Page 701 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 1 May 2007
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judge people in the public eye, and such people need to travel far for privacy. All of us in this place know what that is like. Public focus is not so bad when we are in favour but it is hard to deal with public and media disapproval.
When we allow ourselves a strong life outside our political lives, we can better maintain resilience, even if we can only intermittently and briefly visit our personal lives. I wonder whether Audrey’s job allowed her to enjoy as often as she would have liked those playful moments with her daughter where she could drop the police officer’s mask.
Fourthly, there was Audrey as a woman in a man’s world where we all want to see more women. The increasing number of police officers must be presenting challenges, if not yet new ways of organising the workplace to support officers in their absorbing and important work while helping them to keep their personal lives in balance. At St Christophers, I learned from Audrey’s colleague in WILE, which stands for Women in Law Enforcement, a mentoring program, that Audrey was active in her support of women in the AFP and that she was approachable and open about superwoman being a fictional character.
It is important that women in large, vertically organised organisations, particularly the police forces, are not deterred in their aims to work to their capacity, even if that does mean rising to the top. Many women are afraid of the challenges of power in a world where they have grown up seeing men hold those roles exclusively. We must not be deterred by Audrey’s apparent choice of the most drastic means of escape from that world. We do not know—we may never know—what caused Audrey to leave us. In her conscious mind, it may have had little to do with her gender. But if it did, we need to do our utmost to ensure that it does not happen to anyone else and that when we recognise the signs we act to assist, even if it seems intrusive and even if that person is our superior in the ranks.
We women are often trained, through our roles in life as daughter, sister, wife, mother and friend, to recognise these signs. Studies continue to show that women are more inclined to talk about our feelings and to ask others about theirs—not all of us and not always, of course. I am sorry that Audrey’s mentoring group was not invited to provide the support that she, we now know, so badly needed in those last weeks and days. Because women will continue to take up their rightful roles in positions of power, we need to reawaken and create circles of support as we campaign to make our workplaces more family friendly and to eradicate the idea that it is a weakness to have feelings and to not always feel confident in our jobs.
Fifthly, the most difficult issue opened up for me by Audrey’s suicide was her daughter’s loss of her mother. I cannot imagine the feelings that this wonderful woman, the coolest mother, must have had to take her to this separation. The loss of our closest flesh—our mother, our father, our child—is tearing; it is like a wound. That is why we all cried so much with Clair, who generously allowed us into her grief. In those moments we grew to love her and, as a community, we will nurture her.
Sue Salthouse wrote this message, on behalf of Women with Disabilities ACT, to Clair, and it sums up my lasting opinion of Audrey Fagan:
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