She was not supposed to intervene. For nearly 20 years, Major Cheryl Pearce had obeyed orders and trained for war in an era that favoured a masculine and militaristic way of operating.
Since entering officer training in 1985 as part of the first group of women trained alongside men, she had withstood sexism and resistance to rise to positions of responsibility, while finding a way to integrate her own leadership style. In 2002, when she was invited to wear the sky-blue beret of the United Nations Peacekeepers in East Timor, she was faced with a life-or-death situation. In the heat of the moment, she did what her heart, her gut and her experience told her, and it changed everything.
East Timor was Cheryl’s first deployment with the UN, which was outside the command and control of the Australian Defence Force (ADF). The fateful day started with a patrol at 7am. Cheryl was unarmed and on her own, driving towards the local markets, when she came upon a teenage boy being attacked by five men with machetes.
“As observers, we are to monitor, observe and report; our role was not to intervene,” Cheryl explains.
But when she saw the boy, her instincts overrode her orders. “It was intuitive. He looked at me. I looked at him. He was still standing, but he was badly injured.”
She pulled him into her vehicle and then sped off as fast as she could while doing her best to perform first aid. The attackers chased her. When she reached the market, they mobbed her car, throwing rocks and smashing the windows. Glass rained down on Cheryl and the injured boy.
“I was trying to get people to answer the radio in the headquarters,” she says. There was no response. “I just took off.”
She reached a battalion where she passed the boy into the care of peacekeepers. They took him to the hospital, while Cheryl returned to her quarters.
“We were in this old house that didn’t have any windows in it. No running water, nothing. We were living on stretchers. I tried to clean myself up and I then went into shock.”
She knew she had broken a rule; she was supposed to observe only. When she drove back to her UN compound, it had been surrounded by a mob. The police were trying to quell the anger. An officer fired a warning shot into the air.
“All the feedback I was receiving from my UN colleagues was, ‘You should not have intervened. You’ve created an issue, an incident’.” Cheryl had to write a statement, explaining herself. She felt sick with anxiety. She had fought so hard for her career, and now she feared she was going to lose her job. “Everyone was saying, ‘You did the wrong thing’.”
The next week, the young man’s father found Cheryl and thanked her for saving his son’s life. “It made me realise ‘the why’,” she says. “It made me realise, ‘Trust your intuition. You are on the mark. Keep believing in yourself and backing yourself’.”
When she got back to Australia, Cheryl received a Commendation for Bravery. “I recall bursting into tears. Here I was thinking I was about to lose my job and all of a sudden I’m being commended,” she remembers. The ADF could see potential in her, and she gained confidence in herself.
It’s a lesson that has carried her all the way to one of the top positions in global peacekeeping, where she uses her instinct, and her own judgement, as part of a leadership team responsible for more than 50,000 peacekeepers deployed around the globe.
Cheryl Pearce grew up in the small country town of Loxton, South Australia, on the Murray River. From a young age, she yearned to be a part of something greater than herself.
“I was looking for what that was. Back then, what females could do and where they could be employed was quite constrained.”
In her final year of school, she went to Adelaide to do work experience with the South Australia Police. She spoke with an army recruiter who asked if she was interested in being an officer or a soldier. She didn’t know the difference.
“That’s how much I didn’t know about the military,” Cheryl says, laughing. “They must have seen some potential in me.”
Cheryl was 18 when she started at the Officer Cadet School at Portsea, where she and the other female recruits were expected to complete all the same physical tests as the men. Their fellow cadets were not welcoming; they treated the women like they were “diluting” the army.
“We had to prove ourselves every day,” Cheryl says. “There were a lot of barriers put up and a lot of both conscious and unconscious bias for us not to succeed. It was a really difficult year.”
As a fit country girl, Cheryl adapted, but it wasn’t easy. “Many friends either left or were physically injured. The demand on their bodies was too strong,” she says.
These challenges only made her more determined. She graduated as one of 11 women to complete their training. There had been 20 at the start of the year.
After graduation, Cheryl became a lieutenant. Often, when she took on an assignment, she was the first woman to have held that position. She was a platoon commander in a transport unit, leading 40 people. Then she went to a military police unit, then to Kapooka, in Wagga Wagga, where she trained new soldiers. Her drive and determination made her a natural leader. However, she still encountered instances of sexism.
“They would point out weaknesses. I knew it wasn’t right, but I was young, and I didn’t challenge it,” she says. She sensed she wouldn’t be backed if she spoke up.
“It would be, ‘Harden up, princess’ … I wish I’d backed myself more in my diversity of thinking. I’d learnt to think in a more masculine sense, in a more military leadership style.
“But it wasn’t a natural one for me. It wasn’t my intuitive style.”
Cheryl’s ability to keep up with the men physically earned her some respect. She got married but was frustrated that the ADF made her husband’s career the priority. “They said, well, the cohort before you, they had to get out when they got married, so you should be happy,” she says.
For a decade, Cheryl worked in defiance, holding onto a single, driving thought: “I will succeed in spite of the way I was treated, and I will never treat someone the way I was treated.”
In 1995 Cheryl gave birth to a daughter, Michallie, and was determined to continue to serve, and lead, while raising a family.
“There hadn’t been anyone senior to me, female, who had children and continued to serve, and I was trying to make it all work,” she says. The culture was not supportive.
When her second daughter, Maddison, was born in 1997, Cheryl became a “world-class organiser”. She fostered a network of reliable friends to help her get everything done.
Cheryl’s daughters were in primary school when she was sent to East Timor. Even before she saved the teenage boy’s life, it was a transformative experience. She discovered that she worked differently from the male peacekeepers, and that difference was a good thing.
“What I heard and listened to in the communities I went to was very different,” she says. “What I could hear was the community’s concerns about education, water and food security, and getting access to books. Whereas my male colleagues were more focused on where the physical threats were. Collectively we were able to ensure we were really listening.”
When she returned from East Timor and took command of the Defence Police Training Centre, Cheryl did it her way. “I started backing myself,” she says.
She made small changes, such as starting physical training later to allow people to drop their children at daycare. Where possible, she accommodated leave to coincide with school holidays. She wouldn’t arrange travel on Mother’s Day.
They were little things, she says, but little things that are really important for families. Previously, “it was, you make a choice. You work, or you be a mum. You can’t be both. I did want it all and I worked really hard at having it all,” Cheryl says.
As her daughters grew, she made sure they understood that she would always be there when it mattered. “I would say to them, ‘I can’t be at everything, but I will be at what’s important to you’.” For Michallie, that was sport. Maddison asked Cheryl to do shifts at the school tuckshop.
“They both knew that if they said, ‘I need you, Mum’, I would be there.”
By the end of her second decade, Cheryl had grown into her own style of leadership. “I had command. I loved leadership. It was natural to me.”
In 2012 and again in 2016 she was deployed to Afghanistan, where the fact that she was a woman meant she faced some appalling behaviour, particularly when dressed as a civilian, as she moved in and out of the country on commercial flights. She wasn’t even allowed to board unless she was married.
“I had to ask one of my staff to pretend to be my husband so I could get on my flight. The civilian airline staff would not talk to me. All my bags were upended and absolutely strewn across the floor for me to repack. [I] got patted down really quite invasively and it really shocked me …
“Sometimes I’ll tear up thinking about things and that’s one of them,” she says.
She recalls occasions where senior foreign national male colleagues “wouldn’t look me in the eye, and some wouldn’t shake my hand; 90 per cent did, though.” She is proud that she could show them she was a capable military officer, and equal to any man.
All of Cheryl’s experience culminated in one of the greatest challenges of her life when, in January 2019, she landed in Cyprus as Force Commander of the first all-female leadership team of a United Nations peacekeeping mission. She was running a 14-nation force and learning on the job.
A year in, reports of a mysterious new virus emerged – COVID. She maintained a fragile peace amid a fast-moving, deadly global catastrophe. The mission required all her training and expertise, and she received the Conspicuous Service Cross for her achievements.
In the meantime, Cheryl’s partner, Paul, flew home for a health check after battling cancer and Australia’s borders slammed shut. Cheryl, who re-partnered after her first marriage ended, didn’t see Paul for 10 months.
Last year, Cheryl was appointed to the senior United Nations position of Deputy Military Adviser for Peacekeeping Operations, based at UN headquarters in New York.
Since taking up the UN appointment, Cheryl has barely stopped for breath. But family still comes first, and when she speaks with The Weekly, it’s from Coffs Harbour on the NSW North Coast, where she and Paul are visiting her newborn grandson, Alfie.
She is grateful to be home but is looking forward to the challenges ahead later this year when she travels to the Middle East. It’s a volatile time to be in a global peacekeeping role. She provides briefings on conflicts and is responsive to UN member states’ directions. Her thoughts are already on the future role of peacekeeping in troubled regions.
“How do you give them the dignity going forward? How do we remain agile for future peacekeeping requirements?”
One step at a time.
“I think big, and I think strategic, but when you break things down to their foundations, you can only take baby steps to get there,” Cheryl explains. “I’m big on achieving the one per cent outcome. If you can achieve those little things … it all adds up to make a difference, even if it’s just to make one person’s life better. These are the achievements that give you the ability to keep going no matter how had things are.”
Cheryl Pearce looks back on her early years with a forgiving eye. The army was going through needed changes when she was a young officer, and while those early years toughened her, they also showed her the power of mentorship. Cheryl says the Army of today is not the one she joined in 1985 and she is proud of to have played a part in paving the way towards equality for women in the ADF.
Cheryl’s voice cracks as she remembers the day Regimental Sergeant Major “Lofty” Wendt crooked his finger and said, “Miss McDonald” – calling her by her maiden name – “Come here.”
Having barely heard a kind word since arriving at Portsea, Cheryl didn’t know what to expect. The Sergeant Major was almost two metres tall and towered over her. “He lifted my hat and he said: ‘Miss McDonald, I believe in you.’
“That,” Cheryl says, “is the reason I’m still here today. Because whilst you have doubts along the way, having someone believe in you, and then learning to believe in yourself, is significant.”
The Sergeant Major’s faith, along with many others, has fuelled her ever since. “That was a turning point for me in that drive and determination,” she says.
“I never considered myself the smartest, the fastest, never the prettiest – never anything – but I was always committed to everything I have done and I learnt to always be true to myself.”
This article originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Pick up the latest issue from your local newsagent, or subscribe so you never miss an issue.
