Obituaries Australia

Baroness Gardner of Parkes official portrait, 2019, by Roger Harris

UK Parliament

Baroness Gardner of Parkes was guided by her strong sense of social justice.

'We must stay united in our efforts to combat suffering and inequality, and strive for international peace. That continued effort has always made me proud of being an Australian citizen, a UK resident and a member of the British parliament."

These are the words of Baroness Gardner of Parkes, Trixie Gardner, who has died aged 96. She was the first Australian woman to be elevated to the peerage in Britain and was, at the time of her death, the most senior life peer in the House of Lords and the "grandmother" of both the Lords and the House of Commons.

Appointed to the peerage by Margaret Thatcher in 1981 after a distinguished career in local government, she served as a Conservative member of Westminster City Council and of the Greater London Council (GLC) and spent her life immersed in British politics. During her time in the Lords she witnessed nine prime ministers - Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak.

The news of her elevation to the Lords was reported by the Daily Express with the gleeful headline: "Fair dinkum - Dame Edna's made it!" The article went on to opine: "Most intriguing of all the new crop of life peers must surely be this formidable, Foster's lager-drinking, dentist, Australian lady, one Trixie Gardner." (This outdated stereotypical view was taken in good humour by Gardner, who was the very picture of refined antipodean elegance.)

She hailed from something of a NSW state political dynasty. An uncle, James McGirr, served as Labor premier of NSW from 1947 to 1952. Her father, Greg McGirr, was a former leader of the NSW Labor Party and the first state minister for health and motherhood, who introduced a bill providing an "endowment for motherhood", establishing a pension for widowed mothers and an allowance for children under 18, the first of its kind in the world.

"Like my father, I did not get into politics to push my own personal agenda. I have always simply wanted to help people," she remarked.

Her mother, Rachel Rittenberg Miller, was a fierce champion of increasing opportunities for women to receive a university education, and a keen supporter of the Bush Nursing Association.

An active, committed peer, Gardner took her responsibilities extremely seriously. She was always across her brief, scrutinised legislation without fear or favour, and asked so many questions during question time that the government capped the number peers could ask at six.

Some areas she was passionate about included improving dental care, education standards, proper regulation for private landlords and, to the great merriment of parliamentary sketch writers, limiting the height to which people could grow hedges.

She had friends across the political divide and shared a parliamentary office with actor and writer Julian Fellowes, the Lord Fellowes of West Stafford. She was also close to the late Labour stalwart Baroness (Betty) Boothroyd, speaker of the House of Commons from 1992 to 2000.

Boothroyd described her friend as "a great parliamentarian", saying, "Trixie is one of those people who you feel is truly interested in the answer when she asks 'How are you?' She takes the time to listen. She takes an interest in everyone, from her fellow peers to the catering staff."

At a time when British government honours and peerage lists regularly spark rows for including dubious political donors, assorted cronies and inexperienced, young political aides, Gardner stood out as epitomising the value of public service, non-partisan co-operation and a willingness to get things done, in a plain-speaking Australian way.

Rachel Trixie Anne Gardner was born on July 17, 1927, in Parkes, the second-youngest of eight children. Her other siblings were Jack, Beatrice (known as Muffie), Gwen, Clarinda (who died when a baby), Patty, Raymond, Gregory and Nonna. All the children grew up to have impressive careers, which included law, medicine, academia, farming and occupational therapy.

"I grew up in a very large family and if you didn't use your voice you wouldn't have got very far. My father was a politician and my mother was an activist and we were raised to believe we had a duty to speak up about what we believed in," she wrote in her 2019 autobiography The Long Table.

After two years in Parkes the family moved to Cammeray, not far from the north end of the Harbour Bridge, which had already been in construction for six years. Despite the Depression overshadowing 1930s Sydney, the McGirrs were well-off, and there were opportunities for the children to receive an education and to see something of the world.

Aged 10, Trixie accompanied her mother to London as she was to receive an Order of the British Empire (OBE) at Buckingham Palace. Although she was too young to go to the ceremony, she loved London and recalled her trip - which was reported faithfully in the Herald - with fondness, although Rachel noticed the storm clouds of the Second World War beginning to darken across Europe. The year after this, Patty made a similar trip with their father, where she was presented as a debutante at court and was hosted by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in Paris.

After attending Monte Sant' Angelo Mercy College in North Sydney, she entered the University of Sydney in 1954 to study dentistry, the same year she was presented as a debutante to the governor-general, the Duke of Gloucester, at the University Settlement Ball.

When her father died in 1949 Gardner took a break from dentistry and decided to go to Sydney Technical College for three years to study cookery (she later spent time at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris). She did charity work, including for the Sydney Opera House planning committee, before heading back to university, graduating at the end of 1953.

It was at university she met the love of her life, fellow dental student Kevin Gardner. When she headed to London to work in 1954, Kevin followed her the year after and they married in Paris on July 7, 1956. They set up home in Bayswater and went on to have three daughters, Sarah, Rachel and Joanna.

In London the couple established a dental practice on Old Street in Islington, which they owned for 30 years. It's now a hip inner-city suburb, but when the Gardners arrived it was a deprived, grimy part of the capital. The land around the practice was reputed to be burial pits for victims of the Great Plague of 1665, and they suspected some of their patients were relatives of the notorious gangsters the Kray twins.

Alongside his work as a dentist, Kevin had a political career of his own and was elected to Westminster City Council in 1982, representing Lords, the perfect constituency for a cricket fan. He became Westminster's first Australian-born lord mayor in 1987.

In the late 1960s Gardner became involved in community work and was chair of the Paddington section of the Conservative Party. To those who expressed surprise that the daughter of an Australian Labor politician would join the Conservatives, she merely stated that she had a strong sense of social justice inherited from both her father's political work and her mother's charity work, and because her mother voted for the United Australia Party (and then when they were the Liberals) the family was not expected to vote one way or the other.

"Politics should be about coming together to discuss how to make people's lives better, not standing divided over polarised personal views," she said.

In 1968 Gardner was elected to Westminster City Council, representing Hyde Park, and served until 1978. She ran unsuccessfully as a parliamentary candidate against Labour's Barbara Castle in Blackburn in 1970 and the Liberal John Pardoe in North Cornwall in 1974.

From 1982 to 1988 Gardner was UK representative to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, and served as the voluntary chairman of Plan International from 1990 to 2003. In 2000 her portrait was included in the exhibition Australians at the National Portrait Gallery in London, and in 2007 she was made an honorary fellow of the University of Sydney.

Gardner never retired from the Lords. When the chief whip asked if she had considered doing so, she retorted tartly: "Never given it a thought. I intend to keep going."

A devout Catholic, she loved spending time with her family, as well as tapestry and gardening. Her camellias were her pride and joy, carefully cultivated from plants sent from Sydney in the 1970s. She said when she looked at them, she thought she had a little piece of her Australian family with her. "I will always have an Australian heart," she said.

Trixie Gardner is survived by Sarah, Joanna and Rachel, their families, and her family in Australia. Kevin passed away in 2007.

Reproduced by permission of the Sydney Morning Herald