children. The Commission will 

enable the voices of the victims of 

abuse in such settings to be heard 

and will help to minimise bureaucratic 

cover-up of similar abuse in 

the future. 

However, there are related aspects 

of even greater concern. 

More needs to be done. 

Cardinal Pell is right about at 

least one thing: most abuse is 

not perpetrated by priests (or, for 

that matter, in institutions). Most 

abusers are family, friends or acquaintances. 

The prevalence of 

sexual abuse of children is surprisingly 

high: as many as one in every 

three or four girls and one in every 

six or seven boys experience some 

form of unwanted sexual contact. 

Childhood sexual abuse can 

cause damage to mental health, 

disruption to childhood development 

and later flow-on difficulties 

that are harmful to the victims 

and sometimes to the wider community. 

Causes 

The factors that tend to cause 

males (overwhelmingly males) to 

indulge in sexual abuse of children 

are not confidently known, and 

need to be explored by the Royal 

Commission. They may include: 

sexist attitudes among some 

males, including the perception 

of some that they are en- 

titled to whatever sexual gratification 

they choose 

social degradation with its 

roots in intergenerational 

poverty and/or racism, alcohol 

and other drugs (although 

it is acknowledged the sexual 

assault of children occurs in 

all socioeconomic classes and 

across all ethnic backgrounds) 

intergenerational experiences 

of various forms of violence to 

some degree 

the commodification of sex, 

including the commercially 

driven sexualisation of children 

and their inappropriately 

sexual presentation in advertising 

and the media. 

Extended terms 

It would not cost significantly 

more to extend the terms of reference 

to include an inquiry into: 

the material and other costs to 

the community and governments 

of child sexual abuse 

and its damaging effects generally 

(directly and indirectly, 

such costs are likely to be 

large) 

the factors that induce perpetrators 

to indulge in sexual 

abuse of children 

what governments and the 

community can and should do 

to neutralise those factors and 

minimise the abuse and consequent 

damage. 

Evidence 

The necessary evidence would 

mainly be expert or representa- 

tive. Written submissions could 

be sought, and the most expert 

and cogent of those responding 

asked to assist further. We should 

remember that children will continue 

to be sexually abused even as 

the Royal Commission goes about 

its business. 

What has been announced already 

is a large and expensive 

undertaking but the devotion of 

some additional resources to a 

wider inquiry is justified, There is 

great community support for saving 

children from sexual abuse, 

and people need to know what 

governments and citizens can and 

should do. 

It is likely that well-considered, 

practical recommendations will 

ultimately result in savings in the 

budgets for mental health, children’s 

services, social services and 

criminal justice, 

The course of the Royal Commission 

will probably produce an 

environment receptive to acting 

on such recommendations. 

By virtue of Australia’s ratification 

of the 1989 UN Convention 

on the Rights of the Child, and the 

operation of the Commonwealth 

Constitution the federal government 

has a UN treaty obligation 

and constitutional power to “take 

all appropriate … administrative, 

social and educational measures 

to protect the child from all forms 

of physical or mental violence, injury 

or abuse” (including sexual 

abuse). 

Australia can afford to show 

leadership in this important area. 

15

16 




Giving a 

Gonski 

In December 2011 David Gonski presented to 

the federal government his landmark report on 

school funding. Its radical recommendations 

meant that Gonski’s name entered the 

language as representing equity and 

excellence in education. So who is 

David Gonski and how did a 

wealthy merchant banker 

reach such conclusions? 

Anne Summers reports. 

Photo Louie Douvis 

FAIRFAX MEDIA

Anne Summers Reports / Cover story 

“It wouldn’t have worked if his name was Smith,” 

Angelo Gavrielatos says as he recalls his decision in 

February this year to adopt “I give a Gonski” as the 

Australian Education Union’s campaign slogan. 

THE FEDERAL PRESIDENT of the AEU says 

that many in the public education sector were 

uneasy when David Gonski was appointed 

in 2010 to head up the federal government’s 

review of schools funding. Gonski was, after 

all, in addition to his many business roles, the 

chairman of the exclusive Sydney Grammar 

School and he was Chancellor of the University 

of New South Wales (UNSW), where there 

had been union criticism of some industrial 

matters on campus. These misgivings were 

soon replaced by enthusiasm. 

“I consider the choice of David as inspired,” 

Gavrielatos told me. He formed this view 

early on in the review process, after several 

meetings with Gonski, and had it utterly confirmed 

when what is now known as the Gonski 

Report identified a lack of equity in the 

current system of funding as well as an overall 

deterioration in standards, even in private 

schools. 

“It was what we’d been saying for years,” 

Gavrielatos says of Gonski. “He produced 

a great body of work that has redefined the 

education debate in Australia.”So, how to get 

the government to agree to recommendations, 

especially the key proposed “schooling 

resource standard” that would allocate a 

specific dollar amount per student and which 

came with a $5 billion price tag? 

See GONSKI REPORT here 

The existing AEU slogan “For our future” 

was hardly rousing, but Gavrielatos was initially 

reluctant to accept the rather risqué alternative 

proposed by his staff. Once he was 

convinced, however, and the web-based and 

social-media campaigns got underway, kids 

and teachers around the country were wear- 

ing little green “I give a Gonski” buttons. 

A few weeks after the campaign started, 

Gavrielatos thought to phone David Gonski: 

“I hope you don’t mind”. Gonski replied that 

he thought it was “a masterstroke”. 

It must also have been a moment of quiet 

vindication for the man who had had to make 

his way through public primary school with 

an unusual name and a strange accent to find 

that name now synonymous with fairness 

and equality in Australian education. 

The AEU campaign has been extraordinarily 

successful: the government has agreed to 

adopt virtually all of Gonski’s recommendations 

and in late November introduced legislation 

into federal parliament that enshrined 

this commitment. (Agreements about funding 

with the states and other key stakeholders 

are needed before full implementation 

can begin.) 

ON THE FACE of it, a wealthy 

businessman like Gonski seemed 

an unlikely champion for the under- 

Tweet 

privileged. 

As Gonski himself said in a recent 

speech, “Why did a Labor government 

choose a resident of Point Piper, who 

is a dreaded merchant banker, who was educated 

at a private school, who chaired a private 

school for eight years and sat on the 

board of that school for 18, and who is not an 

educational professional, to review the funding 

of school education in Australia?” The 

answer surely is that Julia Gillard, when she 

was Education Minister, had the acuity to see 

something of her own yearnings in Gonski. 

Like her, he is an immigrant and like her, this 

17

18 

Cover story / Anne Summers Reports 

FRIENDS 

OF GONSKI 

GONSKI REPORT 

Frank Lowy is 

regarded as a 

mentor by Gonski 

who has served on 

the Westfield Trust 

board, been an 

advisor to Lowy, 

ran the ill-fated 

Westfield Capital 

Corporation during 

the 1980s and 

succeeded Lowy 

as chairman of the 

board of trustees 

at the Art Gallery 

of New South 

Wales (and was in 

turn succeeded by 

Stephen Lowy). 

defines him in ways that might surprise those 

who only know him through his stellar business 

career. And like her, Gonski understands 

perfectly “the importance and potency of education” 

that allowed his own father, the son 

of an unskilled poor immigrant, to become a 

brain surgeon. 

Alexander and Helene Gonski and their 

four children arrived in Sydney from South 

Africa in May 1961. David, their eldest, was 

seven. They were one of 47 families who came 

to Australia in the wake of the Sharpeville 

massacre (where police shot and killed unarmed 

demonstrators); families 

who were, according to Dr Suzanne 

Rutland, a University of 

Sydney academic who has studied 

Jewish immigration, “the 

really idealistic wave” of South 

African immigrants. 

It was a second emigration 

for Alexander Gonski who, at 

the age of ten, had left Lodz in 

Poland for South Africa where, 

with the help of scholarships, 

he studied medicine, eventually 

becoming a leading neurosurgeon in Cape 

Town, heading the Groote Schuur Hospital 

and training surgeons. One of his students 

was Christiaan Barnard, who later performed 

the world’s first human heart transplant. 

Alexander was not inclined to leave this satisfying 

and privileged life but Helene insisted. 

“I was the instigator, I just loathed apartheid,” 

she told me. “The last straw was when 

the University of Cape Town was closed to 

Africans after Sharpeville”. 

Gene Sherman, the Sydney philanthropist 

and art entrepreneur, whose family arrived 

in Melbourne in 1964, remembers her father 

saying the system “is going to corrupt us all”. 

You were either complicit or you would end 

up in jail. Four of Sherman’s eight high-school 

teachers went to prison. 

Helene Gonski was also conscious that she 

had three sons in a country where military 

service was compulsory for whites. 

“She did not want her boys to fight in a war 

she did not believe in,” says her son David. 

Despite the financial restrictions on taking 

money out of South Africa, the Gonskis were 

far better off than many other migrants at 

that time. Their first home was a flat in Double 

Bay and Alec had been hired to establish a 

department of neurosurgery at Prince Henry 

Hospital, the designated teaching hospital 

of the newly formed Faculty of Medicine at 

UNSW. Only when he started did he discover 

the department was to be housed in a hospital 

that until very recently had catered only 

for infectious diseases. 

“Why did a Labor government choose a 

resident of Point Piper, who is a dreaded 

merchant banker, who was educated at 

a private school, who chaired a private 

school for eight years … to review the 

funding of school education in Australia?” 

David started at Double Bay primary school 

and while he soon moved onto Sydney Grammar, 

he never forgot the “little hut” that was 

his classroom. It was temporary back then, 

but it is still there. 

“I think it would be good if that little hut, 

apart from being a relic of my past, was replaced,” 

he told a Sydney Morning Herald journalist 

earlier this year. 

They knew hardly anyone, and David 

was lonely at school. “I was very aware that 

a number of my friends were not with me,” 

he told me. “I had to make new friends.”One 

of them was an American boy whom David 

impressed by saying that his father was “a 

head doctor from Africa”. The boy’s parents 

were most disappointed when they met Dr 

Gonski, recalls his wife, and found that he was

white, not a witch doctor and did not have a 

bone through his nose. 

In their rush to get away from South 

Africa, the family had neglected to do their 

due diligence. “We were a bit stupid in some 

ways,” says Helene Gonski. One thing that 

had escaped their notice was the White 

Australia policy. “That was a bit of a blow,” she 

says. She made up for it by getting involved in 

Aboriginal causes. 

DAVID GONSKI, who is 59, is a very unusual 

man. In the testosterone-charged 

corridors of power in the Sydney CBD, where 

ego is certainly not a dirty word, he is unfailingly 

courteous and polite, unassuming, 

humble even. 

“The worst criticism of him is: can he really 

be that nice?” says Janine Perrett of Sky 

TV Business. He does not play golf or follow 

a code. To look at him, with his graying curly 

hair, his biggish brown glasses framing a face 

that often flushes deep red when he is upset 

or excited, his far-from-fashionable blue shirt 

and the building security pass hanging from 

his belt, you would not for a moment think 

that this is one of the most powerful men in 

Australia. 

He has been the go-to man for business 

and governments for at least a decade now, 

consigliore to Packers, Murdochs and Lowys, 

director of blue-chip companies such as ANZ, 

Fairfax, ASX and Westfield, chair of numerous 

arts boards, a silken presence across multiple 

networks, always available, always getting the 

job done, along the way picking up an Order 

of Australia that in 2007 was upgraded to an 

AC. 

Yet, for all this, he never forgets he is still 

an outsider. “I am there because I do the 

job,” he tells me. “That’s all I offer. I am certainly 

not there because I am blue blood or 

whatever.”Two years ago, Gonski sat on more 

than 40 boards. Today he is down to a mere 14 

as he shed business roles to play a bigger part 

in the public sector. He chairs four companies: 

Coca-Cola Amatil, Investec Bank, Ingeus Ltd, 

the company owned by Thérèse Rein, the wife 

of former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and 

Swiss Re Life & Health, an insurance business. 

He is a consultant to Transfield Holdings. 

The rest of his current CV lists non-business 

work. He is chancellor of UNSW and chairs its 

Foundation and oversees the Advisory Committee 

for its Centre for Social Impact (CSI). 

He chairs the federal government’s National 

E-Health Authority, which is overseeing the 

introduction of electronic health records, 

is on the SBS and ABC Nomination Panel, a 

member of Infrastructure NSW and a director 

of Australian Philanthropic Services Ltd. He 

is also chairman of Sydney Theatre Company 

(STC), making him Cate Blanchett’s boss for 

another year until her contract as co-Artistic 

Director with her husband Andrew Upton 

ends. And in March this year David Gonski 

was controversially appointed chairman of 

the Future Fund of Australia, the nation’s $77 

billion sovereign wealth fund. 

That job required him to relinquish a consultancy 

with investment bank Morgan Stanley 

Australia Limited, a directorship of Singapore 

Airlines and his chairmanship of the 

ASX. Even so, he is extraordinarily busy. 

Each of these boards has numerous subcommittees 

and Gonski is on most of them. 

He never misses a meeting, he reads and annotates 

all the papers, and he has regular 

scheduled meetings with the top people who 

run each of the organizations he chairs. He 

also engages with all manner of people associated 

with the work of his boards, for instance, 

negotiating with bureaucrats in Arts NSW a 

lease extension for the STC. Then there’s the 

short-term government advisory tasks not 

on the résumé, or acting as a judge for The 

Australian Financial Review’s Women of Influence 

Awards. Plus the many speeches (which 

he writes himself), the board dinners, the receptions. 

And he never misses an STC opening 

night. 

How does he make the time to do it all? 

“I was trained extremely well as a lawyer on 

how to use my time,” Gonski says. He points 

out that he does not actually run anything so 

he has no responsibilities for staff. 


FRIENDS 

OF GONSKI 

Jillian Segal is 

deputy Chancellor 

of University of 

New South Wales, 

a director of ASX 

and, along with a 

number of leading 

businesspeople 

such as Roger 

Corbett, has 

offices at Investec. 

She is from one of 

47 Jewish families 

who, along with 

the Gonskis, came 

to Australia from 

South Africa in the 

early 1960s. 

19

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MUSES

GONSKI REPORT 

He is well organized, super efficient, keeps 

meetings short and focused, he delegates 

and, according to virtually every one of the 

dozens of people I spoke to, he has a phenomenal 

capacity for work. He is at his desk by 7 

most mornings and puts in a twelve-hour day. 

When he has a dinner, he does not drink, and 

excuses himself early. 

“Board papers to read,” he says by way of 

apology. The Future Fund’s papers alone are 

several hundred pages each month, and that’s 

not counting the sub-committees papers. 

Being chairman means people come to you. 

The Schools Review mostly met in the Investec 

offices, on the 23rd floor of Sydney’s Chifley 

Tower, which is where the Future Fund now 

meets and where I had my two interviews 

with Gonski. The diary is set well ahead and to 

say it is not very flexible would be an understatement; 

recently there were conniptions 

when someone at UNSW suggested changing 

the graduation dates. The Chancellor’s diary 

could not accommodate this and the changes 

were not made. 

Why does he do so much? Why does he 

need to have so many fingers in so many pies? 

As someone who is not an admirer put it: 

“Is Sydney so devoid of talent that one man 

has to do all those jobs?” Another says the 

concentration of power in one person is “almost 

corrupt”, adding “The joke around town 

is, how many times a day does David have to 

ring himself!” 

Gonski’s answer is disarmingly simple. “My 

own drive is definitely based on being an immigrant. 

I know as an immigrant you’ve got 

to prove yourself every day.” 

Perhaps strange in a boy who arrived here 

aged seven, but there is no doubt he feels it 

keenly. Leaving South Africa, he said, “broke 

up the tight and very nice existence we had 

previously. It made us much more unsure of 

ourselves”. 

He retains a softened South African accent. 

Some of those who work with him sense “a 

high need to be liked”, or even a paradoxical 

sense of insecurity. He is the consummate 

insider, the wielder of immeasurable covert 

power, who at heart still feels like an outsider. 

So there was no way he was going to refuse 

when Julia Gillard rang him early in 2010 

and “put a very good case” for why a review 

of schools funding was needed. According 

to Amanda Lampe, Gillard’s chief of staff at 

the time and now responsible for corporate 

affairs and government relations at the ASX, 

Gonski “was the kind of person we wanted”: 

“He is very smart, has gravitas, [is] incredibly 

well connected across the board, understands 

independent schools because of his Sydney 

Grammar connection and disadvantage 

because of his philanthropy.”As when he 

accepted the Future Fund two year later, 

taking on the Schools Funding Review meant 

shedding other roles, moving further away 

from a life of strictly business to one more of 

service and giving. 

Gonski embraced the opportunity. 

“He definitely wants to make a difference— 

to make his mark on the country,” says Jennifer 

Bott, who worked with Gonski at the 

Australia Council and, until recently, ran the 

UNSW Foundation. He threw himself into the 

18-month-long review with characteristic fo- 

rensic energy. He made certain demands: he 

wanted Kathryn Greiner, businesswoman and 

a former chair of Loreto Convent Kirribilli to 

join the panel already selected by Gillard, and 

he wanted Terrey Arcus to help him get the 

right focus on the issues. Arcus is a management 

consultant with Port Jackson Partners, 

which he founded with Fred Hilmer in 1991, 


FRIENDS 

OF GONSKI 

Terrey Arcus 

Worked as 

Gonski’s deputy 

at the Australia 

Council and was a 

consultant on the 

schools funding 

review, both jobs 

done on a voluntary 

basis. Arcus 

founded business 

consultancy Port 

Jackson Partners 

with Fred Hilmer 

in 1991. His wife, 

Anne, served on the 

Sydney Grammar 

School Trust with 

Gonski. 

In the testosterone-charged corridors 

of power in the Sydney CBD, where 

ego is certainly not a dirty word, he 

is unfailingly courteous and polite, 

unassuming, humble even. 

21

22 


FRIENDS 

OF GONSKI 

GONSKI REPORT 

Fred Hilmer 

Now vice-chancellor 

of University of 

New South Wales 

where Gonski is 

Chancellor. Formerly 

CEO of John Fairfax 

Holdings (1998 – 

2005), where Gonski 

was a director (1993 

– 2005). He is a 

director of Westfield 

Holdings (Gonski 

was a director 

of the Westfield 

Group 1986 – 2011). 

Founder of Port 

Jackson Partners 

with another Gonski 

friend, Terrey Arcus, 

in 1991. 

and a long-time associate of Gonski’s. He was 

Gonski’s deputy chair at the Australia Council, 

a job that, like the schools review, both he 

and Gonski did without taking a fee. 

The review was, says Arcus, “an intensely 

process-oriented political task” that involved 

a listening tour of the country, meetings 

with a large array of stake-holders, visits to 

80 schools and other organizations, combing 

through 7000 submissions as well as managing 

the high-level review panel that comprised 

former ALP politician Carmen Lawrence; Ken 

Boston, who used to run the NSW 

education system; Peter Tannock from the 

Catholic edu-cation sector; the economist 

Bill Scales; and Greiner. 

Gonski was utterly determined to deliver 

“a funding system that ensured differences in 

educational outcomes are not the result of differences 

in wealth, income, power or possessions”, 

as he put it in a speech recently. Like 

Peter Karmel, another Jewish Australian who 

also went onto head the Australia Council 

and who was tapped by Gough Whitlam forty 

years earlier to do the first commonwealth 

review of schools funding, Gonski wanted to 

make his mark. 

“I am there because I do the job,” 

he tells me. “That’s all I offer. I am 

certainly not there because I am 

blue blood or whatever.” 

“David used to say, ‘I want to get a High 

Distinction for this’,” says Kathryn Greiner. 

DAVID GONSKI is married to Orli Wargon, 

an American-born paediatric dermatologist 

who, like her husband, is a patron 

of the arts. She served for some years on the 

board of Belvoir Street Theatre. They have 

three children: Michael, a lawyer at Freehills, 

Kate, who is about to graduate in medicine, 

and Tim, who is studying law. 

Gonski is the man he is today, he says, 

because of his parents and the influence of 

three men: the late Justice Kim Santow, business 

tycoon Frank Lowy and businessman 

turned philanthropist Fred Street. Together 

they have shaped his belief that succeeding in 

business is not enough. His father once contemptuously 

dismissed someone as “just a 

businessman”. 

Gonski has said he does not want his own 

son to remember him as someone who cut 

somebody’s fees in an underwriting or took 

over a widget factory. “I have to contribute 

so that I make [my children] proud,” he told 

an Australian Institute of Management publication 

in 2007. “And so that I, frankly, make 

myself proud.”Young David was put off medicine 

by being forced to accompany his father 

on his hospital rounds at weekends. Sydney 

University Law School was the place to go in 

the 1970s if you were headed for a major law 

firm but Gonski chose the newly established 

school at the UNSW, which was more oriented 

towards social justice, and combined it with a 

commerce degree. 

Gonski liked that it used the Socratic method 

of teaching, “the way Harvard does it”. He 

won the university medal for law in 1977 and 

went straight to work at Freehills, Australia’s 

oldest law firm (at the time called Freehills, 

Hollingdale and Page). Two years later at age 

25 he was the youngest partner in the firm’s 

history, working his guts out on mergers and 

acquisitions—“I had to establish my name in 

those days as a lawyer”—and on his way to 

commercial glory, when Santow, who had recruited 

him, said, that’s not good enough, you 

have to start giving back. 

Gonski frequently quotes Santow’s dictum 

that to be a complete, rounded individual one 

must have “generosity of spirit”. Under Santow’s 

tutelage, Gonski quickly made his mark 

in commercial law. At age 28, he managed the 

merger that created the National Australia 

Bank and handled CSR’s takeover of Thiess

LOUIE DOUVIS, FAIRFAX MEDIA 

Holdings. In 1986 he left the law and began 

his ill-fated career as a deal-maker, presiding 

over the disastrous investments of Westfield 

Capital Corporation Limited (WCC), losing 

$303 million in 1988/89. 

“I am not an entrepreneur by nature, ” says 

Gonski reflecting on the experience. “I am better 

at doing the deal than working out exactly 

what the deal is.” He is proud that he was able 

to rebuild his career and that the losses were 

minimized because of Lowy’s acumen. “The 

company did not go into insolvency or anything 

like that,” he tells me. 

Gonski established his own boutique 

advisory firm, Wentworth Associates Pty Ltd, 

in 1988, which he sold to Investec Bank in 

2001, and started on the trajectory to where 

he is today. 

Despite his unparalleled networks, Gonski’s 

world is perhaps surprisingly contained. 

He “embeds himself”, says Daniel Petre, the 

philanthropist who headed Microsoft in Australia 

whose contract Gonski negotiated when 

he joined the Packer empire. 

Gonski does this with organizations (Investec, 

Fairfax, ASX, Freehills, for instance) 

and with people. UNSW, where his father 

worked, and he and his children studied, 

where he is now Chancellor, where colleagues 

with past affiliations work for him, fund pet 


23

24 


FRIENDS 

OF GONSKI 

GONSKI REPORT 

John and 

Jenny Green 

Former Macquarie 

Banker and now 

Pantera Press 

publisher and 

novelist, John 

Green was an 

inaugural student 

at UNSW Law 

School, spent 

time at Freehills 

and in 2011 

donated $500,000 

to establish 

scholarships for 

disadvantaged 

students to attend 

UNSW Law School, 

a donation that 

was welcomed by 

chancellor Gonski. 

Gonski and his 

wife have collected 

bronze pieces by 

Jenny Green, who 

is an awardwinning 

sculptor. 

projects or sit on Council—people like Deputy-Chancellor 

Jillian Segal (ASX), Vice-Chancellor 

Fred Hilmer (Fairfax), Jennifer Bott 

(Australia Council), Terry Davis (CEO, Coca- 

Cola Amatil), John M. Green (Freehills, ASX, 

UNSW Law School) and Petre. The Art Gallery 

of New South Wales (AGNSW), where he replaced 

Frank Lowy as President and was in 

turn succeeded by Stephen Lowy and where 

Kim Santow was a Trustee. Sydney Grammar, 

where he went to school, then joined its Trust 

and became chairman; he recruited Anne Arcus, 

(wife of Terrey), Louise Herron (Investec, 

now heading the Sydney Opera House) and ex- 

Fairfax CEO David Kirk, who is now Chairman. 

This is perfectly normal business behaviour, 

says Gonski. You want at your side “people 

who are excellent or the people you think 

can do things, the people you trust, the people 

you’d like to be in the trench with”. 

GONSKI IS keenly sought as a mentor 

by both men and women and has been 

known to schedule 6 a.m. meetings to accommodate 

someone who is having a crisis. His 

friends and close colleagues praise Gonski 

unreservedly: his loyalty, his work ethic, his 

exceptional intelligence, his generosity with 

his time and counsel, the way he will always 

promptly return a call or a text message. 

Businesswoman Wendy McCarthy is a one 

of a number of high-profile women who have 

nothing but praise. He is “a thoughtful considered 

man who has learned a lot in the past ten 

years”. One thing he has learned is “to soften 

the image of what is a good businessperson”, 

he told a conference in September. “It used 

to be male, tall, tough and ruthless.”Being a 

chairman is like conducting an orchestra, Gonski 

says. People who have sat on his boards say 

he is masterful at making every individual feel 

valued for their contribution even if in the end 

they are overruled. It is a testament to Gonski’s 

skill that there are rarely discontented 

Gonski Report Review of Funding for 

Schooling. Final Report. December 2011 

A Future Fair for All School funding in 

Australia. Deputy Prime Minister’s speech 

15 April 2010 

Gonski Fact Sheet issued by Australian 

Education Union 

The Full Gonski We have compiled a set 

of links to responses to the Gonski Report, 

including from commonwealth and state 

governments, media analysts and education 

stakeholders. 

leaks from his boards. 

Yet you don’t get to where Gonski is without 

making enemies. “He’s known to be very skilful 

at boardroom assassination,” says a lawyer 

who has worked with him. He always gets 

what he wants, says another. Hugh Mackay, 

the social researcher and writer, was chairman 

of Sydney Grammar until 2003 when, he 

tells me, Gonski ousted him in what had become 

a very unpleasant situation. 

DAVID GONSKI IS now a very wealthy 

man and able to “give back”. With 

prompting from Santow, using the example of 

Lowy (who, like Richard Pratt, believed that 

wealthy Jews should not just give to Jewish 

causes) and with the guidance of Fred Street, 

who is an innovative philanthropist, funding, 

He is the consummate insider, 

the wielder of immeasurable 

covert power, who at heart 

still feels like an outsider.

for instance, a major program that allows 

disadvantaged kids to become immersed 

in opera, Gonski began not just to give 

himself but to apply his legal brain to 

how he could get others to do the same. He 

was keen to create a culture of philanthropy 

similar to that in the United States so he 

persuaded then Prime Minister John Howard 

to enable wealthy individuals to establish DIY 

philanthropic funds, now known as Private 

Ancillary Funds (PAFs). 

“Being a lawyer,” says Bruce Bonyhardy, 

president of Philanthropy Australia, “he realized 

that without a ready-made structure, 

people would not do it.” 

In 2001 Gonski came up with the concept 

of a model trust deed that could be placed on 

the Australian Tax Office website, and which 

“created the ability to get a donation to a privately 

controlled foundation”, says Freehills 

partner John Emerson. “He thought of the 

idea. I did the drafting.” 

There are now 1000 PAFs totaling $3 billion 

which, Gonski told a conference of philanthropists 

in September, distributed $200 

million in grants in 2010/11. He expects their 

number to “grow and grow”. 

Gonski’s own giving runs into the millions 

and is generally to organizations he has 

chaired, such as the STC, Sydney Grammar, 

UNSW and the Bundanon Trust. But he is 

also “a philanthropic entrepreneur in service 

delivery”, says Peter Shergold, now chancellor 

of the University of Western Sydney and 

former head of the Department of Prime 

Minister and Cabinet under John Howard, 

and the inaugural head of Gonski’s CSI. 

Gonski’s Foundation partnered with Investec 

Bank’s Foundation and the Royal Flying 

Doctor Service, putting up $2.5 million earlier 

this year to fund 128 dental clinics in outback 

communities. 

“There is no question,” says Daniel Petre, 

“that in the area of philanthropy he has been 

the most influential person in Australia and 

has brought about the most positive change.” 

Gonski also got Howard to agree to tax 

reform to enable workplace giving: 157,000 

people gave $37.5 million 

in pre-tax dollars to charities 

in 2011/12, which was 

matched with $13 million 

from their employers. It is 

no surprise that the Gonski report 

recommended mechanisms 

to facilitate needy schools gaining access to 

philanthropic funds. Currently donations to 

private schools are tax deductible but those 

to government schools are not. 

ON SATURDAY 14 April this year, five 

months after Gonski had delivered his 

report, Prime Minister Julia Gillard hosted 

a lunch at The Lodge for the panel members 

and their partners. It was she who had started 

the review exactly two years earlier, first 

by creating MySchool and continuing with 

NAPLAN, which together provided previously 

non-existent data on schools and student 

performance. “We could never have done the 

review without NAPLAN,” Gonski has said. 

What Gonski learned from doing the 

review shocked him into developing the 

radical response that will forever bear his 

name. He learned there was “a growing tail 

between those who suffer disadvantage and 

those who don’t,” he said in a recent speech, 

“and this seemed totally unjust to me”. He 

learned that, if they wish to attract funding, 

disabled children can only go to government 

schools. He learned there is no planning as to 

where new schools should be built and what 

kind of schools they should be. Most of all, 

he learned that the current education system 

is arbitrary, unfair and ineffective. It must 

change, he said. 

Perhaps, in a country where so much 

has been built on the dreams and labour of 

immigrants, it should not be surprising that 

a girl born in Barry, Wales, who never got 

over the injustice of her intelligent father 

being denied an education, and a boy from 

Cape Town, South Africa, who had thrived on 

the best education money can buy in Sydney, 

should together “give a Gonski” by striving to 

change the game for ensuing generations. 


FRIENDS 

OF GONSKI 

Daniel Petre 

Former head 

of Microsoft 

in Australia, 

established Ecorp 

for the Packer 

family’s PBL (where 

Gonski was a Packer 

advisor when Petre 

joined). He is on the 

Advisory Council 

for the Centre for 

Social Impact, 

the organization 

founded by 

Gonski at UNSW 

to facilitate 

philanthropy-related 

research, and was a 

major donor towards 

its establishment. 

Louise Herron 

Now CEO of the 

Sydney Opera 

House, has worked 

at Investec, chaired 

Belvoir Street 

Theatre when 

Gonski’s wife, Orli 

Wargon, was on 

the board, and is a 

Trustee of Sydney 

Grammar School. 

25

ISSUE 

NO. 

1 




Staff picks 

A random assortment 

of good books chosen 

by the ASR team 

Fishing for 

Tigers 

Emily Maguire 

Picador, Sydney, 

2012. 328 pp. 

THE SMALL, valiant country 

of Vietnam, a nation that has 

seen off predatory incursions 

by China, France and the United 

States, is the setting for Emily 

Maguire’s fourth novel. 

Vietnam has one key value, 

says one of the characters, an 

elderly Vietnamese man who 

now lives in Australia, and 

who is making a return visit to 

Saigon. 

“Self-preservation. That it 

is. That is first,” he says to his 

grandson, a mixed-race boy 

who can’t see past the glittering 

capitalist façade of the city. 

“Communist, capitalist, protectionist, 

socialist, democratic, 

nationalist—doesn’t matter if it 

keeps Vietnam alive.” 

Being “alive” is key. “If it is 

alive, it can one day be better,” 

says the old man to the sceptical 

teenager. “If it dies, it will 

never be better.” 

And that, in a way, is the 

story of Mischa Reese, who ran 

away from a husband who used 

her as a punching bag, seeking 

to get as far away as possible 

from California—“to lose my- 

HENRY PRINCE OF WALES (C.1610-12) BY ISAAC OLIVER, THE ROYAL COLLECTION 

Anne Summers Reports / Muses 

Muses 

Books, art, design, 

architecture and other 

things that inspire us 

27

Muses / Anne Summers Reports 

self so thoroughly that I would 

never find my way back”—to 

Hanoi, a place she knew nothing 

about but which now owns 

her, body and soul. 

Mischa loses herself in the 

cynical expat community in 

Hanoi, a totally safe place for 

a thirty-five-year-old western 

woman. Her male compatriots 

hanker for Vietnamese skin, 

male or female, while the local 

men show no interest. In any 

case, such relationships are 

forbidden, frowned upon, even 

illegal. And unlike some of her 

female friends, Mischa has 

This is familiar 

Maguire territory, 

exploring 

relationships that 

stretch boundaries 

or break rules. 

no interest in casual liaisons 

with the endless procession of 

backpackers who pour into Hanoi. 

Romance is for teenagers, 

thinks Mischa. Her life is about 

falling in love with a country 

being confronted with its war 

wounds, learning its mythology 

(the tigers) and trying to 

understand the lives of women 

in Vietnam’s past and present. 

Into this comfortable little 

world strolls Cal, the beautiful 

eighteen-year-old son of Mischa’s 

expat pal Matthew. Cal’s 

mother lives in Australia; her 

son is taking some time to visit 

her homeland and to reacquaint 

himself with his father. Mischa 

and Cal begin an affair that 

is all the more passionate for 

transgressing so many boundaries. 

Eventually it falls victim 

to Vietnam’s ultra-puritanical 

laws prohibiting relations be- 

28 

tween non-married westerners 

and Vietnamese, no matter that 

Cal is half-Australian, or that 

these laws are ignored when 

western men take Vietnamese 

girls to their hotel rooms. 

Mischa learns a hard truth. 

Not just that there is no privacy 

in Vietnam, but there may be no 

place for her in a country she 

has come to not just love, but 

need. 

This is familiar Maguire 

territory, exploring relationships 

that stretch boundaries 

or break rules. Her first novel, 

the powerful Taming the Beast, 

was about the violently erotic 

union of a young woman with 

her former teacher. 

In Fishing for Tigers she 

embarks on an extended exploration 

of family. Mischa, an orphan 

raised by two older sisters 

she scarcely sees until one of 

them is struck with cancer, married 

a violent controlling man 

whom she was unable to leave 

for twelve yeas. 

Now she’s obsessed with a 

boy almost half her age, whose 

own life reflects the fractures 

of immigration and divorce. 

This is a wonderful book. The 

sounds and smells of Vietnam 

rise from the pages as Maguire 

writes with total assurance 

about a country that is increasingly 

familiar to Australian 

tourists and which, for many of 

us, will always be associated 

with youthful political activism 

against a war that still defines 

the place. 

She hits all the right notes 

with Mischa, a modern woman 

who finally takes charge of her 

life, embraces what makes her 

content and is pretty sure she 

can carry it off. 


Uncrowned heir 

Henry, Prince of Wales, did 

not live to be king. 

But he is not forgotten 

By Paula Weideger 

IT IS ALL VERY well to be heir to the 

throne of England, but if you want to be 

remembered you had better stick around 

and get yourself crowned. This is the message 

I took home after viewing “The Lost Prince”, 

the engaging, eye opening exhibition now 

at London’s National Portrait Gallery, curated 

by Catharine MacLeod. Henry, Prince of 

Wales, born in 1594, was the son and heir of 

King James VI of Scotland and I of England 

and his consort Anne of Denmark. He was 

a golden lad, much loved by those at court 

and, it seems, also his father’s subjects. When 

he died of typhoid in 1612, aged 18, the funeral 

procession to Westminster Abbey was 

made up of over 2,000 official mourners — 

hundreds more than had accompanied the 

body of Queen Elizabeth nine years before. 

“Multitudes” lined the streets. Musicians 

composed mourning music; poets wrote elegies. 

Yet, no monument was erected to this 

man who would have become King Henry IX 

had he lived. Nowadays, even well-educated, 

gray haired English people — people who 

went to school when children still learned 

history — have never heard of him. So this 

is a surprising and enlightening as well as an 

enjoyable show. 

Portraits dominate in this exhibition, many 

of them full length and done from life, of the 

prince, his siblings — Elizabeth and Charles 

— and his parents; many of them painted 

by Robert Peake. But unusually for the NPG 

besides the Early English paintings there are 

also Early English objects — letters, sculptures, 

books, maps and magnificent armour. 

There is even one of Henry’s notebooks covered 

with the prince’s doodles. It is endearing 

that royals also sentimentally hang on to 

PRINCESS ELIZABETH, ELECTRESS PALATINE BY UNKNOWN ARTIST, 1613 © NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON


The Lost Prince: The Life and Death of Henry 

Stuart National Portrait Gallery London, 

18 October 2012 to 13 January 2013 

childhood mementos. But even here there is 

a rather big gap between them and us: Their 

mementos are not likely to become tattered 

piles of valueless clutter. 

Sixteenth and early seventeenth English 

portraits of grandees are often a treat for 

lovers of fine textiles, lace and jewels. Painters 

were expected to show in exquisite detail 

how lavishly these men, women and children 

were decked out. A portrait of Princess Elizabeth, 

for example, painted the year after beloved 

brother Henry’s death, shows her face 

framed in a stand up, gossamer lace collar; its 

panels depicting the lion and unicorn of the 

royal coat of arms. The painting belongs to 

the NPG’s permanent collection and one can’t 

help thinking that Sarah Burton may have 

taken a long hard look at it before designing 

Kate Middleton’s lace wedding jacket. Even 

Henry’s armour — there are two steel suits in 

the show — is magnificently gilded with the 

Scottish thistle and the French fleur-de-lis. 

Portraits like the ones in the show by Peake 

are not only made to please the sitters but 

also to promote them. Henry is always sweet, 

engaging, and vigorous if also commanding. 

Yet once in a while walking through the gallery 

you do stop and wonder. The full length 

portrait of Henry’s father by John de Critz, 

the Elder painted around 1606, for all its jewels 

and fur, makes King James I look less majestic 

and more irritated and dissolute. 

Inevitably “The Lost Prince,” provokes 

thoughts about “what might have been?” It 

gives ammunition to people like me who believe 

that a single individual can change history. 

When robust Henry suddenly died, his 

younger brother Charles became heir to the 

throne. Charles I, as he became, was a great 

art collector but a widely unpopular, misery 

making king who waged and lost two civil 

wars and ended up executed. He is in the history 

books. Until now, four hundred years after 

he died, sweet Henry was lost. Eat your 

spinach, Prince Charles. 

29


fail to weather the storm 

If Manhattan’s leading architects are not planning 

for climate change, then who is? 

By David Hay 

IT WAS ONE OF the defining images of Hurricane 

Sandy, the giant crane dangling unstably 75 stories 

above Carnegie Hall on the day of the storm, and 

would do so for another week, worrying even billionaire 

Rupert Murdoch, who tweeted his nervousness 

and prayed that all would be OK. The possibility that 

the crane could fall forced the closing of two Midtown 

blocks as well as the Le Parker Meridien hotel. 

The crane belonged to the new, opulent apartment 

tower One57, designed by French architect Christian 

de Portzamparc, with ‘residences’ selling for US$90 

million, which, when completed, will house more billionaires 

than any other structure in the world. 

Among the New Yorkers totally unprepared for Hurricane 

Sandy were numerous international ‘starchitects’, 

many of whose high-profile buildings along 

Lower Manhattan’s West Side stand almost empty, 

rendered uninhabitable by the storm. The Richard 

Meier-designed residential towers from across the 

Hudson in Greenwich Village, whose previous residents 

included Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, 

cannot be lived in for at least another two months. 

Calvin Klein has had to relocate, and famed chef Jean- 

Georges Vongerichten has had to temporarily shutter 

his restaurant, Perry Street, on the building’s ground 

floor. Flooding caused by the freakish high tide on the 

Hudson during the storm went into the basements of 

these towers, wreaking havoc on mechanical systems. 

The same fate befell Pritzker-prize winning French 

architect Jean Nouvel’s apartment tower in Chelsea, 

30 

LETTER FROM NEW YORK 

home to Frasier actor Kelsey Grammer, as well as 

Shigeru Ban’s new condo complex opposite. 

Damage to the awkward-looking, in-progress National 

September 11 Memorial & Museum, designed 

by the firm of Davis Brody Bond, is still being assessed. 

As uncertain is the fate of many important artifacts 

from the 2001 terrorist attacks, including the last column 

standing from the Twin Towers and the famous 

cross-shaped steel beam. These were stored on the 

museum’s main floor, 21 metres (68 feet) below street 

level. Their condition and that of the rest of these archives 

won’t be known until all the water is pumped 

out. Nearly 760 megalitres (200 million gallons) of 

water entered the basement of the World Trade Center 

complex, including that of the city’s tallest building, 

2 World Trade Center, causing still further delays in 

its completion. 

ACCORDING TO The New York Times, flooding has 

led to the closure of 20 per cent of the buildings 

in Lower Manhattan below Canal Street until late 

November. 

But the majority of these structures were built long 

before scientists had warned of the consequences of 

global warming, particularly the rise in ocean levels 

and the more frequent occurrence of hurricanes. 

New Yorkers are now questioning why the famed 

and award-winning architects who designed the 

more recent rash of glitzy new buildings, many 

built since 9/11, did not give adequate consideration 

to global warming. According to MIT, the socalled 

100-year storm in which water levels will 

rise 1.8 metres (6 feet) above the Harbor will occur

River Lofts 

in Tribeca 

One57 

on 

57th 

Street 

September 11 

Museum 

every 3 to 20 years by 2100; a 

“500-year” storm with water rising 

3 metres (10 feet) could happen every 25 years. 

Specifically, people are asking why these architects followed 

the pre-global-warming practice of housing so 

much of a building’s mechanicals — its boiler, elevator 

room, water pumps and so on — in the basement. 

An exception is Frank Gehry, whose building 

designed for Barry Diller’s company, IAC, also in 

Chelsea, had its mechanicals situated on the tenth 

floor, and its lobby well above the 100-year flood 

line. Steel gates were installed to keep water out of 

its basement. Nonetheless, because of damage done 


Tenants in lower Manhattan sue 

building management 

Interactive map showing flood 

damage in New York 

Trapped inside 

was Anthony 

Narh, Ghana-born 

parking attendant 

… His body was 

recovered the day 

after Sandy. 

to neighbouring power and communication facilities, 

it’s still not allowing blogger Andrew Sullivan, for 

instance, to post videos on his Daily Beast website. This 

high-profile site, run by Tina Brown, has its offices in 

the Gehry building. 

Given the devastation and dislocation in the poorer 

sections of Queens and Staten Island, where recovery 

efforts are very much ongoing, no one’s worrying 

about the displacement of some of the wealthier residents 

of Lower Manhattan. 

Concerns about the fallout from short-sighted designs 

are nothing compared to what occurred at River 

Lofts in Tribeca, once a nineteenth-century warehouse, 

now a major apartment building with a new 

extension designed by Tsao and McKown. Among its 

residents are Meryl Streep and Gwyneth Paltrow. Its 

garage, operated by an outside company, was flooded 

during the storm; trapped inside was Anthony Narh, 

Ghana-born parking attendant and former UN peacekeeper. 

His body was recovered the day after Sandy. 

A troubling question remains: if these top-notch 

architects are not planning for global warming, who 

is? It’s one of many questions very much on the minds 

of New Yorkers in these increasingly frigid days after 

the storm. 

31


32 

HHhH 

Laurent Binet 

(author) and Sam 

Taylor (translator) 

Harvill Secker, 

London, 2012. 

336 pp. 

ON A HOT DAY outside Prague 

in 1942, a Mercedes convertible 

slows to halt before a 

solitary figure in the middle of 

the road, a man with a raincoat 

slung over one arm. Inside 

the idling car is Obergruppenführer 

Reinhard Heydrich, the 

Protector of Czechoslovakia 

(the Reich’s wartime industrial 

powerhouse) and one of the rising 

stars of Nazi Germany. The 

figure in the road aims a Sten 

machinegun at the man who 

declared all of Europe’s Jews 

‘condemned to death’ two 

years earlier at Wannsee, and 

… nothing. The trigger sticks. 

Chaos ensues. 

Laurent Binet’s HHhH is the 

story of this attempt to assassinate 

Heydrich — the months of 

preparation, the violent event in 

the road, the terrible aftermath 

— by two patriots, Jan Kubiš 

and Jozef Gabcík, parachuted 

back into the country from 

Britain by the Czech Resistance. 

It is also the story of how a 

new generation looks back at 

the events of World War II. We 

are at the tail end of that great 

conflagration that tore a hole in 

the twentieth century like a 

meteor hitting the Earth, 

leaving it smoking and burnt. 

It’s a landscape rich with 

meaning for those of my generation, 

filled with echoes of 

countless history lessons and 

legends told and retold. 

This is where Binet comes 

in. The son of a historian, he 

reconstructs the bravery of 

those who fought back with a 

careful, nervous awareness of 

the immensity of his task. His 

form is 257 chapters, some no 

longer than a paragraph. 

Reading HHhH is like watching 

a film and the ‘making of’ 

at the same time. The author is 

constantly worried that he will 

reproduce errors or propagate 

new ones. He questions his 

“Inventing a 

character in order 

to understand 

historical facts,” 

writes Binet, “is 

like fabricating 

evidence …” 

sources, deliberates over the 

details he has to make up to fill 

in the gaps. Was the uniform 

blue or white? Did Kubiš and 

Gabcík have hopes and dreams 

of a life after the war? What 

did they think as they watched 

the Mercedes coming up the 

road? When defied, did Hey- 

drich say icily, “Don’t take me 

for a fool” in classic Hollywood 

style or “I’ll rip your balls off”? 

Which seems more likely, 

which is more ‘in character’? 

Binet’s intervention in the 

story creates a stop–start 

rhythm that is by turns charmingly 

honest and annoyingly 

self-referential. Ultimately, it’s 

a deeply felt rumination on the 

responsibility we all have to 

remember the many unknowns 

put up against a wall and shot, 

tortured in basement cellars, or 

shipped with their children to 

die in Terezín or Auschwitz. 

Heydrich remains a mystery 

to Binet, who admits to an 

unhealthy fascination with the 

Blond Beast, the Hangman of 

Prague, Hitler’s ‘most dangerous 

man in Germany’. Despite 

the millions of words written 

about the Nazi leaders, their 

psychology remains unfathomable, 

their crimes far worse 

than any fiction. Of Kubiš and 

Gabcík and others like them, 

Binet is in awe. 

We live at a time when 

historical fiction is all the 

rage, when dramatic licence is 

celebrated. Hilary Mantel wins 

a double Booker Prize for her 

recreation of Henry VIII’s chief 

minister, whom she imbues 

with unexpected psychological 

depth. But does all that rewriting 

of history just muddy the 

waters, smooth the surface of 

unacceptable truth? Is it even 

ethical? “Inventing a character 

in order to understand historical 

facts,” writes Binet, “is like 

fabricating evidence … where 

the floor is already strewn with 

incriminating evidence.” 

Stephen Clark 

The Price of 

Politics 

Bob Woodward 

Simon & Schuster, 

New York, 2012. 

428 pp. 

BEFORE 2011, America’s ‘debt 

limit ceiling increase’ was, to 

those who had even heard of it, 

a routine financial instrument 

allowing the US Government to HTTP://FLIC.KR/P/8TTKYP 

continue to service that country’s 

1942. 

then US$14 trillion debt. In the 

northern summer of 2011, that 

routine legislation became, in 

MAGAZINE 

The Washington Post journalist 

TIME 

Bob Woodward’s words, ‘a political 

atomic bomb’ in the hands CHIEF, 

of the newly elected Tea Party 

Republicans in the US House 

GESTAPO 

of Representatives. America 

hovered on the edge of defaulting 

on its loans, a prospect that HEYDRICH, 

would have plunged an already 

reeling world economy into 

unprecedented crisis. 

REINHARD 

Woodward weaves a 

compelling story of the behindthe-scenes 

negotiations as 

ARTZYBASHEFF. 

disaster approached, drawing 

on on- and off-the-record 

BORIS 

interviews, documents and 

emails. No heroes emerge: IMAGE:

Woodward reveals the 

apparent lack of interest from 

the Obama White House 

in building relationships 

with either Democrats or 

Republicans in the House and 

Senate, and the ever-present 

narrow electoral interests on 

all sides that complicated and 

sometimes stymied progress. 

Most chilling, though, is 

the slow realization that any 

serious solution is impossible, 

because of the inability of 

Republican leaders to marshal 

support for compromise from 

party members who believe the 

economy is ‘a hostage worth 

taking’, and that loan default 

would be a salutary lesson to 

the Democrats. 

Woodward concludes that 

catastrophe was deferred, not 

averted, by the last-minute deal 

that saw the Budget Control 

Act of 2011 signed into law 

with 24 hours to spare. 

The Act’s details, and the 

subsequent failure of the 

bipartisan committee to reach 

agreement on proposals for reform, 

will see a US$2.4 trillion 

budget cut begin in January 

2013, an anti-stimulus package 

of nearly one-quarter of annual 

discretionary spending. This 

is the ‘fiscal cliff’. As long as 

the political process remains 

captured by those who see a 

devastating financial crisis as 

an irresistible opportunity for 

electoral leverage, the possibility 

of avoiding that plunge 

seem slim indeed. 

Republican House Speaker 

John Boehner has expressed a 

willingness to compromise in 

post-Presidential election negotiations, 

but it remains to be 

seen if his re-elected Tea Party 

colleagues will agree. 

Ashley Hogan 




In this issue 

Stephen Clark is a former Senior News 

Designer at the Sydney Morning Herald. His 

graphic career has encompassed advertising, 

education and information campaigns, 

magazines and publication design. He is an avid 

reader, writer, and family man who has been an 

actor and (briefly) a secondary school teacher. 

He is available for parties, bar mitzvahs and 

Powerpoint presentations. 

Dr Jean Edwards AM is a General 

Practitioner from 1963 to 1993, who in 1988 

was a medical officer in the Liverpool Hospital 

Sexual Assault Service for Adults and Children. 

From 1994 to her retirement in 2011 she 

worked exclusively in the field of forensic 

assessment and clinical management of both 

adult and child victims of sexual assault at 

the Royal North Shore Hospital. She has 

provided training in this field to both medical 

practitioners and detectives from 1995 to 2009. 

David Hay is a playwright and journalist 

living in lower Manhattan. His most recent 

play, A Perfect Future, premiered last year 

at New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre. His 

contributions on architecture have been 

featured in Dwell, Architectural Record and The 

New York Times. 

Ashley Hogan is a writer by profession, 

historian by training and feminist by inclination. 

Foong Ling Kong has nearly two decades’ 

experience in the publishing industry as an 

editor and publisher of books across a wide 

range of genres. She has worked inhouse 

at Penguin, Hardie Grant, MUP and Allen & 

Unwin, and freelanced for most Australian 

houses. 

Simon Letch is an editorial illustrator 

who has spent more than 20 years working 

for many Australian publications. He likes to 

mix metaphors and to mangle 

clichés in his work, and to add 

healthy doses of pop culture. 

He emigrated from England in 


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1989 and has fully assimilated to his adopted 

homeland; he barracks for Australia in the 

Ashes. He lives at the beach and surfs most 

days, even after surviving a shark attack at 

Bondi a few years back. 

Former Senator Stephen Loosely is a 

former National President of the ALP. 

Rod Madgwick QC is a retired Federal 

Court judge and former NSW District Court 

judge, mainly hearing criminal cases. He has 

presided over a number of trials of alleged 

sexual abusers of children and has sentenced 

many such offenders. 

Ricky Onsman is a designer, developer and 

jack of all web trades based in Corrimal, NSW. 

With 18 years’ experience, 

he is the Managing Editor of 

publisher SitePoint.com, is the 

President of the Web Industry 

Professionals Association and 

runs his own successful freelance web design 

and development business. 

Charis Tsevis is an illustrator specialising 

in complex digital images, based in Athens, 

Greece. His portrait of Barack Obama in our 

Details section was created to support the 

re-election of the American President in 2012. 

His work has been featured in many books, 

magazines and websites around the world. 

Honni van Rijswijk is a Senior Lecturer at 

UTS Law School. 

Paula Weideger, a New Yorker based in 

London, writes regularly about 

art for the Economist and 

contributes also to the Wall 

Street Journal and Financial 

Times. She blogs at http:// 

art-darts.blogspot.com. She is currently writing 

“The Fate of the Golden Lifeboat”, a book about 

the workings of the global art market and the 

vexed subject of expertise. 

33

Links / Anne Summers Reports 

34 

Primary Sources 

The Go-To Place for the words that define us, here and 

around the world 

Who knew that the 

incomparable Meryl 

Streep went to Yale 

at the same time as 

the non-pareil Hillary 

Clinton? Watch Streep 

pay tribute to her 

former classmate as 

she introduces the US 

Secretary of State at 

Women in the World 

Conference, New York, 

March 10, 2012. 

The world watched 

nervously to see who 

Americans would return 

as their president on 6 

November. Watch (and 

read) Barack Obama in 

Chicago that evening, in 

one of the great speeches 

of his time in office. 

Australian Prime Minister 

Julia Gillard electrified the 

nation, and much of the 

world, with her “sexism and 

misogyny” speech to Federal 

Parliament on 9 October 2012. 

More than 2 million people 

have watched the speech 

on YouTube. You can watch 

here, and read the transcript 

here. 

At least the US 

comes up with 

graphic names 

for its financial 

problems. Here 

Federal Reserve 

chairman Ben 

Bernanke tells a 

New York audience 

on 20 November 

about what needs 

to be done to 

tackle the “fiscal 

cliff”. 

ASR editor Anne Summers’ 

Newcastle speech (“Her 

Rights at Work”) on 31 

August documented the 

sexist and misogynist 

treatment of Australia’s 

first female prime minister. 

More than 100,000 people 

worldwide have since 

visited the site to read or 

view the speech. 

In China, there was 

a changing of the 

guard. President-elect 

Xi Jinping speaks to 

delegates at Communist 

Party Congress on 15 

November, saying that 

corruption must be 

stamped out. 

Victorian Police Commissioner Ken Lay delivers a powerful and chilling speech describing the day 

to day realities of domestic violence. Melbourne, 23 November, 2012

PHOTO OF JULIA GILLARD: ANDREW MEARES. ORIGINAL HILLARY CLINTON PHOT0: KEVIN LAMARQUE REUTERS 2011 

Texts from Hillary 

Hey, Hills. 

what r u up to? 


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35

Anne Summers Reports - The Looking Glass

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