Personalities > Suzanne Baker

Suzanne Baker

Suzanne Baker excels in journalism, film, television and history. Her career is outlined in the Wikipedia entry (see Further Reading).  Her formal education was disrupted when her father abandoned the family, and she left school at 15 to work as a cadet journalist. She learned much more in debates at the family dining table and encounters with refugee and other poor families in post-war Sydney. Her horizons expanded when her stepfather, Lindsay Clinch, was posted to the John Fairfax office in New York.  Suzanne grasped the opportunity to study at City University of New York and work in NBC among the many creative youngsters transforming the somnolent Eisenhower years into the 1960s. Next she worked for Thames TV in London, another city buzzing with new ideas - and Australians. When she returned to Sydney in 1973 she had wider and deeper knowledge of media than almost anyone else.  

Recruited to the Sydney Morning Herald to modernise the Women’s Section, she assembled an able team of keen reporters, shed the respectful reporting of social events, and published thoughtful analyses of contemporary women’s issues.  In this campaign Suzanne was almost too successful: conservative managers objected to the change, and feminists were affronted by the existence of a separate Women’s Section.  Suzanne’s next venture - as the first female producer in the new Film Australia - led to her greatest public success, producing the animated film Leisure, which made her the first Australian women to win an Academy Award.  

Oscar opened many doors, including the production of the pioneering documentary The Human Face of China, emerging from isolation and the Cultural Revolution. As a mature and unusually experienced student, Suzanne then took an Honours degree in History at Sydney University, and began writing History. The accumulation of these experiences made Suzanne increasingly aware of gender inequality, so she was a founder member of the Media Women’s Action Group which campaigned successfully for women journalists to gain equal membership of the Journalists Club.  As she reflects on her own life, she can see it as a chapter in her family history – a succession of talented women mistreated by their husbands, yet making their mark. Her recent book, Due Recognition, is part autobiography but also an exploration of a family’s long history.  Due Recognition is also an understated account of the comfortable way Suzanne works in all media: her films can become books, and her books can become films.  She has lived in many of Sydney’s harbourside suburbs, and chose to settle in Pyrmont.  For this we are deeply grateful. 

Further Reading

• Suzanne Baker, Due recognition

  Suzanne Baker, The human face of China