Reflections on life,
art, books,
and family.
A Particular Woman: Inside the life and memoir of Ashley Dawson-Damer. (The Canberra Times)
Former prime minister John Howard, who appointed Ashley Dawson-Damer to the National Gallery of Australia board.
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."
Source:
Grieving mothers were given no tools to deal with their loss. Extract from new memoir in Sunday Life (Sun-Herald & the Sunday Age)
Stunning extract from new memoir 'A Particular Woman' in this past weekends Sunday Life
July 12, 2020: The article appears in Sunday Life magazine within the Sun-Herald and the Sunday Age.
Ashley Dawson-Damer in 1967, aged 21.
One afternoon in September 1974, the phone rang and a woman enquired as to whether I was ready to pick up my baby son in the morning. Piers was six weeks old.
The next morning, my husband, Phil, and I stopped at one of my suppliers in northern Sydney’s Artarmon, Ladybird, where I quickly selected an armful of baby clothes. We then picked up my sister-in-law, Helen, and drove to the hospital. A nursing sister brought in my little boy and placed him in my lap.
Extraordinarily, my Canadian cousin, Paul, and his wife, Audrey, had four adopted children, two girls and two boys. Such are the cadences sometimes found in families. As I looked at this tiny baby with enormous eyes and black hair, which had been firmly parted with a comb, endless happy and fearful thoughts tumbled through my head. Did I want him? Would I keep him? Could I love him? Phil was equally quiet. It was my sister-in-law who took charge and reassured us that “he was a real boy with a beautifully shaped head”. I changed the baby into his new clothes and we drove to collect my four-year-old nephew, Julian, from nursery school. As he climbed into the car to sit beside the baby basket, I turned to him and said, “This is your new cousin.”
I fell in love, gave Piers my maternal grandfather’s name, and he quickly became, as my 90-year-old grandmother proudly said, “one of us”.
My son was two-and-a-half years old when I went into premature labour with a baby of 28 weeks. She was my third daughter. In the 14th week of this pregnancy, the obstetrician had inserted a stitch into my incompetent cervix, basically to hold the baby in. Believing that this time my pregnancy would reach a happy conclusion, I had enjoyed lovely, slow summer days with Piers at Bondi Beach, floating over the swell of the waves – he with his flotation bubble, me with my growing belly.
Unfortunately, I was to confound the specialists and again cause obstetric havoc. The baby girl lived in my womb but died in the birth canal as she was being born. She had become exhausted during the labour. The medical team concentrated on the mother, now hemorrhaging from a torn uterus, and the baby was removed. Thinking she had been taken as a premature baby to intensive care, I did not ask to see her. Weakened by loss of blood and in need of a transfusion, knowledge of her death came slowly. I did not ask to see my baby, nor was it offered.
Three weeks later, while alone at home and with my son at preschool, the telephone rang. An unknown woman asked to speak to Phil. I was informed that $167 was owed for the cremation of a baby. In his distress, Phil had overlooked the account that was rendered for immediate payment at the hospital.
My mind clouded as her complaining voice talked of the tiny babies they collected for disposal, and for whom they failed to receive payment. Murmuring some vague reassurance, I replaced the phone on the wall and began screaming. Instinctively grabbing my tennis racquet, I drove to a favourite park where I could hit tennis balls against a wall. As the sun beat down and summer flies buzzed, I smashed at the wall and thought of death.
Caring for my sweet son helped to heal me and keep the ghosts at bay. With each pregnancy my ability to hold a baby within my womb was diminished. During my subsequent and last pregnancy, I was to spend three months in a hospital bed in an effort to carry the baby to full term. Piers was sent to Perth to live with my mother, where he attended the kindergarten of her old school, St Hilda’s.
Being in hospital, my terrible history of complications and mishaps was guarded against with daily monitoring by an impressive team of medical experts. This time we would succeed, or so everyone hoped. I was to surprise everyone yet again, and in the process almost lose my life. The whole dreadful business began at 24 weeks’ gestation in the delivery room, where I was attached to drips while premature labour pains racked my body. Medication followed and the placement of a second cervical ligature, which stopped the contractions, enabling my pregnancy to settle down.
Back in the ward, I occupied myself on the telephone, organising a surprise party for Phil’s 40th birthday to be celebrated in the first week of June. On the night of June 6, however, his friends came to an empty house. Oblivious of the arrangements, Phil was stationed at the hospital, where I was in the emergency theatre delivering our baby. My body had developed an infection and my temperature soared; it was subsequently discovered I had a small tear in my uterus from the previous delivery that allowed infection to occur. Both the baby and I were in danger of going into septic shock.
Knowledge of that Friday evening was later augmented by stories told by the nurses: of the young obstetrician who ran hospital corridors gathering specialists to save my life and the life of my baby. How I thanked the medical team in the theatre, before they anaesthetised me for a caesarean section. And the ward sister, searching for a camera to photograph the baby, her face resting beside a pink camellia to show how tiny she was. I had been living in the hospital for so long it had become my home and they all knew my story.
Afterwards, I was transferred to intensive care, while my baby battled for an hour in the neonatal intensive care ward. Attached to drips, I constantly exhorted the sister to ring for news of the baby’s progress as I willed her to fight for each tiny breath. Phil stayed near her. It was not long before I saw the lean figure of my obstetrician framed in the doorway, and I knew he had come to tell me my baby girl had lost her struggle and died. Begging him to return through the door and bring me news that she lived. Frightened I would descend into a pit of madness, I made the decision not to hold my dead baby.
Grieving mothers, left to deal privately with their unspoken and unvalued loss, were given no tools then with which to deal with their grief. It was only a short mental step for us to come to the conclusion that we had no value. I continued to believe I was responsible for the deaths of my little ones by failing to give them life. I desperately sought relief, salvation, and some sanctuary in the belief that I had value as the nurturing mother of my son.
It was only a short mental step for us to come to the conclusion that we had no value. I continued to believe I was responsible for the deaths of my little ones by failing to give them life.
Feeding Adelicia.
During the following week, while my body fought infection with the help of intravenous antibiotics, my mind fought to deal with the truth. I overcame the infection, but slid into a mental breakdown.
While I lay in a hospital bed and before my breakdown, I organised the burial place for my baby’s ashes. I may not have held her or kissed her, but I was determined she would have a grave and be named. Her ashes lie in the memorial wall in a rose garden of my local church, and I named her Henrietta, after a courageous ancestor. I was given a photo of my blonde cherub and it sits in a small, heart-shaped silver frame surrounded by antique porcelain figurines of three Beatrix Potter animals. I call them her guardian playmates.
Throughout my last pregnancy, I updated the adoption department on my condition. I had now reached the top of the list for my second baby, a girl, and the next suitable baby would be made available, if I was unsuccessful in producing my own.
Phil and I were invited to an initiation evening run by the adoption department of NSW Youth and Community Services, where we watched a large doll being bathed, after which we mixed with other potential adoptive parents. I found the evening interminable and hated the expectant excitement in the room and cosy bonding among the couples, and I hated the plastic doll. It was on that night I first met the imposing woman who was head of the department.
Anxious that her piercingly intelligent gaze would uncover my secret grieving, I played a role that appeared to fool everyone, including Phil. He whispered during the bathing display that I was clearly in my element.
Three-and-a-half months after the loss of Henrietta, Phil and I collected our six-week-old baby daughter, Adelicia. Although I had been granted a great gift, I could not overcome my depression and I struggled to love this baby, who was to be my last.
Caring for two small children, and rediscovering the first flickers of joyfulness, is a story of despair and healing.
Preoccupied by the effort to grow strong once more, I was unaware that the marriage had ended. Five months after the arrival of our daughter, my husband and I separated. My 12-year marriage was over.
Edited extract from A Particular Woman (Simon & Schuster) by Ashley Dawson-Damer, on sale now.
This article appears in Sunday Life magazine within the Sun-Herald and the Sunday Age on sale July 12.