After delivering a rousing speech on the political persecution of Australia’s first female Prime Minister in August 2012 and then publishing her book The Misogyny Factor, which dealt with the same subject in 2013, many assumed Anne Summers was a close personal friend of Julia Gillard’s. She wasn’t.
But Summers, a writer and a columnist with a PhD and an AO, and Gillard seemed to cross paths at pivotal times. By chance, Summers was the last journalist to conduct an in-depth interview with Gillard before she lost the Labor leadership, and her role as PM, in June last year. The resulting profile, which was published in Summers’ magazine after Gillard’s departure, struck a chord with readers.
Summers says it garnered an incredible response and no doubt further convinced Australians that the two women shared a strong personal bond. In the days and weeks that followed Summers was travelling around the country promoting her book.
“Everywhere I went people, but particularly women, were coming up to me asking how she is,” Summers explains. “She had disappeared and people assumed that I knew her or that we were friends. It wasn’t the case. People didn’t understand that I was defending her because I was appalled a woman would be treated that way. It wasn’t about being friends or knowing her. I just thought how dare this country treat our Prime Minister that way.”
The frequent queries about Gillard’s wellbeing, and the emotional resonance underpinning those concerns, gave Summers an idea.
“In these conversations with women around the country there was a palpable yearning to see that she was alright,” she says. “I thought I would write to her and tell her what I was hearing. I said I would be happy to host a couple of events –in Sydney and in Melbourne – and give her an opportunity to speak to the public.”
Gillard replied almost immediately and said she would do it but with a few conditions. She didn’t want to do the events until after the election was over but she wanted to do them as soon as possible once the election was over. And, critically, she didn’t want anything about the events to be mentioned until after the election. “If it leaked, it was a deal breaker,” Summers says.
It meant the window to promote the event and sell tickets was unusually small. Although they needn’t have worried about that, it marked the beginning of a dramatic – and clandestine — few weeks.
Gillard provided Summers with some dates, who then set about finding a suitably becoming venue in both Melbourne and Sydney. Initially she had thought Angel Place in Sydney but when that wasn’t available she had “a brilliant brainwave” and rang the Opera House which was available on the 30th of September. She then rang Melbourne Town Hall which was free on the night of the 1st of October. Gillard’s reaction to the chosen venues was this: “‘I hope you have a good marketing plan.” (Quite critically though, Summers had the support of Catriona Wallace who generously offered her credit card to cover the substantial booking fee at both venues, and provide the requisite public liability insurance policy to host an event of that size.)
The dates and venues were locked in but the details remained private. No one at either venue knew who the headline act was until the morning of the 10th of September, the Tuesday following the election. At 6am Summers rang the Opera House and informed them of the secret guest. By 9am the tickets were up for sale and a press release and an announcement on Facebook went out at 10am.
“It just went off,” Summers says. “I have never seen anything like it in my life. What was so incredible was we had been very nervous about selling tickets. There was a lot of money at stake and we had some contingency plans in place.”
The Melbourne event sold out in four hours and Sydney in six. “The power of social media and word of mouth was extraordinary,” Summers says. “It was an incredible thing to do – the sheer logistics meant it was just very exciting.”
The day before the first In Conversation with Anne Summers event in Sydney, Gillard and Summers chatted on the phone for 20 minutes; their first direct personal interaction since the interview that had taken place in June.
Gillard placed no restrictions on what Summers could ask but she wanted to cover two things; she wanted to rebut a story in The Australian Financial Review that she and her partner Tim Mathieson had split up and to mention her appointment as a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Even though tickets had sold out, given the format of the event – a live unstructured, unscripted conversation with audience questions at the end — there was no way of knowing how the evenings would pan out.
“We had no idea what would happen because you really don’t know what the audience will do. We made sure there was someone vetting questions at the microphones and we had a lot of security – which thankfully wasn’t needed,” Summers says. “Everyone who was there – and there were plenty of Liberals too – had sufficient respect for Gillard that they wanted to listen which was fantastic.”
Despite some criticism Summers was too soft in her questioning, the atmosphere was electric and the conversation compelling.
“The style of conversation that I am trying to use in these events is that you give the subject a comfortable space, you don’t interrogate them, you research deeply but you don’t script the questions. You go with how it flows and you never know what’s going to come out,” she explains. “You are much more likely to get an engaging conversation like that when they’re relaxed.”
Arranging the subject for her second conversation series has been an entirely different logistical exercise. Despite it being more straightforward to coordinate the public interviews with Dr Tim Flannery, the former climate change commissioner, Summers is confident their conversation will be as frank and captivating as hers was with Gillard.
Next week, in his first major appearance since being dismissed from his job by the Abbott government last year, he will sit down with Summers in both Melbourne and Sydney for a long chat. Climate change itself will undoubtedly be canvassed but his story is bigger than just that.
“I think what the audience might be surprised about — certainly I was until I researched it recently – was the amazing scientific career Flannery has had. He discovered the oldest dinosaur and found more species than Charles Darwin did,” she says. “He discovered climate change by accident when he was asked to prepare a report for the South Australian government.”
That discovery set him on an extraordinary path with quite considerable ramifications – politically, scientifically and for him personally. “He had an incredibly tough time as the climate change Commissioner,” Summers says. “He copped the same sort of vile treatment Gillard did and needed police protection while he was in the role. It was outrageous.”
Flannery does not pity himself though; he says there is a long history of scientists being vilified by those with vested interests in the areas they challenge. Being discredited by industry is almost a badge of honour for a scientist, but it’s not without frustrations.
“He gets very angry when people make unscientific allegations, like saying global temperatures aren’t increasing,” Summers says. “It’s measurable and the effects are known. One of the things that makes him a fantastic interview subject is his ability to make really complicated scientific concepts easy to understand.”
If you’re interested in learning more, tickets for the events are still available.