Irreverent political commentator Kerry-Anne Walsh isn't shy about expressing an opinion. On her home territory in Canberra, she shares some with Joanna Wane
You've got to hand it to the Aussies, they certainly have a way with words. Julia Gillard, the country's first — and only — female prime minister was pilloried for everything from her "fat arse" to her flame-red hair during a brutal three years in office. Here's how a dish of fried quail, dedicated to the Labor leader, was listed on the menu at a Liberal Party fundraiser: "Small breasts, huge thighs and a big red box."
Last month Gillard was back in the headlines, recast as a modern-day heroine on the 10th anniversary of her famous misogyny speech calling out Opposition leader Tony Abbott for sexism, a #NotNowNotEver moment that's been embraced by a new generation of young women on TikTok.
It wasn't only the attack-dog politics and double-dealing inside the federal Parliament that outraged veteran journalist Kerry-Anne Walsh; it was what she saw as the complicity of the Canberra press pack. After 25 years in the gallery, a disillusioned Walsh had quit in 2009, the year before Kevin Rudd was deposed in a leadership spill that brought Gillard to power.
Walsh wasn't about to quit politics altogether though, freelancing for international publications and making regular appearances as a media commentator. Here, she's kept Kiwis entertained (and often appalled) by her lively, irreverent accounts of life across the ditch as RNZ's Australia correspondent for the past 30 years.
A keen observer from the sidelines, Walsh kept an extensive diary record of Gillard's tumultuous time in government. In what she describes as a slow-death campaign of destabilisation, she watched Rudd mastermind a Lazarus-like comeback to dethrone Gillard in June 2013. Revenge was sweet but short. Three months later, he led Labor to defeat at the polls.
The fried quail fiasco is just one of the unsavoury incidents recounted in Walsh's scathing, blow-by-blow account of those tumultuous times, The Stalking of Julia Gillard: How the media and Team Rudd brought down the Prime Minister. At the book launch in Sydney, Walsh talked of a quote she used to have pinned on the wall above her typewriter when she was a young reporter, about how journalists needed to be the guard dogs at the gate of democracy. The first print run sold out within 48 hours. The following year, she won the best non-fiction category at the 2014 Australian Book Industry Awards.
Letters arrived by the sackful from readers thanking Walsh for exposing some of the uglier behaviour on Canberra's Capital Hill. Unsurprisingly, journalists she'd criticised for jumping on the Rudd bandwagon didn't take it so well. "Some of the blowback on me was quite savage," she says. "But you don't call out your colleagues and expect them to embrace you."
Walsh herself had joined the Daily Telegraph's Canberra bureau in the mid-80s after spending 18 months as a press secretary in Bob Hawke's Labor Government and tried to be scrupulously impartial in her own reporting to avoid accusations of bias.
One of her scoops, during Rudd's first term as PM, raised questions over the authenticity of an account he'd given about his widowed mother being heartlessly booted off the family's share farm in Queensland after the death of his father when Rudd was 11.
The story "hit like a bloody bomb", recalls Walsh, who was quietly taken aside by a journalist from one of the television channels and reprimanded for damaging the Labor cause. For her, that was a pivotal moment. "More journalists were coming in and taking sides," she says, "and Kevin courted everybody in the gallery assiduously.
"Getting a drop [leaked information] from certain politicians in return for writing favourably about them the next time — there was a lot of that, particularly in the [anti-Gillard] Murdoch media. Some of the press pack would arrive early and sit in the front row, firing abusive questions at her, and get their photographers to crouch down and crowd in on her to take the most unflattering photos. They don't do that to the blokes.
"I take my hat off to Gillard for sustaining a level of calm through those three years when she was being hounded out of office. She's done what every one of her male predecessors and successors, with their backbiting and sniping, has been unable to do: retire gracefully into private life."
On my first morning in Canberra, I wake to breaking news. After weeks of chaos within the British Government, Prime Minister Liz Truss has resigned after just 45 days in office. By the time I meet Walsh for coffee, speculation is rife that her predecessor Boris Johnson — booted out after one scandal too many — is preparing to contest the leadership and stage a Rudd-style comeback of his own.
The parallels seem extraordinary, but Walsh isn't having any of it. "Nuh," she says, in her throaty, ex-smoker drawl. She's already heard the news, of course. By the time most people wake up in the morning, Walsh has already read four or five newspapers online. "Liz Truss was the architect of her own demise. And Kevin [Rudd] actually has a good brain."
Walsh was in her 20s when she moved from Sydney to Canberra and fell in love with Australia's "bush capital". She hates the way the rest of Australia dismisses it as boring and bland, tainted by association with the worst of federal politics despite its progressive credentials. A federal territory, ACT is governed by a Labour-Green legislative assembly and last year Canberra was named the world's most sustainable city.
These days, Walsh lives in the hip central-city suburb of Braddon. A glowing "rainbow roundabout" was installed on the main street after marriage equality legislation was passed in 2017 and lights at a nearby pedestrian crossing feature a same-sex couple holding hands, a love heart flashing between them.
On Sunday mornings, the village markets are held in Haig Park, where Walsh often walks her two dogs, Les and Darcy, a mix between giant schnauzer and chocolate labrador. Les is a bit nervy and gets upset when she yells at politicians on the television.
Her son, Kieran, runs a Muay Thai boxing gym in Fyshwick, a 10-minute drive away. A former national representative, he's now a top-level coach. Tattooed on his kicking leg is the Walsh family motto in Celtic, which translates as "wounded but not dead". Mother and son are close, and there have been times when that motto has been appropriate for both of them.
Kieran, who was born premature, was only a couple of months old when Walsh found herself raising him alone. As a political producer on ABC Radio's Daybreak programme, she'd get up at 4am to breastfeed her baby son, then leave him in the care of a neighbour to bike to the studio. By 8am, she was back home to feed him again, returning to work a few hours later for the afternoon shift.
From there, she spent seven years writing for the Bulletin. Her father had once won the magazine's short-story competition, using the prize money to pay the deposit on a house for his wife and kids. He died when Walsh, one of six children, was 21. "By the time I got the job, he was long passed," she says. "It makes me weep."
Walsh, who describes herself as "ageing disgracefully" on the other side of 60, came to politics at a time when women were in the minority, both in the press gallery and the debating chamber. When Gay Davidson had become the first female Canberra political correspondent for a major newspaper in the early 70s, no women's toilets were provided so she used the men's loo and her male colleagues boycotted them.
By the 80s, when Walsh arrived, after-hours parties at Parliament were legendary and so was the drinking; an in-house bar opened at noon. They were wild, adrenalin-fuelled times and young female reporters quickly learnt which MPs to watch out for when they stopped by the press bureau at night with alcohol on their breath. "Some of them had terrible reputations," she says. "It was pretty chauvinistic and you had to have quite a thick skin. They'd call you 'darling' or 'love'.
"It wasn't just the disrespecting or the sexual harassment but the diminishing of what we did, and that would happen within our jobs too. You'd break a story and the next thing one of your colleagues from the bureau would go, 'I've got a fact to add to that' and, without having done any work, give themselves a joint byline with you. Most of the male journalists I worked with were terrific, but some were absolute f***s."
The gift shop at Old Parliament House doesn't stock Walsh's book on Julia Gillard, but there's a new essay collection, Not Now, Not Ever, marking the 10th anniversary of the former PM's misogyny speech. In retrospect, Gillard's premiership has been more favourably received, with political experts often placing her in the middle-to-upper tier of Australian prime ministers.
After the seat of government moved to Capital Hill in 1988, this magnificent heritage building was eventually opened to the public as the Museum of Australian Democracy. Walsh was among a group of journalists who recorded stories for a fascinating exhibition upstairs in the press gallery, where you can peer into the studios on "radio alley" with their prehistoric-looking recording equipment and view the Chamber of the House from the reporters' vantage point behind the Speaker's chair.
Walsh remembers looking on as one of the Labor backbenchers became so incensed that he vaulted from his seat and clopped one of the Coalition speakers for trying to stir up a racist debate. She still has a soft spot for Bob Hawke, a transformative leader she calls both a larrikin and a visionary. On long overseas trips, he'd invite journalists up to the front of the plane and fleece them at poker.
Hawke was also notoriously vain. At one stage, when coloured contacts were all the rage, Walsh noticed something different about him. "I rang his press secretary and said, 'What's the go, mate? What's he doing with bloody green eyes?' And he said, 'I haven't stared into his eyes lately, Kerry.' So that went into the story too."
Downstairs, in the Prime Minister's office, you can still see the original desk that was used by three legendary Australian leaders: Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser and Bob Hawke. In the ensuite, an open cabinet drawer shows a few of the toiletries Hawke left behind, including a laxative and a bottle of toner for his silver-fox hair.
For Walsh, every corner and corridor holds memories. When she moved to the grand new parliamentary building on Capital Hill, she found the place soulless. "They were such dramatic years when Hawke came in; it revolutionised the whole country," she says. "From 84, when I joined the gallery, to when I left in 2009, I saw the most extraordinary changes in Australian politics. It was very, very hard work but it was so exciting and I loved it. I wouldn't swap it for quids."
Walsh runs her own strategic communications company now and does advocacy work for the Cape York Land Council, which was established to protect Aboriginal cultural heritage rights and interests in the remote northern tip of Queensland. The region has the highest percentage of indigenous people in the state and they're the most disadvantaged.
She calls this kind of work true politics — changing lives for the better, breaking the cycle of injustice and making amends for the past. She loathes Queensland state senator Pauline Hanson, leader of the populist, right-wing One Nation party, whose "craven need for personal power and adulation" was the subject of another of Walsh's excoriating books, Hoodwinked, which came out in 2018.
Back home in Auckland, I tune in for her morning radio slot and listen to her lampooning Tony Abbott's suggestion to introduce compulsory national service for 18-year-olds. She's funny and sharp, mixing humour with heart. Walsh had told me she likes New Zealanders, finding them polite and civilised and interested in what's going on in the world.
"You remind me of Canberrans," she'd said. By then, I'd spent enough time with her to know there isn't a higher compliment she could pay.
