"Girl will take over 4 Corners," the headline screams.
It was 1972 and Caroline Jones had been named as the first woman to host the respected program.
The press took notice.
"Brains now, beauty next," read another headline.
That story began: "[The] new First Lady of Australian television has had two broken marriages in 12 years."
The writer also felt the need to include: "She smells very feminine".
Now Caroline Jones can laugh at how outrageous the coverage was. At the time she was mortified.
"I'd been invited to Four Corners for my journalism, not as a sex symbol."
At 34, Jones was an accomplished journalist, having already worked for five years on another well-known ABC program, This Day Tonight.
She was not prepared for this kind of attention.
"The appointment of a woman was so rare that it actually became newsworthy," she says.
"Second wave feminism was just getting underway in Australia. But that had not reached the ears of the gentlemen of the press."
A woman's place
Just seven years earlier, a Four Corners viewer would have seen women chain themselves to a bar rail to protest against laws banning them from being served alcohol in Queensland's public bars.
In the story "Breasting the Bar", Labor MP Harold Dean told Four Corners the "prestige of womanhood is too high and too valuable" to let them be exposed to such "vulgarism".
"I don't think it's a place for a woman to be," Mr Dean said.
The justice minister of the day, Peter Delamothe (there were only men in Queensland Parliament at the time) agreed.
"They're not suitable places for the gentler sex to make a habit of frequenting."
Jones's first months in the host's chair only attracted more commentary.
One newspaper pounced on rumours of a wardrobe overhaul.
"By order, Caroline is going sexy."
Days later, a columnist offered a review.
"The Jones girl does not particularly appeal to me — as a sex symbol — but her new hairdo and wardrobe of designer dresses is planned to make her Four Corners appearances attractive to both men and women."
"Her first show of the year last weekend proved she can be a pleasing personality, if not exactly sexy."
While some in the press were dissecting her "sex appeal", inside the Four Corners team Jones remembers the supportive, good company of plenty of women: "Top researchers, production assistant, film editors, and our wonderful makeup artists."
Four Corners
)But she says all the senior positions were held by men.
"Towards me, they were warm, respectful, treated me as a colleague, however I know that was not the case across other areas of the media."
"I was only one woman working at that level, so I mean, I wasn't a threat to anybody else."
Patti Warn, who joined Four Corners in 1967 as a researcher, once recalled, "there was no sense of being separate because you were a woman".
"You were a member of the team, your ideas were listened to, they were totally dependent on you for a lot of the research."
Four Corners would, in turn, show Australia just how dependent it was on women.
One of Jones' early Four Corners stories tried to put a price on the work of an "everyday housewife" comparing her day's jobs to industrial awards and measuring her miles of walking with a pedometer.
The story followed the mother-of-three through a day of juggling child care, cooking, cleaning, mending, washing.
"As a cook, she could earn around 3 dollars an hour, for her general household work she's worth an hourly rate of $1.88," Jones' narration announces.
"The same jobs recur with monotonous regularity, and the daily cycle bears some similarity to a production line in terms of the boredom of repetitive work."
Jones says the professional opportunity she'd been given shaped the decisions she made about her life.
"I chose deliberately not to have a family, because I could not see how I could do both of them and do them well."
"Now, if I'd had a wise and experienced female mentor, I think I could have got a bit of guidance to navigate my way through that, but I didn't, and I didn't.
ABC
)"I don't resent that opportunity, and I don't really regret it altogether. But I do so admire many of the women in the media today who juggle marriage, home, family, and a career in the media.
"They have my tremendous admiration."
'How determined can you appear to be?'
Jones says she knew her role gave her an opportunity to help other women in journalism — something she's described in the past as "my quiet contribution to the women's movement".
She's written that she thought she could open the door for other women, "if I could do this job well, preferably without aggravating my all-male peers".
Other women walked a similar tightrope.
Jones interviewed Australia's first prime ministerial adviser on women's affairs, Elizabeth Reid, who had also been labelled a "girl" by newspapers.
"[I'm] rarely asked serious questions about the job, or the changes that are needed in our society, but just the same old trivia about my private life or attitudes or beliefs," Ms Reid said.
The report ended with this reality check:
"Australian women will pass judgement on Elizabeth Reid's effectiveness. But Australian men will be responsible for her success or failure," Jones said in the story.
"Her advice will be given to a male prime minister and an all-male cabinet. It will be considered by an all-male Labor caucus. And any legislation will have to work its way through an all-male house of representatives."
When women were finally elected, they still had plenty to navigate.
One Four Corners program, Women Politicians, featured Joan Child, the first woman elected to the House of Representatives for the Labor party.
A widow and mother of five who would one day become the first female speaker of the house, Ms Child didn't pause before describing herself as "very" determined.
But Jones's follow-up question elicited a knowing smile.
Caroline Jones: "How determined do you think you can appear to be?"
Joan Child: "At this stage, not too determined. It looks like being aggressive and that's a male characteristic at the moment."
Women regarded as 'hysterical'
Four Corners' coverage of women in the 70s wasn't all pioneers and progress.
There was also pain.
Stories on domestic violence, discrimination, and mental health.
Jones reported on what was seen as an "epidemic" of women suffering from depression, and drug companies' efforts to advertise their products to GPs as a solution.
"Doctors were prescribing an extraordinary amount of psychotropic drugs, especially Valium. There was no Google, there was no easy access to the plethora of information that we have access to today," Jones says.
"So, the response to a flood of sad women was a mind-altering drug that kept them quiet and obviated the need for investigative research into the root cause of the problem."
A 1975 report by Maryanne Smith took viewers inside one of Australia's first rape crisis centres to meet the women running it — women Smith said some police regarded as "hysterical".
"In court, they made a big issue of the fact that my clothes weren't torn, even though … he had a gun," one woman told a group therapy session at the centre.
"They don't seem to realise that submitting to something you don't want doesn't mean you consented," another woman adds.
One woman told Smith going to court was: "Just like being raped all over again, only it's worse because you have an audience."
She said she "naively" expected she would get some sort of justice and that "things wouldn't be stacked so heavily in the rapist's favour".
The story's themes of trauma and consent and a struggle for justice are present in any number of stories that would be told on Four Corners over the decades that followed.
Saxon Mullins's decision to give up her anonymity and tell her story in 2018 changed the national conversation about consent.
Most recently, Four Corners has reported on federal parliament, revealing a culture of sexism and triggering Canberra's #MeToo moment
Executive Producer Sally Neighbour says in many ways, stories like this aren't new.
"Four Corners has been covering discrimination against women for decades, since those early shows way back in the '60s," she says.
"It was Four Corners continuing to cover an issue that we have to keep covering, over and over again."
Work to be done
When she looks at the media today, Caroline Jones is heartened by what has changed.
Jones now sees the mentors she didn't have, and more women driving the agenda.
"For instance, Adele Ferguson's exemplary ongoing Four Corners reports on wrongdoing at the top levels of business, and [the] mostly female journalists keeping the Brittany Higgins case in the headlines, rather than just as a one-off event."
But she says there's still work to be done.
Work to ensure the media reflects Australia's diversity, to fix the gender pay gap, to ensure there's workplace flexibility, and address the problem of women missing out on superannuation when they spend time bringing up children.
She says it's vital that investigative programs continue to hold up a mirror to society.
"To see how well we're going and where we can do better, and to call the powerful to account.
"So, here's to the next 60 years of Four Corners."
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2021-08-28 19:33:14Z
CAIiELaBh3npsGmdyP2WhN0tYGwqFggEKg4IACoGCAow3vI9MPeaCDDciw4
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