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EXCLUSIVE: Meet Her Excellency Samantha Mostyn, Australia’s new Governor-General

The thoroughly modern Sam Mostyn is in a league of her own.
A person with gray hair and glasses stands smiling in an office, wearing a checked suit.

It was a hot January day and much of the country was still on holiday when Sam Mostyn drove through the tall iron gates at Kirribilli House. Beyond the grounds, Sydney Harbour sparkled navy and silver, and seagulls wheeled above a ferry plying its way from Circular Quay to Taronga Zoo.

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Sam had no idea why she’d been called for a private meeting with the Prime Minister. She had variously worked as a lawyer, policy adviser, business executive, sports administrator and social justice advocate.

She’d recently chaired the federal government’s Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce. So, she suspected the PM had questions about that, but he’d not offered any hints on the telephone and her trademark curiosity had been piqued.

“He was there alone,” she begins, “with just the housekeeper and Toto, his dog.” There were no advisors or other staff, which was unexpected. And his fiancé, Jodie Haydon, was nowhere to be seen.

“We sat down, there were a few pleasantries, and then he launched into the question. Would I give him permission to consider me as a candidate for the Governor-General?”

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Her initial reaction was disbelief. She felt sure she’d misheard him. “I thought he might have meant that he wanted some advice on who he was going to appoint,” she explains. “Having been a policy advisor, I thought that’s where it was going. But he said, ‘No, would you give me permission to consider you?’

“It was the most unexpected question. I was shocked, I was surprised – every emotion was running at that point. And then I went from this kind of discombobulated, ‘I don’t think this is happening’, to getting very serious, very quickly. And my first thought was the enormity of the question, and that I couldn’t even begin considering it as a possibility without talking to my family.”

(Photography Credit: Corrie Bond)

That night, back at home in the heart of Sydney’s inner west, there began some “really complex discussions” with the soon-to-be Governor-General’s husband of almost 30 years, barrister Simeon Beckett, and their 24-year-old daughter, Lotte, an actor and writer who had just moved home after university.

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“We had long conversations,” she explains, “about just how seriously it would change our lives, where I’d be living [at Government House in Canberra and Admiralty House beside the PM’s pile in Kirribilli], how Sim’s practice would continue, what the impact would be on Lotte. All those things were in play.”

The Prime Minister had explained that he was looking for a modern Governor-General who understood the mechanics of government and had a broad experience of life. And by then Sam had a feeling that, if her family was willing, she would like to take the position on.

“Simeon was, as always, supportive,” she tells The Weekly. “He went straight to, ‘I can see exactly why he’s asking you. I think you’d be great.’ You know, a wonderful, supportive partner.” And she reassured him that the PM’s vision for a modern Governor- General included a family who had their own interests and careers, and needn’t be tethered to the role.

Then came Lotte’s response, and that, she says, “was the most interesting of all. I think our children always bring a wisdom to these conversations. She had heard me say the words ‘service’ and ‘commitment’, and speak about wanting to make a contribution. She listened very carefully and then asked, ‘But will it make you happy?’

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“I was like, ‘I don’t know if I’m looking at it through the lens of will I be happy?’ “And she said, ‘Well, that’s how I’m looking at it. Because if it makes you happy, then I’ll be happy for you. But please don’t do something just out of a sense of serving others if it won’t make you happy.’”

Lottie and Simon encourage Sam to take the role.

Six months later, when The Weekly team arrives at Government House in Canberra, we find the Governor-General ensconced in a mob of primary school children. She’s giving them an upbeat chat about working hard and why our democratic institutions matter. Then sitting with them on the floor to take any number of selfies.

They adore her – especially the girls. She’s already had a couple of swotty schoolgirls ask her to autograph their copies of the Constitution. And yes, she looks happy.

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Her Excellency hit the ground running following her inauguration on July 1. It’s two months later and, looking back through her diary, she has already welcomed thousands of students to Government House, taken hundreds of meetings, sworn in a new batch of federal ministers, and visited domestic violence shelters, military bases and charities around the country.

She has met with King Charles and is now deep in preparation for the forthcoming royal visit.

Her dear friend, the playwright Suzie Miller, told The Sydney Morning Herald years ago that when they first met, “I thought she was tall, glamorous and very warm. I liked her instantly.” And the Governor-General is all those things. But, she is also driven to make a difference which, she says, very much comes with the territory in her family.

Where did Sam Mostyn go to school?

Samantha Joy was the eldest of Bill and Jenny Mostyn’s four daughters. Bill was an army man who rose through the ranks to colonel. He instilled a sense of if not duty, then service in all his girls (Sam, Alex, Suzanne and Sally).

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“I fall into the trope of the oldest child,” the Governor-General says. “The classic good kid. I studied hard, I loved sport – we all did as kids. Played netball, basketball, tennis, we swam. I ended up rowing. And we did a huge amount of volunteering. We were raised that way. We were the kids that doorknocked for the Heart Foundation or the Salvos. My dad was always on the committee for the school fete, so we were the kids who would be helping make stuff for the stalls and counting the coins at the end of the day. Same with our swim club or whatever it was.”

The youngest of her sisters has an intellectual disability and she says, “philosophically, for the family, that was one of the big currents running through our lives. From a very early age I would look around at the treatment of people who had a disability or had a different cultural background or were different in any way, and we felt personally aggrieved every time someone was abusive. I remember, as a very young person, having that deep sense that everyone does belong.”

The family moved with Bill’s career, and there were lessons there too. “I learnt very early on about resilience and lack of attachment to a particular house or place. Having to make friends quickly, knowing that maybe we’d only be somewhere for 18 months before we’d move again. I think it made us a very close family.”

When Bill served in Vietnam they moved in with Jenny’s mother in Adelaide. “I remember it vividly,” the Governor-General says.

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“Dad and my mum exchanged cassette tapes through the military postal service. He had taken our bedtime stories with him, and I remember her putting a cassette tape on as we went to bed and hearing his voice reading us those stories. One side of the tape was for us and the other side was for my mum. Then she would tape us running around the house and saying, ‘Hi Daddy’ and she would chat to him about our life. These two tapes went backwards and forwards.

“I don’t think we missed him the way she did … She and my father had the most beautiful relationship based on this extraordinary love for each other. A great romantic love story. Always, until she passed away a couple of years ago, they were the centre of each other’s worlds.”

Her mother, she says, was generous, tireless, uncomplaining. “She would pack up and move us into another new place, which was always too small for a family of six. She would do it with grace, humility and hard work.”

Her creative outlet was sewing. She made beautiful clothes for the family. And was a passionate believer in the importance of good food, exercise and natural healthcare. They bought their groceries at a natural food co-op. For a time the whole family was vegetarian, and later in life Jenny would work at the Department of Health.

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By the time Sam was in late primary school the family had settled in Canberra. She was school captain at Curtin South Primary School and a member of the school council at Woden Valley High.

“I liked to get involved,” she reflects with a smile. “Involved with ideas or being part of change. I did a lot of standing up for girls. In high school, I argued for the girls to wear trousers in winter – not to have to wear the skirt.”

She remembers, at 10 years old, breaking her ankle and spending the best part of a day in Casualty having it X-rayed and plastered, and all the time watching a television screen that was tuned to the dismissal of the Labor government.

“It was November 11th, 1975. The whole place just stopped and everyone was watching Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser … And I think that good kid merged with a sense of curiosity about what had just happened.” After that she was intrigued by the mechanics of Australian democracy.

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(Photography Credit: Corrie Bond)

Her Excellency was still 16 when she began university. She entered the law faculty and within the year had moved into a group house in Canberra. She loved the sense of independence, but to pay the rent, had to find a job, which she did in the ACT Magistrates Court.

“I think that’s when I started saying yes to big jobs, even though I felt sometimes that they were a bit beyond me,” she admits. “There was something in me that said, just keep saying yes.”

It was also then that she began to notice, in the law and elsewhere, that women were struggling to forge careers on a far from equal playing field. And the lessons kept coming.

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“The inequities for women were just so obvious. When I started in a law firm in Melbourne, the women coming through as junior lawyers were treated completely differently to the men. We were paid less, we were told how to dress [women were not permitted to wear trousers], we were given clear instruction as to what would advance our careers and what would not … There was just this obvious discrimination and a different set of rules.”

Later, when she worked with the eminent Justice Michael Kirby, “and looked out at the court, I could see there were no women barristers there – everything about that court told me that I was not going to be welcome at the bar.”

She segued into politics but found that Parliament House was also “a shocking environment”. Years later, she told Julia Gillard, in A Podcast of One’s Own, that “as an adviser, it was a toxic, horrible environment where there were no rules. You add alcohol to that and … ”

But her greatest professional challenge came when she was selected as the first woman commissioner of the AFL. As a child and a young woman, she had followed Australian Rules football. It was a sport about which she was knowledgeable and that she loved.

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“Joining the AFL Commission was,” she says, “a sudden entry into the world of men’s professional sport and coming right up against this wall of outrage and anger at the idea that women could have a seat at the table.

“The early days on the AFL Commission were tough. There were a lot of people who were very generous and supportive, who wanted a woman on that commission, but there were a lot of people who were against it.”

“I’m grateful I did that role before the intensity of social media. I would have been trolled. I’d have woken up every day to a litany of horrible, horrible invective. Instead, I received physical hate mail and emails. And I felt it sometimes at football games or events … this attitude of, ‘how dare you’. They were determined to make sure I failed, but I felt I had to keep going.”

And her perseverance paid off. Through that role she met women who wanted to play AFL but had no formal vehicle. Those quiet conversations ultimately became the movement towards the AFLW women’s league.

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Who is the husband of Sam Mostyn?

The one place, Her Excellency says, where she never comes up against sexism “is in my personal life. I married someone who believes absolutely in equality.”

She met Simeon when they were both working as policy advisers in Canberra. She for a succession of ministers including then Prime Minister Paul Keating and he for Robert Tickner, who was Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs.

They met for “a coffee at Aussie’s cafe at Parliament House and then he asked me out on a date. I think we were both ready. We knew quickly that this was going to be a very long-term relationship. We just had this simpatico and this immediate connection.”

She was drawn to Simeon’s family too. His father, the anthropologist “I couldn’t even begin considering it without talking to my family.”

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Jeremy Beckett, had worked in western NSW and the Torres Strait Islands, and his role as an expert witness had made a significant contribution to the Murray Island Land Case. Leading to the Mabo decision and the achievement of native title.

“Sim would say that he grew up deep in the history of Australia,” she explains. “His early childhood was filled with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – either in their home in Birchgrove or with his family out in those communities. He has a deep understanding and respect for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. And my life’s been enriched by Simeon’s and his family’s history.”

The pair moved to Sydney and married, then on to London where she was Director of Human Resources and Corporate Development for British telco Cable & Wireless, and he studied for his Master’s at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

(Photography Credit: Corrie Bond)
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“Lotte was born in London,” she says, “and then we decided to come home, so she’d grow up with her cousins.”

Her Excellency loved parenting instantly.

“I loved it when she was little and it gets better and better,” she says. “I’ve loved every stage of her life, and every time I thought it can’t get better than this, it just does. I think it’s about watching an independent person you’ve created together become that character and that person, and just revelling in what it is they show you about themselves.”

Motherhood did not stop the Governor-General from working. And it wasn’t long before she felt that excruciating tug at the heart that’s so familiar to working parents everywhere.

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“The first time I went on a work trip,” she says, “I felt that pull of how do I leave Lotte and Sim here while I go to London? She was four or five, and Sim said, ‘It’s fine, we’re fine, it’s all good, you should go, just go’. So, I made the decision to go.

“I rang them from Heathrow and Sim answered, and he said, ‘Now, she’s fine, but we are in the children’s hospital.’ She’d broken her leg quite seriously at playgroup. I can still see it. By then I was sitting in a black taxi heading to central London and he said, ‘I’ll just put her on’. She starts crying and I’m crying and I’ve got this very senior job and I’m there to do these important meetings, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is motherhood.’

“He said, ‘You don’t need to come back’. I said, ‘No, I think I’ll come back’. And so I did. I collapsed a week of meetings into two days, and I was back in 48 hours.

“I’ll never forget, I walked in, and Lotte just looked at me and said, ‘You came back’. And I said, ‘Yes, if you need me, I’ll always come back’.

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“There were many other times where I had to be away a lot, and she said, ‘It’s okay, Mum, if you love what you do, so long as I know you can come back if I need you.’

“There’s nothing I love more than being Lotte’s mum.”

Looking to the Future

On the Governor-General’s desk stands a vase of wattle, picked in the grounds, and a bountiful fruit bowl. On the wall hangs a painting by brilliant young Pitjantjatjara artist and activist Sally Scales and a framed photograph of AFLW player Tayla Harris’ extraordinary high kick. It bears a plaque that reads: Presented to Sam Mostyn, AFL Commissioner, Pioneer for Women in Football.

“Sam Mostyn is an exceptional leader who represents the best of modern Australia,” said Anthony Albanese, introducing his pick for the 28th Governor-General. Her appointment met with some grumblings from the extreme right.

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“I’ve had plenty of practice dealing with that,” she quips. But all sides of mainstream politics welcomed her, and largely Australia has too.

It’s important to her to be Governor-General for all Australians. Whether their families have lived here for 60,000 years or arrived just yesterday. And one of her goals, she says (as we watch a conspiracy theorist with a placard pacing the far shore of the lake) is to combat rising division and disinformation.

She will explain to anyone who’ll listen. From captains of industry to little girls carrying bound constitutions, that Australia has a unique and precious democratic system, “which means we can change governments without violence and live in stability and peace”.

Suzie Miller has said of her friend, “I wish she’d be less modest. I’d like to see her celebrate her achievements more.” And typically, when first offered the position, she was incredulous. But then that moment passed, and she saw only the opportunity to make a difference.

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“Whenever I’ve been asked to do something preposterous,” she says finally. And she means something so challenging that she’s not sure why she has been asked. “In those instances, I’ve often thought that saying no would be easier. But then, I think, someone has to stand up, and do it with optimism and conviction … I try to use those moments for good, to have as much heart as head in them, and to give them my all.”

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