Outgoing Governor General Quentin Bryce is enjoying one of those careers you watch from the sidelines with joy.
I speak of Bryce ‘enjoying’ her career because although her GG term officially comes to an end today, her career’s far from over. A woman Like Bryce doesn’t slink quietly into retirement, we’ll be hearing and learning much more from her in the future.
Meanwhile what she’s already achieved, particularly the ‘firsts’ she has pioneered, will always be beneficial to the careers of women.
As Catherine Fox wrote in Women’s Agenda recently, while we haven’t been seeing the GG in the media everyday, it’s been uplifting to remember she was in office. Quentin Bryce normalised the “unusual” and demonstrated why appointing leaders outside of the usual sphere of power is important.
And Bryce has not only demonstrated the power of such “normalising” as Australia’s first female GG, but numerous times throughout her career. She’s a woman of many firsts that have ultimately played a part in making it easier for women in all areas of leadership and public life. Below are just a few:
- First female Governor General
- First Governor General to swear in a female prime minister
- First head of state to speak out about gay marriage and raise the prospects of Australia becoming a Republic
- One of the first women appointed to the Queensland Bar
- First female faculty member at the University of Queensland law school
- First director of the Queensland Women’s Information Service.
- First convener of the National Women’s Advisory Council
- The only girl from her school to attend university
- And yesterday, she took the rather interesting honour of being named our first ‘Dame’ in decades, after Prime Minister Tony Abbott revived the knights and dames honour system.
It’s not easy being the first. It took significant courage and grace under fire to achieve all of the above and ultimately — as former prime minister Julia Gillard would say — make it easier for the women who will come after her, and the women who come after that.
The last time I had the pleasure of hearing Bryce speak in person was during the official release of the Census of Women in Leadership, where she shared with the audience what it was like to be a woman of the 1960s. “A time when women in jobs were clustered in a narrow range of occupations, marriage meant handing in resignation papers, there was no maternity leave, no childcare, no role models, no mentors and little access to super and higher education.”
Thankfully, some things have changed.
But it took the women of ‘firsts’, those like Quentin Bryce, to lead on the change required and challenge what’s considered ‘normal’.