Author: Hilary Burden

I’ll never get used to 4am wakeup calls required for covering the Breakfast radio shift. In the words of one of the best radio hosts in the country, self-styled “Brismanian” Tim Cox, “it’s just not natural”.

Not since student days waitressing in Hobart have I ever done anything simply for money. But these days, penalty rates are a godsend for a writer working casual shifts to help pay the bills. They also help offset the shift in metabolism and social life incurred with working unnatural hours. Not to mention the cost of repair needed to drag yourself out of bed before the birds, a minor vanity in the grand scheme of things except please don’t assume I’m letting myself go next time you see me.

Driving into work under the Milky Way at 430am, you see consul operators in petrol stations, street cleaners, rubbish collectors and delivery drivers, all doing the sorts of jobs most people choose not to. The only food place open at this time is a bakery. We think we live in a 24/7 economy but, clearly, not at this hour or in the real world.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 40% of Australian workers have some form of non-traditional pattern of working hours (ie 9 to 5). This doesn’t mean that we’re all open all hours. If we are, it’s either because you want or must be, or you haven’t learnt to shut down technology and have a weekend off.

There are many arguments for why penalty rates should stay, for all kinds of workers, and you can count and keep track of them on the ACTU website, currently running a petition to “Protect Our Penalty Rates” in response to the Productivity Commission’s  proposed revision of overtime and weekend working. It’s a debate we need to claw back from business and make relevant to people’s lives.

In particular, I’d like to wave a banner for creative people in rural and regional communities who put lifestyle first. We may be like herding cats, working our own hours on very little, but the Tasmanian economy has long benefitted from things creative people make.

A 2014 study by the University of South Australia’s Centre for Work + Life called “Evenings, Nights & Weekends: working unsocial hours and penalty rates” found that those on the receiving end of penalty rates were more likely to be single, without children at home, on casual contracts, or working in rural or regional locations. And that the arts and recreation services industry had the highest proportion of employees who work on weekends only. This is especially relevant for Tasmanian workers, with nearly a quarter employed in the arts and recreation services sector.

Most creative people do not expect to become millionaires, although it would be nice. Instead, artists are content to work for the love of their art, driven to create beauty, intrigue, or express a truth.

An artist doesn’t expect to receive penalty rates for their creative output, but may work casually at a job paying weekend rates in order to support an artistic way of life. For many, it’s an absolute necessity.

According to a 3-year study by the Department of Economics at Macquarie University, the average income of Australian authors is $12,900, with only 5% of authors earning the average annual income of $61,000 from their creative practice. Penalty rates paid to casual workers can offer a lifeline, enabling more time to be creative, with less time spent at a bill-paying day job.
At a time when cultural tourism and employment in the creative industries are both on the increase in Tasmania, we should be trying to protect the ability of those who work creatively to survive, especially when few are protected by a union, most work alone and often in insolation.

I hope the government also looks at other ideas before thinking of cutting the pay of people who earn the minimum hourly wage. For example, Launceston based freelance butler Simon McInerney suggests fewer regional public holidays because “very few waiters can generate sales to cover their $40+ hourly rates” and “of the nine or so public holidays a year, only three fall during peak tourism/holiday season. Fewer public holidays would also have affects beyond hospitality/tourism.”

Hospitality workers like McInerney are frustrated when groups like the TCCI single out retail and hospitality as the focus for where change needs to happen, especially when most restaurants/bars/retailers are busier on weekends than weekdays.

“All too often the focus is on the few, sometimes costly, days rather than annual business turnover,” he observes.

For me, a writer struggling to make a full time living in the country, earning double time on a Sunday, or time and a quarter on Saturday, or penalty rates doing the Breakfast shift from time to time, frees me up creatively, makes me less reliant on the Monday to Friday office routine where, generally speaking, the pace is set by others and space for creativity may be stifled by a corporate culture.

While Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry CEO, Kate Carnell, says “we don’t look at Sundays the way we used to” and “we have to accept that the train’s left the station on this”, the reality is far more complex. Penalty rates should not be changed to make the weekend more like Monday to Friday. Is football ever played on a Tuesday?

The business community’s view that working on a Sunday is no different to working on Saturday, or any other day of the week, is just plain wrong. There is another way of looking at it – more in favour of life than work. Our so-called 24/7 economy could mean that every day holds the possibility of being Saturday or Sunday. That if we are not taking our weekends at the weekend, then taking weekends during the week becomes a matter of necessity.

As one petitioner wrote on the Australian Unions website: “We are humans (not machines) and we work to live, we don’t live to work”.

First published in Tasweekend, The Mercury

I hope Tony Abbott is sitting at home with his chin in his hand, gazing out the window, making a list of the things that led to his own demise. And, like a good liberal for whom the individual counts more than community, I trust he might consider, first, the daft things he said and did. And how what might be daft in an ordinary person is dangerous in a PM.

For me, the list is bookended by one of his first comments and one of his last.

His expression of regret, as both Prime Minister and Minister for Women, over the lack of women in his Cabinet was offensive to every woman and a twisted trouncing of his own leadership before it had even begun. Doomed, if you like, by his inability to make the female, the feminine, the woman matter.

Then, at the end, to admit to never being someone who wanted to “just hang around and smell the roses” and “that’s never been my idea of a day well spent”, you have to wonder why politics rewards this degree of soulless-ness. Those who boast disdain for roses should not inherit the earth.

On top of my list, I would place a disdain for roses because of the truth it tells about the man’s character.

One of the details in Tara Badcock’s Solo Commission, which finished this month at the Devonport Regional Gallery, is from ‘The Index of Her Mind’ – a luscious fabric rose furled inside a woman’s bonnet. It’s a metaphor for the arrival of the Chudleigh textile artist’s baby daughter, and a message of hope and possibility in life.

It’s just one part of an impressive exhibition that deals with the struggle of an artist’s identity after giving birth, of the tension between high creativity and domestic life, and with the role of the colonial female. It is a powerful woman’s work – as brave and as tender as the first rose in Spring.

Smelling roses is like poetry. It is agriculture and gardens, romance and philosophy. It is stopping to see the land around you and recognising beauty. It is taking time for human breath, to enjoy and appreciate what is so often ignored, to appreciate the kind of beauty that does not speak a word. It is where peace begins.

It’s about getting closer to nature so that when you meet an onion grower on farm you know the thing to do is to hold and feel the weight of an onion in your hands, to look at it, to press the top and bottom to see if both are firm, and peel the skin away to appreciate the colour and patina of the flesh. Not to eat it like an idiot.

I’ve not always smelled the roses. But one day I woke up. I’d once given my father a potted rose for his birthday that he planted in his garden. On one of my two yearly visits back from career days in London, he reminded me of the rose I’d given him, took me to admire it, noting how beautifully it flowered. I had completely forgotten my gift to him.

This awakening tinged by guilt was what taught me the truth of the rose, how taking care of the small things, takes care of the big. Not the other way around.

Later, smelling more roses led to regular visits to The National Rose Garden at Woolmers Estate in Longford. To ordering them from specialist rose nurseries, to growing them, cutting them, giving them… An appreciation of roses introduced me to the work of one of Australia’s most famous rosarians, Susan Irvine, and her forensic and engaging rose-lover’s diary called “Rosehips and Crabapples” – a book that opened up a knowledge and discovery of Tasmanian gardens for so many.

If he had followed, or even simply appreciated, the rose path, Tony Abbott might have found Susan Irvine’s choice of quote on the inside, from author Elizabeth Jolley:

“To offer consolation through beauty and harmony is to overcome certain weariness or a sense of futility in a world which contains so much human suffering in the face of which we seem to be utterly powerless.”

If Mr Abbott had more respect for rose lovers, he might have even noticed Arthur Conan Doyle’s exalted embrace in The Naval Treaty:

“Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.”

We should judge our leaders by how much they stop and smell the roses. Dismissing both rose and rose lover in a radio second with a man who laughs and calls you “buddy”, Tony Abbott dismissed himself.

I’m reminded of a verse a friend of mine has hanging above the loo.

“If I had my life to live over,” it reads, “I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall. I would go to more dances. I would ride more merry-go-rounds. I would pick more daisies.”

I would add ‘smell more roses’ because the person who can’t stop to smell the roses is the kind of person who is destined to eat an onion like an apple.

Tara Badcock’s ‘Hunt Nature Birth’ Solo Commission 2015, curated by Ellie Ray for the Devonport Regional Gallery, will tour in 2016^.    

First published in Tasweekend, October 2015

When I worked for British Cosmopolitan in the 90s the magazine had a Political Editor and I wrote about “women’s issues”. For example, how women received, on average, 25% less for doing the same job; how so few women were in FTSE-company boardrooms; how only a quarter of Westminster MPs were women; how women were systematically raped during the Bosnian war …

I blame being a twin for my feminist awakening. Because when my brother and I became teenagers, I sensed my opportunities becoming curtailed while his were wider. His work options were painted more broadly, mine were narrower. His social life freer, mine focused on being safe. It seemed so unfair. In seeking to explore the causes of the unfairness, with the aim of changing it, I found my career.

My reports for Cosmo earned an honorary plate in the 1990 Media Awards from The 300 Group. Their goal was to reach 300 MPs in parliament out of a total of 650.

Twenty-five years on, it’s no surprise so little has changed. I decided I was on a hiding to nothing running women’s issues; that even if I aspired to earn a 48-piece Wedgewood dinner set, my journalist’s efforts would not make a speck of difference because this particular time in which we live rewards white, middle-aged men. It’s just how the system works. It’s not OK. It’s not most men’s fault, but all benefit while few realize.

I stacked my gold-rimmed plate with the everyday kitchen crockery and got on making my own way doing the things I loved with people I liked. I didn’t want to be angry anymore, constantly standing up for women’s issues when so little could be done.

The Matildas are in China next week. Our national women’s soccer team (one of the top ten teams in the world), has put on hold an ongoing pay dispute to continue its planned tour of preparations for the 2016 Rio Olympic Games qualifiers. Thanks to an interim deal struck by the players association, the Matildas are picking up where they left off in September, when a tour of the USA was abandoned over dismal rates of pay. Apparently, a new “Whole of Game” pay deal is in the wings, pending a players’ vote.

At the least, it’s embarrassing. Last season, the Matildas became Australia’s first senior team to win a World Cup knockout game with a 1-0 win over Brazil. While players were paid $500 in match fees, their male counterparts received $7,500 – for doing the same thing.

It’s a bit rich when it reaches the point when women can’t afford to play for their country, while women who frock up for their men steal the headlines.
As a new sporting season opens, images from last season’s are still fresh; Brownlow Medal night celebrating pregnancy style, enormous engagement rings and fashionable wives. How ironic that the ultimate winner, Nat Fyfe, brave enough to go dateless, had no chance of being upstaged by a gown split to the navel.

She is a qualified speech therapist with a Bachelor of Science, but Rebecca Judd has made a career out of being a footballer’s wife. After 11 Brownlow appearances she is powerful, styled as “Queen of the Brownlow”, and with today’s social media she’s managed to make it all about her. Her @Becjudd Instagram account posted a selfie on the night with her husband poking his head into the picture in the background.

I’m not criticizing women who want to realize their beauty through a man. It does all look rather glamorous. But it’s just the degree of attention they inevitably receive for doing so in public, when essentially their choice of a mate is about their own private life – nothing to do with us. Except, in raising their private life to the level of national importance, isn’t it time they realized they are making it harder for women who dedicate blood, sweat and tears to achieving something for themselves?

It’s not simply about being in the spotlight wearing posh frocks. There’s a knock on effect. If women’s sport fails to attract the right amount of media attention, then commercial sponsorship and overseas career paths are denied. Without the platform or profile that clubs can trade on when a talented player advertises a global brand, for example, would Tim Cahill have ever played for Everton, or Luke Brattan move to Manchester City?

If the career path isn’t there, women are discouraged, and it becomes a vicious cycle. It’s understandable why girls wouldn’t want to aspire to be the best soccer player in the world when they are so unseen and paid so little.

It must be more than galling for Matildas players to see complete Brownlow outfits and up-dos worth more than their annual salaries! (Most of the Matildas earn $21,000 a year on FFA contracts.)

Something, or someone, has to give.

I would respect Rebecca Judd more if, instead of thanking her outfit sponsors, she considered donating the value to supporting a Matilda get to Rio. This year’s Brownlow gown featured intricate Egyptian-style beading, with Rebecca confessing she “felt like Cleopatra” on the night.

We need to ask more from women who seek and attract the limelight as our national female role models. Follow Hollywood’s lead, where the #AskHerMore red carpet campaign is encouraging red carpet reporters to go beyond appearance and ask women about their achievements in Hollywood – not about the dress.

It’s taking a paradigm shift, one domestic violence campaigner Rosie Batty has her finger on. It’s up to every woman in their own world to hope to make a difference, ask more of themselves so that, rightly, more can be asked of men.

First published in Tasweekend, October 17, 2015

Looking forward to being upstairs at The Black Hen in Deloraine this Saturday morning (26th September) and hosting a “Writing Memoir” workshop. Contact shop keeper Julie Hall on 0437 833 201 to see if there’s any more room at the table – or lounge! It’s a beautiful space to feel inspired. I’ll have some vintage hilbarn recipe books to give away and Julie, a most generous host, has a writing set for everyone. So, no excuses and every incentive to put pen to paper!