Fighting to fly: how Deb Lawrie made aviation history

AA: You had that solo flight about a month before your 17th birthday – what was that like?

DL: Very nerve-wracking, of course, I think anyone will say that. The thing was, once I got airborne, I knew I was the only one who could get back down, so I just had my instructor’s instructions going through my head the whole time I was doing that circuit. And fortunately, it was a good landing, and it all worked out fine, but it was a really fantastic feeling of achievement to have done that.

The instructor asked me to perform a full-stop landing. I was a bit disappointed, because it meant the lesson was being cut short in my mind. But his intention, of course, was to get out and send me on my first solo. So yeah, he literally opened the door, stepped out onto the wing, yelled something about, you know, remember everything you’ve been taught, or whatever, and slammed the door and jumped off the back of the wing, and that was it. I didn’t think about following him out. I just thought about doing everything as perfectly as I could, and focused completely on getting the aeroplane back to the runway, getting airborne, and doing all the rest of it.

My instructor, I owe him a lot, actually – he was a really good instructor, because he insisted on perfection. You can’t always be perfect, but you were always striving to be the best possible that you could be. And he was a stickler for safety, all sorts of things that were so important to be ingrained into someone who’s learning to fly, because you carry that through your entire career. And that’s why it’s so important, those first few lessons that you have.

AA: After you completed your training, you became an instructor yourself. What was it like training other people, presumably including a lot of men?

DL: It was funny, because being a female instructor had sometimes had its advantages – for example, businessmen who were just taking flying as a hobby or whatever responded better to me than they would to a young, macho sort of guy, and also female students often responded better. So, I enjoyed instructing. I was working with Garth Harris, who was my initial instructor. I was working alongside him, and that was extra special.

I think my favourite thing about instructing was teaching people to fly their first solo. When I did that for the first time, I saw it from the other side of the coin, because when you step out and send someone solo, it’s quite a heavy weight of responsibility on your shoulders that you have established that that person has achieved the competency to do that, and so it’s a lot of faith and trust in your own judgement there, too.

AA: What then spurred you to apply to Ansett and TAA to become a commercial pilot?

My colleagues at the airport, I had the feeling that they were all just like patting me on the head. You know, “Good thought, however, you know you’re way ahead of your time. Airlines don’t have women. We can’t see them ever having women in the near future, so you’re wasting your time.” Basically, they told me not to get my hopes up, which was the constant message I received. I chose to ignore that.

AA: Can you tell us about the Ansett application process?

DL: The application process was simply a letter stating your qualifications and your hours, and there was a minimum requirement from Ansett, so there was no point writing to them until you had those minimum requirements, and I used to receive an acknowledgement in the form of “Thank you very much for your application, could you please keep us updated with your hours as you go along?” So, I would update them regularly and get that response in return, but in the meantime, I saw other people progressing to an interview and subsequently being hired by Ansett, which made it obvious that I was being stalled.

The reason I think they were stalling, of course, was because by the time someone reached 27, that was it. That was the cut-off. You were no longer eligible to be a trainee pilot with them. So, I sort of upped the ante with the letters a little bit, put a bit of pressure on, and managed to get my first interview, which was just a check of my logbook and licence for authenticity. And after that interview, I was told, “Well, you know, we don’t have any intakes for a while, but when we need pilots, we’ll invite you for a second interview”. And then, eventually, that did happen, and I went for the second interview, which was a much more detailed process, where I was interviewed by several of their captains around a big, big boardroom table. And after that interview, they told me they were sending me off for the psychological appraisal test at Chandler MacLeod.

Now, that was always a sign that you’d reached the next step, according to everybody. So, I was quite encouraged by that, and I went along and did that test, and I was also encouraged by the results from that test, so I was feeling pretty confident, maybe even to say that I might actually get a position. So when I received a letter that was saying, “No, you’re not suitable, and good luck with whatever you want to do in aviation, but you’re not going to be flying with us”, it came as a bit of a shock, but a huge disappointment.

AA: Why do you think they interviewed you at all, given Reg Ansett’s position was that it wasn’t safe for women to fly?

DL: I believe it was to just get me off the books. Fortunately, they did process me or interview me, and how do I say this? They did it with good intentions, in good faith. And I know now that I was actually selected – and once that selection, that notification, was given to Reg Ansett himself, he was the one that turned it on the head. He had lots of kind of weird ideas about that, but he was adamant, absolutely adamant, that no women would ever set foot in one of his cockpits.

He tried lots of different arguments. They first went down the route of strength, that women weren’t strong enough. They went down the path that women would freak out every month,  so they were unstable, they wouldn’t handle a crisis, they wouldn’t be able to cope with emergencies. And then also that they would have lots and lots of children, and that this would put an enormous financial burden on the company. So, these arguments just kept rolling forward – when one didn’t work, they tried another one.

I was engaged at the time when I went for that interview, and they knew that I was getting married, and they asked me how many children I was going to have, and I knew that that was the possibility of a question, but it did throw me a little bit, but I knew also that I was never going to be one of these people that have a large family. So, I just said, “Oh, you know, one or two children perhaps”, and that I would be getting some help from my husband with the rearing of the children, and later on in court, that was expanded to three or four children, I think, which was completely wrong. So, they embellished it.

AA: What was your initial reaction when you got that rejection, and what convinced you to fight?

DL: My immediate reaction was, I screwed it up, threw it over my shoulder, and basically said, “f*** you, they don’t deserve me”. That was a petulant sort of response. It was Peter Wardley, who was my fiancé at the time, who was aware of the Equal Opportunity Act; I wasn’t. And he pointed this out to me and said, “The only reason could be possibly because you’re female – we should take this complaint to the Equal Opportunity Commission”. I wasn’t super keen on doing that, because I thought, you know, I was still in that, yeah, stuff them. I’ll just show them anyway. I’ll do something else or what have you. But he insisted that we actually give it a shot.

So, we made an appointment to go and see the commissioner for equal opportunity, and that was Faye Miles, at the time, she was the first one in Victoria. I think the hardest thing about that was trying to prove to her, she said, “Why do you think you’ve been discriminated against?” And it was very difficult to sort of quantify that, except to say that “I just think it’s because I’m female. I don’t know how to prove it, but there you go. That’s why, I think”. And it was when she went and called Reg Ansett on the phone to have a chat with him about this, that she was left in no doubt that that was the reason why, because of his response to her.

AA: How did the case go before the Equal Opportunity Board?

It was the first one that had been formed, and they got a few things in procedurally incorrect for that first hearing – they jumped the gun and came down with a ruling before Ansett had been able to present their defence. That board was disqualified, and it had to be reformed. So, the second board was reformed, and the hearing started again. Ansett switched barristers. They changed arguments in the meantime, and that hearing proceeded in front of that board for the second time, and that conclusion of that hearing was that the board determined that Ansett had discriminated, and they delivered four orders, one of which was that I had to be employed on the next pilot intake.

Now, of course, Ansett weren’t happy with that, so they appealed to the Supreme Court, and I think there was a first appeal, and that was thrown out. And then the second appeal, and Ansett introduced some more things, and they decided that the airline pilots’ agreement, which said you could fire anybody for any reason within the first 12 months of their employment, would be what they would rely upon. And they said, “Well, we don’t want her anyway. We’re going to use the pilots’ agreement to get rid of her, end of story”. Now this airline pilots’ agreement was in conflict with state law, which was the equal opportunity law, and the airline pilots’ agreement was a federal award. So, the Supreme Court had no alternative other than to refer this case to the High Court, where this conflict could be resolved.

AA: That must have been frustrating – what kind of a toll did it take on you and your personal life?

DL: It took an enormous toll on me. It was extremely stressful. I had to keep working at Moorabbin as a flying instructor. At the same time, it was becoming more costly; all sorts of things were going on in my personal life that were making it hard; however, it had to be fought right through to the end. I think what was really important here was that John Dwyer, who was my barrister, was absolutely brilliant. He was sticking with me all the way through, and he was confident that we were going to be victorious in the end. So, he helped me hang in there.

My mother was always worried that I was losing too much weight, that I was going to lose in the end, and then I would be not able to be employed by anyone, because I’d be seen as that troublemaker, and so on. But she didn’t try and stop me, she was just worried about me. My friends were always there, but they took a sideline because of so much involvement with the press and television and things like that – I was, you know, whisked away into this world of all of that sort of stuff. It did put a serious strain on the relationship with Peter Wardley – we’d only just got married. So, eventually that started to crumble a little bit, I think, due to the stress of the whole case.

You have all these things that might go through your mind, and I just thought one day, “I’m such a pain in the neck for Reg Ansett, maybe he’ll just sort of knock me off, and then problem solved.” So, I had myself convinced that they were going to, you know, take me out somehow. And I remember walking out of the house one day to go to court, and this car backfired in the street, and I thought someone was shooting at me. It was stupid, of course, but I said to my mum – she was really worried about it – I said, “Don’t worry about it, because if he does do that, everyone will know he did it, so he’s not going to do it.”

AA: What was happening with your employment at Ansett during all this?

DL: They tried to get rid of me shortly after I started my flying training, and they tried to use an incident that had happened at Moorabbin Airport. Little did they know that I had paperwork to prove otherwise. But that’s beside the point. They were trying desperately to get rid of me in any way possible. Now that was still prior to the High Court decision coming down – after the High Court decision, that all stopped, and by that time, Reg Ansett was no longer in control anyway, so Rupert Murdoch and Peter Abeles had taken over the company. Ansett management was pulled into line. And so, things moved forward from there. There were individuals who felt like they needed to try and continue on with what Reg wanted, and, you know, made life very difficult for me. But as the years went by, I became part of the furniture, so to speak.

In December of 1979, after I’d done the ground school, they’d delayed my endorsement training on the F-27, and they held three of us back – conveniently, because you did it in pairs, so as soon as I was gotten rid of, the other two could progress forward. I got wind of this from information passed on to me, and I decided to call someone I had trained as a pilot, John Calvert-Jones, who was Rupert Murdoch’s brother-in-law.

Rupert Murdoch had taken over Ansett on the 15th of December, I think it was, and he was able to pass this message on to Rupert Murdoch that I was being held back from proceeding with the endorsement training. I think it was the following Tuesday that Rupert Murdoch issued a memo saying that I had to be processed exactly the same as all the guys on the intake. There were 16 of us, and so their little plan – get rid of one and process the other two – fell through, and the three of us went for endorsement training after that.

AA: It was January of 1980 when you finally got to operate your first flight, in the F-27 on the “milk run” from Alice Springs – can you tell us what that was like?

DL: The day started with turning up at the airport in Melbourne to get a passenger flight from Melbourne to Alice Springs to meet my instructor in Alice Springs, and then start that milk run on the F-27. The reason I was doing that was that the day before, I was supposed to have gone with him to Alice Springs together, but my paperwork hadn’t come through with my licence, and there was a big stuff-up with that.

So, the following day, I turned up at the airport, and the company realised that there was a lot of press interest in this particular day, so they organised a press conference. I did lots of photos out on the tarmac with the plane, and then jumped on a 727 to go up to Alice Springs to start my line training, and that’s where I met my instructor for the first time. And I thought I’d be kind of over all the press by then, but that wasn’t the case. They were also there in Alice Springs. So, I had to do a few more photographs with the press before I could actually get on that plane and fly with my instructor on that first sector up to Tennant Creek.

That felt fantastic. In the airline industry, you have your training captain. You also have a safety pilot that sits in the jump seat for the first few sectors, and they break you in gently. That first couple of flights, I was just operating the radio and, you know, watching everything and all that sort of stuff. So, it was a gentle introduction. A fantastic training captain, Alan Reid, who was very, very patient, wouldn’t stand for any crap from management, stuck up for me, looked after me. Was just really, really fantastic.

AA: What has spurred you to finally put your story down in a memoir, after all these years?

DL: I think because the story of that equal opportunity case is so important, I wanted it to be recorded accurately, and also from my perspective of all the different ups and downs I went through at the time. But apart from that, people that I’ve flown with over the years, I would often tell them stories of different things that I’d been through. And I always got this constant, “You should write a book, these are so interesting, you should write a book”. And it was a few years ago that one of my colleagues told me to stop what I was doing and write it. So, I decided to make a conscious effort to get to do that. I’d been taking notes over years and years and years, but I decided it was time to get it all put together.

AA: We’ve come a long way since the 1970s, but we still have a long way to go in terms of gender equity in aviation. How can we lift the bar? Do you still feel quotas are the wrong approach?

DL: I think the opportunities are there. There’s no barriers to women becoming airline pilots, becoming engineers. You see refuellers, women loading planes, push with pushback tugs. I remember the other day thinking, I don’t even recall hearing a female voice on air traffic control when I first started. So, we’ve got a lot more women in that area.

I think I see the airline industry or aviation industry on two sides. I see it on the corporate side and the operational side. Now, on the corporate side, we see women in quite high at high levels. We’ve seen we’ve seen CEOs and women in those positions. But on the operational side, I think we’ve still got a way to go, maybe still a little bit of a boys’ club. But in terms of getting those entry level jobs, there’s no issue. It’s the progress beyond that.

I think in terms of quotas, we shouldn’t be forcing something. We should be addressing the issue of why aren’t there more women? Do they know about these opportunities? That’s number one, but number two is making the job more flexible for women, which I think the airlines are genuinely trying to do, but it’s not an easy job, and you have to make a lot of sacrifices. It’s not for the faint hearted, and you have to be passionate about it, and that’s across the board. So, I think we should be more looking at “how do we create the passion for the industry”, rather than enforcing quotas.

AA: And what would be your message to girls or young women who are considering a career in aviation?

DL: Well, considering a career in aviation, that’s great – getting advice from someone who’s already in the area that you want to be in to give you the best pathway to follow, being aware that you’ve got to be have that burning ambition, and if one pathway doesn’t work, don’t give up. There’s always another pathway to reach the goal. So, it’s basically just stick with it, you know?

AA: Finally, at the end of your book, there was a pretty significant opening you attended – what was that about?

DL: There’s a new road structure into Sydney Airport, international and domestic. And a part of this structure, the last bit, was a flyover – it’s about 800 metres long, and it curves around, comes from international and swoops into the domestic area of Sydney Airport. And I’ve actually watched the construction of this over the last year or so, when I first started back with Virgin, and one day I got a call from Sydney Airport asking if they would mind naming this structure after me.

Now, I thought that was some sort of weird hoax, but I Googled the whole thing and realised, no, this was true, and I was absolutely thrilled to think that I could be honoured in this way. It really, really meant a lot to me.

They then told me, with a little bit of a cynical laugh, “Actually, this flyover goes right over the top of Sir Reginald Ansett Drive”, which is a little side street. And that just made me laugh. I just thought, what poetic justice is that! It’s fantastic.