{"id":63271,"date":"2021-03-22T06:00:10","date_gmt":"2021-03-21T19:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=63271"},"modified":"2021-03-22T06:18:01","modified_gmt":"2021-03-21T19:18:01","slug":"from-the-bookshelf-not-always-diplomatic-an-australian-womans-journey-through-international-affairs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/from-the-bookshelf-not-always-diplomatic-an-australian-womans-journey-through-international-affairs\/","title":{"rendered":"From the bookshelf: \u2018Not always diplomatic: an Australian woman\u2019s journey through international affairs\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

It\u2019s 1988 and Australia has only a handful of women ambassadors, with just four women serving as heads of mission.<\/p>\n

Making a program on the emerging feminine side of Oz diplomacy 33 years ago, 60 Minutes <\/em>is interviewing one of those women, Sue Boyd, Australia\u2019s high commissioner to Bangladesh.<\/p>\n

Question: Is there anything a male ambassador can do that a woman ambassador can\u2019t?<\/p>\n

Sue Boyd: \u2018Yes\u2014pee standing up.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Classic Boyd\u2014sharp and smart, doing the business with joyous brio, finding the humour in the deeply serious life of diplomacy.<\/p>\n

Boyd knows that international affairs may be about nations, but it\u2019s done by people. Humour is a sauce of diplomacy. Jokes and jests help edge across the chasms of d\u00e9marche<\/em> and ease through dragging dialogue.<\/p>\n

As Australia\u2019s ambassador to Vietnam, Boyd gave some advice to Vietnam\u2019s foreign minister on joining the Association of Southeast Asian Nations: \u2018I told him that Australia could help him in a number of ways to prepare for the coming ASEAN debut. There were four informal requisites for success in ASEAN: playing golf, speaking English, wearing coloured shirts and singing karaoke. We could assist with the first two.\u2019<\/p>\n

My memory of this anecdote is that jokes were the optional fifth requisite, but Vietnam\u2019s Communist Party\u00a0struggled with the dialectics of\u00a0setting the\u00a0humour\u00a0policy.<\/p>\n

On giving a speech, another staple of the trade, Boyd adjusted her method as an ambassador in the South Pacific, where strong oral traditions call for an entertaining oration: \u2018A storytelling style is the Pacific way. So a short speech will generally not do.\u2019 Thus, on a trip to Tuvulu, Boyd confides to the audience the reason she\u2019s not married:<\/p>\n

I was single, because I found that men were like parking meters, either occupied or defective. This went down very well and caused some amusement. Funafuti had just two roads, few cars and certainly no parking meters. I was told later that for the next few days the men of Tuvalu had gone around asking each other, \u2018Are you a parking meter?\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Welcome to Sue Boyd\u2019s life in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade: 23 years in seven missions abroad, plus 11 years in Australia, laid out in her wonderful memoir, Not always diplomatic: an Australian woman\u2019s journey through international affairs<\/em><\/a>. This is \u2018a view from the engine room of the making of Australian foreign policy,\u2019 as Kim Beazley<\/a> notes in his foreword (one of Boyd\u2019s early wins was defeating Beazley in an election for president of the University of Western Australia students\u2019 guild).<\/p>\n

Boyd launches the story with Gough Whitlam\u2019s \u2018injunction\u2019. Just back in Canberra from her first posting, to Portugal, she was summoned to the prime minister\u2019s office in April 1974 to brief on the Portuguese \u2018carnation revolution\u2019<\/a>. Whitlam boomed three questions at the young diplomat: What\u2019s going on? What does it mean for Australia? What should we do about it? The three points of the injunction, she writes, \u2018form the basis of the work of every Australian embassy and guided me through my 34-year career in international relations\u2019.<\/p>\n

The next posting, to East Germany, produced memoir gold: a 900-page file on Boyd created by the State Security Service. When she got the file in 2006, Boyd relived detailed records of her conversations and movements. Here\u2019s her Stasi profile:<\/p>\n

[She] appears uncomplicated, open and empathetic. She is single, dresses well, is interested in men, has a lot of male friends, but does not seem to have a particular boyfriend. She is at ease in men\u2019s company … She enjoys food and eating, but does not drink much. But this is not from a prudish point of view, as borne out by the jokes she tells.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The file reinforced for Boyd the need for extreme care with \u2018state-sponsored surveillance of citizens\u2019 because of \u2018how easy it is to reach wrong conclusions and make false assumption based on incomplete information and context\u2019.<\/p>\n

The chapter on \u2018being a woman\u2019 is a masterful meditation on career strategy. The External Affairs Department she joined in 1970 was a conservative and sexist minefield, \u2018half-heartedly\u2019 recruiting a token number of women who were still paid 10% less than the blokes.<\/p>\n

Boyd became \u2018firm, insistent and self-promoting\u2019, learning from her initial mistake of trusting the department to recognise her talents: \u2018We danced the constant dance of upsetting the men as little as possible so that they would become allies rather than adversaries.\u2019 Part of the dance was to \u2018be as blokey as the blokes,\u2019 she writes, debating sport and employing rough jokes \u2018as shock and awe tactics\u2019.<\/p>\n

When Boyd became the department\u2019s spokesperson in 1990 (head of public affairs), such tactics still worked. She had to brief the foreign minister each day before parliament\u2019s question time, and even the formidable Gareth Evans was \u2018agitated and edgy\u2019 when preparing for \u2018questions\u2019, the period when parliament goes freestyle for argument, abuse and advocacy:<\/p>\n

On my first day working with him, he berated me and the department on a grammatical error in a briefing. \u2018Haven\u2019t you read the fucking style manual? It should be \u201cfirst\u201d, not \u201cfirstly\u201d.\u2019<\/p>\n

I asked whether he was as concerned about the use of \u2018presently\u2019 in place of \u2018currently\u2019.<\/p>\n

\u2018No\u2019, he said. \u2018Is that one of your concerns?\u2019<\/p>\n

I said it was.<\/p>\n

\u2018Well, I don\u2019t care about your concerns. I\u2019m the fucking minister, not you!\u2019<\/p>\n

I calmly replied, \u2018For the moment, Gareth\u2019. (An election was due). There was an electric silence in room, and I thought, \u2018Oh shit, now I\u2019ve blown it\u2019. But then he roared with laughter. \u2018Well said!\u2019 Everyone else in the room laughed, too. And I was launched.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Boyd rates Evans the best of the 12 foreign ministers she served. She used two briefing approaches on Gareth: the governess who \u2018could firmly bully him back, calmly encourage him to settle down and focus on the material\u2019 or surprise him with a tough jibe to force the minister \u2018to stop and regroup\u2019. Shock and awe, indeed!<\/p>\n

Boyd writes that in the 1990s, DFAT\u2019s culture shifted and she banished the blokeyness: \u2018things had changed in the public service, and I needed to adjust my style\u2019.<\/p>\n

The trail that Boyd helped blaze means that over the five years to December 2020, the proportion of females heading DFAT\u2019s missions and posts has risen from 27% to a record 43%<\/a>. A year ago, a permanent exhibition<\/a> was created on the ground floor of DFAT\u2019s R.G. Casey Building, with pictures of women who\u2019ve been the first to hold those jobs. One picture is of Boyd, who did the deed three times, as the first woman to head missions in Bangladesh, Vietnam and Fiji.<\/p>\n

If you can\u2019t be what you can\u2019t see, the women of DFAT now see many pictures of what they can be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s 1988 and Australia has only a handful of women ambassadors, with just four women serving as heads of mission. Making a program on the emerging feminine side of Oz diplomacy 33 years ago, 60 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":79,"featured_media":63278,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[89,294,1002],"class_list":["post-63271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-dfat","tag-diplomacy","tag-women"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFrom the bookshelf: \u2018Not always diplomatic: an Australian woman\u2019s journey through international affairs\u2019 | The Strategist<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/from-the-bookshelf-not-always-diplomatic-an-australian-womans-journey-through-international-affairs\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"From the bookshelf: \u2018Not always diplomatic: an Australian woman\u2019s journey through international affairs\u2019 | The Strategist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It\u2019s 1988 and Australia has only a handful of women ambassadors, with just four women serving as heads of mission. 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