‘The Girl on the Roof is fascinating, charming, disconcerting, all round illuminating on the life of a wild, beautiful, gifted woman born to privilege, who has dedicated her life to the greater good of our planet and its inhabitants, flora, fauna, and humankind.’
Read Niki Savva's launch speech for The Girl on the Roof byValerie A. Brown, which was read at the Paperchain Bookshop, 9 June 2026.
Thirty pages in, reading The Girl on the Roof by my dear friend, Valerie Brown, making notes for this speech tonight, I began to give up. I had copied and pasted so much I found interesting that I thought I should just read the whole thing out loud and be done with it.
The Girl on the Roof is fascinating, charming, disconcerting, all round illuminating on the life of a wild, beautiful, gifted woman born to privilege who has dedicated her life to the greater good of our planet and its inhabitants, flora, fauna, and humankind.
I have been lucky enough to know Valerie for more than 50 of her 95 years. I feel privileged and very proud to call her a friend, even more so after reading her book. It was an ordeal for her to write this memoir, to talk about herself, her family, and her achievements, but it is a story best told by her about a life that deserves to be celebrated.
I will read a passage because it encapsulates the spirit and the substance of this book:
In my time, I have been called a change-maker and a conservative, a teacher and a student, a professor and a disciple, too young and too old, too clever and too stupid, and a friend and a foe — all at the same time, and even by the same people. A recurring theme for me was being labelled ‘a woman ahead of her time’.
My nine decades form the warp, the vertical threads that give the cloth its structure. Each vertical thread contains one of the nine lives that I have lived over my 90 years: child, free spirit, wife, mother, lecturer, public servant, professor, caregiver, and writer. Each thread has been the result of my interactions with the society of the time.
The Valerie I know is an incredibly kind, smart, funny, modest person interested in everything and everyone lucky enough to enter her orbit. Because she is so interested in you and all that surrounds her, she seldom talks about herself and what she has done.
She became a change-maker long before, decades before, the description became fashionable. Her way was not to force change on people and institutions.
She showed them how to make that change happen by bringing together everyone involved. It sounds so obvious.
Until you consider how much reluctance there is to change anything tax-related.
And how comfortable people can become with life even though there are ways to make it better, that don’t really require us to recreate or preserve the past.
When you think about it, the past wasn’t that great, except for the people we have lost along the way.
Her guiding principle was not only to find ways to improve peoples’ lives, but to make life fairer.
I cannot think of another Australian who has influenced and managed so much change across so many different spheres in their lifetime.
It would be impossible to calculate the number of lives she has changed for the better — tens of thousands, millions, in Australia, in China, Nepal, and elsewhere around the world.
She read, she wrote, and she did.
She was fearless, selfless, stubborn, and enormously impactful.
The Girl on the Roof has revealed so much about her I didn’t know,= — so much of it profound, so much that we should all be grateful for.
Firstly, for marrying the marvellous Robin Wallace Brown, then for setting aside her dislike of Canberra, after he told her they were moving here so he could be the Brisbane Courier Mail’s political correspondent.
‘Last place on earth I want to live,’’she told him.
I met Valerie through Wally, whom I worked with in the press gallery, only to find his family called him Rob. Whatever, he was the most wonderful person — like Valerie, generous with his hospitality and his knowledge.
At a dinner party at their home in Mugga Way, I remember Wally pouring champagne into what were clearly antique glasses. As a lover of antiques, I asked Wally their origins. His grandmother had left them to him in her will because she knew he would put them to good use.
As the highly respected bureau chief of the Courier Mail, he would be invited to all the state dinners at old Parliament House for visiting heads of state or royalty.
If Valerie couldn’t go, Wally would offer the seat to me, the most junior person in the office.
For a few hours, I was Mrs Brown. We were such great mates. When I met Valerie, I thought she was one of the prettiest women I had ever seen. Curly dark hair, bright-blue eyes.
You can tell that from the cover of this book and simply by looking at her now, still beautiful, still so engaged with issues.
There are so many wonderful stories in here. She went with her family to Elizabeth’s coronation, then afterwards to the garden party at Buckingham Palace. As an adult, she travelled to Nepal to help set up an education system for community health workers.
When she finally became pregnant with Bina — after she and Wally had adopted Matthew — Valerie was deeply involved with a community group fighting for the lifting of restrictions on the availability of the contraceptive pill.
Obviously pregnant, she went on television to talk about why women should be allowed to access a drug that would give them greater control over their bodies.
She and Wallace had wonderful adventures together, raised three great kids – AJ Brown followed Bina — and developed the most amazing range of contacts in politics, academia, the public service, government, and the community.
Having attended her 95th birthday party last year, when Bina’s house was filled with so many of Valerie’s friends from so many different fields and across generations, I was astonished and saddened to read that she had left school with no friends.
‘After the years of strict parental control and constant supervision, I thought I was plain, stupid, and shy,’ she wrote. ‘Released into a different world from those younger years, I discovered that others thought I was good-looking, smart, and self-confident. Every one of these perceptions was completely strange for me. I was afraid I would be found out.’
In fact, what most people found out over the decades was that she was brilliant.
Her life in academia was not cloistered or separated from the every day. Her development of collective learning, which comprised four steps — establishing ideals, facts, ideas, and actions — sounds deceptively simple.
With six students, she tested it on a construction site where alcoholism had incited a high level of violence. It was endemic throughout the industry.
She brought together everyone associated with the worksite: on-the-ground supervisors; the manager, workers, engineers, office staff; occupational health and safety officers; recovering and current alcoholics; business clients; and the local pub owner.
The experiment solved some, not all, of the problems. because some people were just not willing to change, but in Valerie’s words:
That initial workshop design became a core part of the health education degree course, and its principles and practices were adopted in a wide range of fields, including medicine, public health, agriculture, social planning, and local councils, in England, Holland, Fiji, and Nepal.
Valerie, who had seen Edmund Hillary from a distance at Elizabeth’s coronation after he had conquered Everest, became a different kind of summiteer, working with the offices of Prime Ministers Hawke and Rudd on drugs and visions for the future.
It propelled her into new areas of prevention and environmental health. She went from being heretical to respectable.
Sometimes that’s the death of people.
For Valerie, it meant that she was the go-to person whenever someone who knew about science and activism was needed to progress consumer issues.
While on the National Health and Medical Research Council, she succeeded in getting personal management plans for asthma sufferers, granting authority to rural-practice nurses to give medical treatments, registering midwives, and taking lead out of petrol — all things now taken for granted, but not way back in the 1980s. She was heavily involved in the worldwide groundbreaking fight against AIDs in Australia.
In June 1999, Valerie was advised she would be receiving one of Australia’s highest honours, an AO, for ‘Service to science, education and the community’.
Seated next to the then governor general at a dinner to mark her award, Valerie eagerly looked forward to an evening of stimulating conversation with someone she had long admired. Until he turned to her and said: ‘My wife likes cooking. Do you like cooking?’
(She doesn’t.)
Valerie’s career achievements did not come easily. She blazed trails at every point, from her time as a young girl reading on the roof of her family home.
For every man who tried to block her or sought to belittle her —and there were a few of them — there was another to help and support her. Chief among those, despite a glitch that she recounts with great honesty, was of course her husband, Robin Wallace.
Another was her father, who strove to keep alive her dream of being a scientist after he found out her school did not have a science laboratory.
Valerie writes:
My subjects were domestic science (cooking) and household management (budgeting and flower arranging). There was little maths and no science. When my father discovered this, he bearded (a suitable word) the Mother Superior in her den and demanded a science laboratory. Yes, she said, if you pay for it. He did.
Alas, St Margaret’s could not find a female teacher.
There were also women who either supported or misunderstood her.
Valerie says at one point she had ‘five wives’ who helped her through her thesis. When she invited her mother to her graduation, she wrote back saying she was glad she had finished being a student and hoped her degree would help Rob and the children.
Valerie says she only began working full time when she was 50 — a time when many people begin to slow down. It sounds exhausting and exhilarating.
‘I carried this new self-confidence from my research in my fifth decade into my sixth,’ she writes.
In the first half of the decade, I designed and taught an inaugural science degree in Health Education at the University of Canberra, became chair of the board of Greenpeace Australia, and went to Nepal. In the second half of the decade, I established a division of Heath Advancement in the ACT Health Authority, managed a national summit on drugs, and developed a workshop program on collective social learning.
By her own account, she was demanding of her students. Younger men felt threatened by a female lecturer while some vulnerable female students were frightened by what she expected of them, which she says was almost certainly too much.
Years later, former students would pay her the greatest compliment any pupil can bestow on a teacher by telling her: ‘That course changed my life.’
Valerie dedicated The Girl on the Roof to her grandchildren, Chris, Sarah, Elliott, and Amon, saying they would ‘live their lives in the world we made’.
Because of her, it is a much better place than it otherwise would have been.
I declare this terrific book officially launched.
Nine decades, one life — a remarkable memoir by an Australian living treasure.
Valerie Brown was a bookish, rebellious child who had made an important discovery when she escaped to the roof of her large family home. As she watched the activities of her family down below, she found that they did not match the ideals her parents had taught to her. Nor did her family’s actions meet the ideals put forward in the books she was reading.
This simple observation led to a lifetime of concern about the damage done to a society when there are gaps between their community’s good intentions and their practices. She and her team delivered pioneering change programs to bridge such gaps — in partnership with a prime minister, each of the three levels of government, four universities, multiple communities, and several activist groups.
Her interests in health and the environment led her to design and deliver initiatives such as the first Australian science degree in health education; change an outdated public health department into the emerging New Public Health; design and deliver the country’s first national drug summit; and establish community health training for doctors and nurses at Tribhuvan University in Nepal. After a stroke in her eighties, she recovered to supervise doctoral students and co-author five books on social change, including the highly successful Tackling Wicked Problems.
Valerie Brown AO is still promoting, discussing, and thinking about positive social changes. After nine decades, she is still that girl on the roof.
WINNER OF THE 2023 ABIA GENERAL NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD
‘The gripping inside story of how Scott Morrison went from miracle man to roadkill. Savva portrays a fatally flawed leader who trashed his government, his party, and his legacy.’
—Laurie Oakes
Between 2013 and 2022, Tony Abbott begat Malcolm Turnbull, who begat Scott Morrison. For nine long years, Australia was governed by a succession of Coalition governments rocked by instability and bloodletting, and consumed with prosecuting climate and culture wars while neglecting policy.
By the end, among his detractors — and there were plenty — Morrison was seen as the worst prime minister since Billy McMahon. Worse even than Tony Abbott, who lasted a scant two years in the job, whose main legacy was that he destroyed Julia Gillard, then himself, and then Turnbull.
Morrison failed to accept the mantle of national leadership, or to deal adequately with the challenges of natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic. He thought reform was a vanity project. He said he never wanted to leave a legacy. He got his wish.
Niki Savva, Australia’s renowned political commentator, author, and columnist, was there for all of it. In The Road to Ruin, she revealed the ruinous behaviour of former prime minister Abbott and his chief of staff, Peta Credlin, that led to the ascension of Turnbull. In Plots and Prayers, she told the inside story of the coup that overthrew Turnbull and installed his conniving successor, Morrison.
Now she lays out the final unravelling of the Coalition at the hands of a resurgent Labor and the so-called teal independents that culminated in the historic 2022 election. With her typical access to key players, and her riveting accounts of what went on behind the scenes, Bulldozed is the unique final volume of an unputdownable and impeccably sourced political trilogy.
‘I don’t hold a hose, mate.’ Scott Morrison, 20 December 2019, on the Black Summer bushfires
‘It’s not a race.’ Scott Morrison, 11 March 2021, on the COVID-19 vaccine rollout
In an enthralling sequel to her bestselling The Road to Ruin, Niki Savva reveals the inside story of a bungled coup that overthrew the Liberal prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and installed a surprise successor, Scott Morrison, who went on to take the party to a miraculous electoral victory.
On 21 August 2018, 35 Liberal MPs cast their vote against Malcolm Turnbull, effectively signalling the end of his leadership. Three days later, the deed was done, and Scott Morrison was anointed prime minister.
Tony Abbott’s relentless campaign of destabilisation, helped along by his acolytes in the parliament and by his powerful media mates, the betrayals of colleagues, and the rise of the religious right — climaxing in Peter Dutton's challenge — all played a part in Turnbull’s downfall.
But so did Turnbull’s own poor political judgement. He was a good prime minister and a terrible politician. The good bits of Malcolm were not enough to make up for the bad Malcolm.
Nevertheless, the sheer brutality of his removal left many Liberals aghast. MPs were traumatised or humiliated by eight days of madness. Men and women cried from sheer anguish. They went through hell, and feared when it was over that they would not make it back — and nor would the Liberal Party. As it turned out, redemption came with Morrison’s unexpected single-handed 2019 election victory.
Turnbull’s road ended in ruins, as it was always bound to and as he always knew it would, as he predicted to Niki Savva less than three years before it happened.
But when his end was imminent, he could not bear to let go. And when it was over, he was defiant, fragile — and, yes — vengeful.
This is the inside story of what happened — and what happened next.
‘There will be no wrecking, no undermining, and no sniping.’
–Tony Abbott, 15 September 2015
Abbott’s performances in the party-room debates on education and climate change had ranged between woeful and pathetic. He sounded desperate, he was inconsistent, and — his colleagues thought — slightly ridiculous. They knew he would never stop going after cheap headlines during soft interviews where he sucked up the oxygen, with revision and division as his calling cards. All they could hope was that people would soon grow tired of listening to him. Normal people might have, but the media grew more and more hysterical, as if a challenge were imminent.
In the original edition of The Road to Ruin, prominent political commentator, author, and columnist for The Australian Niki Savva revealed the ruinous behaviour of former prime minister Tony Abbott and his chief of staff, Peta Credlin. Based on her unrivalled access to their colleagues, and devastating first-person accounts of what went on behind the scenes, Savva painted an unforgettable picture of a unique duo who wielded power ruthlessly but not well.
That edition became a major bestseller, and went on to win an Australian book industry award for the best general non-fiction book of the year.
Now Savva continues where she left off. This updated edition contains a new, 13,500-word final chapter, in which Savva reveals the inner state of the Turnbull government — and the behind-the-scenes jockeying of friends and foes alike. From Christopher Pyne’s career-stalling own goal, to Peter Dutton’s post-Turnbull leadership ambitions, to Tony Abbott’s ramped-up destabilisation campaign, it is, as usual, an unputdownable and impeccably sourced account.
From one of the most senior correspondents in the Canberra Press Gallery comes a rare account of life as a political insider.
Born in a small village in Cyprus, Niki Savva spent her childhood in Melbourne’s working-class suburbs — frontiers where locals were suspicious of olive oil, and Greek kids spoke Gringlish to their parents.
Only a few decades later, despite all the challenges of being a migrant woman in Australia, Savva had risen through the ranks of political journalism at The Australian, and had gone on to head the Canberra bureaus of both the Melbourne Herald Sun and The Age.
Then in 1997, family tragedy struck, and she was forced to reassess her career. In spite of her own Labor convictions, she became Liberal treasurer Peter Costello’s press secretary, a role that she kept for six years before moving on to join John Howard’s staff.
This is one of the few books about Australian political life written by an insider with decades of exposure to its major players. Hilarious, moving, and endlessly fascinating, Savva’s is a story that moves between countries, cultures, careers and, ultimately, political convictions.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 AUSTRALIAN POLITICAL BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ABA BOOKDATA ADULT NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR
The best of Niki Savva’s scene-setting newspaper columns from The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, along with a riveting and deeply informed analysis of Australia’s epoch-making 2025 election.
Labor’s landslide victory on 3 May 2025 wreaked havoc across the political landscape. It triggered ministerial assassinations, trashed reputations, destroyed careers, fractured the Coalition, and threatened to fracture it again. It took the Liberal Party to the brink of extinction and turned Anthony Albanese into a Labor hero.
When the Coalition government was overthrown in 2022 after nine years in office, it was tempting to portray the loss as merely a personal repudiation of Scott Morrison. Then, when opposition leader Peter Dutton torpedoed the referendum on establishing an Indigenous Voice to parliament, his standing as a political leader improved and the prime minister’s nosedived. That was when, according to Niki Savva, the conservative Coalition thought it had the upcoming election in the bag.
But Niki had noticed the ground shifting: the emergence of the teal independents and the long-term threat they represented to the Liberals; the false dawn of Dutton saying no to the Voice referendum; and the overlooked reality, even back in August 2023, that, ‘The 2022 federal election result was no ordinary defeat … It delivered last rites to the broad-church party that Robert Menzies created.’
In her highly popular columns, Niki Savva captured all this and more in her typically uncompromising, penetrating, and prescient way. Now, following on from So Greek, The Road to Ruin, Plots and Prayers, and Bulldozed, she also provides a detailed, considered analysis of what went on behind the scenes, accompanied by her trademark access to important players and eyewitnesses, of an election that transformed Australian politics.
Niki Savva is a highly acclaimed political writer. She was twice political correspondent for The Australian, and headed up the Canberra bureaus of both The Herald Sun and The Age. When family tragedy forced a career change, she became Peter Costello’s press secretary for six years and was then on John Howard’s staff for three. Her work has brought her into intimate contact with Australia’s major political players for more than 40 years. She is a regular columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, and appears on ABC TV’s Insiders.
