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.

Poverty is an extremely salutary experience. No-one ever tells you how boring it is. Being poor means you have no choices – you can’t buy a new book, or new clothes, or go to the movies. We never missed a feed, but we had some very ordinary feeds, I can tell you.

The guy I worked for was your basic office lech. He seemed to find the idea that I was still breast-feeding extremely titillating, and delighted in making grabs at milk-engorged boobs just for the thrill of causing me to spring a leak.

I had to come up with a plan. So I started talking to all the successful blokes who passed through my boss’s office about what else I might do, and eventually one of them offered me a job selling time on Channel 10.

Now I didn’t know that such a job existed – the notion of selling time struck me as weird – and further, the job being offered was based in Melbourne, and as I had never been out of the State, it was a big decision.

However, it was clear to me that I had to seize the chance, and I said yes. So then the bloke who had offered me the job told his Melbourne Sales Manager what he’d done, and the Melbourne Sales Manager flatly declined to have me, on the basis that Melbourne wasn’t ready for a female rep.

So they had to move a male representative from Sydney to Melbourne, and I washed up in Sydney, feeling distinctly unloved.

Two years later, I was still feeling unloved. The Sydney Manager had left, and I was passed over for promotion in favour of a younger, less-experienced male. When I confronted his boss, he blithely told me that it didn’t matter how long I stayed, or how good I was, they would never promote a woman.

That was 28 years ago, and prior to the Sex Discrimination legislation that protects us these days, so he could say that with impunity – although God got him in the end. Last heard of, he was bankrupt, and driving a cab.

At that time in my life, I acquired my first important mentor. Absolutely outraged at the unfairness of it all, I wanted to storm out, punching somebody’s lights out on the way.

But my mentor had good advice. He suggested I evaluate my position, and decide what would be the best possible next job for me, and then work towards achieving it. That process took 12 months, and it was my first exposure to the notion of patience as a strategic tool.

I am by nature an impatient, impulsive person, and like most people, I manage to rationalise that my weak points are really my strong points, and that patience was merely the outcome for people too nervous to make a decision. The idea that patience was a tool that could be used to deliver what you want was a revelation to me. I’m still not as patient as I’d like to be, but I’ve worked very hard at getting better at it.

The job that I waited for was at Family Circle magazine – then owned by the New York Times – the first magazine to be sold in supermarkets – difficult as it may be to believe it now, in those days, Family Circle was a hot book, and I was its first female ad sales representative. It was probably the happiest time in my working life. I worked my way up to State Manager and then National Sales Manager, with a staff of 6, a budget of $6,000,000, and my first company car. It’s amazing how exciting a white Ford Cortina can be when it’s your first company car.

3 Years later I was headhunted by the Fairfax organisation, initially to work in newspapers, and then 12 months later, I transferred to their magazine division as Group Advertising Sales Manager.

At about this time, I remarried. After 8 years on my own, I finally met a 37 years old straight bachelor, fell madly in love, and finally mated for life. It remains one of the most improbable things I’ve ever done, but it’s certainly one of the most successful.

And about this time I began to work on the project that would change my life for ever.

I developed a plan to launch a version of Dolly magazine in the US. Dolly at the time was per capita the most successful teenage magazine in the world, and the US had nothing like it.

The most successful teenage magazine in the US, then and now, is called Seventeen, and at the time its editor was a 60 year old former nun. The notion that a magazine could be edited and run by a group of young women not much older than their target audience had never been tried in that market, and all our testing indicated that it would be a huge hit.

The process of getting the project approved was a huge test of the patience I was working on acquiring. It was two years before the Fairfax board approved the project, and when they did they wanted me to be in New York in 3 months time.

Mercifully, my new husband manfully shouldered the responsibility of getting both children to the end of their school year, and I left for New York in June 1987, to launch the magazine we had decided to call Sassy.

And it was in New York I met the woman who was to be my business partner, playmate, and great friend, Anne Summers, author of the classic Damned Whores and God’s Police, and then Bureau Chief for Fairfax in New York.

We knew Ms magazine was for sale.

Ms is a feminist icon, founded by Gloria Steinem and friends in the 70’s, and with Gloria still very obviously at the helm, we formed the view that two magazines were better than one, and if anyone could fill Gloria’s shoes, then Anne was just the girl to do it.

Persuading the Fairfax board to cough up for a second magazine was not too difficult, because a number of predators were circling the share registry at that time, and the Board was anxious to be seen as proactive.

So the deal went through in November of 1987 – our first issue under Anne’s leadership appeared in February, and the first issue of Sassy appeared one month later.

And then, in mid April, we discovered that Fairfax had been sold to young Warwick Fairfax, who had put all their overseas assets up for sale.

He did however offer us a 6 week window to see if we could raise the money to buy ourselves out.

What followed was a frenetic round of visits to bankers, and venture capitalists, and somehow it all came together, and we were able to raise $20 million US, and launch Matilda Publications Inc., the new home for Ms and Sassy.

That deal was concluded on July 1st, 1988, and 6 weeks later – just as I was starting to enjoy my new incarnation as a media mogulette – disaster struck.

Sassy was targeted by the religious right with a letter writing campaign to all our advertisers. In the space of a week, we lost our 5 largest advertisers. The campaign was started by a woman from Wabash, Indiana, who ran a little group called Women Aglow. She contacted a much bigger group, called Focus on the Family Citizen, whose leader had a syndicated radio program across the US.

The most letters any advertiser got was 300, but off the back of a clever pr campaign, it was enough to almost sink us.

Kids loved us, of course. Our budgeted circulation for the first issue was 250,000. We debuted at 330,000, and circulation climbed rapidly from the beginning. The sex education content of Sassy was similar to what is in Dolly here – about 1% of the total editorial package, but in the country with the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the western world, girls were still expected to just say no.

It was a bitter lesson. We limped along until May of 1989, when the original investors bought out my employment contract, and installed an American publisher.

On the day that I left the company, the woman from Wabash called to say that she was very sorry that things had turned out the way they had – she hadn’t meant for me to lose the Company – she just wanted me to do what she said.

It was one of the rare moments in my life when I understood with absolute clarity what the phrase “murderous rage” means.

However, a holiday in Paris cheered me up, and I had time to contemplate what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

Offers in the US were depressingly banal. People wanted me to launch more magazines – small, entrepreneurial start-ups – same old, same old.

So I came back to Australia for a visit to see what was happening here, and discovered that Time magazine was looking for a Publisher.

This suited me exactly. A cashed up US publisher, a job I could do on my ear, serious grown-ups talking about important issues. I breathed a great sigh of relief and came home.

I was Publisher of Time for 4 years, and in that period, we took the magazine from its perennial position of bridesmaid to the Bulletin, to the leadership position it has enjoyed ever since, as the No 1 news and business magazine in Australia.

But after 4 years, I was restless. I wasn’t prepared to accept an extended period as No 2 in the organization, and I realized I wasn’t learning anything anymore.

It’s hard, once you’ve been an entrepreneur to settle back into corporate life. The pace seems slow, the meetings endless. I wanted to be in charge of my own life again.

So I chucked it in. This is not a career move I recommend. Do not try this at home. But I knew I was sick of publishing. I wanted to do something completely different, but had no idea what.

But predictably, opportunity presented itself, as it usually does.

I was invited to chair the Australian Council for Women, the advisory body set up by the Federal Government to provide advice on Australia’s participation in the Fourth UN Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995. It ran for 2 years, and the pay was $25,000 a year, but it was an irresistible opportunity. We travelled Australia, holding more than 30 consultations with women from all walks of life. We provided advice to the Government on the key issues for women, and it all culminated in the Conference in Beijing, where I was an adviser to the Australian Government’s delegation.

The two years I invested in this project were extremely useful from a business stand-point, because all those consultations had taught me a lot about Australian women, and that knowledge had a real value and application for business.

When the Conference was over, Saatchi & Saatchi invited me to join their Board as a non-executive Director, and shortly thereafter, as Chair. I had been a client of Saatchi & Saatchi as Publisher of Time magazine, and had stayed in touch with colleagues there, and they were keen to tap into the knowledge I had acquired in the previous two years.

And so this most recent stage of my life began. From 1996, I began to accumulate what I believe is called these days a “portfolio” career. My criteria were that I wouldn’t do anything I didn’t care passionately about. I had to believe that I could make a difference, in whatever role I undertook, and I wanted to develop a mix of paid and unpaid work, so that I could devote some time to my private passions, like books and music.

It’s been a slow process, but I like where my life is now.

My knowledge of marketing was useful to TAFE as it was progressively opened up to competition, and in 1997 I was appointed Chair of the TAFE Board. This has been an absolutely transformatory role for me. I would never have expected to get passionate about vocational education and training, but I’ve fallen in love with it, and I never ceased to be moved by the thousands of people, like my mother, for whom TAFE has provided second chance education, or the thousands of young people training in hospitality, retailing and IT, as well as the more traditional trades.

I’m a director of the Advertising Federation of Australia, the industry’s peak body, and have worked on the Ethics Committee of the AFA for the last 4 years, as we developed the world’s first Code of Ethics for the Advertising Industry.

I chair a small, independent, publishing company, and I’ve re-discovered my love of magazines, and I’m on the board of the Reynolds Wines Company, an entrepreneurial start-up based in the Orange region.

I chair the Sydney Writer’s Festival, where my commitment is to deliver what is unambiguously Australia’s best Writer’s Festival within the next three years.

I’ve bought a harpsichord, and have promised myself I’m going to take up music again, and every year, I sing in the Messiah in the Opera House at Christmas with the Sydney Philharmonia Massed Choirs.

I’m on the board of the Taronga Foundation, and have discovered that raising funds for the conservation of endangered species is an absorbing and rewarding activity.

I coach high potential business executives, which is an extremely enriching experience for me, and I hope for the people I have the pleasure to coach.

And I earn a part of my income through speaking engagements (although I hasten to add I’m not earning any income today – it’s all going to the Library).

So I like the mix of things I do right now –the work I do is varied, interesting, challenging and rewarding. I’ve discovered that a long and happy marriage is a pearl beyond price, and that my children mean more to me than I could ever have possibly imagined. I’m nourished by great friendships, and stimulated by the company of the energetic and talented young women I’m privileged to mentor.

But I think I’m also clear-eyed about the things I’m not – as an arts journalist rather scornfully said of me a couple of weeks ago, I’m no intellectual – I’m intuitive, rather than analytical, and that gets me into trouble sometimes. I’m not particularly clever – I was an average scholar, and I’ve got the concentration span of a gnat. Stripped of everything, I’m a pretty ordinary woman who discovered that if at first, you don’t succeed, just putting one foot after the other seems to work just as well as being a genius, if you keep at it for long enough.

So I think the role of the Jessie Street National Women’s Library is really important. For all that we can learn from all the ordinary and extraordinary women who preceeded us – the telling of their lives can inspire us, educate us and direct us. I’m honoured to have been invited to speak to you today, and I thank you for the opportunity.