There’s a lot more to Virginia Haussegger than what we saw on television for 15 years. A lot more. DAVID TURNBULL continues his series of stories of remarkable Canberrans.
You probably think you know Virginia Haussegger.
And it’s reasonable that you would.
She was in your living rooms reading the ABC News in Canberra for 15 years.
But there’s a lot more to Virginia than what you saw on television.
Virginia has spent many years in journalism, but don’t be fooled by the designer suites, the calm tone or the perfectly coiffed hair. Behind that professional newsreader image there’s a feminist warrior.
No, she’s not storming the barricades and waving placards.
But a passion for women’s rights has always burnt in her heart and, since leaving the ABC, she’s thrown herself into the battle with renewed vigour.
Over the years, of course, she’s written many articles about women’s rights, but now she’s published a book titled Unfinished Revolution – The Feminist Fightback. It’s effectively a rallying cry to feminists to take up the challenge and fight back.
“What I’m trying to do with this book,” Virginia says,”is to get the feminists of 2025 to stand on the shoulders of the women who went before us, to pick up on the gains they made, and to build on them.
“The feminist revolution is not over; there’s women who will never be handed power, we have to take it.”
But where does this passion come from?
The roots of the Haussegger family are in Hungary, in a town called Kosice that is now a part of Slovakia.
All the Haussegger men have been engineers, and her grandfather, Apard, travelled to Tasmania around 1901to work on a large infrastructure project before marrying 17-year-old Lillian Campbell and moving to Melbourne.
Virginia’s father, Kalman, then married Joan Fitzgerald, a girl from Brighton.
Virginia was the fourth of six children.
She was born in 1964 in suburban Bulleen and grew up in a conservative Catholic family in which the local priest or nuns would join the family for dinner regularly.
By high school, the family had moved to Templestowe, a leafy outer suburb populated by artists, musicians and writers living in mudbrick houses; and while Virginia attended the Catholic Ladies College in Eltham, a school that was run by the Sisters of Charity nuns, she remembers the school as progressive.
At 16, she won a Rotary Exchange Scholarship and went to Mexico to live, a pivotal trip that confronted her with real poverty and women who were subjugated within the ingrained chauvinism of Mexican society.
“Originally, I was interested in pre-Columbian art,” she says. “Then I saw those same indigenous faces reflected in the poorest people in Mexico, including the servants of my host families.
“I saw how wealthy women were made to compete with one another, wearing loads of make-up, gold jewellery, expensive clothes; they were virtually imprisoned as beautiful objects.
“It made me very angry, especially with the church – the transparent hypocrisy.”
There was one experience that remains particularly vivid.
“I was Miss International Rotary when I was there, and had this sash, and they’d dress me up and parade me around.
“I hated it. It was just so demeaning.”
After returning to Australia, she was hellbent on writing the definitive text on pre-Columbian art, but got sidetracked doing an arts degree and a cadetship in journalism at the ABC in Melbourne – and the rest is history, as they say.
Starting in the late 1980s and spending time at the ABC, and both the Nine and Seven networks, Virginia experienced more than her fair share of what she calls “anti-intellectual, sexist spivs”.
She has seen news directors repeatedly choose good-looking men and women ahead of other people with superior journalistic skills.
And she’s suffered the typecasting that imprisoned female reporters as the ones who were always assigned the “soft” stories.
After globetrotting for years, she came to Canberra eager to settle into the daily routine of newsreader.
In 2016, she moved on to become an adjunct professor at the University of Canberra Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis where she set up the 50/50 by 2030 Foundation – a small gender-equity research hub.
By that time, of course, her advocacy for women had already been recognised with an Order of Australia and she had served six years on the board of UN Women.
But working full-time and academically focusing on her life’s passion took a toll.
“I was sick of reading the same data. I was sick of seeing glacial change,” she says.
“Let’s call a spade a spade: the treatment of women in our society is discriminatory.
“Governments choose NOT to right the wrongs. It is deliberate.”
Around 2019 Virginia took her frustrations down the coast for a weekend.
“I sat down at my computer and started writing a book proposal,” she says.
“Rage and anger poured out of me. I couldn’t stop.
“I reworked that proposal over two years as the story changed and my anger built.
“So that’s where Unfinished Revolution – the Feminist Fightback was born, but it changed shape dramatically.”
Photo: Hilary Wardhaugh
Rather than a chronological history of feminism, Virginia started the book in the present – where women are today.
“It made sense because in the last decade there’s been a huge women’s fightback against discrimination,” she says.
“In March 2021 we saw tens of thousands of furious and fed-up women rally outside Parliament in the March4Justice, and that scene was mirrored around the country.
“The #Me too movement had spread around the globe. We saw Grace Tame become Australian of the Year for her work highlighting child sexual abuse.
“We had Chanel Cantos bring the rape culture at private schools into the open.
“And then the Brittany Higgins’ story broke, and the government’s political response was on the front page.”
Writing the book has been cathartic for Virginia, particularly researching feminists from the 1970s.
“They were far more radical than we are today, they had backgrounds in politics and philosophy.
“There are too many to name, but Elizabeth Reid stands out like a beacon.
“Yes, she was the first adviser on women’s policy to a government anywhere in the world. But after working with [PM Gough] Whitlam, she spent a lifetime with the United Nations helping women all over the world fight for change.”
Virginia concedes the initial outline for the book was all bile.
“Now I feel more optimistic,” she says.
“I think a lot of women know this is really about saving the planet. Men have made an awful mess of things.
“Women’s deep anger must not be underestimated.”
Unfinished Revolution – The Feminist Fightback (Newsouth Books)
Journalist David Turnbull is writing a series of profiles about interesting Canberrans. Do you know someone we’ve never heard of? Share the name and a number in an email to David via editor@citynews.com.au
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