Hordes of women, like Bill Shorten’s mum, had to delay a dream

There are armies of women who delayed their dreams and desires.

They wanted to be doctors and lawyers and scientists but the world didn’t let them. It was about money, about opportunity, maybe about being a girl.

Opposition leader, Bill Shorten, and his mother, Ann, pictured in Mr Shorten’s AWU days.Credit:The Age

They’d be in their seventies, eighties, nineties now and like many women of that generation, they went on to have children of their own.

And they nagged the living daylights out of them to get the education and the careers they couldn’t have, to fulfil the ambition denied. Even Bill Shorten admits his mother nagged him.

Here’s why. Ann Shorten had to delay her dreams. And she certainly wasn’t going to let that happen to her son. Ann was one of the few women of her generation who finally realised her ambition after years of teaching but her secret dream was to be a lawyer. She finally went to law school, graduated at 50 (the year that her twin lads started their law degrees) and was admitted to the bar just four years later. She had only six years in her field of dreams and died in 2014.

She got there in the end. But six years doesn’t make a career. What it makes is a poignant ending to years of denying her own ambitions.

Ann Shorten’s story is shared by so many others.

Jill Holmes of the Blue Mountains, in her seventies now, tells me she was desperate to be a doctor. She’s now the proud mother of a professor, a banker and a horse trainer. Holmes is filled with love for her children but has so many regrets about the opportunities denied her.

“I would have loved to go on to university but I couldn’t provide my parents with good reasons. My mother asked me what are you going to do with a university degree because her view was that women got married and had children.”

Six years doesn’t make a career. What it makes is a poignant ending to years of denying her own ambitions.

Holmes did have a go at starting a degree much later in life but juggling single parenthood and kids was nigh on impossible. Broadcaster Patricia Karvelas’s mum never got the chance to study (although her brothers did). She died when Karvelas was just eight but all the love and nagging continued through her yiayia, her grandma.

Karvelas says her entire family was focussed on education – and even though her grandmother was illiterate and said she was too old to learn to read, most of her grandchildren all went on to higher education (and one on to the even higher calling of being a national broadcaster after a stellar public education).

“Those experiences shape you and it’s not that long ago … where the disparity between the women and the men is breathtaking and blunt and obvious. It shapes the way you lead your own life.”

Karvelas is filled with admiration for Ann Shorten’s achievements. “That woman in a different world would have been a prime minister.”

So much unfulfilled promise, so much lost time. John Laurie remembers his mother’s ambition to be a scientist too. It may even have been why he ended up being one. But he remembers this clearly, from his mum who cooked 900 rissoles a week for their mixed business.

After dinner, she would point to his room. “Time to go and do your homework.” And he did.

My mum never went to uni either. And her voice telling me I must study, I must do well, remains with me forever.

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