A lot on her plate: Mary Delahunty is still busy, but these days she can manage her time well.
EAMON GALLAGHER
Mary Delahunty, no longer the media star or the politician or the celebrity, walks into the café, after stopping to chat with a group of women at the outside tables.
She’s relaxed and open and prepared to talk about a deeply personal and sad chapter of her life that she’s written about in a memoir and I’m sitting there wondering how she got the nickname “Queen Mary”, which suggests she was brittle, icy, even imperious, and I can only guess it was envy at the heights she reached in journalism.
“I know where it came from and I don’t talk about it in the book because it’s petty,” Delahunty says. She adds: “I was Moscow Mary when I was doing The 7.30 Report. I get a bit confused.”
In the 1990s it wasn’t hard to earn a nickname with a reference to Russia. Anyone slightly to the left of the Herald Sun during the years of Jeff Kennett’s reign was seen by some media commentators as a raving communist. This included staff at The Age – or “The Spencer Street Soviet”, as it was called.
Anyway, she’s just Mary now, and this is her new world – a slower pace, time to ponder life, relieved to be off the media and political treadmill.
She’s trying to reclaim herself from the personal devastations that in recent times have befallen her – losing her husband, Jock Rankin, to cancer, followed by a battle with depression she, initially anyway, had no idea how to fight, or even acknowledge.
Rankin’s illness consumed Delahunty as she tried to maintain her role as a minister in the
Bracks government.
She writes about enduring functions and meetings and having to put on a frozen smile and making mistakes in parliament such as reading the wrong speech while wanting to be with Jock in his final months, and the relentless pressure for the career superwoman to look as though she was coping.
She writes of sitting bolt upright after nightmares, with death as her punishment for not succeeding in handling everything: “As I flayed myself by day for not achieving constant feats of perfection in all my roles – mother, minister, farm, house and financial manager, friend and daughter – by night my mind retaliated with scarifying consequences: death at the appointed time when they discovered my mendaciousness. I was lying, lying to myself that I was coping.”
For someone who’d spent a career using words – as a reporter on Four Corners, an ABC news reader, host of The 7.30 Report – she couldn’t bring herself to tell her Labor Party colleagues what she was going through, including her boss, Steve Bracks, an empathetic listener if ever there was one.
Why didn’t she tell him? “I don’t know why not,” she says. Does she regret that? “Yes. I’ve sat down with him recently and talked about the book. I believe it’s an error of judgement that I didn’t tell him, and I told him that. That is part of my condition. Absolute alone-ness. And it wasn’t until I was writing this book and had shown some of the pages to friends or to writing colleagues that a friend from Sydney said, ‘Who did you tell about the depression?’ I said, ‘Not one soul’. That is the revelation to me in this book.
“I’ve got a lot to learn about this condition. I didn’t believe that I had depression. I resisted the news, if you like, because I thought, ‘I’ve had a blissful, charmed life until I hit 50. People who get depression have usually had really tough lives. But people like me who’ve had a blessed life and are quite resilient, in a way tough – I’ve been described that way, probably inappropriately – don’t get depression’.
“What I’m facing and what counselling was about is me confronting grief and not tucking it away … It was only when my mother died very suddenly that year – and I’d been into hospital and my body was, I thought, packing up. As a good friend who’s a psychiatrist, said: ‘When your body packed up – she didn’t use that word – you felt betrayed and you had to face reality’. When I did face it I realised that I simply had to leave politics, that I was never going to deal with this condition unless I did. I’m sorry I had to leave (politics) that way.”
I asked whether Delahunty saw herself as Superwoman, and talking about her problems and seeking support might have harmed that self-image. “I didn’t know how to talk,” she says. “I’ve never asked for help. That’s what I’ve learnt.”
Did she ever think she’d be judged not just as a celebrity but as a woman? “I was judging myself that way. It wasn’t people judging me. I was placing impossible demands on myself.”
Mary Delahunty has been in the consciouness of Victorians for a long time. “I was in everyone’s lounge room for a very long time. I used to receive letters from mothers who told me lovely engaging stories about their babies who’d be distressed and then I’d come on the 7-o’clock news and they’d sit quietly. I’d say, ‘I wish that had worked for my babies’,” she laughs.
Perhaps her most famous moment in the 7.30 chair was a confrontation with then opposition leader Jeff Kennett just before his victory in the 1992 election, a confrontation that so enraged Kennett he vowed not to appear on the program when he became premier, a promise he honoured.
Kennett took exception to several of Delahunty’s questions. “Some of them were clumsy, some of them were not well put,” she says. “I believe he intended not to submit himself to The 7.30 Report or indeed The Age if he won the election, and it was a fair bet that he was going to win. Remember what it was like in ’98. People were being gagged.
“The fact of the matter is there were several incidences with the media, and the result was that Jeff Kennett refused to submit to what we would call the progressive media.”
Did she believe Kennett used that incident for his own purposes to use as an excuse to not submit to interviews from progressive media? “I don’t know,” she says. “He raised it again when I was entering politics. It gets a good run. He never made a formal complaint to the ABC. He raised it when I was going into politics at a byelection in 1998. The Liberals didn’t stand a candidate against me. He took the opportunity to write to all Democrat voters urging them to vote Democrat. I don’t know what that did to the Democrat vote.”
Her political career started controversially, preselected as the celebrity journalist with the armchair ride, not having to wait long in opposition before becoming a minister. And Delahunty knew she’d be sought out for special attention.
“I was an outsider to the political system and the factional system,” she says. “I was very clear about the unorthodox way that I came into politics. The Labor Party broke their own rules to allow me to stand for preselection.”
Did she underestimate how tough politics would be? “I underestimated the fact that there’s no glance of mercy in politics. And you can’t know how demanding and how tough and brutal it can be until you’re in there. But I came from a pretty tough, competitive environment – broadcast journalism.
“What was tough in politics was losing Jock. I clearly couldn’t do it without my soulmate, someone I could download every couple of days to, someone who would listen to your rants, and would either listen and love you for it or would listen and challenge your stupidity. Some people can manage it by themselves; I clearly didn’t do it very well by myself.”
She doesn’t know whether she enjoyed her time in politics. “There were parts I really relished. I loved the policy development. I loved winning the election in ’99. Winning again in 2002. I loved winning the policy debates and compromises.”
There was a lot she didn’t enjoy. “The constant sense of coded conversations, right across the board,” she says. “And usually that is leavened by people making good friends in the parliament because they’d been a long time in opposition. I wasn’t in opposition very long, so when you go into government you are really then responsible not just to your electorate, your party, your constituency, all your stakeholders, the cabinet … you are splintered. That’s what I didn’t enjoy.”
She talks about her disappointment that there were no great speeches in parliament. “That’s why I practised my pelvic floor exercises on the floor of the house. Most of time it was stultifyingly boring because people bumble through what cannot be described as a speech but a series of attacks and paltry compliments or paltry criticisms. If you do use lengthy, complicated language or big words you do invite ridicule, and occasionally I slipped into that. I was a bit of a ponce at times.”
Politics had become bad for her health, and the withdrawal wasn’t easy. “For a long time I was still so wired that I couldn’t relax in the time that I now had,” she says. “You programmed your body almost. Sunday night you’d read your briefs and your cabinet papers, Monday morning you were trussed up in your best suit and heels and off to your department …”
Delahunty has written a brave book. Public Life, Private Grief is a deeply personal account. She has largely eschewed the traditional self-serving justfications that usually ensure that political biographies are deathly to read. She has peeled away many layers, and it’s hard to reconcile the icy Queen Mary of reputation with this earthy woman revealing bruising personal detail.
Was relief the main emotion when she walked away? “Disappointment,” she says. “I would have preferred to have gone on a little longer. I don’t think modern politics is a 27-year stint. I looked at Geoff Gallup. He was premier (of Western Australia) and he declared, ‘I’ve got depression’, and just closed the book on everything. People left him alone to do his thing.
“He used a phrase that was so revealing and accurate for my condition. He said, ‘I catastrophise everything’. I thought, ‘That’s what I’m doing’ …’’
Did she receive enough support from colleagues? “While Jock was alive and very sick it was a lot more public. I had to ask to leave the parliament. We were on a knife-edge at that period and we needed all of our numbers. So you couldn’t put your nose outside. But people do need to leave, and I had to and wanted to leave regularly. So I had to get formal permission…
“Everyone in the parliament was very kind to me. I have very warm memories of a range of individuals, doesn’t matter which party, being very kind to me. ‘How’s Jock?’ You don’t tell them the truth because you don’t want to face the truth.”
After Jock died, Delahunty had a new life as a single mother with Nick and Olivia. How were those early days? “I can’t remember much of them, quite frankly. It was the divided life. I made the mistake of trying to be mother and father. You can’t replace someone like Jock.”
Nick is now 24 and Olivia 20. How did they cope? “I think that’s a question that I’ll know the answer to in 20 years’ time. They took it very badly. And they dealt with it in different ways. His influence on them and, quite frankly, my care of them, has meant they are wonderful people. They’ve always been good friends.”
After she left politics, Delahunty looked after her ill father. “It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever done. When I say I’m disappointed I left politics, it opened an opportunity I could never have imagined.”
Delahunty is busy, but in a manageable way. She is on several boards – including the Centre for Advanced Journalism at Melbourne University, the Melbourne Recital Centre and Harold Mitchell’s arts and health foundation – and is chair of Orchestra Victoria.
She has set up a writer’s retreat at Rosebank Farm. “It is the great joy of my life, opening the visitors’ book and seeing the writer’s writing about the experience.”
She shares her time between Rosebank Farm and her bayside house. The kids haven’t left home yet. “Occasionally I see beds going down the hallway and I think, ‘What does that mean?’ They’ve got their own loves and their own lives.”
Olivia has won a transfer to a French university for a semester. Nick is also at uni, works three jobs and recently lifted 275 kilograms at the state powerlifting titles. “He’s a big boy,” Delahunty says. “If anyone had said, ‘How did you spend Sunday?’ the last thing they would expect me to say is, ‘I was watching the state powerlifting championship’.”
But then, as Delahunty should know, assumptions are dangerous.
Public Life, Private Grief is out now (Hardie Grant Books).