Australian Dictionary of Biography

Gabby Horan, no date

Supplied by Horan family

Gabrielle Brenda Phyllis (Gabby) Horan (1917–1999), radio commentator and community activist, was born on 6 August 1917 at Coorparoo, Brisbane, sixth and youngest child of Queensland-born parents Elizabeth Christina Nurcombe, née Byriel, later Hayward (d. 1953), and her husband Arthur James Nurcombe (d. 1936), drover. The women in Gabby’s family all died tragically. One sister, Ethel, had lived for only four weeks in 1907. Another, Thelma, would take her own life in 1940. Her mother, although fortunate to win first prize of £6,000 in the Golden Casket lottery in 1944, died as a result of a car accident in 1953. The remaining sister, Florence, was driving the car but survived, only to die in a house fire in 1965.

After attending Hemmant, Brisbane (1928–29); Upper Yarraman, Toowoomba region (1929–30); and Brisbane South Intermediate (1930–31) State schools, Gabrielle lived at Jundah, south-west of Longreach. She would later recall herself at age sixteen as ‘frightened, scared and incredibly shy’ (Parker 1967, 20). On 2 October 1934 at the Catholic Presbytery, Longreach, she married Hector Michael (‘Jock’) Hammond, a grazier nineteen years her senior. The marriage had an unpromising start when Hammond was successfully sued for breach of contract to marry another woman.

Initially, the couple lived with Jock’s mother, Anthea, and a sister, Frances, on Munroe, the family property near Quilpie. Over the next decade, they had ten separate addresses in Queensland and South Australia. They had no children and in 1940 Jock adopted an infant, also called Anthea; Gabrielle was not named a co-adopter until 1943. In World War II she worked in a maintenance hangar inspecting military aircraft engines. By 1945 she was a clerk, living in Brisbane. She divorced Hammond that year and on 27 September at the Albert Street Methodist Church, Brisbane, married Lieutenant James (Jim) Thomas Wallace Horan (1912–1990), Australian Imperial Force. Young Anthea remained with Hammond’s family.

Jim Horan’s army service continued until 1949, during which time Gabrielle lived near Pentland, North Queensland; at Katoomba, New South Wales; and in Darwin and Melbourne. From 1950 the family was domiciled at Flaxton, near Montville, Queensland, where Gabby operated a pineapple farm in partnership with her mother. In the mid-1950s the Horans moved to Broadbeach on the Gold Coast; their elder son, Paul, recalled his mother working at Lennon’s Broadbeach Hotel there. By 1962 the family had settled in Brisbane. Jim became a salesman for Century Insurance Co. Ltd and Gabby a home economist for Simpson Distributors Ltd (Simpson Pope Holdings Ltd from 1963) advising consumers shopping in J. B. Chandler’s electrical appliance stores on hire purchase arrangements.

Mrs Gabrielle Horan refused to be known as Mrs James Horan, as was then conventional. She began to push into local and State politics, a passion that would see her involved in formal and informal campaigning for the rest of her life. Chandler had formed the Citizen’s Municipal Organisation in the 1930s to field candidates in local government elections. As a member of the CMO (1962–67 and from 1969) and the Liberal Civic Party (1967–69), Horan stood unsuccessfully for the Brisbane City Council in 1967 and 1970. Earlier, she had joined the Liberal Party of Australia’s Queensland division and in 1963 contested the Legislative Assembly seat of South Brisbane, losing to the Australian Labor Party incumbent. She held office in both the CMO and Liberal Party.

Although a failed political candidate, Horan had notable success as a community leader. From October 1963 she presided over the Queensland Housewives’ Association. One of her early initiatives was to introduce a system of QHA seals of approval awarded to producers of wares she assessed as good value and quality. Conversely, she led consumer boycotts of products she considered overpriced. Ruling the association with steely tenacity, in 1971 she attempted to expel members who criticised her administration, but the Supreme Court of Queensland reinstated their memberships. Later that year she famously took seventeen members of the State executive to a Toowoomba branch meeting to oust a rival to her leadership. She was to maintain her grip on the QHA for thirty-six years, but its influence began to wane as greater numbers of women entered the paid workforce and fewer identified as housewives. For her services to the association, she was appointed OBE (1981).

Early in her presidency, Horan had begun expanding her community activism to include cultural matters, astutely using the media to publicise her campaigns. In July 1964 alone newspapers reported her views that judges and barristers should dispense with their outmoded wigs in court; that a theatrical censorship board should be established to curb immorality on the stage; and that women should have the same rights as men to jury service. The publicity gained her an appearance that month on BTQ-7’s television current affairs program, Meet the Press.

Horan’s bold commentary on Meet the Press led to an invitation in August to conduct a daily phone-in program, Ask Gabby Horan, on radio station 4BH. Talkback radio was just beginning, and her outspoken, opinionated style suited this broadcasting innovation. Despite her ‘nasal, monotonous’ delivery (Johnston 1970, 11), her program achieved high ratings and made her one of Brisbane’s best-known personalities. Most of her callers were housewives airing their problems as consumers; she advocated on their behalf, endorsed products and services she considered good, and condemned those she did not. In 1966 she transferred to 4BK-AK and added a half-hour morning commentary, Gabby Horan Speaks, to her afternoon talkback show. From 1971 she also sat on the State Consumer Affairs Council. She returned to 4BH in 1972 with a morning program, The Gabby Horan Hour.

By the 1970s tensions were arising in Horan’s advocacy role. She was accused in 1973 of receiving $3,000 from a company she promoted. In May 1974, while on air, she criticised a comment by Frank Crean, the Federal treasurer, about taxation policy. When she refused to allow him to respond, 4BH recorded a statement by him and played it at the beginning of her subsequent broadcast. Claiming she had been denied freedom of speech, she attempted to rally listeners to her cause, but the station shut the broadcast down. She resigned, ending her career on commercial radio, although she took an off-air role with 4IP as a community affairs director and later dabbled in community radio. In the early 1970s she published a regular Sunday newspaper column, ‘Home Truths,’ and hosted Gabby, a television discussion program, on Brisbane’s TVQ-0.

Anti-union activism became one of Horan’s preoccupations. Her efforts included organising (1981) a street march protesting against strikes and addressing (1985) a public forum criticising electrical workers who interrupted power supplies during a prolonged dispute with the South East Queensland Electricity Board. Labor members of State parliament, who had long been detractors, responded with increasingly personal attacks on her.

Horan’s style did not generally lend itself to collaboration, but she was a formidable ally if an organisation’s values aligned with her own. Although staunchly opposed to abortion, she undertook publicity for the Family Planning Association of Queensland, as she believed in managing overpopulation by controlling birth rates. Other community organisations with which she was associated included the Toowong branch of the Catholic Women's League, the Asthma Foundation of Queensland (councillor from 1968, director from 1973, and sometime vice-president), and the ladies’ committee of St Vincent’s Home for Children, Nudgee (honorary vice-president).

On 11 April 1999 Horan died in her Auchenflower home and was buried in Pinnaroo lawn cemetery. Her sons, Anthony and Paul, her daughter, Gabrielle, and her adopted daughters, Anthea and Elizabeth, survived her. After inauspicious beginnings, she had entered public life late and become one of the few women who were successful in the emerging field of Australian talkback radio. She carved an important place in Queensland’s history as an outspoken moral and political conservative who, nonetheless, adamantly championed women’s social equality and unashamedly used her commentary in media, particularly radio, to promote her causes.