Kylie makes the list of ‘25 most influential Australians’
Source: SMH November 28, 2009
KYLIE MINOGUE topped Kerry Packer, Germaine Greer beat John Howard, and Malcolm Fraser was all but invisible.
A list of the 25 most influential Australians of the past half-century, published in today’s Good Weekend, is sure to prove controversial, with the familiar and less-than-familiar rubbing shoulders in a line-up that runs from feminists to philosophers, athletes to opera singers.
“Making a list like this is always thought provoking,” the Good Weekend editor, Judith Whelan, said. “I want people to read it and disagree with it and debate it. We fully expect to cop some angry letters.”
The list, published to celebrate the Good Weekend’s 25th Anniversary Issue, was compiled by eight judges, four from Melbourne and four from Sydney, including the conservative historian Geoffrey Blainey, a former federal Labour minister, Barry Jones, a publisher, Louise Adler, and the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Elizabeth Broderick.
“Measuring influence is difficult, and, as Barry Jones pointed out, politicians have a head start because they’re the ones who make legislation,” Whelan said. “But the judges were able to look past that to consider how influence could apply in the broader sense to our attitudes and lives in general.”
Coming in at No.1 is Greer, who is lauded not only for revolutionising how women thought about themselves but for forcing men to rethink women, too.
Antique clock collector Paul Keating lands in third, as much for fomenting the “culture wars” as refashioning the economy, while Margaret Fulton, Peter Singer and AV Jennings all earn a spot for changing the ways we ate, thought and housed ourselves, respectively.
Whelan insists the list is not strictly “from most-to-least” influential. “For example, the top three all got the same amount of votes each.”
She also admits to several surprises, not least at “how high Judith Wright [five] and Patrick White were [six]. And I did wonder about whether some of the panelists were thinking in terms of fame rather than influence. But when we went back and questioned them about that they were clear that their decisions were based on merit.”
Blainey points out that Minogue [20] makes it not only for “showing what the girl next door could do”, but for being a powerful role model for women’s health.
“When she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005, there was a there was surge of bookings for mammograms,” Whelan said.
There are also some notable omissions. It was only at the end, for example, that the panel released that no one had nominated Malcolm Fraser. “It is a challenging list, in more ways than one,” Whelan said.
Source: SMH November 28, 2009
