Feminist protest and maternity at Pine Gap Women’s Peace Camp, Australia 1983 (original) (raw)

Feminist protest and maternity at Pine Gap women’s peace camp, Australia 1983

Alison Bartlett

Women’s Studies, M202, School of Social &r Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Hwy, Crawley, Western Australia 6007, Australia

A R T I C L E I N F O

Available online 11 November 2010

S Y N O P S I S

In November 1983, eight hundred women converged in the central Australian desert to stage a two-week protest against the presence of the U.S. military installation at Pine Gap. Part of a global women’s protest against militarism and the dangers of nuclear war keenly felt in the early 1980s, I argue that in its organisational practices and ideological conflicts this event can be regarded as a microcosm of second-wave Australian feminism. In this paper I look at the function of maternity. While Pine Gap is often publicly remembered for its lesbian presence, when mothers became protestors their political agency was often recognised at the cost of their maternity. And yet maternalism was a major discursive argument for the protest. Drawing on newspapers and newsletters, pillowcases and poetry, mothers and memory, this paper seeks to create a sense of the controversial place of maternity, its uses and limits, in this particular event of 1980s feminism.
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Introduction

In November 1983, around 800 women from the coastal cities, regional and remote communities of Australia converged just outside of Alice Springs, a small town in the central Australian desert, where they staged a two-week camp to protest against the presence of a United States military installation at the site, known as Pine Gap. Organised by a coalition of women’s peace groups called Women for Survival, the Pine Gap Women’s Peace Camp caught the nation’s attention through the spectacle of the hundreds of women in the desert carrying on their non-violent antics - singing to policemen, holding hands, weaving the fence with flowers, photographs, ribbons and messages, taking tea on the lawns, and performing street theatre. In addition to these decorous acts of civil disobedience, they also broke into the military base, carried off the gates, spray-painted street signs, faced lines of police and went to gaol for trespass, had an organised telex system and regular media briefings, and camped in the desert heat for two weeks and more. This women’s peace camp at Pine Gap was Australia’s response to contemporaneous northern hemisphere campaigns by women against militarism and the pressing dangers of nuclear war being keenly felt in the early 1980s. The most famous of these was the Greenham Common

Women’s Peace Camp in Britain, which set up permanent camp outside the US Air Base at Greenham Common near Newbury in 1981 for over a decade, reaching its height in population when 35,000 women held hands and “embraced the base” around its nine mile perimeter in December 1982 (Roseneil, 1995, p. 101). While Greenham Common is iconised in both feminist memory and public culture, the Australian protest is barely remembered or documented despite being the biggest single action of 1980s Australian feminism. This research seeks firstly to place the event within an international frame and to restore its place in Australian feminist memory. Indeed, in its organisational practices and ideological conflicts the peace camp can be regarded as emblematic of second-wave Australian feminism as it emerged from the groundswell of the women’s liberation movement; as such, the second aim of my research is to offer a reading of the event as symptomatic of feminist debates as they were played out in Australia. In this article, I have chosen to focus on one aspect: the function of maternity, its uses and limits as both ideology and lived practice.

Remembering feminist activism

Recording and critical reflection of feminist activism of the 1970s and 1980s has recently been buoyed by a new urgency

as its pioneers age and public memory fades. Accounts by individuals like Susan Brownmiller’s (2000) In our time: Memoir of a revolution or collective projects like Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow’s (1998) exemplary The feminist memoir project: Voices from women’s liberation seek to address both factors, reminding readers of the conditions through which the women’s movement emerged and the sheer excitement of creating women’s agency, while also drawing attention to the politics of collective memory, its incompleteness and contradictions. Historical accounts from leading Australian feminists like Marilyn Lake’s (1999) Getting equal: The history of Australian feminism, Jean Curthoys’ (1997) Feminist amnesia: The wake of women’s liberation and Gisela Kaplan’s (1996) The meagre harvest: The Australian women’s movement 1950-1990 assert their authority as public histories of Australian feminism, although Henderson (2006, p. 18), argues that the “largely textual and personal” histories of Australian feminism are in many ways constrained by their chosen method of representation and suggests that cultural memory draws on a much broader array of products. “New” social movement theory has also impacted on the ways available to reflect on feminist activism, as in the work of Verity Burgmann (2003) on Australian social movements, Sarah Maddison’s (2008) account of Australian collective feminist identity, and Cheryl Hercus’ (2005) account of thriving feminism in Townsville in Australia’s far north. Burgmann (2003, p. 99) notes the similarity between nonviolent direct action favoured by social movements of the 1970s-1980s and the “militant styles” of the first-wave feminists at the turn of the century, while Sandra Grey and Marian Sawer similarly stress a sense of continuity from firstwave feminists, noting that “dissent events’ have been important for women’s movements (as for other social movements) in attracting media attention and getting a message out to a broader public” (Grey and Sawer, 2008), p. 3. It is noteworthy, then, that the Pine Gap event is absent from any of these published accounts of the movement.

Pine Gap was one of a number of women’s peace camps set up around the world to draw attention to the global uncertainty and fear around nuclear weapons (Cockburn, 2007, p. 174) and yet, it remains largely unrecorded, lodged mostly in personal memory and archival boxes. Its sense of itself as part of an international movement is evidenced by its chosen dates, which were designed to coincide with the anniversary of the armistice for World War I on Remembrance Day (11 November), the anniversary of the death of American anti-nuclear campaigner Karen Silkwood (November 13), and the arrival of President Reagan’s Pershing cruise missiles at Greenham Air Base on November 14. The Greenham Common Peace Camp provided direct inspiration for the Pine Gap event, and there was a direct movement of women, ideas, theories and politics between Australia and Greenham: messages of support and solidarity were sent to Pine Gap from the Greenham women, and a sign erected on the fence in the desert at Pine Gap military base proclaimed “Greenham Women Are Everywhere”. The British protest has been profusely recorded and remembered as part of national and feminist political history (for books alone see Cook & Kirk, 1983; Harford & Hopkins, 1984; Slough, 1988; Liddington, 1989, Junor & Howse, 1995; Roseneil, 1995, 2000; Kippin, 2001). It has websites, online exhibitions (at the Imperial War

Museum), memorials, museum presence and a wealth of innovative research that registers the event as globally significant and enduring in public memory. In contrast, the Australian protest exists either in fragile personal spaces or stored in university basements.

Pine Gap is also absent from work specifically on women’s anti-war or peace activism, which tends to concentrate on women in preference to feminist activism (Mikula, 2005; Cockburn, 2007) indicating some ongoing uncertainty or discomfit around the relation between feminism and peace (see also Murray, 2010). Lynne Jones notes some of the complexities between the feminist and peace movements in the northern hemisphere in 1983:

Some women feel that by working on peace issues we reinforce the stereotyped role of woman from which we are trying to escape - woman as “mother to the world”, conciliator, mopper-upper of men’s troubles … For others it is simply a feeling that mixed groups (of men and women) are dealing with this issue, but not with rape, abortion, day-care and so on, and that therefore feminists should give these issues a priority because nobody else will. (Jones, 1983, p. 3)

On the other hand, Jones notes that some women “felt compelled to act because of the traditional [mothering] roles in which they found themselves” (Jones, 1983, p. 4), which impacted on the kinds of strategies they employed but also meant they formed groups in which they were accepted and valued as mothers rather than challenged by feminist critiques of the patriarchal family and heterosexuality. This apparent division between maternity and feminist ideals is typical of many accounts (Carter, 1992; Strange, 1990; Pierson, 1987). Maternity and feminism are mooted as twin factors in the emergence of the women’s peace movement in Australia in the 1980s by Murray (2006), and yet they don’t appear as theoretically divisive as elsewhere, and seem to play out quite compatibly at Pine Gap as I will argue. Murray’s account of the second Australian women’s peace camp at Cockburn Sound in Western Australia a year after Pine Gap is significant in documenting the event for the public record. Murray contextualises this second camp as part of a legacy of the women’s peace movement, and an emanation of a particularly local concern with US warships docking at Fremantle harbour, however I want to position the women’s peace camp at Pine Gap as an event generated at a particular time in response to international events and in terms of specifically feminist methods of organisation and protest.

Reading protest

To some extent, histories are necessarily partial and selective, dependent on a range of institutional privileges and access to resources but also on the right “moment” in which the recent past can be considered as a valuable topic of history. A 2009 exhibition, Remembering Pine Gap, hosted by the Jessie Street National Women’s Library and held in the State Parliament in Sydney would indicate that time has come, and yet the lack of published material limits the capacity for the event to “stick” in cultural memory. To remedy this, I propose to “read” the Pine Gap protest as a

cultural event which, as Henderson (2006, p. 18) suggests, can provide a valuable supplement to the textual record of Australian feminist history.

The ephemeral nature of this protest means that its traces are materially precarious, widely spread across the nation, and challenging to piece together. In the archives of university libraries, state archives, as well as volunteer-run feminist libraries and individuals’ storage, there lie folders of carbon-copied correspondence, roneoed newsletters, minutes, telegrams, telexes, lists, postcards, photographs, song sheets, newspaper cuttings, cartoons, personal scrapbooks, badges, stencils, banners, pillowcases, a thesis, and some formal interviews. There is a cassette taped on site with protest songs, some video footage, and a set of storyboards containing photographs and commentary deposited with the Jessie Street Library. There is a book of “poetry and notes” published by a now defunct small press (Poussard, 1984) and a slim self-published volume of images (WAAGV); there is a chapter in two books by women who were at the event (Somerville, 1999; Coxsedge, 2007); and there is a radio program produced for the twentieth anniversary (Kelham, 2003). And there are memories, of those who were and were not present at the event. I have not conducted formal interviews however I have emailed and listened to participants and organisers, and pored over personal memorabilia. All of these materials contribute to the researching of this event, however they also herald the impossibility of being able to construct a coherent, authentic and authoritative narrative about it. In choosing to “read” the protest as a cultural event, I aim to circumvent the drive to make “sense” of the primary material and possibly diminish its richness and contradictions; instead I consider Pine Gap to represent a microcosm of Australian feminist issues and I draw on this diverse array of sources as “texts” to focus on a particular issue: the function of maternity. In this way I follow Rachel Blau DuPlessis (2006), p. 47 in looking for “collectivity, heterogeneity, positionality, and materiality …[to] buoy the essay - give it the density of texture, the sense of implication”. The women’s movement “did change culture”, DuPlessis (2006, p. 49), reminds us, “and still has the capacity fundamentally to call social and cultural arrangements into question” including the arrangement of the academic essay, for which she is renown. Buoyed by her legacy, and scaffolded by academic analysis, this paper offers a reading of - among other things - pillowcases and poetry, the Sunday tabloids and my mum’s memory, to create a sense of the sticky place of maternity, its uses and limits, in this particular event of 1980s feminism in Australia. It is a symptomatic reading of Pine Gap in November 1983 as available through its material remnants.

The place of maternity

To read the Pine Gap protest for the way maternity functions is in many ways perverse, as the protest is most likely to be remembered for its lesbian presence; indeed, a recent documentary broadcast on free-to-air television directly attributes the reputation of Alice Springs as a “lesbian haven” to the influx of lesbian women for the 1983 peace camp (Dare, 2007). Whether lesbian or straight, the exclusive presence of so many women in one place at one time was threatening to the small conservative township, and part of the media strategy for the protestors was to defuse the focus on lesbians by foregrounding the mothers, grandmothers,
and nuns participating in the protest (so for example the title of one feature article was “Grandmother tells why I went to Pine Gap” (Richards, 1983)). This was a tactic that presumably “normalised” such a population of women for the benefit of conservative onlookers through the symbolic value of mothering. It would not have mattered whether the mothers or grandmothers (or nuns) were lesbian, as maternity confers a socially agreed moral value that exonerates the threat posed by lesbians (in choosing a sexuality that excludes men and therefore threatens the heteronormativity on which patriarchy rests). Some protestors reflected that this campaign did a disservice to the many lesbians present in not honouring their presence and in upholding the discrimination implicit in a culture of compulsory heterosexuality (Merilees, 1984). These reactions mirror the debates and conflicts of the women’s movement internationally at the time (see Onlywomen Press, 1981), however maternity also occupied an invidious position in feminism, as pioneering writers like Adrienne Rich (1976,1979)(1976,1979) divested it of the natural, the sacred and the sacrificial to become “bondage” and “institution” of patriarchy; see also Bartlett (2000). As it played out at this protest event, however, maternity was both evoked and disavowed as legitimate protest positions. I argue that when mothers became protestors their political agency was recognised at the cost of their maternity. And yet one of the major rhetorical strategies used for protesting against nuclear war and militarism in general was that women were acting as guardians of future generations of children, appealing to an essential maternal function and maternalist feminism.

Like Greenham Common, the anti-Vietnam Save Our Sons campaign, and the many campaigns of the first-wave feminists before them (Liddington, 1989), the Pine Gap protest utilised a maternalist platform as one of a number of discourses to justify its cause to the public and to itself. As Roseneil notes, “the discourse of maternalism has historically underpinned women’s peace campaigning on the basis of a mother’s moral and practical duty to protest life” (Roseneil, 1995, p. 4). West and Blumberg (1990, p. 18) note that such motivations guarantee women a legitimate place in the political sphere “for their actions have been and are simply viewed as an extension of their primary and traditional ‘caretaking’ role”; see also Jones (1983); Carter (1992); Strange (1990); Pierson (1987). Maternalism has been critiqued as anti-feminist in attributing all women with maternal potential and sympathies and thereby reinforcing the iniquities of gendered labour (Onlywomen Collective, 1983). Sara Ruddick (1990, p. 151), however claims in her treatise Maternal thinking: Towards a politics of peace that both peace and motherhood are based on socially convenient myths (as if both are quarantined from violence, for example). Discussions of the use of the mother as a trope in feminist historiography also question its assumed capacity as a “unifying” figure (Gallop, 1992; Moore, 2000; Jolly, 1993). Alison Young (1990, p. 68) notes in relation to the media representation of Greenham Common women that “the strength of the notion of maternity, the investment of women’s biological capability to reproduce with intense value, makes it, of all the thematic gestures found in the coverage of the protest, the most politically and symbolically ambiguous”. This is borne out in my reading of maternity at the Pine Gap protest.

At the Women’s Studies Resource Centre in Adelaide, South Australia, I find a poster by the Adelaide Feminist Anti-Nuclear

Group (FANG) that typifies the use of a maternalist platform to bring attention to the Pine Gap Women’s Peace Camp. Titled “We’re serious about stopping war” the flyer inverts the usual dichotomy by claiming “It is rational to be emotional about nuclear war!” and then lists four actions/emotions: Grief, Anger, Empowerment and Action. Grief is described first with specific relation to children: “We grieve that our children may not have a chance to grow up, that indeed, unless we act, life on earth will end”. Action is described lastly as a “world-wide web of lovers, mothers, daughters, sisters, aunties, friends, family we are women with a deep emotional commitment to other people and the earth”. The deep appeal to family and connection is mirrored in FANG’s support activities for the Pine Gap Action. Like women’s anti-nuclear organisations from all Australian capital cities and some regional towns, the Adelaide branch of FANG organised supportive actions for those who couldn’t attend the peace camp. Theirs was a peace picnic and pillowcase protest held for women and children in Elder Park every day for the two weeks of the peace camp, followed every evening at five o’clock by a peace vigil at nearby Parliament House. The pillowcase protest was devised “to express that we don’t sleep so well anymore, women are making pillowcases telling of our nightmares of a nuclear holocaust, and of our dreams for a peaceful future” (FANG). The pillowcases were hung like washing in the park, and as part of the material culture of this event the pillowcases (and their documentation) are valuable in preserving a diversity of slogans and views. Those made by children, however, and expressing grief and responsibility for children, represent a powerful humanist discourse distinguished from the more radical pillowcase narratives that were anti-authoritarian, antimilitary and anti-patriarchal. These are just a few:

Pillowcase 1

A child’s squiggles in blue and green take up most of the white fabric, with small neat writing alongside one edge: IT’S NO USE / JUST HOPING OUR / LITTLE ONES WILL / SURVIVE THE FUTURE / WE MUST / FIGHT / PERSISTENTLY / FOR A NUCLEAR FREE / FUTURE.

Pillowcase 2
In big uneven red lettering covering the entire fabric: IT’S OUR WORLD / Sarah 5 / Mat 9 / Sean 9 / Josh 2y / Si 6 / Matt 4 / Dominique 1

Pillowcase 3
A complex yellow scribble along one side, with thin red lettering superimposed:
WE DON’T WANT / GUNS / WE DON’T WANT / BOMBS / WE WANT: / KISSING /

• CUEGGING / + LOVE. /Mike 3 with a heart drawn around and

xxx underneath/ POWER TO △\triangle AND CHILDREN
Pillowcase 4
In large blocked letters in alternate colours of yellow, red, blue and green:
LET MY CHILDREN LIVE!
This appeal to women’s essential nurturing nature may well have been strategic to garner more broad-based support,
but was also powerful in mobilising individual political agency. Protester Lee Rhiannon, who has been a state politician and is now a federal Senator for the Australian Greens, remembers the event in terms made all the more poignant by her own maternal conditions:

In 1983 I like tens of thousands, 100s of thousands of people around the world were deeply concerned about the possibility of a nuclear war. I was pregnant at the time - I had a baby in mid-July - and I can remember so often when I was watching the news - breastfeeding late at night when a newsflash came on - and wondering if it was an announcement about the outbreak of nuclear war. (Rhiannon, 2003)

Rhiannon’s distinct linking of her memories of the threat of nuclear war with the experience of being a new mother coincides with Sara Ruddick’s (1990, p. 148) point that maternal practice is fundamentally imbricated in the ethics of violence, and therefore “if military endeavours seem a betrayal of maternal practice, non-violent action can seem a natural extension” (Ruddick, 1990, p. 150). The impact of having a new baby also affected Rhiannon’s capacity to participate, despite her enthusiasm and role in organising the event and support events in Sydney. Being warned about the threat of dehydration in the desert heat, she decided to fly to Alice Springs with her four-month-old son rather than journey by bus with the Sydney women, and stayed for only three days of the two-week vigil (Rhiannon, personal communication). Rhiannon suggests that this compromise was a concession to the concerns voiced by her family, but such concerns about children’s participation were shared by many. In reply to criticisms about children at Pine Gap, she is quoted in the national newspaper, The Australian:

It may be argued that the presence of children in these conditions is irresponsible but the campers maintain their actions are ultimately responsible as they are attempting to preserve the entire human race and the future for their children too. (Tarrant, 1983, p. 10)
“Out to preserve the entire human race” is in bold as the grab quote for this one-page feature article, highlighting the perceived accessibility of this viewpoint to the general public. The slippery meanings of maternity begin to be undone here, as it is understood to prompt a call for ethical action but only passively and rhetorically: the very condition of maternity is also understood to limit political agency when it comes to active protest in the desert.

Personal and political limits

While the persuasive rhetoric of non-violent protest and civil disobedience was often buoyed by maternal vision, maternity may not have been so easily practiced either practically or ideologically in protests like Pine Gap. Nancy Shelley recalls the bus journey from Melbourne to Alice Springs (some 2200 km ) with forty women and three children when the bus broke down on the second afternoon north of the remote opal mining town of Coober Pedy:

For three and a half hours the two drivers worked to repair it. This was the middle of the desert, red dust as far as the eye could see, and not a blade of anything green; absolutely no shade, and the temperature over forty degrees centigrade. There were limited supplies of liquid, and not one vehicle passed us on the way. (Shelley, 2003)

Similarly, Wendy Poussard (1984) records the bus journey to central Australia in her volume of poems and notes from Pine Gap titled Outbreak of peace, noting that

Jeanette has her three little kids with her, but I’m glad I decided not to bring my kids Jim and Lizzie. It’s too hot and too hard. The bus feels claustrophobic and stinks of stale food: “a hell-hole” Marg says. (Poussard, 1984, p. 24)

This is verified for her at the camp, when she notes a few pages later that “It’s hard for women to stay. It needs so much energy to do little things” (Poussard, 1984, p. 34). While not many women recall hardships of camping, conditions were not comfortable: temperatures of over 35∘C35^{\circ} \mathrm{C} were recorded in the local newspaper for nine of the 14 days of the event, “security” floodlights installed along the road were kept on all night and helicopters patrolled regularly, and authorities removed the ablution blocks from the gates of the Pine Gap facility four weeks before the event (Bottrall, 1983) so that makeshift latrines had to be dug and flimsily surrounded with hessian.

The symbolic weight of Poussard’s activism and maternity is recorded again when she has a nightmare “about police chasing me and my daughter Elizabeth” (Poussard, 1984, p. 36). And later,

I am beginning to feel the threat of nuclear war as a personal threat to myself and my family. I’m surprised to realise that this feeling is new to me. Up till now it has been a theory. (Poussard, 1984, p. 39)

Poussard’s poetry remembering the event only ever uses maternity symbolically, as a future trajectory of generations for whom we are responsible. One poem, titled “November 11”, is concerned with the ironies of Remembrance Day, when

Hope and glory is
the order of the day,
the nation silent,
more or less,
for sixty seconds,
to remember war.
Now we are come to the centre of the country and ourselves. We come to mourn
violence against the poor,
against the land,
against ourselves,
our lovers, friends and children… (Poussard, 1984, p. 7)
Children here might be considered part of the “worldwide web of lovers, mothers, daughters, sisters” mentioned in the FANG flyer, and while they are real components of
everyday life they are also abstracted as part of a wider community. Daughters in particular are useful conduits for the continuation of tales of resistance. Poussard’s poem “Telegram from Grandmother”, was written in response to a telegram sent to the “PROTEST LADIES, COURT HOUSE, ALICE SPRINGS” which read “STAY TOGETHER REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED TO THE WALLS OF JERICO” and signed “GRANDMOTHER” (Poussard, 1984, p. 14). The poem is addressed “Dear Grandmother”, and moves between the staying together and the tearing apart (of fences, walls, gates, and security) through devices as ephemeral as song and as concrete as bolt-cutters. Staying together is wincingly celebrated as sound advice: “We change a little day by day / so that it may be possible / to tell our daughter’s daughters / 'stay together”’ (Poussard, 1984, p. 14). If this tone sounds ambivalent about the practicalities of adhering to such sound advice from women elders, so too do other narratives about the practicalities of leaving children behind in order to act for their future.

If the propinquity of children is rhetorically important to the values mobilised in anti-war protest, then Margaret Somerville’s story is instructive for its practical punishments. Somerville (1999, p. 21) describes herself as “a young mother with four children and have never left them” when she went to Pine Gap to protest without her children. She is tentative about the process of rendering the experience into language in her book, Body/landscape journals (1999), signalling the complex differences between oral and written registers:

I talk with Mary about Pine Gap and words pour out, but when I write it is so slow. Written words are overlaid with other meanings, ecofeminism, mothers as nurturers, nurturing the land, too simple to account for the multiplicity of Pine Gap. (Somerville, 1999, pp. 21-22.)

Somerville alerts us here to the conventions of writing (and of life-writing) which make demands of memories in ways that differ from conversation. Deciding to hinge her recollections to forty photographs in her possession, Somerville draws on the process of memory work (Haug, 1987) to use the photographs not as evidence but as physical objects that act as “coded references to, and even help construct, realities” (Kuhn, 1995, p.153). One photograph in particular draws on the maternal subject:

Of all the photographs this one is not especially distinguished as belonging to Pine Gap; it is the fortieth photograph, not grouped with the others. It shows a small child on the road alone, her smallness emphasised by the largeness of the ground surrounding her image. Originally I saw it as the only photograph that introduces the idea of nurturing; yet the child is alone, without a mother, small, vulnerable and beautiful. Even unsentimental friends respond to this photograph with loving sounds and tender gestures. Perhaps it is the image of a small child in the context of Pine Gap that makes it such a powerful picture. (Somerville, 1999, p. 35)

Images provide particularly potent symbolism when they include children, and photographs from Pine Gap that depict children putting on badges, holding signs, or of a lone teddybear attached to the wire fence around the military base draw on similar sentiments. And yet Somerville seems to imply

something disturbing in the powerful fortieth picture, and then goes off on an apparent tangent to connect this photograph with painful memories of losing access to her baby daughter amidst a family break-up. Four pages later, during a discussion on the controversy of women-only spaces generally and Pine Gap particularly, there is this quiet revelation: “Even for the three weeks at Pine Gap, a women’s-only space is highly contested. It was a complex negotiation for me to leave four children with ramifications for many years after” (Somerville, 1999, p. 39). This association suggests that losing her baby daughter was one such ramification. While a maternalist platform acted to draw on women’s status as mothers, the activity of protesting for many meant leaving their children behind in order to act. This maternal absence at home was inextricably tied to and yet complicated by the women-only nature of the protest.

Women only

The controversy of women-only space was taken up by the tabloid Sunday Telegraph in its coverage of about twenty men who set up camp at nearby Emily Gap. The feature was titled “Men win a place - doing camp chores” and reporter Norm Lipson plays on gendered language and the division of labour to write about this separatist camp:

At the foot of the ruggedly beautiful McDonnell Ranges, at a place called Emily Gap, a group of 20 men has set up camp near a freshwater spring to support the 500 women protesters camped at Pine Gap.
The men have abandoned traditional roles to offer their support.
They mind children, prepare food, wash dishes, cart toilets anything to help the women carry out their two-week protest. (Lipson, 1983, p. 3)

Quoting thirty-one year old Ian Cohen from Lismore, Lipson outlines the kind of domestic chores and help the men have provided, and their decision not to be the heroes of this event but to stay behind the lines. “But the support role has had its problems”, he writes:
“At first it was very doubtful whether we were even wanted,” said Mr Cohen.
“We came up against a lot of opposition from some of the women. A strong group doesn’t want any male support at all.” (Lipson, 1983, p. 3)

The scandalised tone and confusion of gender roles act to heroise these supportive men. An article immediately underneath, on the fears of children about nuclear war, strangely verifies the men’s role in looking after the children while their mothers “go off to fight on the front”, as Ian Cohen puts it, which is visually corroborated by a photograph where “John dresses two-year-old Zoe”. If women are off at the front fighting, and men are left to look after the children, then things are looking dire the article suggests with its confusion of domestic and military metaphors. These sorts of representation by the press were commonly noted in the reporting of the Greenham Common peace camp and have been comprehensively analysed. Young (1990) in particular devotes an entire book,

Femininity in dissent, to critiquing the representation of the protestors as women, and then their cooption into a mythology of deviance as women (see also Couldry, 1999; Cresswell, 1996; Emberley & Landry, 1989; Slough, 1988). Maternity is one of the significant themes she traces in media representations, which was used to normalise the protest as one in which “ordinary” mothers and grandmothers were moved to participate, thus restoring the heteronormativity of Greenham’s queer politics (Roseneil, 2000). It was also used “as a stick of castigation with which to beat the Greenham women: if they were so fond of children, why were they not at home with them?” (Young, 1990, p. 68). Such a demand, Young (1990, p. 68) notes, “insists on the women relinquishing their political activism and rediscovering the (traditional) passivity”.

Turning from the Sunday tabloid press to local informants, my own mother offered some memories of Pine Gap that rested on her disgust of the protestors as women and particularly as mothers. She remembers working in Outpatients at Alice Springs Hospital where “those dirty women” from the peace camp brought their kids. Dirt is used not so much to refer to the conditions of camping in the dirt, but as a vernacular affirmation of Mary Douglas’ formulation of dirt as dangerous and risky, and so socially ostracising, or abject (Douglas, 1966). She asked the Hospital Registrar of the time to write an affidavit for my research about the women’s peace camp:

In the hospital lots of women and children visited outpatients. The women had various bruises and lacerations, but so did the security guards who were also brought in by the ambulances. Most of the women were treated and sent home. The children [were] quite often kept overnight for observation. Some mums used the hospital as a babysitting service, not collecting their children for days. (Mary Dare, personal communication, July 7, 2007)

This was a popular local Alice Springs narrative that equated the unwelcome strangers as “bad” women, and bad mothers. It seems to be more intensely felt because of the women-only designation of the action. Addressing similar complaints made about the women at Greenham Common mistreating their children, Cresswell argues that such claims function to mark out assumed notions of women’s “proper place”:

It is not right for women to be at the camp away from their children, who are left, presumably unattended, at home. Equally it is inappropriate for women to have children with them at the camp because that is seen as mistreatment. The only alternative left to the women is to be at home with their children. (Cresswell, 1996, p. 115).

At a peace camp, Cresswell (1996, p. 99), concludes, women are “out of place … due to their desertion of home” a sentiment that applied equally to this Australian event in 1983. This suggests that the deep epistemological divisions between public and private that we inherit from the Enlightenment are easily codified into activist-mother being mutually exclusive terms. Maternity is essentially a conservative - or at least a socially sanctioned - position for women, whereas activism is fundamentally dissident. For some women at Pine Gap it seems that activism was possible

only without their children; and for those who were accompanied by their children their mothering was held up for public scrutiny and found wanting.

Feminist protest and maternity

If it was an easy target for local resentment and media scandal to cast the women as bad mothers in order to diminish their claims, the emphasis on maternity was also a source of anxious analysis within the women’s movement. In a 1984 edition of the Adelaide Women’s Liberation Newsletter, an article on Pine Gap by Margaret Merilees objects to the strategic mobilisation of maternity and professionalism in order to accrue a particular middle-class version of “respectability” and therefore seriousness:

In retrospect, I don’t think that lesbians were visible enough in the image of the camp that we were projecting publicly. There was a lot of talk about the presence of grandmothers, mothers, teachers, doctors, nuns and so on. But I never saw a press release that mentioned the word lesbian. And we countered the “dirty leso” line of the NT (and other) gutter press by pushing a “respectable, earth-loving maternal, here-to-save-you-from-yourselves (yet again)” image. (Merilees, 1984, p. 5)

In the equivalent Perth newsletter, and then later in the journal Social Alternatives in 1984, Bev Thiele wrote a searing article on the inherent contradictions of characterising the women’s peace movement as driven by some natural maternal instinct to clean up the world: “the presumption … is that women have a unique contribution to make to the peace movement because our reproductive capacity ‘naturally’ provides us with critical qualities, such as peacefulness and protectiveness … qualities which men, unfortunately, lack” she notes, thus “posing no threat to the existing patriarchal status quo” (Thiele, 1984, p. 13).

The difficulties of actually mothering at camp also drew some complaints in the wash-up to Pine Gap, prompting the organisers of the next peace camp in 1984 at Cockburn Sound in Western Australia to employ childcare workers, make children’s space available and even arrange a Children’s Bus that drove the 3500 km from Melbourne to Perth. The complexity of the issue was taken seriously, as illustrated in the guidelines on childcare drawn up by Women For Survival for their anticipated gatherings in 1986. Pivoting on philosophical positions and striving for practical implementation, the guidelines demonstrate some of the complexities and frustrations around feminist protest and children’s care, beginning with a statement that “all women should be able to attend national gatherings”, and specific resolutions about children’s needs and rights. For example, children can expect to have kids-only space, which require invitations for adults to enter. There should be girlsonly space in childcare facilities, and sensitivity to women and girls who do not want to “put energy into boys”, while still recognising that there are mothers of boy children who very much want them involved, and that boy children may well be affected by the tensions around such issues. It is decided that boys over seven years of age will have arranged childcare away from the gathering, organised by the regional groups.

The frustrations of trying to reconcile the contradictions and politics of maternity at feminist protests seethes from this final statement:

Considering all these aspects of childcare/kidspace within WFS it’s become obvious that the only way to remove “childcare” and “male children” from the “too hard basket” to be shunted around from one national gathering to the next is for every woman in WFS to share the true gut responsibility of CARING for all children and each other; listening to all the different viewpoints within our national group, and attempting in our regional groups to reduce the isolation of mother & co-parents. This is an essential part of our ongoing work and philosophy, if all women, whether separatist, mothers, lesbian, heterosexual, old, young, immigrant, aboriginal, or any other of the infinite variety of women are to come together as one in national action for peace. (Women For Survival, ND, pp. 24-25)

These guidelines suggest the often competing but certainly complex and intricate needs of protesting and maternity, of women-only spaces and boy children, of collectivity and individual histories and needs. These were concerns not only for women’s peace camps like Pine Gap but also for the women’s movement more broadly as new models of living, decision-making, and social change were debated, theorised, and lived.

Conclusion

In conclusion, maternity had its uses and limitations in theory and practice at Pine Gap. Maternal feminism was strategically mobilised for this remarkable event, following a long tradition of claiming women’s special alliance with peace and non-violence, in order to validate their civic participation in political protest and to appeal to a broad community. And yet when mothers become protestors their political agency is recognised at the cost of their maternity in various symbolic, social and literal ways. A fundamental schism between “mother” and “activist” echoes from the inheritance of Enlightenment dichotomies which understand women as emotional, private, domestic and maternal: feminism’s challenge to such legacies can be understood more clearly through enduring events like the Pine Gap women’s peace camp.

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