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Lunch With Jennifer Byrne |
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Page 1 of 4 The Bulletin - Winter 2004
by Jennifer ByrneEscaped from poverty, she has found success in the corporate world without giving up her sense of humour or her femininity.
When the sisterhood surged in the early ’70s, writing the texts and
shaping the politics of what we now recognise as Australian feminism’s
first wave, Sandra Yates was a solo mother with two young children
struggling to escape a Brisbane typing pool. She was poor,
under-educated – having left school at 15 – and had been through two
disastrous relationships; both times, she ended up losing the home.
During her lunchbreak, she’d change out of her office gear, into jeans and a T-shirt, and attend rallies as secretary of the local Women’s Electoral Lobby. Early hopes of heading to a better job in Melbourne were dashed by the branch manager on the grounds the city wasn’t ready for a female advertising rep. So she went to Sydney instead, and started her long march.
It seems incredible now. Not just because of her achievements, which would take the next three paragraphs to spell out, so let’s confine it to her current roles as director on the advisory board of Saatchi & Saatchi Australia, chair of the NSW TAFE Commission Board and one of the country’s most prominent and influential corporate women. More remarkable is how she has achieved it and allows herself to enjoy it: with a big, rolling laugh, an appetite for life’s pleasures and the sense of more to come as she hatches a retirement plan involving music, books, travel and the companionship of – at last, third time lucky – a good and loving man, Michael Skinner.
When that happens – and it won’t be until she’s in her early 60s, about five years off – she promises there’ll be no trailing of the hanky, no sense of unfinished business. “In business terms, there’s nothing unfinished for me. I’ll run up the flag and say, ‘That’s all, folks’, and leave town. The evidence is I’ve got terrific health. Michael’s parents lived to be incredibly old, mine are hale and hearty; I think there’s a good chance we’ll go on until we’re into our 80s. That’s a long time – and I want to make sure it’s a great time.
”Why should this be surprising? Where to start? Because Australian corporate leaders don’t tend to talk about their real lives. Because Australian corporate women are generally so invisible, so bloodless, you’d run a mile rather than become one. Because power tends to be something that’s wrenched rather than given away. And because, until recently, Yates lived in such fear of a return to poverty that she blanched at the word “casserole” and wouldn’t even consider buying a house since, when the wheel turns, permanence and security are among the first dreams to be crushed.
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