Entertainment Industry Babette was a convener of the Opera House Younger Set, a fund-raising group for what was then a vacant site on Bennelong Point. Babette learned the business side of the performing arts through her job with director Stefan Haag at the
Elizabethan Theatre Trust. She was
Harry M. Miller’s production assistant for
Hair, and worked on the sets of three Australian films including
Silver City and Year of Living Dangerously. Moving to television, she worked for several years at TCN9, where she became in-house producer of special events. She helped create a women’s talk show and worked on many programs, including what she called “Friday Night goes to the dogs” – the Don Lane variety show that switched almost seamlessly from musical items to greyhound races at Harold Park. Her next big job was marketing manager at Hoyts Cinemas, where she made a point of championing Australian movies.
Australian Historian After the birth of her son in 1977, Babette took up a family tree that her father had begun: family lore suggested that there was a convict somewhere. Following the maternal line, she found that there was indeed a convict, Susannah Watson. She was lucky enough to discover Susannah’s letters to one of the daughters she was forced to leave behind in England. Convicted for stealing to feed her family, Susannah made the most of life in Australia, which she described as a plentiful country. She lived to old age and her Australian-born son Charles Isaac Watson founded newspapers. Susannah’s letters are now in the Mitchell Library. Babette's first book,
A Cargo of Women, grew from this discovery that her great-great-grandmother, Susannah Watson, was a
convict transported to Australia in 1829.
A Cargo of Women is an original work, combining Susannah’s story with the lives of 99 other prisoners on the
Princess Royal. Scholarship and narrative flair are the hallmarks of Babette Smith’s work. For her, convict women were neither whores nor society’s victims, but individuals doing their best in very tough times. In
Australia’s Birthstain she examined the role of homophobia in attitudes to male convicts; in
The Luck of the Irish she followed a cohort of male prisoners.
Bar Association, Mediation & Other Roles Babette served as chief executive of the NSW Bar Association from 1993 to 1997, the first woman to do so. She worked as a mediator for Legal Aid, Strata Titles and Farm Debt. She was also an official visitor for Corrective Services NSW, working out of Silverwater and Lithgow jails. The
Mitchell Library at the State Library of New South Wales holds two collections of her papers (25 boxes) covering her research, writing and employment.
Jeannine Baker interviewed Smith in 2018, with the recording held by the
National Film and Sound Archive. == Honours & Recognition ==