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Page 1 of 3 Mercedes Magazine - Autumn 2005
by Caroline Baum
Businesswoman Sandra Yates has worked in publishing, advertising, education and the arts - next stop, concert pianist?
The word most commonly used to describe Sandra Yates is "tough". A
formidable networker who chairs the Sydney Writers' Festival, NSW
Technical and Further Education (TAFE) and Saatchi and Saatchi
Australia, it's a description she doesn't dispute, but which only tells
part of the story.
With her 60th birthday looming, Yates is starting to contemplate her exit from the corporate world - a world in which she is regarded as highly influential. And, when she retires, she is determined to resume a childhood passion, the piano, and to master the harpsichord. A perfectionist, Yates can't bear amateur tinkling. Energetic, opinionated and motivated by an insattiable appetite for ideas and a passion for words and music, Yates believes her core values are shared with many of her generation.
"I expected to work hard, but believed that if you did, there was nothing you could not do." The eldest of four children born into a Christian family in Brisbane, she says: "I'm a classic only girl - an over-achiever!"
Hungry for independence, she quit school at 15 years old and says she has regretted the decision every day of her life. "I'd have ruled the world if I'd got an MBA," says the woman who switched to advertising in 1996 after a publishing career that saw her co-found the Matilda publishing company in New York, and spend three years as the publisher of Time Magazine in Australia.
Despite her business career, concert pianists are the people that Yates most admires. Her heroes are Alfred Brendl, Pier Michelangi and Marta Argerich - all fairly tormented individuals. "I know they are a bit crazy and I am not a single-minded obsessive, but I am in awe of what they do," Yates says. "I've just bought a piano and plan to learn the 48 Bach preludes and fugues."
Her piano playing ceased when she was in her mid-20s. "If I'm tough it is because I was single parent at a very early age," she says. But just 27, she was separated with two young children - it was a time before maternal benefits and before fathers had to pay mainenance - and declines to name her first husband, an industrial relations manager with she lived for five years.
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