Susan Mitchell

According to Andrew O’Hagan, writing in a recent London Review of Books: ‘If you want to be somebody nowadays, you’d better start by getting in touch with your inner nobody, because nobody likes a somebody who can’t prove they’ve been nobody all along.’ The journey from Nobody-hood to Somebody-hood is central to June Dally-Watkins’s recent autobiography. Indeed, O’Hagan’s pithy insight could almost have been the Sydney socialite and queen of etiquette’s mantra.

Susan Mitchell’s fifteenth book is a biography of the Whitlams, published shortly before Gough’s death in November. As a broadcaster, journalist, and author who has examined the lives of prominent Australian women, Mitchell tells the story mainly from Margaret’s perspective. This is not surprising: Mitchell had already amassed a huge body of research for her book Margaret Whitlam: A Biography (2006), and had known her since the late 1970s. And, compared to his frank and affable wife, Gough was less willing to share his personal recollections.

Susan Mitchell’s Tall Poppies first shared their stories with her in 1984. Seventeen years later, her subjects have grown even taller. Between them, Anne Summers, Eve Mahlab, Sallyanne Atkinson, Fabian Dattner, Maggie Tabberer, Pat O’Shane, and Robyn Archer head corporations, shape legislation, run million-dollar organisations and commandeer swathes of print space in the national dailies. And yet, according to Mitchell, younger women are hardly aware of their existence. ‘Who knows the real stories of these Warrior women and their lives?’ she asks. ‘Certainly not the young women in the country who have benefited from their struggles and their passion. Every woman who gets a bank loan or a credit card, who isn’t sacked when she becomes pregnant or who wants to be an engineer or a plumber or prime minister is indebted to them.’ Warming to her theme, Mitchell paints her younger sisters as being sadly devoid of a sense of either community or higher purpose. Reduced, apparently, by the greed-is-good 1980s into aspirationalist drones, thirty-something women are ‘always complaining about how tired they are ... And why do they work such long hours? So they can have a lifestyle like the ones in Cleo, Marie Claire and Vogue Living. All the right labels on their backs, the designer body, the designer home, the designer dinners, the designer partner.’

Tall Poppies is an addition to the literature of ‘women of achievement’. Susan Mitchell’s slim paperback, with its pretty cover photograph of Iceland poppies, is deliberately written in a ‘simple and conversational’ style because, she says, she wants to reach ‘as many people as possible’. But her audience is women only; this is a tract for our times. The nine tape recorded interviews with ‘successful’ women set out to celebrate what they have achieved in spite of the oppression of society, and to present inspiring ‘role models’ to women who read them. One wonders whether the effect will not be daunting rather than encouraging. Mary Breasley disclaims in a foreword that ‘the whole notion of women of achievement implies elitism’; but it must. These women have been picked out. We are asked, predictably, to notice their determination and persistence; but we can’t help seeing too their exceptional energy, talent, inventiveness and flexibility. And they are successful. Quite what this means is not considered. Most of the women have well-known names, they are women who ‘have the media on their backs’, as one of them, Beatrice Faust, says. Some are ‘Top Girls’, in Caryl Churchill’s phrase: they hold top jobs in the professions. But what constitutes success in that woman’s life who chooses to devote her energies to two (or more) goals: her family and her job? Women who don’t make it to the top are not necessarily failures, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick points out in her contributions to The Half-Open Door.