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Chapter Seventeen – an ambassador for queensland
An ambassador for Queensland A key role of the Governor is to raise awareness of the State’s distinctive assets and of Queensland’s excellence and to promote that excellence within the state and nationally and internationally.1 Queensland’s twenty fifth and current governor, Ms Penelope Wensley AO, is a woman for all seasons, a governor who suits the times. Born in Toowoomba in 1946, she has come home to Queensland after a forty year career in the Australian diplomatic service where her job was to represent and promote her country to the world. Now, she has a similar special task as governor, to help modern Queensland engage with the world and to represent the state’s contemporary identity and achievements, at home and abroad. ‘I was drawn back to Queensland by all those things that are attracting so many people to come to settle here’ Governor Wensley says. ‘It is obvious that Queensland has emerged in a most spectacular way in recent years. It has always been the second largest state geographically, is now the fastest growing in terms of population and, along with Western Australia, has been the strongest economic performer among the states. Its growth has been powerful and sustained to the point where the state is now a powerful driver of the Australian economy and one of the keys to Australia being strong and competitive on the world stage. Queensland has been a central part of the modern Australian story because of the success of its export oriented industries such as resources, minerals and energy, agriculture and animal production and tourism. ‘All of that is tremendously exciting, but there is even more to it than that. Queensland’s society and economy has matured and diversified over the past four decades. There are new impressive capacities and achievements in industries like
Left: Governor Penelope Wensley AO – proud to be representing Queensland’s identity and achievements to the world. Right: Governor Wensley and Stuart McCosker at the pearl farm on Friday Island, Torres Strait.
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biotechnology, science and medical research and information technology. People are flocking to Queensland to be part of it and as a result we are developing centres of world leadership and excellence in sectors like tropical medicine and marine science. We are showing the way in many areas like agribusiness, forestry, food security, organic farming and extensive agricultural and pastoral production. Global problems present many challenges in these areas but Queensland is showing how research and good practical management can help resolve those problems, how we can achieve sustainable development and meet our obligations to the environment. Queensland has a lot to contribute to the world. ‘Along with all this has come a cultural renaissance. Queensland is now expressing itself vigorously through the arts, across the whole spectrum of the visual and performing arts – art and architecture, design, dance, music, theatre and film. There is a freshness and creativity in the arts that is accelerating the transformation of our state and is helping us all to recognise and feel good about who we are and what we have achieved. I think it would be acknowledged that the wonderful cultural institutions and facilities that have been created on Brisbane’s Southbank have attracted many people to live and work in Queensland. What isn’t quite so widely acknowledged, but should be, is that there are Southbanks all over the state, places in regional and remote centres that bring into focus our burgeoning talent and enthusiasm for artistic expression. Everywhere I go within the state I see creativity and artistic achievement that we can all be proud of. It is a mark of our mature society that we are now giving greater recognition and more support to the arts, we are embracing the arts to give full expression to the character, personality and diversity of our state. ‘My commitment as Governor of Queensland is to draw attention to the way our state has evolved and continues to evolve. The governor has a unique platform for advocacy and thus I have a special opportunity and a responsibility to raise awareness everywhere of just what strengths and capabilities we have
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in Queensland. Those opportunities arise in all sorts of ways. I am constantly receiving delegations, welcoming visitors, opening or speaking at international, national and state conferences and events being held in Queensland. My message is that Queensland is world class, it is an exciting and dynamic state. The challenge for me is to introduce people to the reality of modern Queensland and to get them excited by that reality.’ Governor Penny Wensley is particularly well equipped to fulfil the commitment she has made to Queensland. Although until 2008 she had not lived in the state for a long time, it was always her home, the place where she was from and the place she would come back to. Her maternal ancestry reaches back to the McCulloch and Evans families who were among the early settlers of the Ipswich area. A maternal grandfather, Will McCulloch, worked throughout Queensland with the Bank of New South Wales before he finally settled in Toowoomba. The governor’s paternal grandfather, Tom Wensley, came from Northern Ireland to the Charters Towers goldfield and subsequently became a settler and pioneer of the timber industry on the Atherton Tableland. Top left: Penny Wensley and her older brother Robert, already bound for the University of Queensland. Centre, above: Courtship – Stuart McCosker and Penny Wensley take time off from their studies at the University of Queensland. Centre, below: Penny Wensley with her parents Doris and Neil, on her wedding day. Below right: Penny Wensley with her daughters Sarah, at left, and Jane.
Penny Wensley’s father, Neil, worked in the mines at Mt Isa during the hungry 1930s, then put himself through the University of Queensland from where he graduated as a chemical engineer. There he met Doris McCulloch, a brilliant student who was one of the university’s first women tutors. Neil and Doris were married; Neil went to war in places like Borneo with the Royal Australian Engineers. After the war he became a munitions specialist within the Commonwealth Department of Supply, later Defence Production. That job took Neil and Doris to various locations in Australia and Britain. Along the way, daughter Penny was educated at schools in Melbourne, Penrith and London. University was always the assumed destination for Penny and her brothers, with the University of Queensland and the residential colleges at St Lucia firmly in the family’s sights. It was a heavy burden for Neil, to meet the college fees for his two older children at once and it was sad for Doris to see those children head north, but the parent’s love of Queensland and their belief in the benefits of a college education was strong. In 1964, Penny joined her brother in Brisbane, she at the Women’s College and he at King’s. Both became Student Presidents of their colleges in 1967 and, in that same year, Penny graduated with first class honours in English and a major in French. She hadn’t been distracted from study or her long-held goal of joining the foreign service by a lively romance with veterinary science student and Emmanuel College man, Stuart McCosker. Stuart, who is from a Sunshine Coast hinterland pioneering farming family, recalls ‘We met at a Women’s College social. We went out together and had a lot of fun but we hadn’t made any commitment when we both graduated and went on to do other things in other places.’ Penny achieved her ambition to be selected as a diplomatic cadet, joining the foreign service immediately after graduation in 1968, the sole woman among an intake of 19 recruits in that year. She was posted to Paris in 1969, while Stuart McCosker found himself working in London from 1971. Stuart remembers ‘I went over to see her and we soon found ourselves crossing the channel to meet one another every second weekend or so. We were married in 1974, just before Penny was to take up her second posting to Mexico, having decided we did not want to be apart again.’
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While in Mexico, Penny became the first woman Australian diplomat to have a baby while serving overseas. That baby, now Dr Sarah McCosker, is today a lawyer specialising in human rights and humanitarian law. A second daughter, Jane, born in Canberra during one of the family’s home postings, is also an accomplished lawyer. Both daughters gained first class honours in combined Arts / Law degrees, Sarah from the University of Queensland and Jane from the University of Sydney. Penny resumed her work as Deputy Head of Mission in the Australian Embassy in Mexico when Sarah was 6 weeks old. Stuart was Sarah’s principal carer for their remaining 6 months in Mexico, while also studying economics externally from the University of Queensland. A series of promotions and a series of firsts came for Penny Wensley through the next 30 years. Her first nomination to represent Australia as head of a diplomatic mission came in 1986, when, after three years in New Zealand as Deputy High Commissioner, she was appointed as Consul General to Hong Kong and Macau. Interspersed with periods in Canberra, she then served in a series of prestigious Head of Mission appointments as Australia’s Ambassador for the Environment, Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the UN in Geneva, Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the UN in New York, High Commissioner to India and Ambassador to France. In each of these postings she was the first woman to be appointed to represent Australia. Another first was her 1994 appointment as the University of Queensland’s first woman alumnus of the year, recognising her achievements in international relations. ‘I’m quietly proud of those firsts. I have long been a feminist and active in championing women’s rights, but not in a strident way. That’s not my style. My working life, after all, has been devoted to diplomacy and achieving results through strategic positioning and negotiation and I’ve always believed we can gain more for women by showing in practical ways and by example what is possible for women to do and achieve. ‘I am finding a good deal of my experience as a diplomat is useful in my new role and relevant to the issues of interest and concern to Queenslanders. My experience as Ambassador for the Environment, for example, negotiating international treaties on climate change, biodiversity and drought and dealing with the international sustainable development agenda, have helped greatly in understanding and discussing community concerns about landcare, conservation, the protection of our coral reefs and rain forests’ the governor says. Now Stuart and Penny are home in Queensland again and have moved into Fernberg. It was an easy transition in many ways. They are used to official residences, to adapting to each new place and making a home wherever they live. Stuart recalls ‘Moving in to Government House felt like something we had often done before. Living there has many of the same rhythms and patterns of behaviour that we had become very used to.’ ‘Its wonderful to be back in Queensland and Brisbane’ the governor says. ‘The air is sparkling, the river is as beautiful as ever, the trees and the flowers look and smell the same and the landscape, though changed is also marvellously familiar. It was a great honour to be asked to be Queensland’s new governor. When I was asked to consider the position, and thought about whether and how I might do it and if I could bring value to the role, I felt that that my global perspective and background would be a plus. I felt that I would be able to help the state be even more engaged with the rest of the world and that is something which is especially
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Left, above: With President Bill Clinton at the Metropolitan Museum in New York during the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000. Below, above: Penny Wensley saying goodbye to Secretary-General Kofi Annan at the end of her term as Ambassador to the United Nations, 2001. Centre: In New York with United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Below: Penny Wensley at the Elysee Palace with French President Jacques Chirac, during the formal ceremony for the presentation of her credentials as Australia’s Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Republic of France.
important and relevant to Queensland’s growth and development at this time. I therefore have a splendid opportunity to contribute to what is happening in my home state. ‘Obviously, I hadn’t previously contemplated becoming Governor of Queensland, but the role of a state governor wasn’t entirely strange to me. I had seen it in other countries with federal systems. After I became a Head of Mission I had considerable contact with governors from all the Australian states, including Queensland. I frequently called on the various governors to enable me to get a better appreciation of state perspectives, interests and concerns, as part of my job of representing Australia effectively overseas. On visits to Queensland, I enjoyed meeting the Governors and remember being very pleased to meet Queensland’s first woman governor, Leneen Forde. And when I discovered that Queensland’s second governor, Sir Samuel Wensley Blackall, shared my family name I became keenly interested in him. I did some research and found out that he had been one of the most popular of all our Governors. It was a good omen I thought! ‘The position of governor is unique and the constitutional aspect of the role of Head of State is something I approach with particular respect. The constitution is of obvious significance as the powers and duties of the governor are derived from the Commission of Appointment, from the provisions of various pieces of constitutional legislation and other Acts of Parliament, as well as the conventions and practice that underlie everything. However, there is another aspect of the Governor’s role which seems to have built up steadily over time and which I believe merits greater recognition. It is what I would call the ‘non-constitutional’ dimension, of engagement with and support for community groups. ‘It has seemed to me, and this book confirms my impression, that my 24 predecessors, while possessing very different characters, backgrounds and emphasis, did nonetheless invest significant time and effort in the cultivation of what might loosely be called ‘civil society’ – the community groups and volunteer organisations which have been so critical to our state’s development. Their values and ideals are part of the framework of our society. I believe it is an important part of my responsibility to uphold and promote those values, just as it is to acknowledge the contribution of these groups to Queensland. ‘I have been fascinated to learn more about the lives of my predecessors and, as I move around the State, especially in this sesquicentenary year, to trace the paths they followed. In the years to come, I will be proud to walk in their footsteps, serving our State and its people, but I am mindful that not only must each Governor deal with different times and tides in the life of our State, but that the Office of Governor must continue to evolve and be responsive to new circumstances. Governors must be prepared to make new tracks. ‘There will be debate, I expect, at some point in the future, as to whether Queensland will continue to have Governors within a system of constitutional monarchy. That is for all the people to decide. Until such time as the people may consider the question, however, we have institutions to uphold and systems that need to be kept strong and healthy, so that Queensland will continue to grow and prosper. As Queensland’s 25th Governor, I am resolved to do my best to meet my responsibilities in this respect and to serve the community and people of Queensland to the very best of my ability.’
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