Word On Books
with Jeremy Fenton
Catch up on the Byron Bay Writers Festival 2002 here!
A Worldly Woman
Margaret Whitlam is one of the (literally) towering icons of Australian public life. Wife of ex-Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, a former competitive swimmer, advocate for woman's and other social issues, and declared a National Treasure, she's also the author of a book of gentle travel reminiscences, My Other World.
In Africa in 1993, helping to lobby for the Sydney Olympics, her husband introduced her as 'his favourite athlete'. She herself plays down her swimming past.
 'I did alright,' she says, including representing Australia in the 1938 Empire Games, where she came sixth in the 220 yards breaststroke. I suggest that she may be being a little modest.
'I came last,' she says.
In mitigation, she was quite ill with a throat infection and there were no magic drugs to help.
'All you could take was aspirin,' she says. 'I swam against the doctor's orders and I didn't exactly do as I'd hoped to do.'
So has swimming changed dramatically in the past 60 years?
'Everything looked prettier I have to say. There was more style in everybody's stroke. These days they're all punch and not much finesse.'
She qualifies this by pointing out that times have practically been halved in the modern era. But then swimmers used to wear 'woollen bathers' for training because they were less revealing and cotton ones for competition swims.
These days, Margaret Whitlam has other passions, especially travel. She didn't start travelling in earnest until into her fifth decade, and has travelled extensively through over 24 countries.
'I was 42 when I went to Europe for the first time. I was planning to go after I left school and then we moved house so we [her family] decided to put it off. Then of course the war came. In those days young people – particularly women – didn't travel without someone older. You had to go with an aged aunt or your parents. Then I got married and it was all off.'
The travel bug had infected her early through broad reading ('a lot of my reading involved other countries'), but the opportunity to feed it didn't occur until she was offered a seat accompanying her husband on an official fact-finding tour.
'It was a real eye-opener for me. We went to something like 14 countries in five weeks.'
In the early 1990s – developing out of her advocacy for adult education – she was asked to take part as a tour leader, in a new business venture catering to senior travellers who didn't want the standard over-packaged travel experience.
'We planned to organise tours on which our travellers could really learn something worthwhile in the countries we visited, so the name we chose – International Study Programs – was very appropriate.'
By all accounts travelling with the Whitlams (Gough often accompanied her, either as a co-leader or just tagging along for the ride) was an unusual and compelling travel experience.
Otherwise closed doors were opened, and the occasional Embassy reception was not out of the question as the pair strove to make their tours as interesting as possible for fellow travellers.
It stretched them as well and it doesn't take long to realise that continual, life-long learning is her great enthusiasm.
'People should never stop learning,' she says (at a recent literary lunch, Margaret said that if a septuagenarian can go on tours, then surely an octogenarian can write a book).
One also suspects that dwelling on past glories is for less adventurous souls than the Whitlams.
'I get asked what my favourite destination or country is, and I say it's always the one to which I've been most recently.'
Unfortunately – because mobility is an issue for the Whitlams these days – they don't do nearly as much travel as they would like.
Despite problematic health, Margaret Whitlam will be at the Byron Bay Writers Festival, where she'll launch the local Senior's Week short story and poetry anthology on Friday, as well as taking part in several panel discussions.
Asked what her greatest achievement is in life (so far), Margaret Whitlam replies with a mischievous laugh, 'Staying married to Edward Gough Whitlam for nearly 60 years.'
I'm sure she wouldn't have it any other way.
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