news / cover story ‘I’ve been to a pretty rough place and I have survived...
Revealed: the private Katy Gallagher shares her intensely personal journey to the ACT’s top political job with FREYLA FERGUSON CHIEF Minister Katy Gallagher is one of Canberra’s most familiar faces, but who knows that: • she’s mum to three children; Abby, 14, Charlie, 6, and Evie, 4? • she’s not married, but is in a loving relationship with her partner? • she was brought up with two younger brothers who were adopted? • she shouts out “living the dream” when things get a bit too much? But she’s also been to hell and back; losing her partner Brett Seaman, the father of her first child, in a cycling accident, and losing both her parents to cancer – her dad didn’t live long enough to see her become a member of the Legislative Assembly. “CityNews” met Katy and her family at their inner-north home to get a rare insight behind our Chief Minister.
Early years KATY Gallagher’s parents, Charlie and Betsy Gallagher, were immigrants from the UK. Charlie, a chronic asthmatic, was advised to move to a country with a warmer climate. He met Betsy on the ship to Australia. Katy was born in Canberra within a year of their move in 1970. The Gallaghers settled in Waramanga; a home where her elder sister Claire still lives. Katy says to cope with the isolation of a husband who worked long hours in the public service and raising young children in a foreign country, her mum threw herself into community work. “Mum became Mrs Community Worker,” she says. “She ended up setting up all these community networks because she was so lonely and she found those early years here really, really hard.” Within four years, there were four children in the Gallagher family, with the adoption of Richard, whose parental heritage is from PNG, and Matthew, who is of Asian descent. “It was a really interesting childhood because we dealt with a lot of racism for poor Richard at school,” she says. But she says it was a “good upbringing... we dealt with things other families wouldn’t”.
Formative years IN 1988, as an 18-year-old, Katy began working in after-school care and school holiday pro-
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grams, initially for the extra money, but soon realised she actually really enjoyed it. “I really liked looking after children with a disability,” she says. “I have my mother’s soft side. I went to look after the children that perhaps were sometimes harder to find staff to work with them and I genuinely liked working with them.” While she worked, Katy attended ANU and studied a Bachelor of Arts, in politics and sociology. “I didn’t have that sense of wanting to bust out and go to Wagga or Armadale, as some of my friends did,” she says. “Maybe I liked the home comforts. My marks weren’t incredibly flash, I don’t think I could have gotten into law or anything like that but I think arts provided me with a safe option.” She ended up doing a double major in politics, a move inspired by her dad, a member of the ALP. “I had always enjoyed talking to dad about politics,” she says. But at that stage getting into politics had no interest to her. “I hadn’t joined the party, I didn’t get involved in student politics,” she says. “In fact, I didn’t really understand it. There was nowhere that I really fitted. I wasn’t way left – and they were crazy – and I wasn’t right.”
The turning point AFTER completing university, Katy began working in the community sector for an advocacy support group called People First. Part of the job was visiting people with intellectual disabilities, in their homes and workplaces, and representing their interests. Katy says she was making headway with the group until her partner Brett Seaman was killed instantly by an 87-year-old woman who hit him at 110km/h while he was road cycling. “I just couldn’t face that work anymore and I never went back,” she says. “I was 27, I was pregnant, it was just a really bad time, it’s integral to the story because I never went back from the accident, I never went back to that job.” It was the union where Brett had worked that took Katy in when she was at her lowest. “They found me a job, sat me in front of a desk and pretty much demanded nothing from me other than being there and trying to keep me going along,” she says.