Fiona Patten

Pictured: Ann Patten and Fiona Patten

The beginning of Fiona Patten’s life in politics was as the CEO of the Eros Association – the peak body representing the Australian sex industry. Fiona’s political career took off when she became founder and leader of the Australian Sex Party, and she is currently a member of Parliament in Victoria. Her mother raised her to be well-mannered, well-educated and well-travelled. But when it came down to sharing the more intimate details of her life in public, her mum was less enthusiastic.

Mum brought out the wooden spoon without any problem. She didn’t just threaten with it, she used it. She felt that there was nothing wrong with punishment. When I got caught smoking, she made me sit in my bedroom with the windows closed and smoke a packet of cigarettes. That worked for a couple of weeks.

But she was a very friendly and happy person and she would wake us in the morning in good spirits. I don’t think she was overly affectionate – I don’t ever remember my family being touchy-feely – but she was one of those ‘just get on and do it’ type of people. Mum was very sort of English in that way – you know, stiff upper lip and let’s just go.

She also was the one who got up at five o’clock in the morning and took me to swimming training and drove me to swim meets three hours away on a Saturday. She was a very dedicated mother in that way and she saw it, really, as her job to do that.

My mum was English. My dad was in the navy and he was stationed in Scotland. They met, fell in love and married and then, for their honeymoon, they took a ship to Australia. My mother had never been here before and she didn’t know anyone and, really, she didn’t even know Dad that well – she’d never even met my dad’s family.

Mum was twenty-one when she met Dad. Her upbringing was as part of an upper middle-class Scottish/English family and she’d been to finishing schools in Europe, so I don’t think Mum had any real ambitions, except to get married.

They moved to Canberra, of all places. This was in the early 1960s. My mum had spent a lot of time living in London and so this was quite a change for her. I was born shortly after that. My sister was born eighteen months later, and my brother a few years after that.

When we were really young my mother didn’t work, although she did take on part-time jobs from time to time, but because Dad was with the navy we travelled a lot. We travelled between Canberra and Sydney, we went back and forth between England and Scotland, and we lived in America for many years. My mother was really attuned to this lifestyle because her father had been in the army so she had travelled all her life. We grew up in Canberra, Sydney, London, Washington.

Mum was very matter-of-fact, so there was just no question that there was going to be a problem. I don’t recall ever going to a new school thinking: ‘I wonder if I will make friends.’ I think it was like: ‘I will go to a new school and make friends.’ She never, ever gave us any doubts. Mum loved travelling and I still love travelling today.

Mum travelled so much that she was used to always getting to the next destination and she had strategies in place for meeting people. She had a lot of close friends through my dad’s work, as well. There was a group of naval wives who travelled and had children around the same age – she had a group of very dear friends. Quite often they would find themselves all in England together, even though they were Australian, or they might all be living in Washington at the same time.

Probably the hardest move we ever made was coming back from America. We had lived there for four years and that was the longest any of us had ever lived anywhere in our life. And I was aged between eleven and fifteen – the incredibly crucial junior-high years. I had just got into high school, plus I looked like I would qualify for the nationals in swimming, so there was a whole bunch of stuff I felt attached to. I think it was also the hardest move for Mum. It was a very wrenching time for all of us.

When we were in America, every weekend we had a chance to we would take the pop-up camper to a national park or to a historic town somewhere and she would never miss an opportunity to do these things. Mum would have loved to stay living in America – she was very sad to go. When we got back to Australia, she went straight into full-time work and started a career for herself, working for a telecommunications company. I think it was her way of keeping busy.

She was very keen for us to have extracurricular activities. Every single place we went, particularly for me, there was sport and Brownies and Girl Guides and those sorts of things. I think it was good for her, too, as it enabled her to meet people and get to know the neighbourhood. I probably take after her a bit in that way. I like being busy.

We used to have swimming or soccer training after school every day and swimming training before school, so I don’t think we particularly noticed her working later and not being at home waiting for us. Maybe my brother noticed more because he was younger. I mean, at that age – as a teenager – I didn’t want to be anywhere near my parents. She was always quite rigid about everyone doing their fair share and she probably became more rigid about that when she started working. Her time to handle all the domestic stuff was obviously more stretched than ever.

I think I do have a tendency to just say yes to lots of things, which can put me in really good situations, and occasionally in not so good situations, but I do think the travelling gave us all a little bit of faith in ourselves and enabled us to be quite independent. Because we were regularly the new kids, we all developed a strong resilience.

‘The Talk’ happened after she found a whole bunch of condoms in a wastepaper basket in my room. Mum and Dad had been away for a weekend or something and I had stayed home and obviously had a friend over. Mum sat me down and told me that they’d been using condoms before I was born, but when they thought she was pregnant they stopped using them. As it turned out, she wasn’t, but they thought: ‘Oh well, bugger it, we’re not using condoms again now.’ And that was how my life started. There was no way they were going to have a child at that stage, otherwise. I was born in their first year of marriage and that wasn’t the plan but once they’d thought she was pregnant they got all excited and changed the plan. So when Mum found condoms in my room she knew what that meant – she didn’t want me to get pregnant young. She must have had some regrets about her own life not turning out the way she had originally intended.

Mum had had other boyfriends but she’d never had sex with them. Dad always said that she hadn’t had sex with him before they got married, despite considerable effort on his behalf. Oddly enough, that conversation was in a letter he wrote to his parents when he announced that he was getting married. When I was ten I found I letter he wrote to his parents saying that there hadn’t been much to write about but that now there was a bit of news: ‘I have met this wonderful woman – her name is Ann, she’s gorgeous, she’s a virgin (despite my best efforts), with child-bearing hips, and I will love her till the day I die.’ It was hilarious but lovely.

When I did get pregnant later and I had to have an abortion, that’s when I found out that Dad had got another woman pregnant – weirdly, she was called Fiona – and they had to go through a backyard abortion. Finding out things like this about your parents is strange in some ways, but it does give you the bigger picture of who they are, and why they parent you the way they do.

Mum and I had a fairly tempestuous relationship from when I was about fifteen until about twenty. Around nineteen it got very bad, so my father stepped in and I started having a weekly lunch with him. He would report back to Mum about how I was and what I was up to.

Looking back, I think I was just doing my own thing. I was going to university, I was going out and I had broken up with a boy whom she really liked. I suspect that she would have hoped that I married the bank manager’s son – she liked him very much – but then I started going out with a guy she liked a lot less and that’s when we felt like we were really drifting apart.

It’s a bizarre story – this new guy’s father was a doctor and when she had first come to Australia, he was her first doctor. When she was pregnant and she didn’t really know anyone, apparently she felt that he abandoned her because during her pregnancy he went on to become an anaesthetist. She felt that she’d been dropped by him and, secretly, she’d never actually forgiven him – and then she transferred all those feelings onto his son.

Originally, I wanted to be a landscape architect. Mum was very pleased until I changed to industrial design because that is what my boyfriend at the time was doing.

I think she was just generally worried about me – she probably thought that I wasn’t on a great path and that I was partying too much and maybe, you know, just being a bit of a bitch. I thought she was trying to boss me around too much.

I was very raucous and probably did get up to a bit of mischief in those years. In fact, I did get up to a bit of mischief in those years. Mum caught me selling marijuana at one stage while I was still at home. I was in my last year of high school and my boyfriend – the one that she liked, actually – and I had got some hash to sell so we could have a holiday when we finished school.

That wasn’t good. She had no experience with drugs of any sort. She absolutely freaked out and thought that this was the end – that the daughter she knew was bound for hell. She really didn’t know what to do and at one stage she was thinking of ringing the police to make me own up, but she thought better of that and actually rang a drug and alcohol counsellor, which was great. They spent most of the time counselling my mum – telling her that it wasn’t heroin.

I had about five hundred dollars cash in my top drawer and Mum took the money as punishment, but gave it back to us later so we could have our holiday at the end of the year.

Mum’s life experiences were so different from mine. Up until my late teens, our life experiences had been quite similar – we’d moved, we’d gone to new schools, we’d travelled and all of that – and then, I guess, when we began to have less in common she worried that I was going on a different path and probably not a very safe path. Later in life we kissed and made-up, but even back then, really, she was always there if I needed her. I would even get weekly food packages.

When Dad retired, they bought 100 acres and ran it as a B&B homestead. They had separate units and she loved that. She loved craft and when she was at home she was always doing something – a pottery course, an upholstery course, a sewing course. She made our clothes and she taught me to sew as well. When I was at uni and I left industrial design, I switched to fashion design and ended up with my own fashion business. I don’t sew as much now but I did sew a dress last year – it is a skill that I obviously still have.

Mum loved having dinner parties and she was a good cook. I am the same but probably a bit less in recent years since I’ve been in the world of politics. I think work takes over your ability to cook a three-course dinner for people.

When Robbie Swan and I launched The Eros Association, the Sydney Morning Herald ran a front-page story about it that started with: ‘Former sex worker, Fiona Patten,’ and one of my mum’s friends faxed it to my mum.

That was a difficult phone call.

She said: ‘I have seen you in the paper today.’ I think I was just sort of hoping that, because she lived on the south coast, she wouldn’t see the Sydney Morning Herald and everything would be fine, but no – she did see it. She said: ‘How could you?’ She repeated it over and over.

I went down to see them soon after that – not because of the article, just because I was going down there – and that is when Mum started grilling me.

‘What was it like?’

I think because it was ‘former’, it was actually also easier for her to cope with. I told her: ‘It was just something I did – I didn’t do it very much and I don’t do it any more.’

I have no doubt that it was the last decision she would’ve wanted me to make. But it wasn’t really a decision I deliberately made – I kind of fell into sex work. I was doing outreach at the time and it was like: ‘Oh, there’s no one here to do the client – all right, I’ll do it.’

I guess that sort of ‘get on with it’ approach to life and to everything was one of the reasons I did just say yes on that day.

I think, at that stage, Mum was quite happy with her own life and she knew I was happy. She was absolutely in love with Robbie, my partner, and I don’t think she particularly judged me on it. I was twenty-eight. I know that she was somewhat embarrassed by it, but she knew that Robbie and I were having a good time.

Her asking me about what had happened was more out of curiosity – ‘What about if you’re with an old man or something?’ During this conversation my father was asleep in the chair and his false teeth had slightly fallen and we looked at over at him and my mum went: ‘Aahh,’ and just sort of nodded and it was hilarious. Then she didn’t really want to talk about it. My dad definitely didn’t want to talk about. I think that he dealt with a few things that way.

When my sister, Kirsty, came out as gay, my mum couldn’t deal with it but my dad could. It wasn’t that they were worried about her being gay – they were worried about her happiness. She probably had a few bad choices of girlfriends at that time and so my parents didn’t warm to her choice of partners, but then once she started going out with Linda, the woman who remains her partner today, everything changed.

I remember one Christmas and Linda was coming with Kirsty. Mum always insisted on Kirsty having single beds set up in her room. I got the double bed with my boyfriend – there was even one time I didn’t bring a boyfriend and I still got the double bed and my sister got the two single beds. When I found out Linda was coming I made a point of telling Mum: ‘Look, if you don’t give them the double bed then I’ll give them my double bed.’ But to her wonderful credit she had already done it, which was really lovely and made Kirsty feel fantastic.

Because she went to boarding school when she was only seven, my mother never had a close relationship with her mother. Her father was in Germany doing repatriation work after the war and there were no schools in the area they were in, so they found this French convent and Mum was sent there. My grandmother used to go and visit her a lot.

My grandmother was not that maternal, but she was born in India and when she turned seven she was sent to boarding school in England, while her family stayed in India, and then moved to Hong Kong. She saw her family maybe once a year. I think it’s what you learn.

Mum got very sick seven years ago, about a year and a half before she died. It was all prior to us setting up The Sex Party and I still hadn’t moved down to Melbourne then.

Unfortunately, my dad also died before we got into the elections. He was around when we set up The Sex Party and he helped us with that and was very good, but he wasn’t quite like Mum. He sort of took more of a backseat on things like that.

I really, really still miss her and I think a lot about how she would be involved in my life right now and how much fun she would be having with it. She would’ve loved helping out; she would’ve managed campaigns for me, without a doubt. She would have done anything she could, whether it be letter-boxing or handing out leaflets. It was one of the saddest things that she wasn’t around because I think she would have really enjoyed the fact that I was in Parliament.

Mum was a wonderful organiser and she had a very practical way of looking at things – if you had a problem, she would always have a straightforward solution. ‘Let’s get going’ – that was Mum. I think she instilled that in me to the point where I don’t like sitting around. I can’t really lounge around at home in daylight hours. I hear her voice – ‘What are you doing there just sitting around? Get up and do something.’ As a newly elected Member of Parliament, it is quite a good voice to hear.

When I used to ask my brother and sister about this, they always said that Mum was embarrassing because she would put a lot of demands on people. For example, when I got engaged to this fellow she didn’t like, she immediately put ads in the paper celebrating the engagement; she immediately bought me an engagement gift and started getting my whole family to send me engagement gifts because she knew that the minute she started doing that, I would started getting cold feet – and she was absolutely right. She told me, one day, that had been her exact strategy. She knew it would cause me considerable consternation and, indeed, I moved out and I never married the fellow. I went overseas with my grandmother instead. Mum, sometimes, was very cunning. But she did it for the right reasons.