Zoe McKenzie (Flinders, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Taking linguistic licence on the grievance debate tonight, please bear with me as I explore the grief in grievance and talk about the loss of my dear old mum over this past summer break. My mum, Elizabeth Ann Shanahan, was an extraordinary person. I know everyone says that about their mum, and everyone is right because mums are extraordinary, but my mum was next level. She was a freak, a unique, phenomenal, contributive human. Mum didn't understand rest, and her life was about purpose and serving others.

Known as Ann or Miss Shanahan—Bear to me and my friends—she held tight to the tradition that medical specialists always went by their maiden name and by 'Miss' and 'Mr', none of this 'Dr' stuff. It belied her quarter of a century of training to become one of Australia's best cardiothoracic surgeons. As a child, she had wanted to be a lawyer but her highly influential and most adored father, Thomas Shanahan, thought lawyering was a job for mugs, so she set her sights on medicine in the fifties, only to come back to law in the eighties.

At medical school, she was one of only a handful of women. She resided at Janet Clarke Hall but rapidly found her way into the boys' college next door, first as a tutor and later sharing the warden's cottage of Trinity Cottage with Ian McKenzie, where they resided as senior medical students. Like me, they bought their first home in their happy place, albeit on the other side, at Point Lonsdale, where their weekends, like mine at least before politics, were filled with water, swimming, sailing and entertaining good mates. Ian still lives there on the site they bought together, and when I go and visit him he tells me stories of my mum: 'She was an amazing woman, your mum.' While they topped their graduating medical class together, Mum caught the wave of a feminist era which saw her clean sweep scholarships desperate to attract women into the surgical profession. She spent a fair amount of her winnings on ball gowns. She had come to medical school without much money in her pocket but eventually there was a conversation about whether she would have to give some of it back. I'm now the beneficiary of those ball gowns, hand-stitched on Collins Street, and her tailored winter fur coats from her time in Boston and Toronto.

Mum loved her time in Canada and the United States, and she tells the most outrageous stories of her wild adventure, blind to discrimination. Mum just ploughed through attitudes towards women in medicine and ploughed through attitudes to different skin colours as well. To Mum, everyone was the same. It was talent that mattered.

Mum raised me with the help of a mothercraft nurse of whom I have spoken elsewhere and my grandmother, who moved in after Molly left. I loved Nan to bits for the time she had to play and tell me stories, and when home Mum always seemed to be on the phone to her patients, their families or her colleagues. But I realise now how precious it was that Mum got to have Nan by her side for those last years of Nan's life—a privilege I had hoped to recreate for Bear, but it was not to be.

After Nan passed, I became Mum's constant companion, accompanying her on her ward rounds. In the last few weeks it has been a delight to hear from Mum's former colleagues, who remember me as a five- or six-year-old trailing my Winnie Blue fagging mum through the cancer wards of Prince Henry's or the Alfred or sound asleep in the nurse's station while Mum sewed up someone's chest in the middle of the night. Whenever we had been called out to such a night-time rescue mission by some ding-dong trying to stab themselves through the heart to prove their unrequited love, Mum would invariably provide a lesson the next day on which bits to go for next to get the job done properly next time.

Mum's medical skills were second to none; even her exceptional oncologist, David Pook, would admit it. At medical school, she won countless clinical and exhibition prizes. She was awarded a Fulbright scholarship, the American Association of University Women overseas scholarship, the Patterson Traveling Fellowship and the National Heart Foundation of Australia overseas fellowship, and, finally, she picked up the Paul Dudley White research fellowship of the Massachusetts heart association. She studied and worked at Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital and the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. She practised as a thoracic surgeon from 1971 until 2004 across Cabrini, Dandenong Hospital, Moorabbin, Southern Memorial, Dandenong Valley Private, Monash, Prince Henry's and the Alfred. She also taught at Monash from 1974 to 1985.

She was loved by her patients and their families and was loved by her students, but she gave up teaching to become a student herself in '85, this time in law, graduating in '89. While studying in Clayton at night she continued as a surgeon during the week, and when she graduated and joined the Victorian Bar she operated on her patients on the weekends. The bar was not for her, and she joined the Administrative Appeals Tribunal in 1991. When she received a call from the Liberal Party after the 1996 election asking why she had resigned her longstanding membership, she explained she had received a letter from the Attorney-General stating that tribunal members should be apolitical and she duly gave up her membership. 'We didn't mean that one', she felt they wanted to tell her but didn't. She served on the tribunal for almost 30 years, and her good friend and former colleague, Deputy President Graham McDonald, told me last week:

As I am sure you would appreciate Ann's combination of a medical speciality and as a barrister was then considered unusual… She was universally held in such high regard…

I recall sitting with her when a professor of medicine in a speciality other than Ann's was called to give evidence.

On entering the hearing room he announced, 'Why am I being called when you have [Ann] sitting there?'

On another occasion we were due to take phone evidence from a rural GP.

It transpired he had been a registrar of Ann's.

On my announcing Ann as one of the Tribunal Members his audible response was 'Oh shit'.

He knew that the (mis)diagnosis in his report would not fool Ann.

Ann was always well prepared and fiercely independent.

I heard from other friends at the AAT. One said, 'Your mum would always sit with the secretariat staff or the associates, rarely with the members.'

It is in the last weeks that I have seen just how loved Mum was by those with whom she had everyday contact—not necessarily the surgeons or the lawyers but the secretaries, tip staff, nurses and cleaners, as well as the people who helped her look after her home and the garden she so loved because it was where life would always flourish. Humble and purposeful people were Mum's speciality in life, and her plants kept her kind and optimistic. I cannot hear from her plants but last week I got a note from Brett, who cleaned the pool at her house in that much-loved garden. Brett caught the essence of Bear in what he said to me:

Hi Zoe, Brett from Swimart here.

I just wanted to send my personal condolences on the passing of your mum, Ann.

She always treated me well, was thankful for my pool service, and most importantly to me, she respected me as a person.

I can have a laugh, she really intimidated and had it over a few of the pool guys.

She knew all the answers but still asked the questions and gave us the opportunity to say our opinions.

Early on, I realised it was her way of drawing the best out of people.

Aside from all her knowledge, achievements and occasional scowls, she could be a softy too.

She would often give a medical consult at the back door:

"I heard your cough."

"Have you had your asthma medication?"

"What's your specialist's name?"

She knew my past as a pastry chef, the past couple of years she bought me a slice of her favourite cake for my January birthday,

Sadly, I missed this year.

I thank Peter Dutton not only for his support of me throughout the past year but also for his raw enjoyment of my mother's unique character when he met her. I thank Bert van Manen and his team for helping make things work in this place so that I could always be there when mum needed me. I thank my colleagues on all sides for their constant care, cheeriness and asking after Bear. I'm always keen to highlight the kindness of this place across the aisle, so I thank her local MP, the member for Higgins, and my friends, the members for McNamara, Wills, Parramatta and Reid together with Senator Ciccone. You all knew what I was going through, and if I had a particularly feisty appearance on the ABC or Sky alongside you, you always knew why. On my own side, my goodness, I would not have gotten through the last year without the fine friendship and constant care of the members for Menzies and Nicholls. Indeed, the member for Nicholls and his extraordinary kids came to stay with us a few weeks ago, and Sam's remarkable daughter Sophie got to spend time with mum talking about life, purpose and adventure. Mum was, by then, a tired lion, but I got the impression that Sophie appreciated those moments. I thank my colleagues and former colleagues in this place for the abundance of calls, letters, cards, flowers and stories of mum over the past few weeks. I especially thank my kind constituents whose letters and messages, even though they did not know Bear, have been of enormous comfort.

Politics is a hard life. It takes our families from us, and it demands we put it before everything else. Over the last 12 months, I have lost my family to the demands of this job, and now I've lost my mum to cancer, but—as is life, and the blessings we cannot predict in it—it also opened up a new family to me, one that I have built, one which understands the demands these jobs put on us and one which very much loved and admired my mum and her determination for my contribution here. When mum was diagnosed with kidney cancer a year ago, I set up a small WhatsApp group comprising my friends who knew mum well, my girlfriends as far back as primary school, ex-boyfriends she loved, former colleagues and friends that mum had helped confront tricky health issues themselves—the people who have become my family. They were there for me throughout this annus horribilis and were always there when I needed someone to step in for Bear. I'm so glad that, in the final days of mum's life, so many of them were able to come and spend time with her through the glorious Mornington Peninsula summer: Jackie Suchames, Marisa Lo, Christina Teague, Julia Doyle, Deb Kwasnicki, David Luff and Aldo Borgu in particular.

Early in the summer, mum would regale them with stories of her studies in the United States or the adventures of her spinster, teetotaller, pub-running grand-aunts in Trafalgar. Towards the end, it was just quiet and loving company, and I'm so grateful to Jules, Deb and Stephen, who held me up in those last weeks so, in turn, I could hold up mum. We would not be who we are without these people, and on behalf of mum and me, I say thank you.

Karen Andrews (McPherson, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for her contribution, and I am very confident that her mother would be extraordinarily proud of her.