See the other face of ANU vice-chancellor Genevieve Bell

She has one of the toughest jobs in management, hacking $100 million out of the pay bill of a big national institution with a unionised and opinionated workforce. Herding cats, you might think, would be easier.

Sometimes it seems like the university's main union has pinned a painted target on her back. She might feel like it's been nailed there.

Even feminists at her own university have had a go at her. When she complained that "sexism is alive and well and living in Australia", a group of "ANU gender experts" said she was "weaponising gender".

Partly, it's a matter of style and personality. Where her predecessor Brian Schmidt exuded ease and avuncular bonhomie, she can look awkward, particularly in unscripted events in front of cameras, like being grilled by senators.

And yet. And yet. There is another side to the uneasy way Professor Bell appears in public. Image and reality don't always match - books and covers, etc.

"It's not me," she told The Canberra Times.

She herself likens the way she is sometimes portrayed to a distorting mirror at a circus - what she calls a "fun house mirror's projection of me".

And it is true that the person in her office, sitting cross-legged in a chair, high-heeled boots tucked up on the seat under her, is a million miles from the austere image outside.

She is much more unfiltered than many important people, particularly politicians. There is an air of authenticity which more media-conscious people don't have. Where they (or their media advisors) pre-weigh every answer to calculate its effects, she seems to answer directly.

"Do you regret not having children?" "No," comes back without hesitation. Other interviewees would have simply found the question impertinent and batted it away.

In her own office in the ANU's Chancelry Building, she comes over as much warmer and open to challenge than her public image indicates.

(By the way, it remains a mystery why the ANU spells chancellery that way.)

She does get hurt by criticism: "Is it nice to see yourself denigrated in the media?" she asks and answers her own question: "No, not especially.

"Does it concern my friends and my family about me? Sure."

But she does get irritated: "I'm waiting to be complimented in a newspaper," she said in what is the first interview she's given to The Canberra Times in the 18 months of asking, since she's been vice-chancellor.

She does have a much tougher task than that of her predecessor who took over in 2016, before the pandemic and the tighter finances that followed it.

Her mental defence against what has been a barrage of criticism as she has tried to bring costs under control is her belief that she and the ANU are now on the right course.

"I was raised to be really clear about why you do things. I was raised to believe that your work should make the world different through the dint of your labour."

And she has friends and a partner around her. He is another academic whom she keeps out of the spotlight.

She is a self-confessed nerd: "I am so unbelievably, tragically nerdy."

She can - and does - expand at great length about the history of typewriters, for example, and how the QWERTY keyboard came into being. On subjects like the relation between human beings and technology, she is fascinating.

Her current reading is - unsurprisingly - books about technology: "I'm reading two books about the establishment or the attempt to establish an overland telegraph line from Alaska to Russia, and then I imagine under the ocean."

She said she liked spy novels, but you get the feeling that nerdy stuff grabs her harder.

In the middle of an insomniac night, she said she sometimes goes online and surfs the Trove library of newspapers. "When I don't sleep, and sometimes that happens, Trove is a thing of beauty. And I can spend hours lost in 19th-century newspapers, happily reading my way through all kinds of things."

Not only does she read the 19th-century articles, but she also corrects the transcriptions. "I told you", she said. "It really doesn't get much nerdier."

She does try to switch off from the job, literally switch off. "At a certain point in time in the evening, my phone is designed to just turn off all the apps and all the notifications and all the beeping.

"And then, when it turns itself back on again in the morning, I get half an hour's worth of the news of the world, which may not always be the kindest way to wake up, but I do like a bit of the BBC and NPR."

"I try to go to bed at 10. I try to get to sleep at 10. I try to set a regular waking-up time. It doesn't always work. Winter makes that harder. These days, I wake up anywhere between 4 and 7."

Her love affair with the relationship between technology and human beings has shaped her career.

She was born to the Australian anthropologist Diane Bell in Sydney. She keeps her age to herself - and off Wikipedia, for example - because a date of birth would enable malicious people to find out too much. But she is in her late 50s.

She was then raised in Melbourne, Canberra and the Northern Territory in what she called a "peripatetic childhood" which gave her "a real appreciation for the range of the Australian experience. So big cities but also I'm partial to a bit of red dirt".

"I came to Canberra in the 1970s, and that was its own amazingness. I spent part of my childhood on this campus when I was a little girl.

"And then I spent some of my childhood in the Northern Territory, and those were really important years for me. I grew up on some of my mother's field sites in central and northern Australia, and so I spent time in Aboriginal communities."

She moved to the United States for her degree at Bryn Mawr College, and then a doctorate at Stanford, the university of Silicon Valley, where she taught before moving to the Intel computer-chip manufacturer.

Her job as "director of user experience research" was to study the relationship between people and machines for a big company seeking to make machines more human-friendly - and, so, sellable.

"She may still see herself as 'just a feral kid from Australia'," a New York Times profile in 2014 said. "But for Intel, she personifies something grander: the company's aspirations to be regarded as more than just a chip maker.

"Reverberating down the hall comes an emphatic Australian voice and the rhythmic thwack-thwack of pointy-heeled boots on carpet. And then, Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist who is Intel's resident tech intellectual, materializes - auburn-haired, big-ringed, trailing clouds of Chloé perfume."

Some things haven't changed, like a love of shoes.

"I do like a good pair of shoes. I own a lot of them," she said - but "considerably less than (Imelda) Marcos".

She describes shoes for women as "an aesthetic pleasure. I think they're an extension of our creativity as well, whereas boys: is it black or brown, and that's it".

Some shoes are just comfy and some are to make her feel different, like thick heels, which "in my case, make me look taller because I'm actually quite short and sometimes being taller is helpful".

She has three favourites: sneakers; a pair of Rossis ("When I have those on, I know I am driving a four-wheel-drive vehicle on a dirt road with a horizon ahead of me, and that is always a happy place.")

"And then I have a pair of shoes that I call my lucky shoes, that are a pair of shoes that were given to me a very long time ago by someone that I worked with."

She used to wear them when she "spent 20 years in America on stages with 6000 people in the audience in massive venues" (so disputing the idea that she doesn't like public appearances).

And her sneakers aren't common or garden ones.

At a recent official function at the ANU, she wore Golden Goose. For those who know, Golden Goose sneakers are as much a style item as a Gucci bag. Their combination of deliberately distressed look but expensive brand identity is very Silicon Valley. To the cognoscenti, they say casual but moneyed.

After spending nearly 20 years in the Valley, she returned to Australia and brought back more than just "the rhythmic thwack-thwack of pointy-heeled boots on carpet".

America imbued her with the sheer thrill of being at the epicentre of a technological revolution. "They used to joke about the fact that they lived in the future and visited the present on weekends," she said.

"There was something about this constant possibility that was extraordinary for me. There was a sort of speed and an urgency that was very different from where I've been in the universities."

It was a very male world.

"Intel had a vast majority of its population who were men, and there was a lot of robust conversation as a result of it. And they were kind of hard-charging. A lot of people would argue in meetings about things really robustly and really aggressively."

"Because there were really fierce arguments, you also had to work out how do you bring people back together again when you're done."

The head of ANU said that universities move "at a slightly different speed" - by which she did not mean faster. "Some things we should iterate our way to a little bit more quickly."