Feminist protest and maternity at Pine Gap Women’s Peace Camp, Australia 1983 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Feminist Protest in the Desert: Researching the Pine Gap women’s peace camp, Australia 1983
Gender, Place & Culture, 2013
This article examines the rich symbolism offered by the central Australian desert, and what happens when it becomes a site of feminist protest, as happened in 1983 when Australian women mounted a women-only peace camp at the Pine Gap military facility. The desert holds iconic status as both the ‘centre’ of Australia and ‘the middle of nowhere’, evoked as the ‘heart’ of the country and yet represented as dangerous and deadly. Its ambivalent meaning for white Australia unsettles Pine Gap as a site of protest, and also differentiates it from more traditional protest sites like urban streets, as well as from the most famous women’s peace camp at Greenham Common in England. This account is made more complex by my own formative relation to central Australia, where I lived as a child and left in 1983 around the same time as the protest. The impact and limits of situated knowledge and feminist writing practice thus form part of this research as it also intimately addresses the formation of my feminist self through the remembering and remaking of meanings for this landscape of my childhood.
Feminist Protest and Cultural Production at the 1983 Pine Gap Women’s Peace Camp, Australia
Women: a Cultural Review, 2013
This article reflects on the creative cultural production so politically integral to second-wave feminist protest and seeks to position it in the field of material culture. The commitment of the women’s movement to transforming social conditions, and their representation, meant creating new cultures: of literature, sexuality, work, parliament and protest. The author uses examples of cultural production from a particular protest*the Pine Gap women’s peace camp held in Australia in 1983*as emblematic of such cultural creativity through its politics, performativity and aesthetics. Reflecting on how such apparently ephemeral, spontaneous and site-specific productions might be remembered and represented, part of the politics of this article is to mobilize feminist methods that mimic the performative aspect of the protest and, at the same time, invest significance in such cultural production by theorizing it as material culture.
Sites of feminist activism: Remembering Pine Gap
In 2009, the Jessie Street National Women’s Library curated an exhibition in Sydney, Remembering Pine Gap, using their extensive collection of materials relating to the Pine Gap women’s peace camp held in central Australia in 1983. Arguably, one of the most iconic events of the Australian women’s peace movement held at the height of Cold War politics, the event accrues significance through being the subject of an exhibition. As well, the exhibition is one of the few that takes a feminist event as its sole focus, and so reminds us of the material connection between the politics and aesthetics of feminist space and time. This article investigates what this might mean as a form for remembering feminist activism, and as an activist form. Remembering Pine Gap is therefore critically situated in relation to other feminist and social protest exhibitions, and is then addressed as an activist form through its feminist aesthetics. In doing so, the paper seeks to extend the ways in which activist spaces and forms can be remembered as physical and material sites as well as intellectual cultural heritage.
Women's studies international forum, 1999
Synopsis -In spite of the 'maternal turn' in feminist theory, at the level of policy and practice feminism has neglected the politics of motherhood. This article explores the ambivalent relationship between the Australian women's movement and mothers' organisations formed to contest the management of childbirth and lactation. It argues that the advent of a 'politics of difference' allows greater acceptance of seemingly non-feminist positions on maternity and recognition of the role played by childbirth reformers in effecting social change. It examines Australian feminist attitudes to motherhood before discussing the response to feminism of women's groups which saw themselves as possibly part of a wider women's movement, but 'different' from mainstream feminism. A strong familial orientation was often contradicted by the everyday lives of activist women, who gained new skills and self-confidence in a significant challenge to medicalised reproduction.
The Royal Commission into Human Relationships was an initiative of the Whitlam government, instigated in 1974 to investigate ‘the family, social, educational, legal and sexual aspects of male and female relationships’, with particular attention to the concept of ‘responsible parenthood’. The commission heard evidence from thousands of Australians on a broad range of topics, and given the Royal Commission’s origins in the 1973 Federal Parliamentary debate over abortion, it is perhaps unsurprising that motherhood featured so prominently in submissions presented to the Commission. In this article I argue that mothers’ submissions to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships reveal the ways that social and cultural meanings of motherhood were being contested in 1970s Australia. Rather than making claims for rights in the established language of maternal citizenship, many women deployed their private experiences of mothering to argue that the state should facilitate their access to both paid employment and time away from mothering. These mothers argued for equal citizenship rights, challenging the reproductive compact that had long been central to maternal citizenship. The submissions reveal the ways that mothers (and their critics) drew upon both new and old meanings of motherhood to articulate new cultural and political possibilities for motherhood and citizenship in 1970s Australia.
Postmaternal Times and Radical Feminist Thinking
Linking the postmaternal to postfeminism as products of late twentieth-century neoliberal capitalism, postmaternal thinking is defined in this article by its historical time period, from the early 1980s onwards, and by its legacy of radical feminist thinking which was critical in messing up traditional understandings of maternity. This is demonstrated through research and resources related to the women’s peace movement, with specific reference to the women-only peace camps at Greenham Common (U.K.) and Pine Gap (Australia). The intellectual legacies of these complex and compelling debates around the social practices of maternity, the politics of family, collective domesticity and activism are often occluded in social memory, as Stephens argues in Confronting Postmaternal Thinking (2011). This paper extends Stephens’ working definition of postmaternity to argue for an interconnected structural social analysis of postmaternal times, and contests modernist categories of knowing to consider postmaternity as postmodernist in its multiple and shifting array of politics. In this way postmaternity becomes a time in which maternity is open to redefinition through a proliferation of meaning and possibilities, and this is demonstrated by concluding in the form of a manifesto.
ISAA Review, 2016
This article explores the influences that changed a woman born into a socially conservative evangelical section of American society who spent more than a decade as a member of a small European community in Fiji to a vehement anti-war socialist and feminist in World War I Australia. Jennie Scott Griffiths arrived in Australia from Fiji in 1912 with nine children and a wealth of journalistic experience that led to her appointment as editor of the Sydney-based Australian Woman's Weekly. In Australia, she was thrown into a maelstrom of ideas that articulated many of her previously held but unexpressed views. She was empowered by this ferment of feminist ideas among activist women in Australia to become a well-known fighter against war and conscription in World War I Australia and as a 'red-ragger' who gave impassioned support to those imprisoned for their beliefs. Her flamboyant, unsparing support for causes she embraced, led to the loss of her hard-won editor's job and to surveillance by the Government secret intelligence organisation.
Women's Studies International Forum 37: 85-94, 2013
In the increasing academic attention placed on social memory, the popularization of material culture, and the growth of the heritage and museum industries, the modern women's movement finds itself at a strategic juncture. Given the limitations of narratives available to talk about recent feminist history, we are interested in the capacity of feminism's material culture to provide a new set of languages and esthetics through which second wave feminism might be understood. This article reflects on one particular project in which we were commissioned by the National Museum of Australia to produce a dedicated museum collection on Australian second wave feminism. We detail the criteria for selection, classifying themes, objects obtained, and the absences in the collection. We then use the methodology of object biography to interpret two of our objects to demonstrate the possibilities feminist material culture offers as ways of reading feminist activism as well as rendering museums more feminist.