I’ve been reflecting for some time now on what it means to deliver this address to you today, and in doing so to honour Jessie Street, and the National Women’s Library that bears her name.

And for me, the significance lies in the opportunity to reflect on the shared experiences of the women in my immediate family, and to value the contribution of the wider family of women who have been my friends and familiars for the last 30 years. I’m conscious there are many young women here today, and it was in thinking about them that I arrived at the title of this address “If at first…”.

It’s taken me 30 years to become an overnight success, so in my case, the title might more accurately have been If at first, second, third, fourth or fifth – because I’ve certainly had my fair share of setbacks – some were just bad luck, some were self-iinflicted, and some were as a result of the bastardry of other people.

But the good news is that I’ve never wasted a setback. Something good has come out of every single one of them – not immediately, of course, life is never that neat, but I see now a pattern of cause and effect that gives me comfort in the inevitable downtimes.

The first setback is being born female in the first place. You probably know the UN stats – women do 60% of the world’s work, for 10% of the world’s income, and we control 1% of the world’s assets. It’s easy to forget that, living as we do, in a rich and developed democracy, but the accidental gift of geography that sees us tucked away in this little corner of the globe is one of life’s mindless blessings.

The upside for me is that in my family, I’m the eldest child and the only girl. Both these stats seem to be factors in helping women succeed, and in my case, I scored both.

I have 3 brothers all younger than me – one installs security systems, one drives cabs, and the third is a gardener. It would be fair to say that all of them regard me as some sort of Amazonian over-achiever who would benefit enormously from a cup of tea and a lie-down, while from my point of view, whatever ambition there was in the family gene pool never made it past me.

My maternal grandmother came here from England to join the man she loved – a soldier she had met during the First World War. She had four children in fairly quick succession, one of whom died in childhood as the result of a contaminated diphtheria inoculation. But the marriage did not survive, and my mother’s earliest memory is of being pushed in a pram to the local police station. It was the depths of the depression, and in the era prior to Social Security and Family Allowances, the police handed out meals to needy families.

This privation must have had a significant impact on my grandmother’s character. I remember her as a cranky old woman who regarded any display of emotion as exceedingly poor form. My own mother tells me that her mother kissed her for the first time on her 21st birthday. By that time, Mum was a mother herself – unsurprisingly, she is a relentless kisser.

My mother left school when she was 14 to help support the family. She went to work at the dry-ice factory in South Brisbane. Before the development of refrigeration, dry-ice was the mechanism for keeping bodies from going off in the hot Queensland sun before they could be decently buried, so Mum was working in an essential industry.

She worked there for 3 years, before she was swept off her feet, literally, by a dashing young soldier on his way home from the war

Dad was a farmer, and Mum used her considerable mathematical skills to keep the books of the farm. She didn’t return to paid employment until the early 70’s, when like many women of her generation, she seized the opportunity for second-chance education pioneered by the Whitlam government, swanning through a diploma in accountancy and business studies at TAFE, and beginning and ending a distinguished second career as the Company Secretary to the Mercedes dealership on the Gold Coast.

Like Mum, I left school early, married early, but unlike Mum, who has nearly 50 years of marriage to her credit, my matrimonial life was a disaster.

My first husband was an A-grade Rugby League footballer – the strong, silent type – so it took me some time to discover that he was a compulsive gambler. His mother strongly disapproved of me because I refused to confiscate his pay packet every Friday, as she had done. I persisted in treating him as a grown-up who should learn to manage his own money. Time eventually demonstrated painfully that she was right, and I was wrong.

By this time, our daughter, Anne was 3, and I moved out of the marriage, and back into the workforce. I went to work in a solicitor’s office, and fell in love with one of the clients.

I am humiliated to have to confess to you that I fell for the “my wife doesn’t understand me” line, and another baby later, this time a son, Matthew, I discovered that I didn’t understand him, either.

A problem with drugs and alcohol saw me decamping in haste when Matthew was 6 months old, and I was on my own, with very little education, no money, and extremely exasperated parents.

I took another secretarial job, and started to assess my options. It was clear that Prince Charming, if not late, was at least, seriously delayed, and that if I wanted to get out of poverty, I was going to have to do it myself.