A Particular Woman: Inside the life and memoir of Ashley Dawson-Damer. (The Canberra Times)
There was a time in Ashley Dawson-Damer's life when she had media camped out in front of her house.
It wasn't during her modelling career in the 1980s, but for an incident that one journalist predicted to be Australia's Watergate.
In 1993, Dawson-Damer was catapulted into the spotlight after she and two other women wrote a letter to then-prime minister Paul Keating, disagreeing with the purchase of a teak dining table that for the Lodge from Thailand, using money from the Australiana Fund.
At the time, Dawson-Damer was on the acquisitions committee for the fund, considered to be the caretaker and advisor on the fine arts and furniture for the four official residences. The $20,000 acquisition in question came about after Keating had approached Sydney antique dealer and friend Paul Kenny to source a long teak table for the Lodge's official dining room. Despite being advised against it by the fund's directors, Dawson-Damer and two other women from the committee decided they couldn't agree with the purchase.
As Dawson-Damer writes in her recently released memoir, A Particular Woman, "as a reproduction from a foreign country, the table did not fit the character of the fund, and so we could not pay for it".
It's just one anecdote in a memoir that follows Dawson-Damer's life through her time as one of the few women studying economics at Sydney University, the years spent living in Canada, the Philippines, Singapore and Nigeria with her first husband, and her experience losing four premature babies, the adoption of her two children, her time as a single mother and the modelling career she fell into to help support her children. She also sheds light on her second marriage to John Dawson-Damer, and her time serving on various boards and committees, including the Australiana Fund.
At the time of writing the letter to Keating, Dawson-Damer thought that would be the end of it, and even doubted that her words would have any impact. But it meant that she and her two committee members - who made up half of the committee overall - had said their piece.
It was after Dawson-Damer discussed the matter with two of her friends, whose husbands were the executive chair and managing director of News Corporation, that the news broke on the front page of The Australian; shortly after, the table was removed from the Lodge.
Ashley Dawson-Damer was one of the few women to graduate with an economics degree from Sydney University in 1967.
When asked about the event, Dawson-Damer chuckles, saying "it's like bringing up an old skeleton"
"People had forgotten about it, but I thought it would increase their understanding of the critical nature of the arts and the government in this world," she says.
"The fact that the Thai teak table did not fit the parameters of the organisation on which I was sitting, was one of the first instances in my life where I and two other women say 'That's not acceptable and we're going to go to the highest in the land - the prime minister - and say that it is unacceptable'. Who was to realise that it would create this incredible storm?"
It was after the story first appeared that Dawson-Damer was warned that the saga of the table was not over yet. Briefly, she considered warning the prime minister's office that the incident was set to continue in the media until someone was fired for leaking information to board members.
Detail of some of Ashley Dawson-Damer's modelling shots.
However, she chose not to, not just because her party loyalties lay with the opposition, but because she was curious to see "whether a great and powerful man would allow malice to drive reaction against an intelligent woman".
The fine arts advisor Margaret Betteridge took a redundancy and went public with her version of events - that she too had opposed teak table.
Keating hit back at what he called the "revenge of the hyphenated names" and the "blue-rinse set" - Dawson-Damer was singled out as a member during the radio interview. That was when the phone calls and media campouts began.
"There wasn't a lot happening politically at the time. It was like the media was looking for a cause and that was it," she says.
"The journalists were camped outside my gate and my little daughter would go to the gate and they would ask 'Is your mother at home?' and she said 'No she's not' and then one of them said 'Well I just saw her passing across the doorway'. It was really strange to feel followed like that."
Former prime minister John Howard, who appointed Ashley Dawson-Damer to the National Gallery of Australia board.
Below: Ashley Dawson-Damer at the National Gallery of Australia.
It was after the incident that Dawson-Damer says her credentials flourished and she began to attend more political functions, "learning the special language used only in this rarefied world". It's something that would go on to help her when she went on to sit on the board of arts institutions including National Institute of Dramatic Art, the Art Gallery of New South Wales and what she calls the "jewel in the crown for the Commonwealth Government", the National Gallery of Australia, which she was appointed to by then prime minister John Howard.
"Having very good political relationships - and that's long-standing - when you're running a public arts institution - it's very important that you have a good relationship with your governments," Dawson-Damer says.
"You can't grizzle and you can't complain and you can't always have your hand out. You have to give your public servants something and that's bringing them on board and getting them excited with what you can create. Artists can sometimes be a bit whingey and I don't think that works at all.
"And knowing not to be critical of the government. You can't ask for money and then tell them what's wrong with them. It just doesn't work. All arts organisations need to pull together a lot more. We shouldn't compete with each other so much. But that's a pipe dream, I think."
Ashley Dawson-Damer with fellow benefactor Myriam Wylie with Frederick McCubbin's Violet and Gold, 1911 at the National Gallery of Australia.
Of all the boards to which she has been appointed, Dawson-Damer says the AGNSW and NGA were the most challenging. In both instances, she says there had been objections to her appointment. While women on boards are now relatively common, when Dawson-Damer started down that path, it wasn't the norm.
"There was probably a little bit of questioning that went on. I would hear the odd statement that perhaps some woman that I replaced would say, 'Why Ashley'?," Dawson-Damer says.
"As I said to my great friend, the politician Peter McGauran, 'I think I'm a late developer' and he said 'No Ashley, you've always been underestimated."
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