This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.
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Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, one of the most vocal supporters of Julian Assange, says the United States must drop its espionage case against the jailed WikiLeaks founder. He faults the Australian government for pushing for a plea deal that would allow Assange to walk free from Belmarsh Prison in London in exchange for an admission of guilt. “Julian is never going to plead guilty as if journalism is a crime,” says Varoufakis. He also discusses his new book Technofeudalism, which argues that platforms like Amazon have destroyed the idea of buyers and sellers operating in an open market. “Capitalism was killed by capital,” he says.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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BroadAgenda is featuring a short series of profiles on amazing women and LGBTIQ + folks. You’re about to meet Distinguished Professor of Creative Practice at the University of Canberra, Jen Webb.
If you were sitting next to someone at a dinner party, how would you explain your work and research in a nutshell?
I’m very interested in people, and particularly in communities of people, and what provides meaning and connection in their lives. And because I am a creative practitioner myself (I’m a poet), my work over the past decades has focused particularly on how artists – by which I mean anyone who does creative ‘stuff’, anyone who thinks of themselves, at some level, as a creative person who does creative things – how such people fit into society, and how society fits them to itself.
One example of that is what I did for my PhD. I was living in Rockhampton, in Central Queensland, which at least in the 1990s was not a centre for creative excellence. But I knew there were plenty of artists tucked away here and there in the communities up and down the Western line (Yeppoon to Winton). So I set out to talk to local artists, get a sense of their life, of their work and what they make, who they know and what they do in their community, how they make their living, and how they publish their work (exhibition, performance, book or journal publishing etc.).
In between such conversations, I talked to members of local governments, schoolteachers, representatives of community organisations etc., and read the local newspaper if there was one, and visited the local museum where there was one. All this provides a sense of how a community is organised and structured, how its members see themselves, and what they think of their artists and the art things they make and do.
At the end of this research I crafted a narrative about that community that showed what sort of art practices are valued and in what contexts they are valued; Oh, and I wrote a book of short stories about it all, too.
What are you currently working on that’s making you excited or that has legs?
I’m particularly excited about the work I’ve been doing with my colleagues over the past almost-decade on the impact of creative practices on people suffering from trauma or other stress and distress.
We have been conducting biannual month-long workshops with returned service personnel who are wounded, injured or ill, and teaching them skills in creative writing, or visual art, or music-making; and the effects are both positive, and sustained; five years after completing a workshop, they’re still doing very well.
We extended this into similar, but much shorter, workshops with rural and regional communities who have suffered from environmental catastrophe (fires, drought, flood) and seen how writing and talking and drawing et al. can help both the individuals and the community as a whole to recover and rebuild.
Distinguished Professor, Creative Practice at UC, Jen Webb. Picture: Ginger Gorman
Let’s wind back the clock a bit. Why did you go into this field? What was compelling about it? Feel free to dredge up childhood memories and bring colour in here.
I grew up in apartheid South Africa, surrounded by examples of injustice and trauma, and with parents who instilled in my siblings and in me a deep sense of responsibility to try to make the world a better, fairer, kinder, more just place. And for me this has meant writing / art / learning. I was a standard girlie-swot as a kid; I loved learning languages and grammar and history, loved writing stories and poems.
My parents and my school took me to theatres, art galleries and concerts very often; and my parents also took me into places of terrible poverty to deliver blankets and medicines and food. So, I guess my small-child mind drew lines of connection between the worlds of learning and of art, and the obligation to do somethingin society. Later, as an adult, this process of distributing largesse smacks far too much of white saviour behaviour, so I would not now do that. But the principle of paying attention to others, to their lives and aspirations, to their expressed needs; and the importance of knowing more, knowing better – this hasn’t changed. It is just that I don’t unquestioningly assume that I know what others need. At least, I hope I don’t!
What impact do you hope your work has? Or give concrete examples of where/how your work is making change? What do you want readers to know about?
I gain immensely from working in research and creative practice with others. When it comes to the arts and health projects, I am one of a group of people doing this work, and my role has been far more in theorising and analysing than in getting out there and conducting workshops.
This work in the arts&health area has had measurable impact: significantly reduced suicide rates, for instance; participants telling us that they are continuing to write, or draw, or drum years after their workshop; and the top rating of ‘high impact’ for creative arts research, in the Australian Research Council’s 2018 Engagement and Impact Outcomes. That the work is having a positive impact fills me with delight, and also with energy to keep learning more about what creative interventions such as these can offer.
Do you view yourself as feminist researcher? Why? Why not? What does the word mean to you in the context of your own values and also your work?
Absolutely! I’m a feminist researcher, and a feminist poet, because I’m a feminist person. I don’t think it should be considered a feminist act to work toward a kinder and better-informed society – this is everyone’s task. But until ‘everyone’ has access and equity, it does seem to me important to keep attention on women’s issues and women’s work. One tiny way I try to do this is to foreground women in my research – ensure that when I write articles, and quote from the work of others, at least 50% of those others are women scholars and artists. My colleagues and I used to play a pretend drinking game when listening to lectures from important (usually) international professors of poetry – drinking an imaginary shot each time they mentioned a woman poet.
Usually, after the lecture, we’d agree that if there had in fact been any alcohol involved, we would be stone-cold sober. (And often one of us would ask the Important Speaker about the paucity of women in their talk, and watch the defensive response.) If we don’t talk about women, they are, or seem, invisible. We need to support each other, and each other’s work.
What have you discovered in your work that has most surprised or enchanted you?
If I consider what might have enchanted me, probably the greatest enchantment has been experiencing and researching the remarkable benefits of creative collaboration.
Poets tend to be solitary creatures, but when they work together, a lot of the anxiety seems to fall away, and greater leaps of creativity can emerge.. I have been part of several interconnected poetry collaborations over the last decade and found it literally enchanted – I am cast under the spell of working in this way. At the heart of it is a 10-year-old collaboration we call the Prose Poetry, where a shifting group of poets email off-the-cuff poems – fast writing, barely edited – to everyone in the group, and these spark new poems in response. All sorts of creative and scholarly works have Catherine-wheeled off this Project over the years. This is enchanting – it keeps me writing, and thinking, and playing, and feeling part of something I care about.
Is there anything else you want to say?
The academic world gets a bad rap, so often. We’re called elitist, eggheads, Ivory Tower dwellers; or we bemoan our sense of being overworked and underpaid, tied up in red tape, writing articles no one will ever read. The poetry world is no better: poetry operates outside the economy; and who reads poems, except other poets (and excepting at weddings and funerals, of course)? However – there has to be a however – both are also fields of extraordinary richness, measuring wealth in ideas, creative thinking and practice, opportunities to connect with others, and to pursue the something you are passionate about.
Poetry and the academy: both are tough gigs, but for me they have been life-making, life-affirming. And they’re enchanting – I’m still here, captivated by the power of their magic.
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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg says NATO allies are committed to doing more to ensure that Ukraine “prevails” in its battle to repel invading Russian forces, with the alliance having “significantly changed” its stance on providing more advanced weapons to Kyiv.
Speaking in an interview with RFE/RL to mark the second anniversary of Russia launching its full-scale invasion of its neighbor, the NATO chief said solidarity with Ukraine was not only correct, it’s also “in our own security interests.”
“We can expect that the NATO allies will do more to ensure that Ukraine prevails, because this has been so clearly stated by NATO allies,” Stoltenberg said.
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“I always stress that this is not charity. This is an investment in our own security and and that our support makes a difference on the battlefield every day,” he added.
Ukraine is in desperate need of financial and military assistance amid signs of political fatigue in the West as the war kicked off by Russia’s unprovoked invasion nears the two-year mark on February 24.
In excerpts from the interview released earlier in the week, Stoltenberg said the death of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny and the first Russian gains on the battlefield in months should help focus the attention of NATO and its allies on the urgent need to support Ukraine.
The death of Navalny in an Arctic prison on February 16 under suspicious circumstances — authorities say it will be another two weeks before the body may be released to the family — adds to the need to ensure Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian rule does not go unchecked.
“I strongly believe that the best way to honor the memory of Aleksei Navalny is to ensure that President Putin doesn’t win on the battlefield, but that Ukraine prevails,” Stoltenberg said.
Stoltenberg said the withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from the city of Avdiyivka last week after months of intense fighting demonstrated the need for more military aid, “to ensure that Russia doesn’t make further gains.”
“We don’t believe that the fact that the Ukrainian forces have withdrawn from Avdiyivka in in itself will significantly change the strategic situation,” he said.
“But it reminds us of that Russia is willing to sacrifice a lot of soldiers. It also just makes minor territorial gains and also that Russia has received significant military support supplies from Iran, from North Korea and have been able to ramp up their own production.”
Ukraine’s allies have been focused on a $61 billion U.S. military aid package, but while that remains stalled in the House of Representatives, other countries, including Sweden, Canada, and Japan, have stepped up their aid.
“Of course, we are focused on the United States, but we also see how other allies are really stepping up and delivering significant support to Ukraine,” Stoltenberg said in the interview.
On the question of when Ukraine will be able to deploy F-16 fighter jets, Stoltenberg said it was not possible to say. He reiterated that Ukraine’s allies all want them to be there as early as possible but said the effect of the F-16s will be stronger if pilots are well trained and maintenance crews and other support personnel are well-prepared.
“So, I think we have to listen to the military experts exactly when we will be ready to or when allies will be ready to start sending and to delivering the F-16s,” he said. “The sooner the better.”
Ukraine has actively sought U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets to help it counter Russian air superiority. The United States in August approved sending F-16s to Ukraine from Denmark and the Netherlands as soon as pilot training is completed.
It will be up to each ally to decide whether to deliver F-16s to Ukraine, and allies have different policies, Stoltenberg said. But at the same time the war in Ukraine is a war of aggression, and Ukraine has the right to self-defense, including striking legitimate Russian military targets outside Ukraine.
Asked about the prospect of former President Donald Trump returning to the White House, Stoltenberg said that regardless of the outcome of the U.S. elections this year, the United States will remain a committed NATO ally because it is in the security interest of the United States.
Trump, the current front-runner in the race to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, drew sharp rebukes from President Joe Biden, European leaders, and NATO after suggesting at a campaign rally on February 10 that the United States might not defend alliance members from a potential Russian invasion if they don’t pay enough toward their own defense.
Stoltenberg said the United States was safer and stronger together with more than 30 allies — something that neither China nor Russia has.
The criticism of NATO has been aimed at allies underspending on defense, he said.
But Stoltenberg said new data shows that more and more NATO allies are meeting the target of spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, and this demonstrates that the alliance has come a long way since it pledged in 2014 to meet the target.
At that time three members of NATO spent 2 percent of GDP on defense. Now it’s 18, he said.
“If you add together what all European allies do and compare that to the GDP in total in Europe, it’s actually 2 percent today,” he said. “That’s good, but it’s not enough because we want [each NATO member] to spend 2 percent. And we also make sure that 2 percent is a minimum.”
This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Chicago is the economic core of the vast hinterland that spans the United States Midwest called the Rustbelt. Unlike other major Rustbelt cities like Baltimore and Detroit, on the surface Chicago seems to have weathered the industrial decline that gave the region its nickname. Yet a closer look at the city reveals an uneven pattern of capitalist development: decades of state and private investment…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Updated October 19, 2023, 5:38 p.m. ET
Authorities in China have banned a book about the last Ming dynasty emperor Chongzhen after online comments said its analysis could apply to current Communist Party leader Xi Jinping.
“Chongzhen: The hard-working emperor who brought down a dynasty” by late Ming dynasty expert Chen Wutong recently disappeared from online bookstores, including the website of state-run Xinhua Books, with multiple searches for the book yielding no results on major book-selling platforms this week.
Meanwhile, keyword searches for the book and its author on the social media platform Weibo yielded no results on Thursday.
Current affairs commentators said the book has likely been removed from public view after online comments drew parallels between its analysis of the fall of the 1368-1644 Ming dynasty and China’s current situation under ruling Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping.
Many online comments picked up on a particular line in Chen’s book: “With one bad move following another, the harder he worked, the faster he brought the country to ruin.”
“From the Ming Dynasty all the way to the present day,” chuckled a post on the “Stupid Stuff from China” Facebook page dated Oct. 17.
“It’s obvious what it’s hinting at,” commented one reader.
Another reader likened Xi to several emperors who were the last of their dynasties.
“Chongzhen, Daoguang, Pu Yi, Winnie [the Pooh], so many like this,” the reader said, using Xi’s nickname Winnie the Pooh, whom he is said to resemble.
Current affairs commentator Wang Jian said the book’s ban was likely down to that sentence, which resonates in people’s minds.
“The book wouldn’t have much of an effect on [Xi], except that it reflects what everyone is thinking,” Wang said. “Xi Jinping has been going against common sense and the will of the people in recent years — everyone has reached a consensus about that.”
“[The book shows that] if someone tries to abuse their power, misfortune will befall them, so it has become a sensitive topic,” he said. “It would never have been banned if it didn’t speak to that social consensus and public feeling.”
A copy of the book appeared on second-hand websites for 1,280 yuan (US$175), 27 times the price of a new copy. Credit: Online screenshot provided by Chen Zifei Former Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kei, who now runs a bookshop on the democratic island of Taiwan, said any book in China that carries a potentially political message can be banned at any time.
“The top priority for the [Chinese Communist Party] regime is to maintain its grip on power,” Lam, who was detained for months by state security police for selling political books to customers in mainland China, said.
“As soon as they find a book with ideological implications for the regime or its hold on power, they will list them as banned books,” Lam said, citing the banning of the “Sheep Village” series of children’s picture books in Hong Kong.
“The people in power make the decisions, and also determine the criteria for banning a book, which can’t be rationally understood,” he said.
Current affairs commentator Fang Yuan said it’s common in China, where people can’t express their opinions freely, for public dissatisfaction with the government to emerge indirectly, through historical references.
He said people have seemingly responded to the ban by selling used copies of the book at hugely inflated prices on second-hand book-trading platforms, which are less stringently regulated.
One copy of the book was even listed on the Confucius online second-hand bookstore for 1,280 yuan (US$175), 27 times the listed price for a new copy.
“When there’s no hope of playing hard-ball, the public and civil society expresses its anger by playing a softer game, as a way to curse out the government,” Fang said.
“[This book ban] shows that the situation is very sensitive and has reached a stage where everything is tense and everyone is on guard.”
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Eugene Whong.
Update changes the image to the most recent edition of the book.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Chen Zifei for RFA Mandarin.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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And Then She Fell, by US author Alicia Elliott, is a mind-bending and slinking novel unpacking themes of motherhood, mental health, Indigeneity, dispossession and connection to land and culture – all of which remain key themes in our contemporary Australian landscape. BroadAgenda editor Ginger Gorman had a chat with Alicia over email. (We’ve kept Alicia’s US word spellings to be true to her voice.)
Alicia thank you for your wonderful, compelling book! It must have taken some courage to write. Firstly, tell us a little bit about you and who you are.
I’m a white-passing Mohawk woman whose paternal family is from Six Nations of the Grand River Reserve in Canada. I write and edit. I love horror and professional wrestling, which have more in common than you’d think.
What inspired you to write this book? How much of it was triggered by your own experiences?
This book originally started as a short story about the experience of being a new mother. I had my son when I was 18, and I felt in some ways tricked about what being a new mom actually looked and felt like – not just emotionally, but also physically, in my body.
It seemed like there was some big conspiracy to keep us from knowing the full, often ugly truth of what it takes to care for a newborn infant.
The story never seemed finished, though, so I put it away, taking it out from time to time to tinker with it. It was only when I started reflecting on my own love of genre-bending work, and considering that the protagonist of another short story that I couldn’t figure out was actually the same protagonist for this story, that I realized these were the missing pieces that would slide the entire thing into focus. And so it became a novel!
Rather surprisingly, after I decided that Alice would be struggling with psychosis, I ended up having a full manic episode with psychosis myself. It took a while to come down from that and be able to look back and assess the situation clearly. When I did, though, it illuminated the experience of psychosis for me. I knew that everything I assumed about the experience was totally wrong – and I knew intimately what stereotypes were levied against people in the thrall of psychosis, and the devastating pain it produced. All of this helped me shape the novel into what it is now.
The cover of “And Then She Fell.” Image: Supplied
Tell us a bit about Alice. Who is she as a character?
Alice is funny, caring, and insightful, with a deep sense of duty – too deep, in fact. Since she was young, Alice has had to carry far more responsibility than many other kids her age, putting her in a position where she’s become used to putting everyone else’s needs, desires and expectations first.
This has, unfortunately, developed into a belief that you show others you love them by forcing yourself to become whatever they want or need you to be, even if it hurts you. It’s very hard for Alice to understand who she is separate from those she loves and cares for, or for her to value herself apart from what she’s able to do for those around her.
Why is her Indigenous identity such an important lens on this story? How does it intersect with other parts of her life – such as her relationship with her white husband and neighbours?
Having lived on the Six Nations reserve her whole life, Alice is acutely aware of what reserves were actually designed for: to isolate her people and push them into ruin, ideally forcing them to move into cities and give up their identity, language and culture, so that Canada no longer had to uphold any historical treaties made with them. Which means she’s also just as aware of the unintended side effect of reserves: that our people were all together, and therefore could keep our language and culture alive – at least, as much as was possible, considering the laws Canadian politicians were continually passing forbidding us to do so.
White people, who society has ensured do not have to face these histories every day, can therefore easily relegate all of it to some distant past. Or worse: they can altogether ignore it.
For Alice and her family, on the other hand, this history of dispossession, intergenerational trauma, and cultural and linguistic genocide lives in their every action and possibility, in their very genes.
They couldn’t ignore it if they tried. In fact, the more Alice tries to ignore this and pretend that everything is fine to assuage her white husband and neighbours, who are uncomfortable and passive aggressive whenever “race” is even mentioned, the more this history rears its head and forces her, and them, to acknowledge it.
Why have you chosen to really meet mental illness head on in this text (and often with great levity)?
After my own experience with psychosis and mania, it occurred to me how much I’d previously thought I knew and understood about them were not just wrong, but offensively wrong, contributing to stereotypes and injustice being levied against other mad folks. I wanted to use this text as a way to speak back to those assumptions.
Alicia Elliott. Picture: Alex Jacobs-Blum
As for the levity, I think that those who have experienced great despair are more likely to appreciate the power of humour, to understand the way it acts as a sort of nightlight, helping people to see, and hope, in the dark. Indigenous people are some of the funniest people I know, and so are other mad folks, so it felt important to incorporate that humour into the book.
And a related question to the one above. I’ve suffered from postpartum depression myself – and the feeling that you are failing as a parent/can’t bond with your baby. Why did you want to tackle this issue?
As I sort of hinted at above, I think there’s a lot of effort put into giving new parents the (false) impression that everything from pregnancy to childbirth to raising a child are pure and uncomplicated joys. While that does play into it, too, I found that there was also a lot of grief, guilt, despair and loneliness. The more I spoke to other parents about it in private, the more I realized that this complicated duality was the actual experience of parenthood – not the sort of joyous fairy tale we’ve all been lead to believe.
I think the more we normalize this experience of parenthood, the more we temper the expectations of new parents, the more we give new parents room to voice and then deal with their own difficulties. It’s important we look at these sorts of things realistically, not idealistically, because we live in the real world, not some imaginary ideal one. We all need to know we’re not alone.
Your book has been described as “intoxicatingly original.” And I agree, it was very hard to put down! Tell us a bit about your writing style. How do you write a book people can’t put down?
I’m a big fan of voice-driven fiction. If you develop a compelling enough voice, it doesn’t matter what you have the character doing, you’re going to make the reader want to stay with them through it. I wanted Alice’s voice to be that sort of compelling vehicle, especially since she was navigating early motherhood, which is generally—and in my opinion, unfairly—considered to be very boring to all who aren’t parents.
Is there anything else you want to say?
Obviously, I’m far too long-winded to be given this sort of question, but I’m also self-aware, so I’ll say no.
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Menstruation is something half the world does for a week at a time, for months and years on end, yet it remains largely misunderstood. Scientists once thought of an individual’s period as useless, and some doctors still believe it’s unsafe for a menstruating person to swim in the ocean wearing a tampon.
A new book called “Period” by Kate Clancy counters the false theories that have long defined the study of the uterus, exposing the eugenic history of gynecology while providing an intersectional feminist perspective on menstruation science.
Why did you want to research and write about periods?
I’ve been studying menstrual cycles and periods for over twenty years. What first drew me to them in college was the idea that you really could do research on something that you personally find interesting. I didn’t know anyone in academia or research – I didn’t know you really could study just about anything. And up to this point my exposure to periods was what I learned from my doctor and from sex ed in grade school.
The scholarly study of periods opened up a whole different way of understanding the body – we can look to the historical study of the body, we can look to different ways of measuring things, we can understand variation not just pathology. It was the beginning of my love of biological anthropology and human biology more broadly.
I wanted to write about periods for the same reason – I want more people to know what I know, that menstrual cycles are variable, responsive to environment, not inherently gross, and actually kind of weirdly cool.
It’s 2023. Why do you think periods are still misunderstood? Are they wilfully misunderstood?
Some of the misunderstanding is wilful and some is not. I think when people make jokes about “blood coming out of her eyes or wherever” (Trump) or giving a cis man a tampon as a way of saying he is weak (Tiger Woods) – two things that have happened in recent years among famous men in the US at least – then yes, it’s wilful.
Equating menstruation with weakness or emotional instability is such a tiresome, tired way of conceptualizing the uterus. I mean, if you’re going to be sexist, at least try to be clever about it.
Another wilful misconception, to my mind, is in evolutionary psychology, where they seem to want to make everything about fertility detection. Humans are often said to be “concealed ovulators,” which isn’t exactly accurate but means we don’t have really obvious changes in behavior, or sexual swellings, or other ways of indicating our fertile period. Bros who want to know exactly when menstruating people are most fertile are obsessed with “detecting fertile periods” and with knowing our sexual preferences at different phases of the menstrual cycle to avoid getting cuckolded (the venn diagram of incels and certain fields in evolutionary psychology is a near circle).
They are convinced there is some sort of intentional strategy that women and other menstruating people participate in that they can game to increase their own chances of getting a girlfriend, or something.
The cover of “Period: The Real Story of Menstruation”. Picture: Supplied
But I have also encountered so very many people who fundamentally misunderstand what a period is, why we have them, and what is going on in their or their loved ones’ bodies. When I was a kid I remember a friend’s boyfriend who thought menstrual blood came out of the belly button. More recently, I interviewed a high school biology teacher who has had students who thought periods were more like bowel movements, where you could hold them until you went to the toilet.
Almost every man who has learned I study menstrual periods (and many women) have asked me if they synchronize among people who spend a lot of time together (they don’t). And something I’ve heard from many people as they’ve been reading my book is that they had no idea how much variation in menstrual cycles and periods was in fact quite normal – adaptive even, as we are supposed to be responsive to environment. It’s been a relief to them to know they are not “irregular” but in fact typical menstruating people.
Why do you say gynaecology has a “eugenic” history? How does racism play into this discussion?
I say it has a eugenic history because it has a eugenic history. Gynaecology was founded on a number of things:
1) Pushing out midwives with massive experiential knowledge, most of whom were Black and brown, criminalizing their work, and shaming them out of the profession – maternal mortality increased when they did this.
2) Many of the procedures and practices we have today came from the unanesthetized and nonconsensual experimentation on enslaved people
3) Gynaecology is founded on the idea that we need to preserve the fertility of white women while limiting the fertility of “undesirables” – people of color, disabled people, incarcerated people. As late as 2010 we were still sterilizing incarcerated people (mostly people of color) after pressuring them repeatedly to consent.
Racism is central to the conversation on the history of gynaecology and the ethics of the discipline and its practitioners because the race of the patient is so often central to the type of care they receive.
Why do you challenge the notion of a “normal” menstrual cycle?
Because the idea that there can be one “normal” menstrual cycle is just bad science. Research shows that ovarian hormones are incredibly variable, even among ovulatory cycles that are fecundable (meaning, that person is likely able to get pregnant that cycle if they try). And we’ve known this for at least forty years. My lab shows it’s not just that the overall quantities are variable, but that the pattern of expression through the cycle is variable.
So that picture you saw when you were learning about what a menstrual cycle is in grade school is really not accurate. In fact, in our samples we see that pattern in less than a third of ovulatory cycles.
What this means is that when we think we are weird, or not normal, or there is something wrong with our cycles… a lot of the time that isn’t true. Of course if a person is experiencing pain, infertility, or other symptoms it is crucial they get seen by a doctor. It is also important, though, to recognize that some amount of variability we experience just means our systems are functioning as they should.
Picture: Vulvani Gallery: Free stock photos around menstruation
You talk about “medical betrayal” Can you unpick this for us?
Medical betrayal is a subset of a larger concept developed by Dr. Jennifer Freyd and others called “institutional betrayal.” Freyd defines institutional betrayal as “wrongdoings perpetrated by an institution upon individuals dependent on that institution, including failure to prevent or respond supportively to wrongdoings by individuals (e.g. sexual assault) committed within the context of the institution.”
Medical betrayal is the kind of betrayal experienced by medical institutions: both at the provider-level and system-level. When people are not believed, when they have to advocate for themselves for a decade or more to receive a diagnosis, when their ailments are understudied, when dealing with insurance is a full time job – that’s medical betrayal.
People with uteruses have a lot of betraying experiences in the medical system, and over time that can lead to a real loss of trust in science and in medicine. Sometimes this leads them towards treatments or methods that end up helping them a lot, other times they end up in the arms of charlatans. While I think there are limitations to Western medicine, it has many incredible uses and I find it really sad not only that the limitations are so centered around gonadal health, autoimmune and chronic diseases, and stigmatizing of fat people, but that this means that times when people with uteruses could really use health care, they may stop trying to get it.
How can we change these age-old notions of periods (and women’s bodies more broadly) as being dirty and taboo?
Periods are a fascinating case study for biology: instead of relegating the menstrual cycle to a short mention in sex ed it really should be featured in high school biology classes. I mean, you have tissue remodeling, you have immune regulation, you have the uterus itself which is basically the original 3D printer! Why don’t we study why and how humans menstruate, and how the uterus works, at this time?
I think if we bring back some of the wonder and curiosity it works better to reduce stigma than some efforts I’ve seen to normalize period blood (some of which, in my opinion, backfires because all it does is stimulate a disgust reaction in all the people who are already in the stigma camp). Whenever I talk to doctor friends I am appalled at how little they learn about the typical menstrual cycle or how or why periods do what they do (or, though this is a topic for another time, how they learn next to nothing about perimenopause and menopause). If the people who treat menstruating bodies don’t themselves know anything about periods I don’t know how we can get to a point where they are less stigmatized.
What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing the book?
When I was a very junior scholar, I expressed interest in studying endocrine disrupting chemicals and how they might affect menstrual cycles. I was immediately told by someone very senior that “they don’t do anything” and that I should look elsewhere in my research.
Well, now we know that EDCs are everywhere, they are intensely harmful, and they do directly influence menstrual cycles, egg development, possibly even period pain or endometriosis. There are EDCs in tampons, pads, period underwear – but also in our drinking water, our food, and the air we breathe. A lot of this is due to fossil fuel extraction, plastic production, and exposure to plastics themselves.
These data were surprising to me not just because they contradicted what an expert once said to me, but because I couldn’t figure out why this wasn’t a bigger deal. Plastics, disinfecting our water, particulate matter in the air – as we completely destroy our planet we are destroying human health. I cannot imagine a more important thing to sound the alarm on, and there are decades of incredible work showing in every way we can imagine that human damage to our planet is also damage to humans themselves – damage we can’t individual-solution our way out of. We need to fundamentally rethink the way we engage with the world and the obligations we have to each other and the planet.
While I only put a little of this in the book, I ended up writing a separate article on this for American Scientist and have continued to follow this research both in collaborations in my lab as well as my next writing project.
What do you hope your readers go away with? What impact do you hope the book will have?
I hope talking about periods opens up bigger conversations for them around disability justice and what it means to create a true public where all humans can participate. Right now we have publics that are not fully accessible to children, caregivers, disabled people, immune compromised people, people of color, and menstruating people…to name just a few, and of course, these identities all can intersect.
It’s not safe to be a Black person driving on the highway; it’s not safe to go to a crowded indoor space as an immune compromised person; it’s not safe to breathe the air some days as a pregnant person.To participate in public life, too many people have to take risks for their physical and mental and emotional health – risks that we could reduce through reduction of fossil fuels, slowing of climate change, better ventilation and filtration of indoor air, an end to racist policing as well as abolition from the perceived need for policing at all.
I also want people to feel hopeful at the end of the book. The future is not inevitable, it’s not already set in stone. The future is up to us: what we imagine, what we work for, what we fight for.
Maybe the piece I imagine is about having better ways of having periods in public, and being able to suppress periods as needed with fewer side effects.
But maybe this gets you started imagining better air in your workplace, or an end to natural gas use in your home – and from there you dream bigger and bigger and bigger, working with coalitions of interested groups towards something brighter and ever more exciting.
Is there anything else you want to say?
I think that’s it! Thank you for the chance to talk about my book – I do hope people buy it, and read it, and use it to enjoy cool science and dream of a better world.
Period: The Real Story of Menstruation, out now
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Picture at top is from Vulvani Gallery: Free stock photos around menstruation
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Let’s start at the start. What is endometriosis? Who does it impact?
Endometriosis is a painful, chronic, incurable illness that affects one in nine people who menstruate. Gynaecologist and author Dr Susan Evans defines it as “a condition where bits of tissue like the lining of the uterus are found in places outside the uterus where they shouldn’t be”. Endometriosis symptoms can include, but are not limited to: debilitating pain during periods, abdominal bloating, nausea, fatigue, low mood and depression, anxiety, pain with sex, adhesions, painful bowel movements and/or urination, chronic pelvic pain, and infertility.
Patients can have some, none or all of those symptoms. There are four stages of endometriosis with one being the least endometriosis lesions and four being the most, but there is no correlation between stages of endo and levels of pain.
You could have stage one endo and severe pain or stage four endo and no pain. We still have tons to do in terms of research and awareness to work out why and how that is so.
Tell us a bit about your own endo story and how it’s impacted your life?
I was born and raised in Canberra and moved to Adelaide at 14 years old. Just when we were about to move, I had a sudden attack of abdominal pain and I fainted on our icy cold Canberra bathroom tiles. My mum suggested it was probably period pain because she suffered similar and was a fainter as well. Later that day, I got my first period. Figuring it was normal and just the way period pain worked, I got on with my life, and we moved to Adelaide where I endured these painful, dizzy and nauseating episodes every month.
When I was 19, I had a working holiday in Cairns where a friend told me she’d been diagnosed with ‘endometriosis’ and described her symptoms to me. They matched my own, so I took myself off a doctor and he sent me away with a diagnosis of ‘partying too hard’ after chastising me for diagnosing myself (where did you get your medical degree? he asked).
At 22, I was back on the east side, living in Jindabyne and working at Blue Cow Mountain. I woke early one morning in severe pain, staggered to my local GP and promptly collapsed on the waiting room floor. I was whisked off in an ambulance to Cooma and my appendix was whipped out.
My surgeon visited me after the procedure and said he’d removed a healthy appendix. I asked, what’s wrong with me, then? And he said, You’ve probably just got your knickers in a twist over something.
Back in Adelaide for many years, I visited doctors complaining of pain, only to be told it was all in my head, until I was 35 and pregnant with a much-wanted baby that turned out to be a cornual ectopic pregnancy (a rare and dangerous condition where implantation occurs on the outside corner or in the cavity of the ‘horn’ of the uterus). This was the first of 11 pregnancy losses and no surviving pregnancies.
After having the ectopic removed via caesarean surgery, I was in more pain than ever, so I kept going back to my specialist asking for help and he kept saying I was fine, just grieving and/or stressed (eg, all in my head). After 12 months of dismissal, he reluctantly agreed to do a diagnostic laparoscopy but assured me there was nothing wrong with me. That surgery revealed stage four endometriosis. Finally, I had answers. Finally, it wasn’t all in my head. Finally, I could start healing. Because, when you spend 22 years trying to fix a head that isn’t sick, your head gets a little sick. So, I had a lot of work to do to forgive myself.
The cover “Endo Days.”
In a nutshell, what’s your book about?
Endo Days is a journalistic memoir that’s part narrative, part instruction manual and part comedy routine. It threads my story through interviews with a diverse range of ‘endo friendos’ across Australia, including the experiences of trans, queer, neurodivergent, younger, older, First Nations, metropolitan and rural Australians. The book offers tips and tricks for living well with chronic illness and takes the reader through my journey from misdiagnosis to treatment, through medical gaslighting, pregnancy losses, raising step-kids and a foster son, and working towards educating others.
Why did you write it?
When I was first diagnosed, I was angry and confused. I was sent home with this word, ‘endometriosis’ but no further information. I googled and was even more confused. I am a teacher by trade, so I immediately wanted to get some resources out there for people like me who were diagnosed late and feeling lost in the void.
But I also wanted to educate 14-year-old me (and her mum) that pain like that isn’t normal and there are better ways we can advocate for ourselves.
So when Wakefield Press approached me to write the book I knew I wanted to write the resource that would have helped me when I was first trying to navigate this illness.
You actually have a comedy how about endo and your book is quite funny in parts too. Why take this approach?
Someone once said to me, ‘there’s nothing funny about chronic illness’ and that felt like a challenge!
In my family, we have always used humour to diffuse tragic, difficult or awkward situations and my journey through endometriosis has been all of those things. But I also learn best through laughing. My husband Matt and I wrote our comedy cabaret (also called Endo Days) about our experiences with endo together.
In the show, we sing and joke about things like pain, the partner experience, medical gaslighting, fertility issues, being excluded from the ‘Mum Club’ because I didn’t birth my three children, unsolicited advice (have you tried yoga?) and there’s even a rap about suppositories. The show is great fun and a well-earned laugh for people with pain and their supporters.
It’s therapeutic for me as well, but the best bit is giving people who feel like there’s no hope and nothing out there for them an hour of comedy and song that is entirely relatable and allows them to feel validated and important, which they deserve.
Libby Trainor Parker is also a comedian. Picture Supplied/Craig Egan
A huge concern all through your book is gaslighting by the medical profession. Unpick this for us.
It took two decades for me to be diagnosed with endometriosis. I went to so many doctors complaining of pain, moods, fertility issues, bloating, nausea, bladder and bowel pain. And every time, I was told it was stress and anxiety, tiredness or a mystery virus. I was never referred to a gynaecologist until an ectopic pregnancy accidentally took me to a specialist who also said it was in my head, but who finally diagnosed me.
Endometriosis, in addition to many illnesses that affect women and people assigned female at birth, is still underfunded, under-researched and lacking awareness. Many of us are sent away with a prescription of ‘paracetamol and a lie down’ or ‘get some exercise and take up a hobby’ or ‘deal with it, it’s a women’s lot’. One woman told me a story that she was instructed by a GP to, ‘have an affair because then you’ll lose weight and feel better about yourself and your pain will go away’.
But it’s hard for doctors as well, especially GPs, because they are expected to be experts on everything from coldsores to cancer, so they need us to know our bodies better so we can go to see them armed with more information and the confidence to describe our symptoms better.
And I think things are changing. We are talking more. There is more information out there and, what was once a taboo topic is becoming more acceptable to discuss.
I see a generation of younger people coming through who are gutsier and more informed than I ever was and it gives me hope that endometriosis will be easily diagnosed and treated in the near future.
You also delve into all the endo myths. Give us an example.
Patients are often told pregnancy or hysterectomy will cure endometriosis, but there is not yet a cure for endo. People are also often told endo causes infertility, but that is also not always the case. There is so much that is unknown about endometriosis, but telling someone to get pregnant or have a hysterectomy before they’re ready to is extreme and dangerous!
If people take one thing away from your book, what would you like it to be?
I want people with endometriosis to feel seen, heard, understood and validated, and I want them to know they are not alone. There are people fighting for them every day and working hard to get this illness better recognised so we can fix it. I want them to know there is change on the horizon and there is hope. I want partners, parents, supporters and health practitioners to feel acknowledged and that we are grateful to them.
Living with chronic illness is so hard and we’re all doing our best. We can’t be warriors every day. Some days, I’m too tired to fight and I go back to bed and try again tomorrow. And that’s okay. I want people with endo to know that they’re enough, what they’re doing is enough and I’m proud of them for surviving.
Is there anything else you want to say?
I am hoping to bring my show and book to Canberra, so please come and see me so I can be the Homecoming Queen.
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Chinese authorities have banned a book on the history of the Mongols, citing “historical nihilism” – a term indicating a version of history not in keeping with the official party line – in what appeared to be a concerted attack by Beijing on ethnic Mongolians’ identity.
Orders have been sent out to remove “A General History of the Mongols” by scholars in the Mongolian Studies department of the Inner Mongolia Institute of Education should be removed from shelves, the pro-Beijing Sing Tao Daily newspaper reported.
It cited an Aug. 25 directive from the Inner Mongolian branch of the government-backed Books and Periodicals Distribution Association.
The move comes after President Xi Jinping called for renewed efforts to boost a sense of Chinese national identity in a visit to the northwestern region of Xinjiang.
Xi vowed to double down on China’s hardline policies toward the 11 million mostly Muslim Uyghurs who live in the region, warning that “hard-won social stability” would remain the top priority, along with making everyone speak Mandarin rather than their own languages.
And his warnings seemed to apply to other regions, too.
“Forging a strong sense of community for the Chinese nation is a focus of .. all work in areas with large ethnic minority populations,” Xi said in comments paraphrased by state media reports.
China’s President Xi Jinping delivers a speech during his visit to Urumqi in northwestern China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Aug. 26, 2023. Credit: Yan Yan/Xinhua via Getty Images “Education on standard spoken and written Chinese must be resolutely carried out to enhance people’s consciousness and ability to use it,” he said.
Ethnic Mongolians, who make up almost 20 percent of Inner Mongolia’s population of 23 million, increasingly complain of widespread environmental destruction and unfair development policies in the region, as well as ongoing attempts to target their traditional culture.
Clashes between Chinese state-backed mining or forestry companies and herding communities are common in the region, which borders the independent country of Mongolia, with those who complain about the loss of their grazing lands frequently targeted for harassment, beatings, and detention by the authorities.
Historical narrative
The banned book, published in 2004, was previously lauded for its work in “connecting the history of Mongolia from ancient times to the medieval period, making the history of Mongolia more complete,” according to a Baidupedia entry still available on Friday.
“Systematizing, organizing, and using a scientific approach can help the world better understand China’s five thousand years of glorious history, strengthen the unity of the Chinese nation, and make Chinese culture and history more prosperous,” said the entry, which must have once been approved by government censors.
Analysts said the book is already fairly nationalistic in tone, and describes the Mongols as part of the Chinese nation.
But the ban comes as the authorities are increasingly concerned about a growing sense of Mongolian identity among ethnic Mongolians living in China.
“A lot of Mongolian scholars and Mongolians in general don’t like this book because it describes the Mongols as a people of China,” Yang Haiying, a professor at Shizuoka University in Japan, told Radio Free Asia. “The Mongols have never considered themselves to be a Chinese people.”
Nonetheless, the book is now considered to contribute to a pan-Mongolian identity because it didn’t go far enough in making the Mongols appear to be historically part of the Chinese nation, Yang said.
“A lot of Mongolian scholars and Mongolians in general don’t like [“A General History of the Mongols”], because it describes the Mongols as a people of China,” Yang Haiying, a professor at Shizuoka University in Japan, told Radio Free Asia. Provided by Yang Haiying A pro-government comment on the social media platform Weibo hit out at the book for “historical nihilism.”
“Criticizing the pan-Mongolian nationalist trend is conducive to #cultivating the consciousness of the Chinese national community, conducive to #ethnic exchanges, exchanges, and integration#, and conducive to #forging a strong sense of the Chinese nation’s community !,” user @XiMay1 wrote on Aug. 29.
Ending Mongolian instruction
At the start of the academic year in 2020, China announced it would end Mongolian-medium instruction in schools, prompting angry protests and a wide-ranging crackdown across the region.
Taiwan-based strategic analyst Shih Chien-yu said the banning of the book sends a more general message to China’s ethnic Mongolians.
“There are still a lot of Mongolian cadres in the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party of China, a lot of Mongolian intellectuals and officials, while most of the ethnic minority intellectuals in the various central nationalities colleges and university-level schools are Mongolian,” he said.
Protestors hold banners and wave the Mongolian flag during a protest in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, against Chinese policies in the neighboring Chinese province of Inner Mongolia on Oct. 1, 2020. Credit: Byambasuren Byamba-Ochir/AFP “The main reason for banning the book is to warn them that they should believe they still have any clout within the regime,” Shih said. “Don’t put up any resistance behind our backs, because we can take away your power at any time.”
In 2018, Chinese authorities detained Lhamjab A. Borjigin, a prominent ethnic Mongolian historian who gathered testimony of a historical genocide campaign by the ruling Chinese Communist Party, prosecuting him on charges of separatism.
He was handed a one-year suspended jail term for “separatism” and “sabotaging national unity,” then released under ongoing surveillance.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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The following article is a condensed version of a research paper delivered at the ANU Gender Institute symposium on ‘Understanding Coercive Control’ that explored coercive control from multiple inter-disciplinary perspectives.
The issue of coercive control – what is it, how do we recognise it, should it be criminalised – has been subjected to significant media and public attention in the last few years. This, in conjunction with the fact that the term ‘coercive control’ was only coined in 2007 by sociologist Evan Stark, contributes to the assumption that coercive control is a new phenomenon.
However, the patterns of behaviours designed to intimate, control, and isolate an individual that Stark classifies as coercive control have been a feature of intimate partnerships since at least the nineteenth century.
Notably, it was as early as the 1880s that these behaviours were beginning to be criticised and recognised as unacceptable masculine marital behaviours, or as abuses of patriarchal authority. Through law and literature, wives and women were claiming that a husband’s unquestioned control over all aspects of his wife’s life was an unacceptable abuse of patriarchal power – with some divorce court judges supporting this assertion.
The 1886 novel of Rosa Praed, The Right Honourable, is an enlightening example of how colonial women used literature to critique domestic violence in all its forms, including the non-physical and especially patterns of behaviour that would now be termed coercive control. Despite Praed being Australia’s most popular and well-known female author during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, renowned for her damning portrayals and critiques of marriage, few of her books have been reprinted since their original publication.
The Right Honourable is no exception to this – despite being reprinted multiple times throughout the 1880s and 1890s, it has been out of print for a century.
Zoe Smith believes the 1886 novel of Rosa Praed, The Right Honourable, is an enlightening example of how colonial women used literature to critique domestic violence in all its forms. Picture: Supplied
In The Right Honourable, Crichton Kenway is introduced as a man ‘who seemed fairly fitted to be a hero of romance of the conventional order. He was tall, upright, good-looking, well dressed, and had an air of breeding’. A politician who moves in all the right social circles, he and his Australian wife Koorali seemingly have the perfect relationship. However, Crichton’s marital behaviour means that the marriage between himself and Koorali is clearly no ‘romance of the conventional order’.
The marriage is characterised by psychological and verbal abuse directed towards Koorali, with Crichton’s behaviour comprehensible to the modern reader as behaviour we would now term ‘coercive control’ and ‘gaslighting’.
Crichton tells Koorali how to dress, he regulates her behaviour at balls to ensure she is constantly working to his advantage in using her feminine wiles to charm his superiors, he reads her letters over her shoulder, he criticises and monitors her expenditure. All this occurs in conjuction with his verbal abuse designed to belittle and demean her, ‘crude, hard things in a way that hurt her like a blow’.
As Praed describes, ‘Crichton, though never absolutely rude or rough, had a rasping, overbearing manner at home – a way of harking upon mean detail, of fault-finding, and of attributing the lowest motive to every action, which often caused Koorali to wince, destroying her spontaneity and self-confidence, and making her timid and reserved, and less and less a thing of flesh and blood’. Resultantly, Koorali ‘began to believe that she was really stupid and wanting in common sense, as Crichton so often told her, and that he had reasonable cause for complaint’.
Notably, these behaviours are the most prominent form of domestic violence depicted by Praed in the novel, and are judged by Praed and other characters in the text, both male and female, to be behaviours beyond reasonable patriarchal authority. It is insinuated that this form of abuse is inherently linked to other forms of domestic violence – later in the text when Koorali states that she will leave Crichton as a result of his controlling behaviour, he threatens her with legally sanctioned marital rape which is coupled with the first explicit hinting of an act of physical violence – ‘he made a gesture as if he would have fell upon her and throttled her there and then’.
The acts of verbal and psychological abuse, and what we would consider coercive control, are the key feature Praed sought to emphasise in her critique of masculine marital behaviour – her fiction, situated in the romance and domestic realist genres, generally sought to highlight the myriad forms of abuse faced by wives in colonial marriages.
These patterns of behaviours were not a new form of unacceptable marital masculine behaviour for colonial female authors such as Praed to criticise. From 1880, Ada Cambridge, a popular writer of serial fiction in Australian newspapers, detailed the systematic regime of control and abuse wives could suffer at the hands of husbands in her fiction. In Cambridge’s ‘Dinah’, serialised in The Australasian from 1879-1880, Dinah’s husband subjects her to a regime of humiliation, economic control, and psychological abuse that would be recognised today as coercive control: ‘he watched over her expenditure with a suspicious watchfulness that pounced upon every sixpence wasted; and if she tore her dress, or knocked over a wineglass, he made her life a burden to her for hours afterwards’.
As the narrator describes of Dinah’s experiences: ‘the humiliations to which she was subjected were petty, indeed, from an outside point of view – hints and slights and sneers that made no noise or scandal but they were nonetheless the cruellest that the ingenuity of an aggrieved husband, who was at once bully and coward, could devise’.
In a similar state of marital relations to Koorali and Crichton, the psychological abuse and controlling behaviour perpetrated by Dinah’s husband is the only instance of domestic violence that Cambridge explicitly details, aside from hinting at an occasion of marital rape.
By the mid 1880s then, there was certainly a growing awareness and criticism of the myriad of forms that domestic violence could take in marriages. The question of what to call this spectrum of behaviours was a difficult one – whilst ‘wife-beating’ was still the most popular term, connoting images of working class men perpetrating physical violence, courts and newspapers focused more broadly on what they termed ‘cruelty’, a legal term subjective to the discretion of individual judges. Acts that we would now consider to be economic violence, psychological abuse, and coercive control were either constructed as ‘mental cruelty’ or as constituting a broader ‘system of tyranny’ that a husband could subject his wife to.
By 1890, the New South Wales case of Hume v Hume, presided over by Justice Windeyer, court cemented ‘mental cruelty’ and a husband’s ‘system of tyranny’ as a form of domestic violence cruel enough to warrant a wife a divorce without also declaring physical violence. Edward Hume had ‘cut his wife Ellen off from the intercourse of her friends; refused to speak to her for days and weeks, except in orders’ coupled with oaths and abuse, and refused to let her leave their property’.
Yet, coercive control alone or accompanied by the ‘occasional’ blow was not enough to break the sacred bonds of marriage across the whole of Australia – Windeyer was the exception amongst his fellow judges in Victoria and Queensland. Dismissing a 1912 case in Queensland in which William Tredea had isolated his wife Laura on a rural pastoral station and controlled the amount of time she spent with her children, Justice Shand declared he had to be ‘careful not to go beyond the limits of legal cruelty’ and to not overly restrict a husband’s understood household authority.
A husband’s ‘system of tyranny’ could therefore and still was tolerated and upheld, despite growing awareness and criticism, and it wouldn’t be until the 1970s that this broader pattern of abusive behaviours would again be brought to public attention by feminists criticising domestic violence more broadly. The establishment of women’s refuges such as Elsie in 1974, alongside the testimonies of wives to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships published in 1977, put a spotlight on domestic violence, with acts of coercive control given renewed public and feminist attention. See Michelle Arrow’s The Seventies for more on this.
Yet, it has taken until 2007 for the pattern of behaviours to be given an official name and definition, and it is only in the last few years, in the wake of cases such as the murder of Hannah Clarke and the subsequent relevant of the nature of her husband’s abusive and controlling behaviour.
Why? That I can’t answer, but it is high time that we acknowledge that coercive control in Australia has been the subject of feminist and legal attention for 150 years.
As for what historians like myself can contribute to current discussions by historicising coercive control, openly acknowledging the cultural discourses and acceptability around contemporary forms of violence, and judging historical violence by current standards, allows for a revitalised and more complex understanding of domestic violence in the past – an understanding that is vital in thinking about domestic violence and coercive control in Australia and Australian society more broadly if we ever going to deal with our ‘national problem’.
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Zimbabwean author Lucy Mushita has written a moving, original and emotional novel called, Chinongwa. The book recounts a coming-of-age story set in rural 1920s Zimbabwe. Chinongwa’s family have been displaced from their lands and are very poor. One desperate solution to hunger is to trade young daughters into marriage. Chinongwa, a small, thin girl, is eventually offered as a second wife to a man who is old enough to be her grandfather.
Given Lucy Mushita’s brave decision to tackle child marriage, BroadAgenda editor Ginger Gorman had a chat with the debut author.
This book was based on a real story from your community. Why was it so hard to find out the background to this story from people in your village?
Though not my own grandmother (both my grandmothers died giving birth), Chinongwa’s story was a village shame that was whispered about.
What happened when you tried?
Between the age of three and five, I innocently joined a conversation of these two grandmothers. One of them threatened to wash my mouth with soap if I repeated what I had heard. I ran away but from then on, Grandmother Chinongwa’s story became my obsession. I’d pretend to play next to adults, eavesdropping. Years later, I’d return from France with my first child, to discover that I could now join adult conversations. On asking questions about Chinongwa, I got three reactions.
‘Who send you to ask me?’
‘I don’t remember; let sleeping dogs lie.’
‘That was sad, wasn’t it?’
I had to pull any information out of their noses.
Is it usual to be so secretive about these things in Zimbabwe?
Unpalatable pasts tended to be cloaked in tired nods, shrugs and sighs. They had given her away; they were responsible for all her suffering. The sight of Chinongwa could only provoke their guilt, making it difficult for them to maintain the group amnesia they preferred.
Please give us the global context for child marriage and why it makes you so angry.
In Zimbabwe, the man pays roora (a dowry) in money, cows, goats, clothes – for his bride. This incentivises parents to dehumanise their daughters and treat them as objects of exchange. While an unknown adult man who has sex with a random girl commits paedophilia, when that random girl’s parents (who should protect her) permit the same random man to have sex with her, the girl becomes a bride.
Shakespeare says, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Sex with a child, regardless of roora, is still paedophilia. A 2023 UNICEF report reveals that of all marriages, 19% are of children, 45% in South Asia, 20% in Sub-Saharan Africa.
What drives child marriage within Zimbabwe?
Tradition (millennial customs that haven’t changed), poverty (receiving roora is more attractive than paying school fees), parental greed (an old man loaded with bling is easily welcome).
Your character is only a little girl (the same age as my own daughters!). How have you tried to portray Chinongwa so we see her humanity?
Though Chinongwa knows she will most likely be given away, she is a child, innocent to what marriage entails. She needs her mother, chases butterflies, dreams of going to school.
Your writing is highly beautiful and evocative. Tell us how you developed this style.
My writing was most likely influenced by the poetic and imaged language the elders used when I was small. Most of these illiterate raconteurs mesmerised us children as they sang, slammed and danced to poetry. As my writing is very visual, and I was telling their story, I was a simple interpreter.
‘She had never seen talking lions or giraffes, never seen singing pythons that gave their eggs to humans but then, neither had she ever seen overflowing granaries, rivers of milk and honey, nor the kneeless with a woman-king.’
‘A man who never marries. When he dies, a mouse is tied onto his back and he is told that it is his child. That way, he does not come back to haunt his family looking for his children. Because he cannot see what is on his back, he thinks it is a child.’
The cover of ‘Chinongwa.’ Picture: Supplied
Why is this a feminist call to arms? What are you hoping people will take from your book? What change do you hope for?
The measure of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable. My hope is that once one has read Chinongwa, the above-mentioned statistics will acquire a face, a name, a place. I want readers to put themselves in Chinongwa’s shoes, feel her likes, hear her laughter, sense her fear, pain and helplessness at leaving her mother and home. I want them to put on their shining armour, come to her rescue.
I want communities to stop dressing girls in bridal outfits to celebrate weddings in which the child cannot fathom the horror awaiting her.
I want men and women to wake up to the plight of girls, to lobby the UN to criminalise paedophilia. Otherwise, what kind of society are we to condone child rape. Slavery was outlawed.
What are we waiting for, to outlaw societal paedophilia? Given the choice, would any of us choose an eleven-year-old illiterate mother? I am sure we would all go for an older mother, who chose to have us, who knows what she is doing, who can protect us and satisfy our basic needs.
Picture at top: Author Lucy Mushita. Picture: Supplied
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In her new novel, Untethered, debut author Ayesha Inoon, who is now based in Canberra, shares with readers an incredibly intimate portrait of a young Sri Lankan woman who immigrates with her husband to Australia. Here, Ayesha speaks with BroadAgenda writer, Jesse Blakers, about the book.
For readers who may not be familiar with the novel, can you give them a sense of what the story is about?
Untethered is a story about the complex experience of immigration but it’s also about a young woman who faces and overcomes great obstacles to find a stronger, freer version of herself. The protagonist Zia has a very sheltered and comfortable life in Sri Lanka, however she is restricted from pursuing her dreams of travel and higher education. She agrees to an arranged marriage as she knows that is what is expected of her.
In Australia she faces homesickness, isolation and poverty, however she also discovers there’s a certain freedom in being in a new country away from the cultural boundaries she’s always known.
The novel follows Zia’s journey of self-discovery, the grief of her losses and the joy of her newfound hopes and dreams.
This story is partially based on your own experiences. What was the process of blending fiction and reality like for you?
It wasn’t so much a blending, as of drawing on my emotional experiences of immigration and navigating life in a new country to create the fictional stories of Zia and Rashid. In some ways it was easy, because I had my knowledge and experience of living in Sri Lanka, of Sri Lankan Muslim culture and life as a new immigrant in Australia.
This sometimes meant it was difficult to have distance from my characters. The initial draft was written in first person. Rewriting in third person helped give me some distance and perspective.
I’d love to know what the pitching and publishing process was like for you as a debut author. Was there anything you didn’t expect?
The pitching process was long, and sometimes disheartening. I tried to be objective about it and not take it personally when I received a rejection. There are so many factors that influence whether a book gets picked up or not, and I realised I could do little to control that beyond making sure my novel was in its best possible shape, and my submissions were well presented.
Needless to say I was thrilled to win the ASA/HQ prize and the journey from there to publication has been a dream. The team at HQ/HarperCollins have been amazingly supportive and I’ve loved working with them to launch my book into the world.
I didn’t expect the enormous amount of work that goes into producing a book – from the editing and proofreading to the cover design and marketing, there is so much that goes on behind the scenes to get books onto shelves!
Zia and Rashid both come from wealthy Sri Lankan families, but Zia, as a woman, does not have the same freedoms as Rashid. We see gendered expectations impact their relationship. Why was it important for you to explore this dynamic?
I wanted to explore how gendered expectations can limit individual freedom of choice and the ability to be true to yourself.
Zia is expected to be submissive, to accept the choices of her parents in terms of what would be best for her life and to then be a ‘good wife’ to Rashid by supporting his choices. Rashid is expected to be the breadwinner and to know what is best for both himself and Zia.
We see both of them rebel against these expectations at various stages of the novel – Zia in wanting to study or work and Rashid in struggling with the fact that all the responsibility for their lives lie on him. And yet they are so confined by societal rules that they are unable to voice their true desires to each other or see how things could be different. I wanted to portray how difficult it can be to step away from such expectations and the strength it would take for someone like Zia to break free of them to follow her own path.
Cover of “Untethered.”
Zia experiences many difficulties moving from Sri Lanka to Australia, but her female friendships and her relationship with her faith are huge pillars of support. What did it mean to you to include these relationships?
We all need the love and support of good friends to make it through difficult times, and I wanted Zia to have these relationships as she navigated life as a new wife and mother in Sri Lanka and then as an immigrant in Australia. In Sri Lanka, these friends are girls she grew up with and they find comfort in their shared experiences.
Her friendship with Jenny in Australia is especially poignant because although they have hardly anything in common, they enjoy each other’s company and build a strong friendship which becomes one of Zia’s foundations in Australia. Zia’s faith also evolves as she goes through her journey yet remains a constant source of comfort and strength.
Although Zia puts some of her dreams aside to be a wife and mother, she never sees motherhood as a substitute. Was it difficult to strike that balance with Zia’s character?
It was challenging, because Zia, like many women, wanted very much to be a mother. I think there’s generations of women who were taught that this was their primary role in life and that all other ambitions were secondary, if at all. For Zia, this conditioning meant that she felt she couldn’t have more than one purpose.
Still, as you say, she never sees motherhood as a substitute because although it fulfils that desire, there are other deep needs which remain unmet, and she is left brimming with all this potential that she’s not able to express or pursue.
Zia spends much of the story ‘searching’; for approval from her family, for a sense of purpose and freedom. What is something you hope readers take away from Zia’s journey?
I would love for readers to see that Zia’s sense of purpose and her freedom, eventually came from within herself. At the beginning of the novel, she complies with all that is expected of her, believing the love and approval of her family and Rashid to be her reward, despite her secret yearnings for more out of life.
As the story progresses, Zia finds the courage to break free of her constraints and reach for independence. Although that comes at the cost of irrevocable losses, that is part of her journey, building her resilience and giving her a greater capacity to hold both the sorrows and joys of her new life.
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Pride month ended last week, and I cannot tell you how many social media posts I’ve seen reminding us in the queer community to take care of ourselves, especially in these times. As a queer person, it feels like my heart is forever sinking in my chest because another book has been banned in the US.
We may be in Australia, but we’re not as separate from America as we like to think; many of our cultural cues are imported from the US, and as I’ll explain, Australia has its share of book bans too.
Over the last two and a half years, a constant stream of new laws across the US have targeted the queer community, in particular transgender people, including access to healthcare, drag shows, and education within schools. A specific example of these sorts of attacks is book banning, which is the removal or restriction of access to certain books in schools and libraries.
While not a new phenomenon, school districts in the US have been experiencing alarmingly high rates of ‘challenges’ against a range of books, often depicting stories representing the LGBTQIA+ community, immigrants, and people of colour. The practice of ‘challenging’ a book results from an objection to the book’s content, and triggers a systematic review process to discern whether the book is deemed appropriate by librarians, teachers, and administrators.
Professor Mary Lou Rasmussen, an expert in gender, sexuality, and education from the Australian National University, believes that they can at times be politically motivated towards a certain cause. “I think that cause often involves children…and [is] about evoking children as a figure that needs to be saved.”
Professor Mary Lou Rasmussen. Picture: supplied
Many of the challenges to books have been from a minority, sometimes even a single person, lodging a complaint directly to school boards and administrators. For instance, the Florida Citizens Alliance has lodged many of the complaints in their state responsible for book bans.
Yet, their official Facebook page is followed by approximately 1.3% of Florida’s total population (3 thousand out of 22 million). Other conservative groups, such as Moms for Liberty and the Concerned Parents of the Ozarks, are no different.
Despite those small numbers, lack of access to any queer books can still affect the LGBTQIA+ community. “Books are powerful. They can teach empathy, but they can also teach self-awareness,” says queer writer and author Karis Rogerson. “I might have realised who I was sooner if I’d read a broader selection of books as a teen.” Karis isn’t the only person who struggled with a lack of diversity in books.
Trans and queer writer Robin Gow, founder and director of Transcendent Connections, released a novel in 2022 exploring the story of two transgender teens and their relationship. “With my verse novel, A Million Quiet Revolutions, I wanted to write a story I would have wanted to gift myself as a young person grappling with my gender who was without the language or resources to explain my experience.”
Just like Karis, Robin, and many other queer people, discovering queer stories changed my understanding of who I was as a teenager.
Between July and December of last year, the state of Texas banned 438 books, a 28% increase from the previous six months. This huge number of bans is partially due to books being immediately removed once challenged, despite the American Library Association and National Coalition Against Censorship recommending that challenged books should remain accessible during review. In some instances, school boards have been overwhelmed with a high number of challenges submitted together, dragging out the review processes.
We’ve seen this in Australia too. Throughout the 20th century, many literary classics, such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, were banned or restricted in Australia, often vaguely citing “obscene content” as the cause. As recently as March this year, Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer (which is also currently the book with the highest number of bans in the US) was removed from a Queensland public library after a complaint from a member of the public. Progressives have used book bans as well; two years ago, several Dr Seuss books were permanently pulled from publication due to racist stereotyping.
What makes the current book bans in the US so frustratingly painful are the type of books being banned and why.
Many of the books being challenged are accused of containing sexual content. While some do include implicit sex scenes, plenty do not. First published in 2001, Susan Meyers’ Everywhere Babies was included in the 2021 “Objectionable Materials” report (written by the Florida Citizens Alliance and often known by its inflammatory name, the “Porn in Schools” report), which listed 58 books as sexually inappropriate.
Each book in the report has a link to an individual review, requiring the reader to actively open them – and the Everywhere Babies review states that there is no ‘objectionable content’. It is listed as an LGBTQIA+ book, due to some images that show two same-sex people looking after a baby. The complete absence of sexual content in the book makes it clear that LGBTQIA+ themes have been sexualised and deemed ‘age-inappropriate’ in the report (to see a video read-through of Everywhere Babies, click here).
The popular Heartstopper books, written and illustrated by Alice Oseman, have also been challenged and banned in several school districts. The series primarily follows Nick and Charlie, two young teens navigating their feelings for each other, and later, their blossoming relationship. Having personally read these books, I can attest to the distinct lack of sexual content throughout the entire series.
I only recently reread the series, and I wholeheartedly agreed with journalist Gary Nunn when he told me that it “particularly stings” that Heartstopper has been part of the book bans. Even more so when considering that Oseman actively counteracts narratives of hypersexuality throughout the series, focusing on other aspects of Nick and Charlie’s relationship.
Nick and Charlie in the upcoming second season of Heartstopper. Picture: Netflix
“It’s rare to have such an innocent depiction of same-sex romantic affection,” continued Gary. In a previous article discussing the ambiguous grief Heartstopper stirred in him, Gary stated that Heartstopper depicts “an innocence that a whole generation of gay men like me were denied.”
So, why are we seeing books such as Heartstopper and Everywhere Babies being banned for non-existent sexual content?
PEN America’s 2023 banned books report found that of the 874 book titles banned in various US school districts between July and December last year, 26% (roughly 227) contained queer characters or themes. People of colour were also being targeted, with 30% (approximately 262) containing characters of colour or themes of race and racism.
The 2021 “Objectionable Materials” report specifically attacks same-sex parents and couples by insisting that novels portraying same-sex parents “undermine Florida Constitution that marriage is between [a] man and a woman” (Florida’s Constitution has not had its marriage section removed, first adopted in 2008, despite the legalisation of same-sex marriage back in 2015).
While some intentions behind the book bans might not be political or biased, homophobia and transphobia are, regardless, playing a large role. We all know that our teenage years can be a time of figuring out our identity, and books can be an important tool in discovering ourselves as individuals. Reading has always been a source of comfort and guidance in my life, and to think that others will not always have this opportunity is both frustrating and devastating.
“The stories we consume matter,” says author Melissa Blair. “The first way we learn is through story, and therefore the stories we read, even fictional ones, impact how we see our world.” What is just as important is the books we don’t read.
Banning and removing books that represent real people tells us that we will not be accepted as who we are, if who we are is outside of a white, heteronormative and cisnormative identity.
Professor Rasmussen, who we heard from earlier, worked in the US during the 1990’s as a queer activist. She dealt with book bans at the time. “In some ways, I think that the symbolism of the bans is more pronounced now that it was then,” Professor Rasmussen said. “LGBTQIA+ people already often feel like they’re not welcome, and these cement that.”
When discussing the impact on health and wellbeing, Professor Rasmussen voiced her concern that these book bans would “do nothing” for the mental, social, and economic wellbeing of the LGBTQIA+ community, especially young people with limited independence and choice in where they go to school. “The issues on them are compounded because of a lack of autonomy associated with the bans, which makes them all the more onerous.”
Working as a bookseller myself in a part-time job, I have witnessed the moments of joy and pride that teens especially experience when they see books that represent themselves. As a reader myself, I have come to value the experience of not only critically engaging with books, but expanding my worldview through reading. Inclusive and hopeful books such as Heartstopper are especially critical – as Gary argued, “it ought to be compulsory reading for all schools to tackle homophobia, promote equality and nourish empathy via the imagination.”
Access to a range of books, especially those reflecting our diversity, is joyful and essential. Removing that representation takes away a chance to see ourselves be understood and truly embraced, even if it’s just through fictional characters.
If you’d like a powerful reminder of why books like Heartstopper mean so much to queer viewers, Jesse Blakers wrote this piece last year.
- Feature image at top: Heartstopper, Season 1, Episode 2. Nick and Charlie lying in the snow. Picture: Netflix
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Who designs cities? And who are they made for? In her book, ‘Trophy Cities:’A feminist perspective on new capitals,’ Associate Professor Dorina Pojani from the University of Queensland offers a fresh perspective on socio-cultural and physical production of planned capital cities through the theoretical lens of feminism.
She evaluates the historical, spatial and symbolic manifestations of new capital cities, as well as the everyday experiences of those living there, to shed light on planning processes, outcomes and contemporary planning issues. BroadAgenda editor Ginger Gorman asked Dorina. a few quesitons.
In a nutshell, what’s your book “Trophy Cities” about?
This book evaluates the planning processes and outcomes of seven new capital cities, spread across time and cultures: Canberra, Australia; Chandigarh, India; Brasília, Brazil; Abuja, Nigeria; Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan; Naypyidaw, Myanmar; and Sejong, South Korea. I have approached my research from a feminist perspective, considering the role of gender in these cities. I am a hard critic of these dystopian megaprojects. I argue that they have been, for the most part, great planning disasters.
Why do we need to look at cities through a feminist lens?
Because the patriarchy is the common thread that connects these megaprojects in their shortcomings. All the other connections are tenuous. Major failures are evident in both democratic and authoritarian settings; in post-colonial nations and places that had long been independent by the time they created their new capitals; in places with a socialist legacy and those who were always capitalist; in countries where the population majority is Black, White, or Asian; in poorer countries and wealthier ones; in national or regional capitals; in early capitals and very recent ones; in capitals built in greenfield locations and those created as extensions to existing settlements; in capitals built during the modern and post-modern eras, and so on.
What are the (everyday) consequences if we don’t?
If we keep building cities that embody the patriarchy, we’ll end up with dreary, overpowering, underserviced, wasteful, and unaffordable places.
Instead of friendly, usable streets, we’ll have large, monumental spaces. Instead of public transportation and neighbourhood services, we’ll have cars and highways. Instead of bringing people together, our cities will exacerbate social and ethnic inequalities.
You’re not just asking questions through a feminist lens, but also questions about class, race, ethnicity and religion and how these things intersect. Why?
That’s correct. Not only does the patriarchal city oppress women as a broad group but it also pitches women against one another on the basis of class, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, disability, marital status, motherhood, occupation, political opinion, and other systems of exclusion and segregation.
Without a united global sisterhood, it is much harder to chip away at the patriarchy and the cities planning models it produces.
What are the patriarchal and colonial themes you’re exploring? (Why is it men who want to found new capitals)?
There are so many reasons. For one, new capital cities have been a key component in grand nation-building projects, and independence and nation-building have been, for the most part, male endeavours rather than inclusive ventures. Moreover, some new capitals have been built based on a militaristic and bellicose image of nationhood, which at times has veered on paranoia. For example, Naypyidaw and Abuja were the pet projects of army generals.
In championing the construction of new capitals, male politicians or government bureaucrats have cast themselves as benevolent patriarchs. And they have given free rein to a few handpicked male architects and planners to design these cities. This has resulted in cities that are, first and foremost, expressions of egomania.
One of Nur-Sultan monuments I visited contained the solid gold imprint of President Nazarbayev’s right hand, and visitors were invited to place their hand on to be granted a wish!
Associate Professor Dorina Pojani
Some motivations have also been economic. In the last three or four decades, the dominant economic order has been neoliberal globalization. Most of its front-runners have been well-educated, upper-class, wealthy men, leaving little space for women. The “new economy” is led by notoriously male-dominated sectors including finance and real estate.
Capitals cities have joined the international race to produce shiny urban design and architecture. For example, Sejong is aiming to become a prototype of the ‘ubiquitous eco-city’ (u-eco-city). However, this is really a marketing term that seeks to reinforce South Korea’s image as an international technology hub. Overall, there is little evidence that creating a new capital has been more economically beneficial to a nation than investing in the existing capital or peripheral cities would have been.
How do we throw all this off? What would cities look like if we planned them with a feminist lens? How would outlives be different?
Much feminist advocacy has centred on affordable housing, living wages, accessible transport, safety and security provisions, free childcare, affordable health care and education, participatory budgeting, political representation, gender quotas, gender impact assessments, and gender mainstreaming. These aspects are important and undeniable gains have been made. However, cities around the world are still planned, built, and managed based on traditional gender roles. Capitals, as national showcases, are a prime example of a patriarchal approach in urban planning.
I argue that technocratic fixes to gender issues in the city, applied within a patriarchal framework, are eventually bound to fail. At this point, we need much more radical solutions that transform the patriarchal state, society, and economy in conjunction with tangible urban space. Patriarchy, physically articulated into cities, is not the only way. In fact, its endurance is a failure of our collective imagination.
Cover image: Trophy Cities – A feminist perspective on new capitals.
Looking to the future, is there anything else you want to say?
Matriarchy is the future. By this I don’t mean a role reversal, in which women assume the status of men. That would be another dystopia.
My conception of a matriarchy is a political and cultural model founded on what are commonly regarded as maternal values: caretaking, kindness, and nurturing. A matriarchy is gender-egalitarian, classless, peaceful, non-hierarchal, inclusive , ecological, healthy, and beautiful. It is based on economic need and reciprocity rather than greed, private property, and cutthroat competition. Hierarchic religions worshiping omnipotent male gods do not exist.
Small communities practice a grassroots democracy based on the principle of consensus rather than negative public engagement like NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard), NOMS (Not On My Street), and 3N’s (No to New Neighbours). Totalizing planning, such as that prevailing in new capitals, is shunned.
It sounds like John Lennon’s anarchic vision in ‘Imagine’, doesn’t it?
We need to decide together what the spatial form of a matriarchal city should be.
In the book, I refrain from proposing specific shapes or patterns. All urban utopias tend to turn authoritarian, and my book stands firmly against authoritarianism, aggression, hierarchy, and dominion.
- Picture at top: An aerial view of Sejong City, South Korea near an observatory park. Photo: Shutterstock
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Was there a time when our white ancestors lived in harmony with nature and respected women? How far back would we have to go to find such a time, if it ever existed at all? How did we lose respect for the natural world and for women? The answers to these questions opens the door to finding a way to change the course of history.
This post was originally published on Estuary Press.
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Sarah Holland-Batt’s poetry collection The Jaguar won the 2023 Stella Prize for Australian women’s and non-binary writers’ work. It’s an extraordinary and unexpected collection of poems, which confronts what it means to be mortal in an astonishing and deeply humane portrait of a father’s Parkinson’s Disease, and a daughter forged by grief.
BroadAgenda editor, Ginger Gorman, had a chat with Sarah about her award-winning work.
Congratulations on this extraordinary achievement. As writers, we never know if anyone will read or appreciate our work. How did you feel when you found out you’d won the Stella Prize?
Really delighted and so surprised. I think I’m still taking it in, to be honest. It’s a huge honour, of course, and it also means that so many people who might not otherwise encounter my writing will have the opportunity to read it, which is an extraordinary gift.
The Stella Prize has done so much to change the reception of women’s writing in this country, and to shift our literary culture in general, so it’s particularly lovely to be recognised by a prize driven by such laudable ideals.
The Jaguar is about your relationship with your late father, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease. Why did you decide to write about this topic?
Often writers don’t get to choose their material; life gives it to us.
Watching my father’s trajectory with Parkinson’s, particularly towards the end of his life, was one of the most profound and moving experiences of my life: challenging and tragic at times, but also poignant and deeply beautiful too.
Many of the experiences were so striking and insistent in my imagination that I felt compelled to write about them.
This isn’t a topic one might traditionally associate with poetry…What inkling inside you made you think it WAS?
Much of the greatest poetry through history has been, in various ways, about reconciling with our mortal nature, and accepting that one day we will die. So I’m not breaking new ground in that sense; my work is part of a long conversation that is as old as poetry itself. But I hadn’t read very much poetry about the frailty of the parent, which I think is a particularly acute and at times challenging thing to witness.
Our parents are the bedrock on which our own adult selves are built, generally speaking; to watch them change and become vulnerable and in need of our own care is intense and profound, but it’s also not a topic we speak much about openly or freely.
There are so many taboos still remaining about ageing, and such stigma about neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and dementia. Poetry seemed to me to be a good form—short, intense, with the capacity to move through space and time and draw together disparate images and ideas—though which to explore this complex terrain, and hopefully open up that conversation.
Cover of Sarah Holland-Batt’s book, ‘The Jaguar’ (2022). Picture: Supplied
What does the book say about caring roles in our society?
I don’t write didactic or activist poetry, so the poems don’t tell the reader what to think about caring, per se. But I hope the poems encourage the reader to imagine themselves in those scenes, to see the dignity and humanity of older people, and to think about what it means to die and to care and to love for someone who is dependant or vulnerable.
The poems contemplate those questions through quite a specific portrait of my father and my relationship to him—but hopefully they also open a window out to others who have had, or may, have similar experiences.
Why did you infuse the book with such a sense of beauty and wonder – especially in your images of nature?
I think we are often so afraid of death that we refuse to see dying as part of living—or to admit that death and dying can be both confronting and difficult but also, at times, beautiful.
This societal denial of our animal natures, and of our position as mortal animals, means that we refuse to imagine ourselves as ever becoming old, or conceding that death will happen for all of us, or to even conceded that death is part of what gives our lives meaning.
The imagery I draw on—especially imagery of the natural world—invites the reader to consider how humans are animal, and how death and dying are natural, and at times, mysterious and deeply beautiful phenomena.
What questions were you trying to ask – and perhaps answer – about living, dying and mortality, frailty and vulnerability?
I was interested in the question of why it is that we are so frightened to look at ageing, at cognitive decline and vulnerability, and of what sort of beauty and meaning we might be missing by averting our gaze from these subjects. These poems are a form of insistence: insisting on looking when looking is difficult.
What kind of picture were you trying to paint of your dad? (It must be bitter sweet now he’s no longer with you. How do you think he would have responded to the news?)
My father was brilliant, generous and kind, and a phenomenal intellectual mentor to me when I was young, but he was also complex and difficult in certain ways, like any human being. It was important to me that the poems captured the complexity of his character, rather than sentimentalising or simplifying him in retrospect. The poems delve into the personality changes he experienced alongside his Parkinson’s, and track the changing nature of our relationship. I hope they hold those complexities in balance.
Sarah Holland-Batt winning the 2023 Stella Prize. Picture: Supplied
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This is a slightly revised version of a vote of thanks given after a panel to launch of the ‘Women and Whitlam’ book with contributors, Elizabeth Reid, Marie Coleman and Blair Williams in conversation with editor Michelle Arrow. This was part of the ANU Meet the Author series, organised by Colin Steele at Kambri Cultural Centre Cinema, April 18. The podcast is available at Meet the author – Michelle Arrow, Marie Coleman, Elizabeth Reid and Blair Williams.
If you’re interested to know more about the book itself, check out this Q and A Michelle Arrow did with BroadAgenda editor, Ginger Gorman.
As the Honorable Tanya Plibersek observes in her foreword in popular memory, “the Whitlam government can feel like a three-year blur of movement and change.” But those revolutionary changes took years of hard, detailed policy work, much of it in the “long, cold exile of opposition” for 23 years. Moreover, despite the parlous representation of women in Parliament, the judiciary and senior levels of the public service at the time, these changes were co-created in partnership with women who were directly affected by major policy changes. As Plibersek avows, as we now say, Nothing about us, without us.
Women were brought into the governing apparatus, but were connected to large numbers of women beyond, mobilised through the Women’s Electoral Lobby and the wider congregation of the Women’s Liberation Movement, embracing vibrant, diverse, debating streams of feminists – liberal feminists, radical feminists, socialist feminists. I swam in the latter stream.
Plibersek draws two great lessons from Gough Whitlam – first that governments must be brave and bold, and second that they must be practical. She quips: “You can buy Blue Poles and sewer Western Sydney.”
The many contributors chart how expansive this revolution was for women. Legislation and policy changes initiated included:
- Equal pay for work of equal value, extension of the minimum wage for women, early analyses of the gendered segmentation of the work force and of gaps in pay and superannuation
- The establishment of paid maternity leave provisions for women working in the Commonwealth Public Service
- No fault divorce and the establishment of the accessible Family Court system, moving marriage law away from the patriarchal precepts of medieval ecclesiastical courts and Christian notions of guilt
- Support for women subject to domestic violence, and for divorced, widowed and unmarried mothers, through the Supporting Mothers’ Benefit
- Provision of broad public health support through Medibank (pushed back under Fraser, but reanimated as Medicare under Hawke) and specific women’s services – cheap, accessible contraceptives, breast screening, pap smears and moves toward to the decriminalisation of abortion (although that was not effected across all states and territories until 2019)
- Free tertiary education for women and men (precipitating a great wave of university enrolments including many working class and older women)
- Robust support for the arts – leading to the establishment of the Australia Council, the Australian Film Commission and the Australian Film, Television and Radio School which afforded opportunities for women performers including Cate Blanchett, Margaret Roadknight and Patricia Amphlett (aka Little Pattie)
And a range of other policy developments: support for the disabled, dedicated urban and regional planning, the end of conscription and the release of draft resisters from prison, all of which had positive effects for women.
Born in 1949 into a working-class family in Sydney where I was involved in the anti-war movement, the women’s movement and students for a democratic society, I felt viscerally the effects of these revolutionary changes in Australian politics and society. They transformed, indeed revolutionised, my horizons for the future.
This book consummately charts these revolutionary changes in Australian society – across diverse fields – women’s influence in politics, women and the law, women’s health, welfare, and social policy, women in arts and education. I was sad not to see the latter accompanied by a consideration of the revolutionary changes in higher education – not just in the numbers of women as students and staff but of the radical revolution in knowledge, challenging masculinist disciplines and misogynist practices.
Still, the book shows the vital connections between these several fields across the broader terrain of Australian society. For example, the changes effected in family law (as remembered by Elizabeth Evatt and Camilla Nelson) were integrally connected with the broader changes in what was happening in socio-economic life and in social values.
Authors contributing to this book combine moving personal memoir with consummate analysis of the processes they were engaged in and the changes they were precipitating. I especially relished Biff Ward’s evocation of sisterhood in the women’s movement in Canberra in the 1970s and her recollection of the party where the position of a Special Adviser to PM Whitlam was announced – a post awarded to Elizabeth Reid. Less rosy recollections pervade the chapter co-authored by Cathy Eatock and her late mother Pat – a woman who combined strong commitments to women’s rights and Aboriginal rights but who endured domestic abuse, difficulties with caring for a disabled child and homelessness.
(L to R) Marian Sawer, Elizabeth Reid, Blair Williams, Mare Coleman, Michelle Arrow at the “Women and Whitlam” author event in Canberra. Picture: Supplied
She lived for a while at the Women’s Liberation House on Bremmer Street (where she and her kids could only bed down when meetings were over) and with her friend Elizabeth Reid (who was her campaign manager when Pat ran as an Independent for parliament. Pat suffered racist interrogations and vilifications of her Indigenous identity. She eventually won a defamation case against Andrew Bolt.
There are graphic accounts of media and popular misogyny in the period. There was the snide reporting of women appointed to new well-paid positions in the public service – sexist jokes proliferated (e.g. to Margaret Reynolds that Chairlady sounded like Charlady). There was the infamous Canberra Times’ reportage on the Women and Politics conference in Canberra in 1975 which brought over 800 women to the capital.
This occasioned a vigorous protest from many delegates who occupied the newspaper’s offices, demanding professional journalistic standards. Similarly in reports on the International Year of Women, and subsequently the large UN Conference in Mexico in 1975, divisions between women were often exaggerated and amplified. Yet, there were welcome signs of the popular penetration of new values – alongside the “Easy Summer Cooking” in The Women’s Weekly appeared an “Easy Guide to Family Law.”
I focus finally on the key message for me about that revolutionary period and how this matters in our present feminist moment. Fundamentally, that is the need for sustaining an interaction between a large social movement and bold action at the heart of government. This is a potent double helix. As Elizabeth Reid and Biff Ward so eloquently show us, it was the mobilisation of women in small consciousness-raising groups, where the personal was political, in large meetings and conferences, and on the streets which put pressure on and legitimated this cascade of policy changes.
The cover of “Women and Whitlam.” Picture: Supplied
Moreover, in her work as Whitlam’s Special Adviser Elizabeth reached out through consultations with women right across Australia and they reached out to her in a flood of letters. Moreover, although women like her and a number of other women who authored chapters in this book might be recognised as ‘leaders’ in this period, there was a broader feminist ethos which stressed collectivity rather than individualist achievement.
As Ranuka Tandan persuasively argues in her chapter – a grassroots women’s movement is vital. And a social movement relevant today and resilient in the face of future misogynist pushbacks must be one that embraces women in all their diversity, and that expressly and frankly confronts the entanglement of the oppressions of race and gender. Tandan celebrates First Nations women fighting on the street today.
We might recall that when Elizabeth Reid made her famous speech at the UN Conference in Mexico she addressed that question, confronting how the feminist perspectives of women differed, diverging between what were then called ‘First World’ and ‘Third World’ (what we might now call minority and majority worlds). It was exciting to be part of that large crowd outside Parliament House in the March4 Justice in 2020 and to witness the incendiary intergenerational outrage which ignited there.
It is gratifying to see the boldness of young white women like Grace Tame and Britanny Higgins. But, as Ranuka Tandan and Blair Williams argue it is important to work to redress intersecting oppressions and to build and sustain the energy of a large, inclusive social movement, beyond the bright spotlight of the media, and now the relentless spotlight of social and digital media, with its even greater potential for misogyny. As someone who has worked in universities for decades, I end by highlighting how important universities are as sites for transforming knowledge for revolutionary social change, as places where books like this can be created, launched and most importantly read for their insights for our shared feminist futures.
- Elizabeth Reid was appointed the world’s first advisor on women’s affairs to a head of government by the Australian Labor Government of Gough Whitlam in 1973. Picture: Ginger Gorman
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The Whitlam government of 1972–75 transformed Australia. And yet the scope and scale of the reforms for Australian women are often overlooked. A new book called Women and Whitlam: Revisiting the revolution. BroadAgenda editor, Ginger Gorman, chatted to the book’s editor, Michelle Arrow.
Why was Gough Whitlam – as a political figure – so interested in women’s rights?
Whitlam was part of a group of Labor figures in the 1960s who wanted to reform the Labor party to focus on human rights, not just worker’s rights, and to think about other kinds of inequality other than class. This meant he was much more open to action on Indigenous rights, on poverty and disadvantage, and of course, on improving women’s rights.
Why did you personally want to revisit the Whitlam period, with this focus?
There were two reasons I wanted to revisit the Whitlam era. The first was that in 2019 I was lucky enough to be part of a conference organised by the Whitlam Institute called ‘Revisiting the Revolution’. The conference was the brainchild of the late, great Susan Ryan and Leanne Smith, then the director of the Whitlam Institute, and it was held in old Parliament House, a place filled with history and meaning.
To be there with all those women who had played such a crucial role in the social change of the 1970s was tremendously inspiring, and editing this book was my attempt to recreate the experience of being at that conference, and to amplify these women’s voices.
The second reason is that since that conference in 2019, the impact of COVID, the March for Justice, and the impact of the Morrison government, we saw a feminist reawakening in Australia. I felt that Australia’s trailblazing feminist history had something to say to that moment.
Among feminists, many of Whitlam’s achievements for women are well known. But can you summarise them for us? Why WAS this period so groundbreaking?
Michelle Arrow is a Professor of History at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Picture: Supplied
The Whitlam era was a period of significant reform in many aspects of life, but the scale and scope of reforms for women were remarkable. A few of the most significant reforms were:
Expanded access to child care, equal pay for work of equal value, the introduction of the supporting mothers’ benefit, cheaper, more accessible contraception, government funding for women’s refuges and women’s health centres, no-fault divorce, free university education, which was of particular benefit to older women, and a grants program of more than $3m for groups around Australia to celebrate and commemorate International Women’s year in 1975.
Much of this was spearheaded by Whitlam’s women’s affairs adviser, Elizabeth Reid (pictured at top), who was appointed in April 1973. She was the first women’s affairs advisor to a national leader anywhere in the world! She helped develop women’s policy machinery to make government more responsive to women’s needs. This was truly groundbreaking. Whitlam recognised women as a distinctive political group whose needs were not always met by policy settings that focused on men.
Not long ago, I interviewed Elizabeth Reid regarding her role as women’s advisor to national government — a world first at the time. It was astounding to think of an Australia without women’s refuges or the single mother’s benefit and paid maternity leave. It showed me how far we HAVE actually come when it comes to women’s equality. How has this book made you reflect on this historical period?
One of the lessons from the Whitlam era that I think is most important is that some of these significant policy changes – like the introduction of government-funded women’s refuges – were the product of radical activists and reforming governments working together, or at least working in mutually productive ways.
Elsie Women’s Refuge, the first feminist-run women’s refuge in Australia, ran for nine months on volunteer labour and donations before it received its first injection of funding from the Whitlam government. What governments do is crucial. But what activists do – outside of government – is just as important for creating the conditions in which governments can make change.
The cover of “Women and Whitlam.” Published by NewSouth
One commentator suggested this book shows politics can be radical. How does this collection of essays reflect that?
I think it reflects it in a number of ways. The formation of the Women’s Electoral Lobby in 1972 was a radical move because it forced women’s political issues onto the national agenda in a way that they had never been there before, even though WEL was regarded as a reformist, rather than a revolutionary organisation. WEL interviewed every candidate running in the 1972 election and ranked them on their policy positions on women’s issues – the survey made a huge impact in the election campaign.
Second, it shows that Women’s Liberation was able to secure a seat at the table of the Prime Minister, to advise on government policy. Elizabeth Reid, Whitlam’s women’s affairs adviser, was a member of women’s liberation before she took the role. She was an activist and a tutor in Philosophy at ANU – not a professional bureaucrat – and she approached her role in a radical way.
She was just as concerned with changing the ways women thought about themselves as she was about providing better childcare.
This mixture of radicalism and pragmatism was a hallmark of the era, I think.
Third, Reid always spoke about how important it was to have allowed an active feminist movement outside government to shape decision-making inside government. There was a strong relationship between revolution and reform, and this book shows that.
What are the lasting impacts of the policy reforms of the early 70s?
There were two key impacts worth noting. The first was many of these reforms challenged the deeply ingrained idea that women’s sole, lifelong role was to be a wife and mother, dependent on a male breadwinner. The introduction of the supporting mothers benefit, which meant women could be mothers without marrying, or they could leave abusive partners. Funding women’s refuges gave women alternatives, as did the passage of the Family Law Act. Free higher education and equal pay (in theory, if not always in practice) meant that many women had a much firmer foundation for their independence, if they wanted it.
The second impact I think was Whitlam’s focus on women (and women’s increased political activism) established that women were a distinctive political constituency, especially for Labor. Over subsequent decades, we’ve seen working and middle class women shift more firmly into the Labor camp (when for much of the twentieth century many women were more likely to vote Liberal). In the most recent federal election, we have also seen that governments which ignore women, or fail to appeal to them, will pay an electoral price for that neglect.
What’s your favourite story or anecdote in this book? What’s something that really surprised you?
I think one of my favourite stories in the book is about the late Pat Eatock. Pat was an indigenous activist who played a very important role in establishing and maintaining the Aboriginal Embassy in 1972. She later stood for Parliament in the 1972 election for the Black Liberation Party – and Elizabeth Reid was her campaign manager.
Perhaps the detail of her story that I like the best was that Pat was the only candidate to achieve a perfect score on the Women’s Electoral Lobby survey – if only she’d been elected!
Some believe feminist progress has stalled since this era. How would you respond to that?
Sara Dowse (one of the book’s contributors) was asked this question recently, and her answer was really striking. She said that one of the things that made her feel that feminist progress had been made was that when she was a girl she was raised with a pretty narrow set of expectations for her life. Her granddaughters, however, had no such limits on their imagination or ambitions. And that was one of the goals of women’s liberation, to expand women’s horizons. I think we could regard that as a success.
However, there are still significant structural barriers in place for women. And we know those structural barriers are much more rigid for poor women, older women, CALD women and First Nations women.
We know rates of violence against women remain unacceptable, especially Indigenous women. But there has been a change in the ways that we discuss these issues publicly. In the 1960s. Domestic violence was not really discussed in public because it was not regarded as a public problem.
Feminism has transformed the ways we talk about violence against women and women’s rights but we don’t always have the best public policy responses. The new Labor government has taken some encouraging steps, especially on improving wages and conditions for female-dominated industries – again, as a result of years of feminist advocacy.
If we think about looking forward to the future, what do you hope readers take from Women and Whitlam?
This book pays tribute to the feminist activists of the 1970s, and I hope that it might introduce some of these women to a new generation. And by placing their essays alongside writing by younger feminists, I hope it can open up productive intergenerational conversations.
I also hope that the book shows us that there are many different ways to achieve reform, and that it a reminder that we need to use all the levers at our disposal if we’re going to make life better for all women – from radical protest to working with government. And most importantly, if you want a better world, you need to turn up and help make that change! These women are all fabulous role models for those who are trying to change our society, culture and politics for the better.
- Picture at top: Prime Minister Gough Whitlam discusses International Women’s Year with two members of the National Advisory Committee, Ms. Elizabeth Reid and the Secretary of the Australian Government’s Department of the Media, Mr. James Oswin. Source: National Library of Australia obj-137047143
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Every year miscarriage affects up to 150,000 Australians and the people that love them. So why are we so damned bad at dealing with it? Journalist Isabelle Oderberg has written a groundbreaking book called Hard to Bear. The work investigates the science and silence of miscarriage. BroadAgenda editor, Ginger Gorman, had a chat with Isy about the book’s themes.
Tell us about your own personal backstory that led you to write “Hard to Bear”.
During our journey to complete our family, I experienced seven pregnancy losses. Obviously during that time I did a lot of reading in my quest to figure out why my body couldn’t do what I needed it to do. Being open about it publicly meant a lot of other people made disclosures to me about their own experiences. But I didn’t feel comfortable writing about it until our family was complete.
Once we decided that it was, I started reading again. And I realised that while I had some answers, I also had a lot of questions. And there was a huge amount of work and unpacking to be done in this space. And I thought there was no one better than me to do it, with the lived experience but also the ability to put that aside where necessary and wear my journalism hat to approach the issue with a forensic eye, while never losing sight of the human element.
There were so many OMG moments that just stopped me in my tracks. Like the moment I realised we had no idea how many people are actually having miscarriages in this country. Absolutely no idea.
You’ve long been vocal about the silence around miscarriage. Unpick this for us. Why the societal shame and silence? How does your book try to change this?
One thing that drives me crazy in this space is acknowledgement of the silence without understanding of why it exists and where it comes from. So that’s a big part of the book; unpacking it so we can move forward. We have a multitude of issues that feed this silence.
Miscarriage exists at the intersection of two things we find incredibly uncomfortable in Western society: grief and menstruation. Also it’s wrapped up in Judeo-Christian tradition, abortion and misogyny.
It certainly wasn’t always this way. I also do a lot of digging around other cultures that treat and talk about it completely differently. I really do find it fascinating.
Your book is also funny. Why does humour play a role here?
I’m Jewish and I draw on a long cultural tradition of irony, satire, self-deprecation and Black humour. There absolutely is a lot of humour in this book, where appropriate. I want people to enjoy reading it to whatever degree that’s possible, without struggling under the weight of a heavy topic. We can acknowledge the sadness of something while still finding ways to smile along the way.
Your book delves into the science (in addition to telling personal stories). Every year miscarriage affects up to 150,000 Australians and the people that love them. What do we know about why it happens and how it can be prevented?
I guess that’s a core part of the book: there is far too much we don’t know. And the things we do know aren’t properly explained to the people birthing the babies or their partners or families. For instance, environmental factors are a huge risk factor. But we don’t talk about it. Also, poverty. Nutrition.
And as in medicine so often, there are often factors overlaying each other that increase your risk profile. I do examine some of the factors that can contribute, both the commonly known ones and the ones we’re not talking about. But if there was more extensive testing and funding for research, we’d know far more.
Hard to Bear: Investigating the science and silence of miscarriage (published in April 2023 by Ultimo Press.)
How does “medical misogyny” play into this?
We know through the work of journalists and authors like Gabrielle Jackson (Pride and Prejudice) and Kylie Maslen (Show Me Where It Hurts) that medical misogyny affects almost all aspects of medical care for women or people with uteruses.
This was acknowledged by the medical journal The Lancet when it wrote that the era of just telling women to try again after miscarriage is over. This issue affects up to 150,000 Australian families each year (and could be higher, we don’t know). We are decades past the time when we should have started talking about it openly.
Conversely, what do you have to say about the need medical kindness around instances of miscarriage?
The Australian medical system is not fit for purpose. It is stretched far too thin. And consecutive governments want to fix it with band-aids, if at all, rather than giving it an overhaul and structuring it from the presence.
Where there are medical and allied health practitioners who do want to do better (and there are many of them), often they are restricted by structural barriers. And the other thing I would say is that where medical practitioners do express kindness and compassion – I can tell you from the hundreds of patients I’ve spoken to – it is remembered and valued for the rest of our lives.
What role does hope have in this discourse?
This book is aimed at being fully accessible and fully inclusive. We are a village. We have to lift up parents whose journey to children isn’t easy and give them hope. Through sharing my story and doing this research, that’s what I want to do. Otherwise, I’m sharing for the sake of sharing and that’s just not my jam.
Equally, hope must be felt in our fight to change the system. Because otherwise what’s the point? This book is absolutely a book of hope that aims to improve the experiences of my children and theirs. We can do it. We absolutely can.
- Hard to Bear is out now.
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I have a new book out called Lao Sue And Other Poems, available in paperback or on PDF/ebook.
❖
❖
❖
❖
Crazy
They’ll make you poor,
then shame you for being poor,
then push you into a job that keeps you poor
at a billionaire megacorporation.They’ll make you crazy,
then shame you for being crazy,
then sell you the cure for crazy
at eighty bucks a pill.You’re a failure if you can’t make ends meet
on impossible wages at an impossible cost of living
with a worthless degree you will never pay off no matter how hard you work
while advertisers blare at you about your insufficiencies,
while the news man tells you war is normal,
while Hollywood tells you the system is working perfectly,
while armed police guard grocery store dumpsters full of food from the hungry,
while executives go on five billion-dollar space rides for fun,
while you live surrounded by screens that tell you you are crazy
if you think any of this is not sane.Take Oligarchizac™ for your depression,
take Plutocracipam™ for your anxiety,
just ninety bucks a pill.
Side effects may include compliance,
acquiescence, subservience, docility,
menticidal ideation,
a marked lack of interest in guillotines,
a dystopian society and a dying biosphere.And the pundit says
“A new study by a Raytheon-funded think tank says war is good for the environment,
but first here’s a millionaire to explain the benefits of urinating on the homeless.”And Hollywood says
“Here’s a movie about well-dressed attractive people with nice houses
engaging in amusing antics you’re too poor and stressed out to experience yourself.”And the news man says
“Here’s a rags-to-riches story which proves capitalism works fine
and you should hate yourself if you can’t hack it here.”And the advertisement says
“Do you feel like you’re losing your mind due to your sense of inadequacy
because you can’t afford Google’s latest NSA surveillance device?
Ask your doctor about Empiradol™,
just a hundred bucks a pill.”They lock us in a room
and fill the room with water
and then shame us for drowning
and then charge us for tiny gasps of air
from a hose that leads to an ecosystem
that they are destroying as quickly as they can.And hey I’ve invented a new antidepressant anti-anxiety antipsychotic
that I’m getting to market as quickly as I can.
It’s not a pill or a jab or an electrical shock treatment,
it’s just a big wad of cash taken by force from thieving megacorporations.
Side effects may include peace and relaxation,
an ability to buy food and think clearly,
a fondness for red flags,
and a hysterical corporate media.And hey I think we just might make it,
past the veil of madness and cutthroat cruelty.And hey I think there’s something deep within us
as yet untapped and as yet unrealized.And hey I think an earthquake’s coming
that just might topple the towers of madness
once and for all.❖
❖
Click here to order Lao Sue And Other Poems in paperback.
Click here to order Lao Sue And Other Poems on PDF/ebook.
Thank you!
I love you.
This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
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Who is the kind of modern leader we need to elect, reward, and celebrate? Through the uncertainty of the past few years, revolving doors of leaders in some governments around the world, and the emergence of leaders that do not fit the traditional mold (think Volodymyr Zelensky, Jacinda Ardern or even Greta Thunberg), it is clear our expectations of leaders across politics, business and even in our families has changed.
Leadership expert Dr Kirstin Ferguson, has conducted extensive research into modern leadership and uncovered the essential ingredients for our times. She’s put it all into a new book called, Head & Heart: The Art of Modern Leadership. In this chat, BroadAgenda editor, Ginger Gorman, asked Kirstin to put a gender lens over leadership.
Most people think they know what leadership is. But a cynic would say we so rarely see it in action. How do you define it?
We see leadership in action every day but dismiss it as not being from the type of leaders we ordinarily reward and celebrate. Since at least the nineteenth century, when the non-ironically Great Man theory first burst onto the scene. We were taught that leadership was only capable of being demonstrated by men (and not even all men – just privileged, powerful, white men). As a result, we still tend to think of leaders as only being those men (or now, some women) in formal positions of authority, with fancy titles, power and influence.
Leaders are found among us every day. Parents, teachers, nurses, shopkeepers, farmers…everyone is a leader in their own way.
Of course, the sphere of influence will be different to that of someone leading the country, but we all impact those around us through the words we use, the behaviours we role model and the choices we make every day.
The leaders we desperately need most in the world are those able to lead with both their head and their heart – curious, capable leaders who put people at the centre of their decision-making and who are not afraid to lead with humility and empathy. Leaders who understand they need to integrate the leadership they show at work with the leadership they show in their families and community.
Why did you write a book about it? What’s the gap you’re trying to fill?
The genesis of this book came through the experience of the pandemic as we saw traditional leaders, used to leading through command and control, flailing when they could not easily lead with empathy and compassion.
We also saw unexpected leaders emerge, those who were prepared to be decisive and act in the face of little information as they balanced that with a self-awareness of the impact their leadership would have on others. The latter group were the modern leaders that made people feel safe in times of uncertainty.
Leadership is simply a series of moments, and every moment is an opportunity to leave a positive legacy in your wake. Many leadership books focus only on the most senior, formal leaders among us, the stereotype built by the Great Man theory of the past. Those leaders are incredibly important, of course, but I wanted to write a book that is literally for anyone regardless of any formal position you may hold.
These are uncertain times – and we’re looking for a different kind of leader that we were perhaps 50 or even five years ago. You say we need modern leaders who can lead with their head and heart. Unpick this for me. Why?
Thinking about modern leaders made me want to understand the leadership attributes common to them. I did a considerable amount of academic research on current thinking about emotionally intelligent and highly capable leaders and wanted to be able to articulate and measure modern leadership; that is, those able to lead with the head and heart.
I identified eight attributes of modern leadership which are – curiosity, wisdom, perspective and capability (head based leadership attributes) and humility, self-awareness, courage and empathy (heart based leadership attributes). The ‘art’ of modern leadership is understanding how to use those attributes in the right way at the right time.
BroadAgenda is a platform focused on gender equity. You’ve interviewed some extraordinary female leaders in your book (although it’s a book for everyone!). How did you select them as interviewees? What insights did they bring?
I really wanted to interview and incredibly diverse range of people to highlight the point that we are all leaders. I spoke to people running some of the largest companies in the world through to schoolteachers and activists – all their stories will surprise, challenge and amaze you.
When I spoke with Sally McManus, Secretary of the ACTU, we spoke about what it was like to say something many saw as incredibly controversial in an interview which then made front pages of newspapers for weeks afterwards. Professor Megan Davis and I spoke about what it was like to co-lead the Uluru Dialogues and how she navigated that moment in Australian history.
I spoke with Professor Tanya Monro about the role of music in her leadership as Australia’s Chief Defence Scientist and to investigative journalist Jess Hill about the role of self-awareness in her work on violence against women and children. Other women I spoke to include the QLD Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll, barrister Jane Needham, media owner Mia Freedman, lawyer and human rights advocate Nyadol Nyuon, Salesforce APAC CEO, Pip Marlow and many others.
Who did you learn the most from? What surprised you most?
I remember interviewing Professor Clare Wright very early in the book and she insisted she was not a leader. She couldn’t quite understand why I might want to speak to her. For Clare, like so many others, notions of leadership had always been tied up in stereotypes of formal, corporate positions with power and authority. Sure that this was evidence she was not a leader, she proudly told me she had never read a leadership book.
Professor Clare Wright is an award-winning historian, author, broadcaster and public commentator who has worked in politics, academia and the media. Picture: Susan Papazian
I remember asking her if she had ever read a parenting book (she had not) and we soon laughed about how that hardly made her any less of a parent.
I think Clare is typical of many people, especially women, who think leadership is for someone else. Clare is a Professor of History and Public Engagement at Latrobe University. She is also an award-winning historian, author, documentary film maker, podcaster, and broadcaster. By most people’s standards she is a leader but, again like many, the persistent tropes of the Great Man theory remain.
How do female and non-binary leaders differ from male leaders in style and technique (and whatever other attributes you might like to add)?
I argue that all leaders, regardless of gender, need to lead with the eight attributes of head and heart leadership. From my experience both as a leader myself, a researcher and in my coaching work, I do think women are naturally more skilled and capable at leading with the heart.
Women can see the strength in leading with humility and are well practiced at it, often through having had to defer to self-effacing language in the past to survive in male-dominated environments.
Ultimately though, leading with the heart is not enough. As modern leaders we need to be able to lead with head-based attributes as well so the ‘art’ of modern leadership for all of us is knowing what attributes you will need to draw upon and when.
Is there anything else you want to say?
To accompany the book, in conjunction with QUT Business School I have built a free online tool to self-assess your own head and heart leadership. It will take you about 5 minutes to complete. You will then receive a free, personalised report.
Dr Kirstin Ferguson is an author, columnist, and company director. She is the former Acting Chair and Deputy Chair of the ABC and an Adjunct Professor at QUT Business School.
- Head & Heart: The Art of Modern Leadership is available for pre-order now.
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From acclaimed author Anna Spargo-Ryan comes A Kind of Magic, a tender, and at times, wry insight into complex mental illness, and indeed, the moments of magic in among it all. BroadAgenda editor Ginger Gorman had a chat with Anna about her stunning new work.
In a nutshell, what’s your book about?
A Kind of Magic is a memoir about life with anxiety: how it starts, why it happens and how we can understand it.
You said that, “Writing it [A Kind of Magic] has transformed the way I understand myself and this kaleidoscope life.” Can you unpick this for me?
When I started writing, I was very angry. I didn’t realise it at the time – or if I did, I felt justified and virtuous in my anger. I wrote about terrible things that had happened and people who had wronged me, and the way no one understood how I felt and how isolating it all was.
At the same time, I was researching the way memory works. I’ve always struggled with memory, particularly with big gaps in what I remember, and I was trying to understand if there was a reason for it.
As I wrote (angrily) and researched (earnestly), I learned that trauma and some mental illness changes the way memory works. It affects what we remember and what we use those memories for. We’re more likely to remember negative memories and more likely to combine multiple events into giant, awful memories.
From there, I learned about identity. We form a self based on what we remember – even if we can’t consciously recall these formative moments, they can exist in other parts of our memory. People who live with trauma are more likely to remember negative things and therefore more likely to build their identity on a negative sense of self.
As I learned these things about myself, I understood who I was better than I ever had before. I recognised there was a scientific basis for my confusion and anger, and that helped me to contextualise and reimagine it.
By the time I got to the end of the book, I understood myself in a whole different way. I didn’t want to write about terrible things and people – I wanted to share what I’d learned with others who might also find peace in it.
A Kind of Magic is by Anna Spargo-Ryan.
What do you mean when you say it’s an “‘anti-self-help book”?
To my mind, a self-help book is paradoxical – directing a reader to think or behave in a certain way. I wanted to write a book that would help someone feel comforted through a process of learning and being seen, I think. A book that’s also a friend. You know how when you’re supported to be courageous? That’s what I want the book to do.
As someone who has dealt with Australia’s mental health system myself – as a reporter but also in attempting to get support myself and on occasion for someone close to me – I know there are massive gaps in the mental health system. What can you tell me about that?
I’m not sure there’s a succinct answer to this! There are shortfalls at every step of getting mental health care: a lack of government funding, a lack of private funding, a shortage of psychologists and psychiatrists, exorbitant gap payments, poor access especially in regional and rural areas, stigma, dangerous public mental health hospitals, poor communication between patients and clinicians, no standardised performance criteria for therapists … it goes on and on.
The work to get the right help is extensive and complex enough without also being unwell on top of that. I wrote something in the book like: you have to be both well enough to figure out how to navigate it and unwell enough for someone to believe you need help.
You’ve said to me previously “the whole mental health industry is gendered.” What do you mean?
The whole mental health industry is gendered. Men are more likely to complete suicide by a significant factor. Women are more likely to live with debilitating depression and/or anxiety. More women than men experience high levels of psychological distress.
This has been true since before there was a “mental health industry” – women have long been “too emotional”, “hysterical”, these gendered words without nuance. As with so many aspects of women’s healthcare, men have charged themselves with the policy and governance, men have made decisions about our needs, men have controlled our bodies and minds.
The mental health model is male-centric, as so many medical models are. It’s the same reason women die of heart attacks – the way the medical industry treats them is modelled on a man’s heart attack.
We can see this in action in the under-diagnosis of girls and women with ADHD, which is not a mental illness but has crossovers (both in symptoms and genetics) with bipolar and borderline personality disorder. For decades, it wasn’t identified – and so opportunities for early intervention were missed – because it simply didn’t look the same in girls as it does in boys. So, no one saw it.
Anna hopes her book with support others to be courageous. Picture: Supplied.
In your writing, you’ve mixed brutal honesty with meticulous research and compassion. Why did you take this approach?
Mental illness is hard to understand and hard to articulate. At one level, I was worried about reinforcing a stereotype – being self-indulgent, being hard work, all the things I had internalised about myself.
I wanted to counter that perception by sharing the research and contextualising it. Because these things are so poorly understood, I wanted to draw connections between what the science tells us and what the lived experience looks like.
And I wanted to do that for two discrete groups of people: those who would see themselves in it and be reassured; and those who don’t share the experience but need to be schooled. Basically.
What do you want people to take away from this book?
I want this book to be part of moving mental health care forward. That’s a complex ask, so I want it to be different things to different people. I want it to offer clinicians better ways of understanding and talking to patients, so they can provide more effective treatment. I want policymakers and politicians to read it and reimagine what “a person with mental illness” looks like and what they need. I want a carer to recognise their own enormous effort and the gratitude I – and people like me – feel for what they do. I want the wider population to come away with new vocabulary and empathy.
And for those who live with mental illness, like I do, I want them to feel like someone’s glad they’re here.
Picture at top: Editor, writer and cat lady, Anna Spargo-Ryan. Photo: Supplied
- A Kind of Magic is out now.
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In the new book ‘Leaning Out’, respected journalist Kristine Ziwica maps a decade of stasis on the gender equality front in Australia, and why the pandemic has led to a breakthrough. This short excerpt is published will full permission.
How do we begin to tackle the Great Exhaustion? (Editor’s note: Earlier in her book, Kristina defines ‘The Great Exhaustion’ as “…the absolute overwhelming feeling of emotional exhaustion like there’s nothing left in the tank.”)
Part of the answer lies in changing the conversation. We need to move away from lean-in ideas that posit the solution rests with individual women alone, who should devote more time and energy to their ‘wellbeing’ and simply shore up their resilience. Beware corporate ‘feminist wellness’, selling a soothing balm of herbal tea and scented candles – faux feminist Prozac to help women recover from the uniquely gendered impacts of the pandemic – instead of structural change.
Many are fond of quoting the late activist Audre Lorde, who once wrote, ‘Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.’ And while that is absolutely true – and they are wise words for a growing army of feminist activists who are now taking to the streets in pursuit of gender equality – self-care as an idea and now an industry has been twisted beyond all recognition from Lorde’s original meaning.
This is ‘feminist wellness’ or self-care as a kind of escape, not, as Lorde intended, a restorative practice to give those seeking deeper, collective change the energy and resilience to persevere. This kind of feminist self-care is, at best, devoid of meaning in its attempt to move product or, at worst, a cynical attempt to divert women from the task at hand.
No one ever said, ‘Nevertheless she persisted with her daily regime of scented candles and massage therapy.’ (Though if I close my eyes and listen, I can almost imagine Gwyneth Paltrow uttering those words.)
Kristina is speaking tonight (Wednesday, September 7, 2022) at the ANU. Book tickets here.The rise of the wellness industrial complex, particularly in relation to women, is mirrored by the way neoliberalism infected feminism in the 1990s. No structural inequalities to tackle collectively here, folks. This is an individual problem. But as Angela Priestley, the founding editor of Women’s Agenda, told me, ‘this isn’t something more lunchtime pilates will fix’.
This is not what we need at this critical juncture.
‘It’s really important that we look at the higher-level factors that have led to all of this,’ Dr Adele Murdolo, the executive director of Australia’s Multicultural Centre for Women’s Health, told me. COVID caused lots of stuff, but it also just exacerbated a lot of inequality that was already there. It showed it up and it made it more apparent to everybody.
‘We need to have a look at gender and race discrimination in the workplace and develop policies and programs that are knocking that off at the source, which is a big job and not something you can fix in a month because it’s something that’s so embedded in our workplaces,’ added Murdolo.
Cover of “Leaning Out: A Fairer Future for Women at Work in Australia.” Picture: Supplied
Lisa Annese, CEO of Diversity Council Australia, has said that ‘inclusion at work is an antidote to the great resignation’. She points to new research from DCA that demonstrates the link between non-inclusive behaviours and workers’ intentions to stay. Workers in inclusive teams are 4 times more likely than those in non-inclusive teams to report their workplace has positively impacted their mental health, and they are 4 times less likely to leave their jobs. ‘So you are investing in the wellbeing of your people, and making your business more resilient.’
We need to develop policies, legislation and programs that change not only workplace cultures and attitudes, but also the way that workplaces are structured; at the moment, workforces are really about the full-time, unencumbered male employee. We need to look at making workplaces really flexible.
Not flexible just for employers in terms of insecure work, but flexible for what people in families really need. We need childcare so that women are able to actively participate in the workforce. We need to tackle the gender pay gap, and not just as it relates to gender alone, but also taking into account ethnicity, disability and sexual orientation … all the intersecting forms of discrimination that make the gender pay gap even larger for some than others.
‘Bigger structural issues: pay equity, equal jobs of equal worth (particularly for women in undervalued caring jobs), childcare, giving people permission to voice the good, bad and the ugly is also part of the healing process,’ Leisa Sargent, the senior deputy deanof UNSW’s Business School and the University’s co-deputy vice-chancellor Equity Diversity and Inclusion,told me. ‘But I also think that making sure that employees are engaged in the decision-making process coming out of the pandemic is really important. We went through two years of being told what we had to do and how we had to do it, which is very disempowering.’
We now need to create opportunities where people feel they have a say in how things get done, in flexibility, in opportunities to work in different parts of the business and to be stimulated.
‘And it’s also about a fundamental redrawing of the boundaries,’ added Sargent.
Research from the Australia Institute’s Centre for Future Work suggests why a redrawing of boundaries may be particularly necessary, as the pandemic has only exacerbated the trend towards the intensification of work and highlighted the costs of insecure work, where women are heavily concentrated. The research found that the average worker did
6.1 hours per week of unpaid overtime in 2021, a substantial increase on 2020.
‘Let’s make jobs plentiful, safer, secure and invest in social institutions that support people, in particular women, to work’, Alison Pennington, a senior economist at the Centre for Future Work, told me was the quite simple, yet powerful, prescription.
‘The treadmill of insecure work fuels anxiety and makes planning for a decent life nigh impossible. The reality is that the human cost of unchecked employer power is enormous. And there are multiple indicators that this power has deepened over the pandemic.’
The solutions are structural and collective, going far beyond self-care, and even beyond direct psychological treatment for women’s mental health, though this is undeniably necessary and should be addressed with more targeted and innovative mental health support. At the time we spoke, Professor Jayashri Kulkarni, for example, had just opened Australia’s first dedicated mental health centre for women, a specialist model she would like to see replicated elsewhere.
As we endeavour to ‘build back better’, we need these types of broad, wide-ranging proposals as part of the wider debate about women and work. The changed conversation around women’s workplace burnout and the factors driving that will play a significant role in moving the conversation forward from the lean-in feminism that has so far dominated the Australian landscape to something better, something more impactful and meaningful. If that happens, then women’s collective suffering during the pandemic won’t have been in vain.
- Leaning Out: A Fairer Future for Women at Work in Australia is out now
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‘Do you want to meet your Grandma?’ is a humorous and insightful book for young children about our shared universal ancestors. It celebrates female wisdom and ancestry.
Illustrator Auntie Fonu (left) and author SV Middleby (right) had a chat with BroadAgenda’s Ginger Gorman.
Soli, If you were explaining the storyline your book to someone who didn’t know anything about it, what would you say?I would say it is a journey to meet our Grandmothers from long long ago and to learn about who these ancestor Grandmas are, how we are still like them and what they might have to teach us.
Soli, Where did the idea come from?
‘Do You Want To Meet Your Grandma?’ had been circling around my head ever since I first tried to explain evolution to my own children and seeing the surprise and joy in their reaction when they found out their Grandma was a fish!
For many years I thought about how to tell that story in ways that honoured both my own childhood, growing up in Australian in a family that loved science, nature and creativity with her adult life mostly spent in the Pacific islands, a place of deeply religious and spiritual people who shared with her their connections to each other, the land, ocean, and ancestors.
On this page, Fonu’s illustration depicts grandma as a lizard 256 million years ago. Picture: Supplied
Soli, this study came out a while ago but males are central characters in 57 percent of children’s books. Your book is a female-focused book. Why have you mainly focused on women?
I wrote this book for all kids regardless of gender to celebrate our female ancestry and female wisdom.
Who better than a Grandma to teach children wise important lessons and help them understood how they came to be in ways that also help them understand their connections to each other, the planet, and the whole universe?
I come from a family full of strong women and my parents taught me to challenged the patriarchy from an very early age, so it was no surprise that this book has allowed me to pay respects to my own maternal lineage, that before me and that to come.
Fonu, the illustrations are gorgeous. How did you go about capturing the story, given that some of the ideas about our connections to the universe, each other and nature are huge?
Thank you! I would say the huge ideas behind the story are what drew me to Soli’s concept in the first place. They were delicious and so true and right feeling. I could relate on a scientific and a spiritual level. A logical and a poetic one. A deep cultural level and a global level. I loved it.
My art has always focused on more intangible subjects like emotional and metaphysical experience through depictions of our bodies, and through texture, colour and nature. I saw Do you want to meet your Grandma? as an exciting challenge and an important one to attempt.
My process began with the very core of the story which is the grandmas! Starting from their words of advice I imagined their spirits, their colour palettes, what environment they existed in and what their favourite flora might be there; all in all trying to capture their personalities, wisdom, “Grandma-ness” and the corner of the universe they occupied.
I think the process of making art, of creating something, naturally taps you into the sense that everything is connected – just like being in nature and connecting to the wonder of life does. So the way we are all connected came together organically in the drawings when I surrendered to the wonder of things and let the grandmas speak their messages through each page.
Fonu, what do you hope children take from your illustrations?
I hope that children reading this story and seeing these illustrations can feel these grandmothers’ mana, their wisdom, their spirit and loving guidance; and be inspired to think of our universal lineage and responsibility to one another and the planet. I hope that adults do also, and that the experience is fun!Both of you: How did you incorporate diversity?
Soli : Representation matters so much. There are far too few Children’s books in the Pacific and even fewer that have Pacifc kids in them. This was something very important to me and to Fonu and I knew she would create illustrations that captured not only Pacifc kids but also their homes, the land and the sea. We both hope all kids can see themselves in our story and that we have contributed to this gap.
Fonu: I tried to weave diversity into every area of the illustrations, from the children’s backgrounds and their emotional range to the plant forms and colour choices throughout. Living in multicultural places all my life and being culturally diverse, neurodiverse and an artist – I feel like diversity in representation isn’t just a matter of equity and dignity, it’s also a matter of accuracy. So I drew from the world around me, because this is a story for the world.
I did it quite literally too: the children were all given names and reminded me of real kids; the adults are based on outstanding and colourful humans in Soli’s and my life; most of the plant life came from my father’s garden and from our wider backyard of Fiji; and the star grandma’s face is Maya Angelou’s, because that is how I feel her when I sparkle and my own light shines bright!
Grandmas are enjoying reading the book to their grandchildren. Picture: Supplied
Is there anything else you want to say?
Most of all I hope this book will encourage intergenerational conversations, sharing of wisdom and celebrating of Grandmas!
Feature image: Auntie Fonu (left) and SV Middleby (right) with their book, ‘Do you want to meet your Grandma?’ Picture: Supplied
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Opening a mysterious case of old photographs, former documentary filmmaker Sharon Connolly begins a search for the great aunt she never knew.
Gladys Shaw was a whistling comedian, a singer and saxophonist, an eccentric dancer and a whip-cracker — one of the ‘girls’ who made Australia laugh in a man’s world. Sharon’s new book is called My Giddy Aunt and her sister comedians. BroadAgenda editor, Ginger Gorman, had a chat with her.
If you were sitting next to someone at a dinner party and you were explaining your book in a nutshell, what would you say?
It tells stories of whistlers, whipcrackers, comediennes and eccentric dancers, surprising women entertainers in Australia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They had unusual talents and they lived in an era of enormous change, for women and for performing artists everywhere, who were challenged by new entertainment technologies like cinema and radio.
A lot of us have quirky family backstories. What made you sure this was a story the public needed to hear?
I’d encourage other people with family backstories to make those public too! Our history needs more stories about the lives of women in earlier times, women often overlooked by history books and national mythologies.
I’d especially encourage those who have stories about the lives of people who were neither well educated nor well off, because they’re under-represented in our nation’s histories too. I’m confident about the public appetite for stories like those of my own family. My years in documentary production for film and television taught me that well made and accessible Australian history stories win audiences.
Tell us about the moment you made a discovery about your aunt, and you wanted to know more.
My musician brother (the late Steve Connolly), and I opened a mysterious case of family photos together.
When we saw the 1920s photographs of Keith Connolly’s Syncopating Jesters, an early Australian jazz band, our jaws hit the floor. Steve was impressed by their anarchic quality and the obvious exuberance of the musicians they showed; “I want what they’re having” he said.
But I was struck by the fact that in many of those shots there was only one woman, and to me she looked like she was stealing the show!The other pivotal moment was my discovery of a handful of letters written by my great grandmother to a husband she’d abandoned. In one of them she explains that she has a new baby, a daughter who is not her husband’s child.“She was born almost on the stage,” she wrote. “I will bring her up to it as she shows signs of being remarkably intelligent.” And so I wanted to know more about why that seemed to her a good career choice for a daughter born in 1895.
Who was Gladys Shaw? What made her so unusual?
The baby born “almost on the stage” became known as Gladys Shaw. By the age of five she was performing in theatrical companies managed by her father. Her stage career would go on to span 50 years, decades in which she earned her own living in a demanding and sometimes unkind profession. But I think she also had a lot of fun.
At the height of her career in the early 1920s, she was the principal character comedienne with the famous Stiffy and Mo revue company, and in press interviews she said “My idea of life, particularly stage life, is lights and laughter.”
She was extraordinarily adaptable and multi-skilled. So she was well known not only as a comic actress, but also as a whistler, a stand up comedienne, a dancer, saxophonist, banjo player and even as a whip cracker and sharp shooter! Though it sounds unusual, there were other women not unlike Gladys.
Women were surprisingly well represented on Australia’s vaudeville stages, and though they often played female stereotypes — servant girls and society matrons, ingenues and maiden aunts — they were themselves far from “ladylike”. Like Gladys they were independent women in an era of changing ideas about how they should behave.
Little Miss Gladys Shaw and Master Keith (the author’s great aunt and grandfather) appearing with _The English Pierrots_, ca. 1909.
What did you discover while writing this book that surprised you?
I think I was perhaps most surprised by the prevalence and popularity of male impersonators on our popular stages. When I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s there were plenty of Priscillas, but I never saw anyone like Effie Fellowes, or Nellie Kolle, or Nellie Small. I didn’t know such women existed.
Effie Fellowes also appeared as Bobby Folson and Freddie Manners. She dressed as a man onstage and sometimes off it. The Perth “Truth” accused women like her of predatory and sybaritic behaviour, but Effie seemed not to mind. She went to the US where she appeared alongside Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker and Stan Laurel. After her return to Australia she continued to perform for many years.
Apparently in late life she could be found performing her signature tune “I’ve never seen a straight banana,” in aged care homes around Perth.
Why is this a feminist tale?
It’s a feminist tale because it focusses on women in our theatrical history rather than the men! But also because I’ve told the women’s stories against a backdrop of social and political changes that affected women in general.
So while wars and depressions are part of the story because of their effects on women, so are the achievements of women’s suffrage, divorce law reform, and changes to child custody laws. Gladys Shaw and her mother both registered to vote as soon as they were entitled to have a say.
My great grandmother had neither the means nor the right to take her two small sons with her when she left her husband. Gladys had to prove her husband’s infidelity before she could escape an unhappy marriage. But they asserted their independence despite the restrictions of law and social expectations that would have had them live private, domestic lives, rather than dancing and whistling and carrying-on in public.
There is of course a darker side to the story, about the mental illnesses suffered by a number of women in the book. One was consigned to an asylum during her menopause, and stayed there for the remaining 46 years of her life. Another had a lobotomy, a crude treatment that seems to have been inflicted on women more frequently than men.These are stories that speak volumes not just about poor treatments of mental illnesses that were not well understood in the past, but also about the ways in which women who were in some way “different” were treated.
Author of ‘My Giddy Aunt”, Sharon Connolly.
Why have you spent so much of your career telling the stories of uncelebrated women?
I guess I’ve always wanted to know about the women who went before, and their stories are so often untold. When I made my first film, Red Matildas, in the 1980s, women were forming peace camps at Pine Gap.
The media seemed to suggest that this was the first peace activism in which women had been involved. Clearly that’s not the case, so I made a film about some of the women who were anti-war and anti-fascist activists between the world wars. They were inspiring!
As are the women in My Giddy Aunt, who were prepared to thumb their noses at convention so they could live as they chose. I hope the experiences of my “giddy aunt” and the many overlooked women of her entertaining sisterhood, contribute to a richer understanding of the “fabric” of our society and its culture, which is made of more threads than those spun by the well educated, the moneyed and the men about whom most history books are written.
My Giddy Aunt and her sister comedians is out now.
- Feature image: Elsie Hosking (aka Sunny Day, the author’s grandmother) with husband Keith Connolly(r) and colleagues at the ABC, Perth, ca. 1949. Picture: Supplied
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