Lady Sonia McMahon

SONIA McMahon, loyal wife of one of Australia's least-admired prime ministers, will always be remembered for that dress which wowed and scandalised the White House in 1971.

She wore the daring dress - split both sides to the armpits though held together by rhinestones about 2cm apart from the waist up - to a dinner for her husband hosted by President Richard Nixon.

In later years, the elegant Sydney socialite and charity worker became more known as a mother - of actor Julian McMahon.

Lady Sonia McMahon, who died on Friday, aged 77, was born Sonia Rachel Hopkins on August 1, 1932.

Her father was a Sydney textile merchant who also owned a property near Orange while her mother was independently wealthy.

After attending posh Sydney schools, she worked as an occupational therapist before becoming a paint company color consultant, having a stint in New York with the Australian News and Information Bureau and then joining 20th Century Fox as a production assistant, a job which took her to Jamaica for the filming of `A high wind in Jamaica'.


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She'd joined the Young Liberals at 18, though that was for the social life.

By the time she met William McMahon, then Labor and National Service Minister, in April 1965, she'd had several serious relationships and, as a 20-year-old, been engaged and jilted.

McMahon said it was love at first sight. Eight months later they married. She was 33 and he was 57.

The blonde, attractive wife did the career of the little bachelor, about whom baseless rumours of his sexuality circulated, no harm.

They had three children - Melinda, Julian and, in 1971 after McMahon became prime minister, Deborah. Margaret Fisher was the only other wife of a serving Australian PM to give birth.

In 1966, when Harold Holt succeeded Robert Menzies, McMahon became treasurer and deputy Liberal Party leader and in 1969, under John Gorton, foreign affairs minister.

In March 1971 he ousted Gorton and went to The Lodge for a difficult 21 months before Gough Whitlam ended the long Liberal reign. As prime minister's wife, Sonia McMahon was loyal and careful.

She didn't have a separate intellectual life like her immediate predecessor, Bettina Gorton; nor did she fashion a parallel career like her successor, the larger-than-life Margaret Whitlam.

Journalists were infuriated by her refusal to comment on anything even vaguely political.

"When Bill was PM, they called me a dumb blonde because I felt it wasn't my place to be making statements that might seem slightly political,'' she recalled.

When Germaine Greer sneered in 1972 that she was the product of suppressed Australian women, she sniffed back: "Women's lib is becoming old hat''.

She totally supported her husband, even making the "huge sacrifice'' of leaving her small children in Sydney to be with him in Canberra.

Nor was she altogether unpolitical. Particularly before her husband became PM, she'd often attend informal political dinners and was sometimes used as a go-between.

She and her husband discussed everything.

"I'd been around the world with him as treasurer, then minister for foreign affairs, and all the business is done around the coffee tables and dining rooms and I was able on these occasions to pass on a bit of intelligence,'' she said.

An example, which she told Susan Mitchell for Stand by your man, a study of three PMs' wives: "Once we went to Germany to borrow some money for Australia and I was seated next to the host. Bill was at the other end of the table.

"I just smiled and smiled and while listening to the conversation I realised that we could borrow more money for much less interest than they were declaring.

"I got hold of Bill over coffee and told him to go for it, which of course he did. So just from my eavesdropping I actually saved the country a considerable amount of money.''

She was calm in apparent crisis, like when a carload of young men drove to a Lane Cove hairdresser to "kidnap'' her.

They were university students who intended to take the PM's wife back to campus and ransom her for the Children's Hospital.

She told them she didn't have time to be kidnapped, but offered $10 for the hospital. McMahon was phoned and approved, the money was handed over and the students departed, with police taking no action. Sonia, once her hair was done, went shopping.

That story only came out years later for she was always, apart from that dress, unobtrusive.

It was the PM who chose the dress, as he regularly did.

Nixon was bowled over, some White House social writers declared it scandalous and the Australian media had a field day. However, the dress was not as daring as it seemed for she wore a flesh-covered body suit under it.

She said later: "It certainly made an impact. Suddenly the world knew where Australia was.''

McMahon said people wanted to see him so they "could have a squiz at Sonia''.

Neil Brown, a future Liberal deputy leader, had a different take: "She towered over her diminutive husband and her elegance and good looks stood in sharp contrast to the decrepit gnome-like figure beside her and simply added to his comic appearance.''

This sort of thing, she said, mostly came from people who were prejudiced, didn't know him, or both.

What hurt her most were claims that they only had Debbie to boost his election prospects.

Like most PM's wives, she left The Lodge with mixed feelings - relief for herself, disappointment for her husband. It had been "like living in a glasshouse'' and she'd felt she was "an appendage''.

McMahon stayed on as an MP until 1982 and died, aged 80, in 1988.

Sonia soon stopped being an appendage.

She worked in the fashion business for big French names, Christian Dior and Louis Feraud, and managed the family property which bred poll hereford cattle and merino sheep.

She was a charity worker, particularly for hospitals, and, still glamorous in her 70s, was one of the best-known figures on the Sydney social scene.

Nearly 20 years after the White House visit, she wore a replica of that dress - the original is in Sydney's Powerhouse Museum - in a cabaret skit for charity.

There was a rupture, soon healed, with Julian when he dropped out of university to model and act.

In 2005, Julian was the unwitting cause of another example of his mother's sang froid.

She went to a cocktail party for cast members of the superhero movie Fantastic Four, in which Julian played the evil Dr Doom. Suddenly a candle set fire to her boa.

American Michael Chiklis, another of the movie's stars, ripped the boa off and put the fire out.

"I say to her: 'Are you okay','' Chiklis later told an American television show.

"And she turns to me with a martini, never spills a drop, and says 'Why wouldn't I be?'

"And I say 'Well you were on fire' and she said 'No, no. That was my boa'."

Her health deteriorated in her late 70s. She was seriously injured in a fall on a yacht in 2009 and battled cancer.

Sonia McMahon may have been an appendage in the glasshouse Lodge. But she was cool, capable, energetic and, above all, a loyal and loving partner in an unlikely marriage which, a year after Bill died, she said was "as close as I could ever hope to get to perfection''.