JM
Kate Jennings grew up on a farm in outback Australia in the fifties. It was a toughening childhood, and as it turned out, she has needed all her native resilience to pursue her life's course.

A passionate feminist, she was well known in Australia in the 1960s for a remarkable and confrontational speech which, basically, launched the Australian women's movement. She also edited a book of poems by Australian women, Mother, I'm Rooted, which was a best-seller – over 10,000 copies, and she published her own volume of tough-type poetry, Come To Me My Melancholy Baby.

Then she moved to New York, and married Bob, an art director, a much older man.

Kate visited Australia for the Sydney Writers Festival to launch her second novel Moral Hazard. Written in spare beautiful prose, it is loosely autobiographical, and based on two major events in her life in the 1990s – her husband's diagnosis with Alzheimer's disease and, as a consequence, her taking a job as a speechwriter on Wall Street....


JM
In this interview, Kate, we'll try to get a sense of a life journey, so I want a snapshot of the Kate of the late 60s, might have been the early 70s, on the front lawn of the University of Sydney, it's a moratorium against the Vietnam War and you gave a very provocative speech about women, can you take us there with a picture?

KJ
I think you'd call that speech `in your face.' They were wild, rackety outrageous days and we were not getting the attention of the men at that point. We were a very small group that started meeting and that was the speech I gave. I'm not sure that we can actually say it out loud on radio. It was that outrageous.

JM
But what was the core content, the cry from the heart?

KJ
The cry from the heart was that we were all Vietnam activists and the men were all gung-ho about fighting that cause, and nobody cared about women, and at that stage women could not have legal abortions.

JM
And when you look back are you amazed at the courage you had, that was a new voice then, the voice of women saying: `Look out over here, something's happening, or not happening?'

KJ
When I look back at all my life I am amazed, I do keep walking a plank. I thought those days were terrific.

JM
Why?

KJ
We were very inventive. We weren't as earnest as people are making us out to be now. I don't think of course those tactics are necessary now. Goodness, you sending me right back.

JM
At that time, to talk of women in Australia and their issues, wasn't it perceived as a betrayal of the much greater suffering of the Vietnamese people?

KJ
Oh absolutely, and also you have to remember what it was like back then. We have become used to Feminism. Feminism has just infiltrated all our lives and it's taken for granted and it wasn't then.

JM
You went to New York, you went to the United States, why?

KJ
I took off. Just the grand tradition of Australians leaving and going elsewhere, instead of going to England I went to New York, and having a lot of pride and not wanting to come home with my tail between my legs, I stayed.

JM
And you didn't want to be an academic, did you? That was part of it.

KJ
No, absolutely not; with all due respect to academics, they often seem as if they have got both feet nailed to the floor.

JM
Why not that life, why not the feet to the floor?

KJ
I wanted experience, the real world.

JM
And what was real about New York, what was the excitement, the attraction?

KJ
What anybody else would say about New York, it's a very very competitive, unforgiving city, and it suited me, it made me clean up my act, and really concentrate and remake myself, and I needed to do that at that stage.

JM
When you say clean up your act, what did you clean up?

KJ
One thing, I stopped drinking, 20 years ago now, and I needed to do that and I am glad that I did, I could not have done what I have subsequently done.

JM
You choose to get married and in the latest book (Moral Hazard) you describe yourself as a `bedrock feminist,' certainly in your publications of poetry and your editing of poetry and your activism you were a real passionate feminist, so marriage to a much older man might not have been anticipated. Tell us about that, was that a shift within you?

KJ
Legally in the States you're better off married and my husband wanted to get married, and I adored him, and he did so much for me that it didn't seem such a large thing.

JM
Tell me about Bob, the man you met, that you adored.

KJ
He was really generous and optimistic and he taught me to have fun, taught me to be silly, I was a bit of a snarler back then and it was just great good luck, I must say when I met him I thought: `not for me, he's way too nice.'

JM
Why not a nice man for you?

KJ
Well, like a lot of women I thought, perhaps men who treat you badly were more suitable. But he certainly grew on me.

JM
In your poetry book of the 70s, Come To Me My Melancholy Baby (and I searched every book in my house last night, Kate, and I couldn't find my copy) but ...

KJ
Just as well.

JM
No, but I remember a yearning in there, I remember a poem that began `Met a man, a fine man ...' and it talked about marriage, was there even in that angry girl of the 70s an echo, a yearning of a desire for love and stability, of real union with a man?

KJ
Sure we all would like a companion, and I had the great good luck to find somebody who was exactly that. Because he was older he was also fantastically supportive and that helped a lot, he just encouraged me all the way.

JM
When you first think that he might have Alzheimer's?

KJ
Several years before he was diagnosed he started forgetting things, and we started going to doctors. It wasn't until ¼ he was working right up to the time of the diagnoses as an art director and he was designing a book and he made a huge mistake, he forgot to get a estimate on the type and we were suddenly in the hole for $30,000 and it was something that he would have never have done. It wasn't ... when people ask me about the first signs of Alzheimer's it's not forgetting your car keys, it's often huge errors of judgement. And that point we went back to the neurologist and he did lots of cognitive testing, but they also had a new test, a spinal-tap test of amyloid-beta protein and his was through the roof.

JM
Didn't the neurologist say some heart stopping words to you at that session?

KJ
He did, he said you're going to have to say goodbye to the man you love, and at the time I thought `you're being melodramatic,' but you don't just say goodbye, you say goodbye every minute of every day for seven years.

JM
We've been having a radio diary over the few weeks and we've had a woman over a two years period holding a tape recorder and she kept a diary of what happened when her husband was diagnosed with Dementia. She describes the mood swings as being tough, was that an experience for you?

KJ
Oh, absolutely, in the end we really had to medicate him, I describe it in the book, as you said it is loosely based, but he spent a lot of time crying, a lot of time raging and you never knew what exactly he was going to do. But one day I was trying to show him how to do something and he just flew at me and tried to throttle me and at that stage I want back to the doctor and told him and more medication was ordered up, anti-psychotic medication basically.

JM
But you say in that incident in the book that the character waits a few days before they go to the doctor because of shame. What's that for?

KJ
Yes it was, and even though I knew it was the disease you can't believe that it's happening.

JM
Did you feel betrayed by life? You'd got it all together, you'd met the man you loved, you'd `landscaped your life,' I think is a poem phrase from the 70s, and then this. Did life betray you?

KJ
He felt betrayed. He felt that finally he'd got his life together and met the person that he'd wanted to meet, I didn't have the luxury to think about anything much. I had to go to work and earn lots of money to pay for his care, and ... not betrayal, I mean I'd made my decision, I was going to look after him, I could have just as easily said `No, I'm too young and it's going to take years,' and tried to make other arrangements, but ... I loved him, I adored him, he was my family.

JM
And you accepted at a very deep level, apparently without resentment, that responsibility of care. Not to make it Mary Poppins, I mean it was tough, but you did accept, didn't you, at a very deep level? Tell me about that.

KJ
People have asked me about that, and it's strange, but I haven't thought about it, I'm a country girl and I'm really determined and really focused and once I make my mind up to do something I do it.

JM
Well, the money. You go to Wall Street which takes us to this novel, Moral Hazard, yes there is this amazingly tight unsentimental description of a loved husband and dementia, but there's also absolute equal space to financial matters on Wall Street, had you had any prior experience of the financial world?

KJ
Absolutely none. I couldn't tell a stock from a bond. I think that anybody who knew me would really laugh, fall off their chair laughing at the thought of me on Wall Street.

JM
Well, you laugh when you know you are writing speeches for executives.

KJ
Yes, putting the very words into their mouths.

JM
How long did you stay?

KJ
Seven years in all. I'm truly not sorry for the experience, I learned so much and as a woman I had always felt side-lined from power, and the big guys, and I couldn't believe that I was actually sitting there with them and watching them in action. I had to pinch myself.

JM
You describe the ethic of the big company of the characters as equal parts Marines, CIA, and Las Vegas. What do you mean?

KJ
Well they're gamblers, banking is gambling. The Marines – a lot of these guys that work in these companies have come through the army, at that stage quite a few of them had been in Vietnam, so they'd been Marines, ... what was the other one?

JM
CIA.

KJ
The CIA, oh sure, being a banker is a very good cover for being a spy and there are lots of them in those banks.

JM
And tell me about the men you worked with, I mean it was a very male dominated environment, describe the men - and how did you adapt to that culture?

KJ
Wall Street is the last bastion of male chauvinism. I can't imagine that it's quite like that anywhere on the face of the earth. To adapt to it, I basically turned myself into an anthropologist. At the time, interestingly enough, the psychiatrist I got to help me with my husband's illness turned out to be an expert on organisations, and he was a huge help because I'd go running to him and say: `What are they doing? What are they saying?' and he would give me basic survival tactics because, as he would say, they're not going to change and I can't keep throwing myself against them, I would just break into a million bits, and somehow I managed. I can't say I ever fitted in. But somehow I stayed there.

JM
Let me read a fragment of your book which goes to a moment when you boss required you to write a speech for the firm's Women's Network:

This was a problem, I had kept my distance from diversity issues. I admired the people who put energy into the task, but they were Penelopes, always weaving, their work unravelling during the night. No matter how many speeches were given, targets announced, and initiatives launched, the numbers of African-Americans, Hispanics, and Asians at the firm kept falling, with women making only the tiniest of gains. And, to be honest, I found young women bankers off putting. They seemed to have perfected -- indeed made into an art form -- the kind of hand gestures that showed off large diamond rings to maximum effect. And they could be more obnoxious, more condescending, than their male counterparts. While I marvelled at their astonishing self-confidence I couldn't help but think, For this, my generation of feminists fought the good fight? (The answer: Yes.)

Tell me about these women, and how did you feel that this was part of the product of your efforts in the 60s and 70s?

KJ
I have to say, I met some marvellous women on Wall Street, women who were incredibly generous and retained their humanity, I also met women who were scarred by the experience because it's very very tough, and perhaps handicapped by earning stacks of money. That being said, feminism means you can't say women should have equal rights and then say: `But I don't want you to do that job, I really don't want you to be the Lord High-Executioner.' The rights of women are indivisible, you have to fight for them to do whatever job they want to do. If you want to fight against the hypocrisy in Banking that is a separate issue. It's very hard to be supportive of women who are earning a lot of money, but supportive we must be.

JM
Let me turn now in the minutes we have left to the toughest of issues in the book, the issue of death, and the means of death when someone is unravelling slowly and suffering. The character in the book goes to a nursing home, did your husband go to a nursing home?

KJ
He did go to a nursing home, and I have to say that the day I put him in a nursing home was the worst day of my life because he had enough of a mind left to know what I was doing. It was truly ... truly, truly awful. And he said he never wanted to go into a nursing home, he never ... I think there's a sentence in the book where he says: `I never want to get like that.' And he did get `like that' and he had said that he wanted the Doctor and me to take care of it when the time came, when it was time for him to die and of course, I can't do that. So, all those issues did come up in the end, because after about two years in the nursing home I became aware that they were going to keep him alive regardless, and there is one episode in the book that is actually true, every detail in it is true, and that's when Bailey starts to haemorrhage and he is taken to hospital and Cath wants him to die, and they start transfusing him regardless of what she says. And that happened, and so after that I really had to think about what I was going to do. Will I let this go on? In real life he died of a massive stroke. But I became very interested in that issue and of people who have to make those kinds of decisions.

JM
And so, euthanasia is addressed in the book. (I hate it when you ruin a book by saying what happens.) Will that be tough in the United States, given the deep faith of that community?

KJ
It will be tough, yes, America is a very churchy country, outside of New York it is very churchy and we have an Attorney General, Mr. Ashcroft, who is actually making it his personal mission to go after doctors who help with dignity in death.

JM
You mention the faith of America, but I'm not sure there's faith for you. Let me read a fragment from the book:

I can't abide the sentimental scaffolding that people erect around their lives, but when I am beset, I allow myself to talk to him, imagine what he might have said in response. He could always make me laugh at stupidity and meanness. .... Sometimes, in the spirit of Frank O'Hara, I tell him I do not totally regret life. All the same, he asks too much of me, my darling husband.

Is that a bit of Kate speaking?

KJ
Yes, that is me speaking.

JM
So, no sentimental scaffolding, no faith at all?

KJ
Oh, I've been given a dog and I couldn't be more sentimental about this little dog. I allow myself to be completely silly about the dog, but no, I am not a very sentimental person. I think, overall, I'd say that life is full of hard choices. We do the best we can, and sometimes we don't.

JM
And the character closes, Kate, by railing about the ideas of learning lessons and self improvement so deep in the American culture. And also railing against closure, which I enjoyed immensely. But there's these remarks:

Actually I did learn something,...

and this is from the experience in Wall Street but I guess I'm wondering in relation to your experience with your husband,

... the dailyness of life, that's what gets you through at times, putting on your pantyhose, eating breakfast, catching the subway, that's what stops your heart from breaking.

Is that you again?

KJ
That's absolutely true too.

JM
Tell me more, what is this `dailyness of life?'

KJ
You know after my husband died you would have though that it would have been a relief not to have the nursing home and the burden and to be watching him and everything that goes with it, but I was absolutely devastated after he died because I didn't have anything to do. I didn't have bits, the practical things I could occupy myself with and I was just left with me and the grief. Yes, and I think that anybody who is a caregiver out there, anybody who is going through a similar sort of thing, it's daily life that saves you. Thank goodness.

Kate Jennings book is called Moral Hazard and is published by Picador Australia.
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[Text prepared by Carole Ferrier and Drew Whitehead]