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Tasmanian Historical Research Association 1 TASMANIAN HISTORICAL RESEARCH ASSOCIATION TASMANIAN LIFE SERIES LECTURE BY HER EXCELLENCY PROFESSOR THE HONOURABLE KATE WARNER AC GOVERNOR OF TASMANIA, HOBART, TUESDAY 8th SEPTEMBER 2020 Good evening, I begin by to paying my respects to the traditional and original owners of this land, the palawa people. I acknowledge the contemporary Tasmanian Aboriginal community, who have survived invasion and dispossession, and who continue to maintain their identity, culture and Indigenous rights. The COVID- 19 pandemic brings home to us the destructive force of respiratory illnesses on populations without immunity. One of the reasons we have no living descendants of the mouhineener – the people who occupied the land on this side of the river – is due to the devastating effect of respiratory disease. Thank you Caroline [introduced HE]. And thank you Tasmanian Historical Research Association for inviting me to address you this evening. I had planned this evening to talk about the some of the families who have lived at Government House – rather upsetting the expectation that this was to be a lecture about my life. So this will be a compromise with a bit of both. Something of my own story. I have often been asked to talk about my career, and more recently particularly how it is that I came to be Governor. Which is a common question from school children – How did you get to be Governor? After explaining the process of appointment: Premier asking me; submitting my name to the Queen and so on, one little boy responded, ‘Is Will Hodgman a friend of yours?’. Worse still, on another occasion after explaining [I had spent some time explaining?] the role of Governor, one little Prep boy said, ‘But where is the Governor?’. Clearly, a shortish older woman, even older than his granny, without a distinguishing uniform or medals flashing, could not be the governor. 2 In his autobiography, Lord Rowallan (Governor from 1959-1963) asserts, ‘The first thing a Governor requires is a uniform’.1 And he had a uniform specially made for his Governorship – but as a Knight of the Order of the Thistle, he was entitled to an elaborate uniform of sashes, collars and a plumed hat. Not that this was his everyday dress of course. To start from the beginning – I was born in Hobart. In the year before my birth, my parents moved here from Sydney. My father, Kenneth Friend, was a Queenslander, born in Gladstone, where his parents had a department store. Dad and his brother Gordon were sent to boarding school in Warwick, where Dad was Dux of the School. He studied medicine at Sydney University and then was engaged in post-graduate study in surgery at the outbreak of World War II. He enlisted and served in the Medical Corp serving in the middle east, Tobruk and the Pacific. When he returned to Sydney, he changed specialty from surgery to the new field of radiology and was awarded his Diploma of Radiology in 1947. Meantime, at Sydney Hospital he had met my mother, a young radiographer, Pamela Spicer. Mum was born in Adelaide, where her father, Eric, was a banker. During the war he was transferred to Melbourne, where Mum studied to be a radiographer, and then at the end of the war, Eric was transferred to Sydney, and his twenty-year old daughter, and only child, went too. Ken and Pam married in April 1947 and by the end of the year had settled in Hobart, where Ken set up a radiology practice at 175 Macquarie Street. He also worked at the Royal Hobart Hospital and Calvary Hospital and was the first qualified radiologist in the state. There was a housing shortage after the war but Ken and Pam found a small flat to rent behind Miss O’Connor’s house in Macquarie Street next door to St Joseph’s Primary School. This house has since been demolished and the land incorporated into the middle school of St Michael’s Collegiate School. By the time my brother Bill was born, they had purchased a house at 332 Davey Street. This attractive two-storey brick house with its distinctive diamond-shaped leadlight windows had been built by the Lewis family with the neighbouring house between the wars. It, 332, was to be the Friend family home for the next twenty or so years. (Abernant House) 1 Lord Rowallan KT, Rowallan: The Autobiography of Lord Rowallan, Paul Harris Publishing, Edinburgh, 1976, 168. 3 It was a wonderful neighbourhood to grow up in with many other girls and boys my age for company. At age three and a half or four, I attended a kindergarten in Anglesea Street, South Hobart and I have early memories of going home on the trolley bus and a vivid memory of being bitten on the nose by a dog when I poked my face through a hand-hole in a wooden gate when walking up Anglesea Street. We had two fish ponds in the garden at 332, and they were a magnet for the neighbourhood children, particularly the tadpoles. Some child or other, falling or being pushed into the pond was a common occurrence. I disliked wearing dresses and from an early age would demand ‘joddies on’ when my mother was dressing me. But parties demanded a party dress, and I can remember skipping around the edge of fish pond in my party dress, slipping and falling in and being in a lot of trouble as a result. At age four and a half, I started school at Collegiate, where I remained for twelve years. While most of the children in our immediate neighbourhood attended private schools, South Hobart was a very mixed neighbourhood. And children in the 1950s and 1960s were allowed a lot of freedom to roam and play in the streets, in the creek at the bottom of Lynton Avenue, the recreation ground at the bottom of D’Arcy Street (where I learnt a lot of new words) and when a bit older, to wander in the reserve at the Waterworks. I had some hair-raising billy- cart, roller-skating and tree-climbing accidents and was frequently going home with grazes and torn clothes. I enjoyed school, including almost a year in boarding school in Grade 5, where I made life-long friends. Brother Bill, two years younger, at seven, had a miserable time as a boarder at Hutchins, partly because he was easily the youngest boarder but also because the Hutchins Boarding House was not nearly as well run as the Junior Collegiate Boarding House. We had a very competent resident matron (Mrs Livesey) who slept in a room adjoining our dormitory. She was as much nanny as a matron. On Tuesdays, her one day off, we ran wild. I loved that day but I know some of the girls found it alarming and dreaded Tuesdays. Richard, my younger brother, stayed with my aunt and uncle Peg and Neville Newman, who had also moved to Hobart from Sydney. As a child, I was a tomboy and a bit of rebel at school. However, my parents expected me to apply myself academically and I grew up knowing they wanted me to go to University and were insistent that I have an education that would enable me to be financially independent. Both of them valued education highly 4 and my mother resented the fact that she had not been able to spend an extra year at school to matriculate and qualify to attend University. So I was given every opportunity and encouragement to achieve academically. My parents were also reasonably permissive for the day – allowing me plenty of freedom and placing a lot of trust in me. My father encouraged me to think about physiotherapy as a career. This required Schools Board physics as a prerequisite but as I had chosen German instead of Physics in Year 10 I had to pick up physics at night school in year 11. So I had the different experience of attending night school at Tech for three hours once a week with a very different cohort of students, all of whom had left school. Sport was an important part of my school life and I played in the tennis and hockey teams , and was in the school teams for swimming and lifesaving. My parents were both keen tennis players, and my mother a rather good player. I joined the Tasmanian Law Tennis Association Club at Creek Road, New Town, now based on the Domain, and played there in the weekends and in the May tournaments. As a family we also water-skied and snow skied. The water-ski club – the Moorilla Ski Club – consisted of a group of six families, including the Alcorso family (hence Moorilla Ski Club) and we water-skied at Moorilla and Austins Ferry and later at New Norfolk. Snow skiing took us to stay in the very rustic government huts at Mt Field – at a time when there was not even a basis rope tow on the ski field. Sometimes Dad also took us for a bit of a ski on kunanyi, Mt Wellington. By the time I was in Year 12, I had decided against physiotherapy, and applied instead to study an Arts degree here in Tasmania. I suspect, the decision to stay in Tasmania had something to do with having a Tasmanian boyfriend. However, when it came to enrolling, I enrolled in law, something I have never regretted. My first year, with some five female students, about 15% of the class, was the first year to have enrolled more than one woman.
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