The general manager of collapsed Australian airline Ansett described Deborah Lawrie as a “very nice person” who couldn’t possibly become a pilot because she was a woman.
She had been flying since 16, aced the tests, outperformed her successful rivals, but when she first applied to Ansett in 1976, the airline had a policy of only hiring male pilots.
Lawrie wanted that job, so she fought. She took the airline to court, while women around Australia held a “girlcott” against Ansett to support her.
She made history when she became the first woman to win an anti-discrimination case. And so, she became the first female Australian pilot for a major airline.
In 2020, she celebrated 50 years in the aviation industry, and 40 years since she flew for Ansett. And on Saturday night, 30 women who followed in her footsteps will fly (or drive) to a spot outside Wollongong, where Captain Deborah Lawrie will be inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame.
“It’s a tremendous honour,” Lawrie says.
“It really is, and what makes it special is that it’s my peers, and my industry supporting this nomination. That’s what makes it special.”
Lawrie says one of her most memorable moments after winning the right to be an Ansett pilot came about four years into her tenure.
“Every year they have a dinner, an annual dinner to farewell the people that retire,” she says.
“Up until then it had been male only. They felt that guys would be inhibited in telling their war stories, which might involve a few indiscretions, so women weren’t allowed at all.
“After four years they extended an invitation to me, saying ‘you’re one of us’.”
Robyn Clay-Williams will be at the celebration, and will meet Lawrie for the first time. Clay-Williams was in high school when Lawrie took Ansett to court, and she decided to follow in her footsteps, only in the military.
She and Deborah Jepperson became Australia’s first female air force pilots.
“[Lawrie] was really quite revolutionary,” Clay-Williams says.
“And it was not about wanting to be the first. It was about ‘this isn’t fair’. She was just so persistent. I found her really inspirational.
“What she did was a difficult thing to do, and she was very brave to do it – for someone who’s not an attention-seeking person, to have a court case against someone like Ansett.
“She was in the press every day, not all of it complimentary. She had to have really thick skin.”
When Lawrie applied to become a trainee pilot at Ansett she was already a flight instructor with “extensive flight experience”, a parliamentary essay on the case notes.
Her test scores were higher than the average on most counts, and she outperformed one of the successful applicants on all counts except her age (which was the same).
Her application was rejected.
The general manager, Frank Pascoe, told her: “We have a good record of employing females in a wide range of positions within our organisation but have adopted a policy of only employing men as pilots.”
He had said, though, that she was a “very nice person”. She was “highly intelligent and undoubtedly a good pilot”, he said.
Airline founder, Reginald Ansett, reportedly referred to air hostesses over the age of 28 as “old boilers” and believed women’s menstrual cycles made them unsuitable to fly planes.
Aside from having a policy of not hiring female pilots, the selection board had an “economic rationale” to reject her – she was young, about to be married, and likely to become pregnant. Ansett also thought all male crews were safer than those that had mixed genders.
Lawrie, though, wasn’t having a bar of that. She took Ansett to the Victorian Equal Opportunity Board, and won despite challenges from Ansett that went all the way to the high court.
In 1979, the court ruled in her favour, setting a legal precedent for anti-discrimination laws. It was 1980 when she made history as the co-pilot on a flight from Alice Springs to Darwin.
The parliamentary essay noted the Ansett case “documents an employer caught by surprise at having a job applicant challenge its managerial prerogative to hire whomsoever it wanted for the job of being a pilot.”
In 2020, Lawrie told the ABC that “Reg Ansett did not want any women on any of his flight decks under any circumstances”.
Lawrie said she took strength from public support, even after Ansett tried to fire her after being forced to hire her.
Women called on businesses to move their travel accounts to rival airline TAA. Ansett took a financial hit.
“I knew I could do this,” Lawrie said. “I knew I was qualified, I knew I was capable. I had confidence in my own ability.”
Clay-Williams says Lawrie is still “very generous … very supportive” to younger women who join the profession.
To get her own wings, Clay-Williams had to wait until the 1984 federal Sex Discrimination Act came into effect.
“That forced the military to do something,” she says.
Also attending the Hall of Fame gala will be Satya Tanner. She graduated from the air force as a pilot in 2001 – and was just the 13th woman to make it.
Asked if the air force is still a boys’ club, she laughs.
“Things have changed a lot … but systems can discriminate against women and anyone who doesn’t fit the regular mould,” she says.
Lawrie, who was appointed a member of the Order of Australia in 2001, will become one of just a handful of women appointed to the Hall of Fame. Almost 50 men are already there – including Reginald Ansett, whose airline folded in 2001.
“He could be gruff and famously ran into trouble with comments about female flight attendants,” Ansett’s citation reads.
“His refusal to allow the recruitment of women pilots was settled in the High Court in 1979 in favour of pilot Deborah [Lawrie] , leading to female flight crew at Ansett.”
As for Lawrie, her citation reads:
“She is regarded as a trailblazer and standard bearer by all those women who have followed her lead.”
