Breaking Bread: Loretta Baker, Maitland Mayor

Walking through the city’s art gallery is part of that journey of discovery, not just for what hangs on the walls but for the walls themselves. The gallery occupies the former technical college building, which was constructed more than a century ago.

It is in the gallery’s cafe that I meet Maitland mayor Loretta Baker for lunch. She has a heavy cold and initially covers her mouth with a scarf, which could have muffled what she has to say. But thankfully, the scarf is lowered and an extraordinary story flows.

For just as the city she represents has a rich history that continues to be discovered, so does Loretta Baker. Lately, she’s been learning a lot about her herself and her family, especially her father, Albert Baker.  

“It’s been extraordinary,” Cr Baker says. She explains how her sister has been researching for years their father’s family history, and gradually pieces of the jigsaw have been falling into place. In just the past few weeks, her sister has made contact with Albert Baker’s extended family. Loretta and her siblings have found their father had another surname (which she doesn’t divulge out of respect to the extended family), and his roots can be traced to South America.

“It seems our background is mixed race; Brazil, Portugal and African-American,” Cr Baker says.

“I always knew there was a South American connection, but we never had a name. And he [their father] never told us a thing. We just got on with it. Every now and then, we’d ask. He brought us home black dolls once from Sydney, but just handed them to us. And said nothing. No explanation.

“I feel I always had an identity, but I probably didn’t have a reference point. I now have a reference point. There’s something in you, and you don’t even know why it’s there. But it’s in your genes.”

LORETTA Baker was born in May 1952, the oldest of six children, in Orange. When she was small, the family moved to Cobar, close to the Irish Catholic family of her mother, Dulcie Kitson, and back to where her parents had met.

Dulcie had been married before. After that union ended, she met Albert, who was about 15 years older than her. They wanted to marry, but navigating out of a divorce took ages; Loretta had arrived by then. 

She wasn’t Dulcie’s first child. There were two daughters with the former husband, and they lived with him. Not that Loretta knew for some time.

“What used to happen, we’d go to our grandmother’s house every Sunday for dinner, and these girls were always dropped off there,” she recalls. “We didn’t even know they were our half-sisters. One of them told me at school in the lunch shed that she was my half-sister, and I went home and told my mother. So then she told me.”

Her mother, Loretta says, was “non-judgmental, completely”. It’s a quality she tries to bring to her role as a politician. I ask how that works in party politics; she’s a Labor party member.

“That doesn’t always bode well for me. But that’s why I’m in local government, not in state or federal, where you have to actually take an oppositional role and debate policy, ideology most of the time.”   

Growing up in Cobar, young Loretta was aware she and her siblings had “distinctive looks … We had big Afros”, but she rarely thought about her heritage. She occasionally had to contend with racism. From a house she passed on her way home from school, a boy would call out, “gollywog”. She continued to walk past that house; she had learnt from her father to not give in.   

“I think what he gave us was this confidence. We did well at school. He made sure we were at school every single day of our lives, no matter what. Made sure we all read.”

Baker remains a passionate reader. Her favourite writer is Australian author David Malouf.

“Every time I read a different set of books, I started thinking differently,” she says. “And this is why I think literacy is so important, because it opens up a world.”  

When she left school, Loretta decided to become a nurse. She figured as a nurse she would “make people better”, but within weeks of beginning training, the 17-year-old confronted her first death.

“I was devastated, absolutely devastated,” she says. “I’d never seen someone dead. And I didn’t expect this person to die. And I hadn’t gone into the profession, thinking people would die.”   

The experience was life-defining for her: “You’ve got a window, which is your life, and you shouldn’t waste it.”

Loretta Baker adhered to that belief. She worked as a nurse in a string of centres, including Sydney, Cairns and Perth, having driven with her boyfriend, Greg, and brother from North Queensland to Western Australia via the Top End in a Holden station wagon.

“I guess I wanted to see a bit of the country, and I had this plan I could move around through nursing,” she says.

While working in Cairns, Baker became interested in social justice, as she realised many of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women were disadvantaged. She wanted to be involved in a public health research program in the nearby Aboriginal community of Yarrabah and mentioned she’d like to work there as a nurse.

A couple of years later, when she was in Adelaide, a job came up at Yarrabah, so Baker returned to North Queensland. She found herself working in the hospital, and in uncharted territory for her life experience. During her year there, she treated everything from tropical diseases to gunshot wounds and the effects of alcohol.   

“You learn so much,” she recalls. “It gave me so much confidence when I left, because I’d learnt an extraordinary amount. 

“You’re right there in the thick of it at night. Some nights I was terrified.”

One incident tipped the young nurse over the edge. A man suffering alcohol withdrawal tried to strangle Baker with a telephone cord. She was saved when a kitchen hand hit the attacker over the head with a frying pan.

“It was all pretty surreal. I said, ‘I’m leaving, I’m going’.”

She left Yarrabah “highly politicised”.

“Prior to that, the only thing I’d done was in Perth in an anti-uranium march with Gough Whitlam,” Baker explains. 

“I was angry, and I had this social justice thing. It really made me think. But it also gave me an interest in mental health, and in addiction.”

To better understand the issues that had made her feel out of her depth, Baker studied psychiatric nursing and worked in Orange. She and Greg’s daughter, Stella, was born in Orange, before the family moved to Maitland in the mid-1980s.

Loretta wasn’t keen on the move. Having only driven through the lower Hunter on her way to somewhere else, she thought the place was “putrid”. That view wasn’t improved by her first impressions of Maitland - “coal trucks everywhere”.

“It didn’t seem to have any vibe,” Baker recalls, “but it had those beautiful buildings, which I saw straight away.”

The buildings beguiled Loretta Baker, especially when she crossed the river and saw the historic houses in Lorn. That’s where Baker lives, in a Federation house with a big garden, and surrounded by “a lot of lovely people; I’ve made good friends”.

“It’s like the whole village is connected, so you never feel lonely,” says Cr Baker, who is single, having separated from Greg about 20 years ago.

Once in Maitland, Loretta Baker secured a job in community health, and she remained in that sector for more than 30 years, until a couple of months after being elected the mayor in September.   

“I miss nursing,” she says. “It’s been my life since I was 17. But the thing I enjoyed about it always was the people, and I’m enjoying the people in this job as well.”

Community nursing, particularly her concerns about how those who struggle socially and economically often have poor health, led to Loretta Baker’s local government career.

She had established an outreach project at a local caravan park. The project included a needle exchange program, which had stirred up controversy. Some politicians and local councillors called for it to be removed. Baker refused, knowing the program was helping reduce incidence of harm, including needle-stick injuries to children: “They were operating on a political level; I wasn’t.”

The debate fuelled her thoughts about entering local politics, to try and make a difference from within. She had already joined the Labor Party, in opposition to Australia’s involvement in the Iraq war. 

Then a retiring councillor, Tony Keating, encouraged her to run for council, and “he paved the way” for Baker’s preselection.

Loretta Baker became a Maitland City councillor in 2008. Last year, she was elected as the city’s first female mayor. To Cr Baker, the significance of that is sinking in.

“I’m realising it is an opportunity for a different approach, and part of it is probably because I’m female, part of it is because I’m me. It’s good to break that ceiling. Let’s hope it gets broken again and again.”

Cr Baker is keen to help guide the re-emergence of the city’s centre, while still retaining and restoring its heritage buildings.

“I’d like a bit of soul, some sort of vibe, in the CBD,” she says. When asked if Maitland is lacking that, she responds, “I think it’s getting it in spades.”

The mayor sees the recently completed Riverlink building in High Street as a big step in reconnecting the city with the Hunter flowing through its heart and soul.

As for her own future, Loretta Baker is hoping for more time to simply listen to music, read, be with friends, and to immerse herself in the garden, so she can tame the plants and clear her head.

As she works to be “a force for positive change” in Maitland, Loretta Baker looks forward to seeing where life takes her. 

While she’s finding out more about her family tree, the 66-year-old believes that can’t tell her whole story. Loretta Baker’s grown into the person she is through all that she’s done and learnt. 

“I feel like I’ve always had an identity,” Baker says. “But that’s probably been shaped more by my life experiences.”