The year was 1973. A young, idealistic Elizabeth Reid marched up the gravel drive to The Lodge, propelled by bravado and terror. She wore her best Laura Ashley frock and underneath, for courage, her favourite feminist undies. They were purple and green and emblazoned with the women’s symbol.
Within the hour, Elizabeth would be offered the position of adviser to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam on matters relating to women (the first such position in any government in the world). In a little over two years, her work would change the lives of Australian women forever. Initiatives on which she worked included the introduction of the Family Court and no-fault divorce, the single parent’s benefit, paid maternity leave, extending the minimum wage to women, and ensuring government funding for community childcare, women’s health centres and refuges.
However, Elizabeth would pay a personal price.
“From before I was appointed until I resigned,” she says, “I was demeaned, parodied, insulted, patronised, judged, cartooned and lampooned by the press. Newspaper stories regularly began with: ‘Elizabeth Reid, 33, not wearing a bra, said in Canberra today … ’ Or ‘Elizabeth Reid, whose daughter does not live with her, said …’ It was always degrading, and you had no comeback.”
By October 1975, she had been driven out of her role and out of the country, and that is where the public very largely lost sight of her. But the Whitlam years were just the first chapter in Elizabeth Reid’s quite extraordinary life.
The elegant and very gracious grey-haired woman sitting in dappled light in the leafy garden of a Canberra seniors’ community was once that young trailblazer. She has the measured, whip-smart gaze of someone who — in her 82 years — has been as comfortable at a village meeting in the highlands of Papua New Guinea as in high-level negotiations at the United Nations in New York. All the while, she has been driven by deep-seated convictions about justice and fairness, which she imbibed as a child from her schoolteacher parents, Jean and Jim.
Elizabeth was born in Taree on July 3, 1942. Her father taught agricultural science. Her mother, who had also taught in the public system, was forced to give up her career when she married. The bar on the employment of married women in public service wasn’t lifted until 1966.
The family moved with Jim’s work, first north to Lismore, then to “the dusty streets of western Sydney”, and on to a great aunt’s farm near Queanbeyan where the Reid kids (there were three by then) learnt “to collect eggs, ride a horse, kill and skin sheep”. Eventually, there would be six young Reids living in Canberra, “on the foothills of Black Mountain. We would set off, trespassing through the shade houses at the CSIRO, on our way up to pick everlasting daisies or race to the top of the hill.”
Elizabeth graduated high school and won a statistics cadetship and a scholarship to the Australian National University (ANU), where she quickly became involved in campus life.
However, her future was thrown into jeopardy at the end of the first semester. While making her way home from a conference of student newspaper editors in Sydney, she was involved in a devastating train collision.
Elizabeth sustained a serious head injury and spent three weeks in hospital, her head packed in sandbags, her eyes shaded from light. Finally, a neurologist announced that she had sustained lasting brain damage, and “if you do anything that requires thinking,” he insisted, “you will end up in an insane asylum”.
“It was hokey-pokey,” she scoffs now, but at the time, the advice was devastating.
“I was lost. I didn’t know what to do with myself,” she says, tears in her eyes as she remembers. “Late at night, after my family had gone to bed, I would walk to the university and just wander around, thinking, this could have been my life.”
There was no chance of returning to her coursework, but a family friend recommended she learn to type and apply for a receptionist position in the Research School of Physical Sciences at ANU. She did, and it helped rebuild her confidence.
One day, someone left four pages of notes about computer programming at the reception desk and suggested Elizabeth read them. These were the days when computers were the size of church organs, and the brilliant if eccentric Professor Kenneth Le Couteur (who had worked on the Enigma machines at Bletchley Park) decided to purchase a shiny new IBM 1620. It was the university’s first computer, and Elizabeth became its operator/programmer.
“Not long after, I thought, ‘Look, if I can do this, surely I can go back to university,’” she says.
The Dean took some persuading but eventually agreed to a year’s probation. Elizabeth re-enrolled in her degree at 20, and she excelled.
It was 1966. London was swinging, and Elizabeth, 24, had arrived at Oxford University for post-graduate studies in philosophy. She loved everything about the place, from the wood-panelled drawing rooms to the cobbled streets. Her Australian immunologist boyfriend was studying in London, and they spent weekends together, seeing operas and plays and visiting museums.
Then, the unthinkable happened.
“I got pregnant,” she says. “I didn’t know any woman who had a child outside of marriage, and I didn’t know how to begin looking for an abortion in England. So we married.”
Elizabeth had been writing a thesis on the Greek philosopher Aristotle, but when a senior professor learned she was pregnant, he insisted that her scholarship be revoked. Undaunted, she fought the decision and stayed.
“A beautiful baby girl was born, but it was quite a difficult birth,” she says. “I ripped from end to end and then got an infection.
“The professor was so irate at my still being around that he put my name down to give the first seminar of the year. I couldn’t even sit down …
“People ask what training I had to become a feminist. This gives you some sense.”
However, the marriage was already floundering. “Partly my fault, partly his,” she admits.
Elizabeth and her daughter flew home to Australia, and her husband followed. Her parents wouldn’t hear of a divorce and insisted all three move in with them. “He was in one room, the baby and I in another.” It was untenable.
Elizabeth decided to finish her degree in Oxford, leaving her daughter, by then a toddler, in her father’s care. She told him she wanted custody when she returned, but he refused. “It was,” she admits, “a difficult start” to her relationship with her daughter. The deep sense of loss she felt adds context to the cruelty of the media headlines that would follow.
Her studies complete, Elizabeth settled back into life in Canberra. She taught at the university and joined the fledgling women’s movement, read voraciously, explored consciousness-raising groups and lobbied for change.
When she saw the ad for the women’s adviser role, she was in two minds about applying. “One of the issues we’d really struggled with in the Women’s Liberation Movement was: Do you go into an institution to affect change from within, or will you inevitably be compromised by that? We had never worked out quite what to do.”
In the end, she applied but, she says, “I never dreamed I’d get the job … I’ve always thought they stuck a pin in the list.”
Elizabeth began her role with a national listening tour. She wanted to hear the voices of women from all walks of life across Australia. And she received thousands of letters. In her first six months, she received more letters than any minister, aside from the Prime Minister. Every letter and every voice helped define her priorities.
Moreover, the United Nations had declared 1975 as International Women’s Year, and responsibility for Australia’s participation fell squarely on her shoulders. Amongst her myriad tasks, Elizabeth led an impressive delegation to the UN World Conference on Women in Mexico, showcasing her skills in policy and negotiation.
Back at home, she used the International Women’s Year budget to “right discrimination, encourage change”, and unleash women’s creativity. She sponsored filmmaking, art and literature, and convened a women’s health conference (attended by 900) and the more controversial Women and Politics conference, which drew 700 to Canberra in September that year.
The latter event, Elizabeth says, “was rowdy, enlightening, uncomfortable, productive,” and it seeded a new generation of women determined to take their place at all levels of public life. However, the media scorned it from the outset. The Canberra Times was particularly ruthless, and the women responded by occupying its newsroom.
Elizabeth was called into the Prime Minister’s office. “Some men in his entourage spread the more sensational clippings across his desk and floor. They argued that his commitment to women’s issues was becoming a political liability. They suggested he silence me by shifting me sideways into a public sector position …
“I had no desire to become what we might now call a ‘femocrat’. I walked out, furious and upset.”
Weeks later, she resigned, announcing her departure in a media release just hours before she left Australia. At the time, she described herself as “a political refugee in flight from the Australian media”.
Elizabeth was scheduled to address the UN in a fortnight’s time for Human Rights Day. En route, she visited friends in British Columbia, Canada. They were shocked by how “obviously shattered” she appeared. And so they offered her use of their holiday cabin in the wilderness, and the next day, they took her in a boat upriver.
“They dropped me on the riverbank with a bag of food and a rifle in case of bears. I walked into the forest alone and found the cabin.” She remembers the sense of relief: “Not being hounded; not waking up and finding yet another damning headline.” She remembers the beauty of the place and the healing that it brought.
That week was, she says, “more than an intellectual experience … It was a spiritual exercise in the cleansing aspects of solitude — getting rid of all the crap that they’d poured on me. But emotionally I was … I was just coming apart.”
Tehran rumbled with prerevolutionary discontent. It was 1978, and support for the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini was building. Elizabeth had moved there three years earlier, within weeks of her address to the UN. She’d been invited by the Shah’s twin sister, Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, to work there, implementing the resolutions of the Mexico conference and establishing a UN women’s centre for the Asia-Pacific region.
Elizabeth shared a house in the north of the city with a female diplomat, but on this particular night, she was at home alone when a group of the Ayatollah’s men forced their way in, insisted she cover herself with a chador and hustled her into the back street.
The men surrounded her and spoke quickly and aggressively in Farsi.
“They told me,” she says, “that I had until the festival of Muharram, in November, and if I hadn’t converted to Islam or left the country, they would kill me.”
Yes, she says, she was frightened, but again undaunted. Elizabeth stayed on in Iran until the day before Khomeini’s return in February 1979.
From there, she moved to New York. She was now Deputy Secretary General for the 1980 World Conference of Women.
One unseasonably cold night in the spring of 1979, Elizabeth was invited to a cocktail party in a long, narrow room lined with diplomats.
“I made my way laboriously down one side,” she remembers. On her way, she met a rather gruff and dismissive fellow who had lived and worked in Africa. They had a brief, somewhat strained exchange, and she moved on.
She was on her way to the exit when she came upon an old friend, the Sierra Leonean diplomat Davidson Nicol, who invited her to dinner. “I said, ‘Alright, I’ll see you outside,’ and he said he would meet me in just a few minutes.”
“I stood outside,” Elizabeth recalls with a little smile. “The snow was coming down, and there were streetlamps — it looked idyllic. I waited for a while, but there was no sign of Davidson. Then I noticed there was someone else standing nearby, and I realised it was the rather rude man from the party. I said something about the cold, and it transpired that we were both waiting for Davidson Nicol.”
He never appeared, and they later decided he had plotted to set them up.
The gruff man’s name was Bill Pruitt. He’d grown up in Zaire but now lived on Lake Michigan. They went out for dinner, he walked Elizabeth home, and a year later, they were married.
“We were married for four and a half years,” she says, and her words catch a little. “I often say we got married for the rest of our lives, and that’s true.”
They moved to Africa, where Bill headed up the US agency, Peace Corps, and their son, John, was born. They were living in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, when Bill began to bleed internally — life-threatening for anyone but worse because he had haemophilia.
“By the time he got to the doctor,” Elizabeth explains, “he’d lost more than half of his body’s blood.”
Bill was medevacked to Pretoria and then back to the United States.
“I was flown to Washington because they were sure Bill would die,” Elizabeth says. “He didn’t, but during the course of his treatment, he received blood from everywhere. The first known death from AIDS had been recorded a year earlier, but this was before there was any test for the presence of the HIV virus. From that moment on, we lived in fear that he’d been infected.”
He had been. In early 1986, Bill’s health deteriorated.
“He was flown back to Australia,” she recalls, still with enormous sadness, “and he died in Woden Valley Hospital, in Canberra, on the last day of winter 1986.”
Elizabeth’s first reaction, as it had been after the Women and Politics Conference, was to escape into solitude. “But then I said to myself, ‘You can’t, ducks. You’ve got to be here for your child and make sure he grows up okay.’
“Bill had an acute sense of social justice and a set of values that matched. He was a very outgoing, thoughtful person, and I hoped I could instil those values in John.”
Losing Bill changed Elizabeth’s professional life. She began working with the United Nations Development Program, eventually establishing their HIV and Development Program.
She was always guided by that same philosophy she’d employed as Whitlam’s adviser: Of listening without judgement or expectation. Elizabeth developed a method called Community Conversations, through which she encouraged local people to explore together the issues that affected them (including family violence and the spread of HIV) and work towards their own solutions.
This work took her across Africa, the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the Pacific, including an extended stay in Papua New Guinea. John often travelled with her.
“I think I’ve been really blessed,” she says, “in the jobs I’ve had, the places I’ve seen and worked, the people I’ve met.”
In 2015, Elizabeth called an end to her travelling life and settled back in Canberra. It is, she says, “the place that nourishes, restores and cherishes me”.
We’ve left the garden now and are encamped at her dining table with mugs of tea and boxes of photographs.
The journey in from the yard required a walker because Elizabeth has, for some years, been grappling with Parkinson’s Disease.
Undeterred, she has been working for months now on two new papers to commemorate the 50th anniversary of International Women’s Year.
“I can’t physically write anymore,” she admits, “and I can barely type because I can’t control my fingers. So, I laboriously type [with two fingers], and then I take the cursor and make corrections, and then I take the cursor and correct the corrections. It can take hours to write two paragraphs, but I get it done.”
It’s been suggested, in the past, that she write a memoir, but she says she’s never had time. “I’ve always been too busy living,” she smiles. And that’s not going to change just yet.
She admits there’s an inevitability to the course of the illness.
“But there’s a sense,” she says with the same determination that has propelled her from the beginning, “in which I’m not going to let the bloody Parkinson’s stop me.”
This article originally appeared in the March 2025 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Pick up the latest copy at your local newsagent or subscribe so you never miss an issue.
