Illawarra top cop Anne Clarke has retired from the NSW Police Force after devoting 30 years to protecting the community, empowering women and improving working conditions for her colleagues.
There’s a small town in country NSW with 300 residents and an Aboriginal name meaning “very bad camping ground”.
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Grong Grong has little more than a post office, a church, a pub and an arts hall and while there is a train line, not many locomotives stop there.
Forty years ago the Riverina town certainly didn’t fit the bill as a likely destination for a single sheila from the big smoke.
But Anne Cooney had an eye for adventure and relished the chance to get out of her home town of Wollongong.
She’d graduated from the Goulburn Police Academy, cut her teeth in Wagga Wagga for four years then ‘’put her hand up to go anywhere’’.
Back in the day, Grong Grong was a “one manner” – a town deemed worthy of just one man in blue to keep the peace.
But Anne – who would become chief inspector Anne Clarke – came to town and changed that culture. It would be the first of many times in her 30-year career that she elevated females to new levels in the ranks of the NSW Police Force.
“I was the first woman to go into a single station in 1991. It was great, very different to what I was used to,” she recalled.
“An example is the number of chin-ups required to get a certain position. It’s about saying ‘is that an appropriate level of strength you require to do that job or is it really just a cultural thing?”
“I used to like going out having cups of teas with the farmer’s wives. Grong Grong had around 200 people at the time. It was a great experience.”
Anne grew up in Thirroul and was well known in the Illawarra thanks to her family’s pumping pub of the same name.
She spent 10 years as a school dental therapist before considering a more fulfilling career.
“At that time in the ’80s there was no real career advancement in my job. It was really a job designed for women to come into the workforce, have families and leave,’’ she said.
“That was not my plan. I decided to leave my job based at Bulli on the Friday and I started in Goulburn on the Monday.’’
Anne wasn’t keen to come back to Wollongong straight away. And that’s how she ended up in that small town that’s not real good for camping.
“This was a new start for me. The policing family is just amazing, they looked after me, helped me settle in out there. I stayed two years then transferred to Sutherland, where I was on the beat in general duties and got into domestic violence and victims support.”
Through her work, the plight of domestic violence victims struck a chord with Anne, prompting her to apply for a job as the first Domestic Violence Liaison Officer Wollongong had seen. It was 1997.
Read more: Time for all to hit back at family violence
“The job was largely about building relationships with courts and ensuring we were making it as easy as possible for women and children to be protected,” she said.
“We introduced victim support rooms within the courts with other agencies, and started making sure police were really involved in the process.”
Anne believes domestic violence is more on the radar as a significant problem than ever before and more changes are vital.
She has faith in the new commissioner, Mick Fuller.
“Thankfully we are seeing some great changes. Mr Fuller is so focused on that which is great. The fight is real. Woman and children are being killed by domestic violence.”
Anne continued her climb up the ranks, moving to the Southern Region head office in Wollongong in 2000. She successfully applied for the manager’s job in 2002 and has held that position for the last 15 years.
Her 2015 Commissioner’s Award for the advancement of women in policing is overwhelming evidence she is considered a true leader by her peers and superiors.
Anne herself credits her confidence – that willingness to have a crack at the biggest jobs in what is largely a man’s world – to the powerful women before her.
“The late Bev Lawson of course was great. Christine Nixon, who I worked for, was the one who encouraged me to apply for secondment to HR,” she said.
“I wasn’t confident. I was just a sergeant, I thought ‘I can’t do that it’s an inspector’s position’. She said ‘what’s the worse thing that can happen?’. She was so encouraging.
“In saying that I have had a lot of terrific men that I have worked with that have offered me the same amount of support,” Anne said.
While she rose to the ranks of chief inspector, she’s very aware the percentage of women in the top jobs is not what it could be.
“The figures have stabilised in a way.”
As of 2014, women represented 26.9 per cent of commissioned officers in the NSW Police Force. “There are still some difficult barriers in terms of it being hard for women with shift work and the type of work we do with young families.
“But the organisation is working to make it as flexible as possible. My job has been about talking to commanders and influencing them to look at ways to manage their workforce.
‘’We need to keep looking at how we do things … we have really gotten to a place where there is no real area of policing that women can’t do, so it’s interesting times.
“An example is the number of chin-ups required to get a certain position. It’s about saying ‘is that an appropriate level of strength you require to do that job or is it really just a cultural thing?”
Having worked with eight different region commanders in the 15 years, Anne feels she’s made great headway and it’s time to give someone else the chance to carry the baton for better conditions for police of all ages, both sexes and all situations.
“I’ve chalked up 30 years of service. I started work at the age of 17. I never had children, which has meant never any time away from the work force, so it’s time to do a bit of travelling with my husband,” she said.
Having had a taste of life outside of a uniform, with extended long service leave, Anne is convinced she will have plenty to do.
‘’I’ve worked with some amazing people in the community trying to make a difference. It felt like time.’’