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Last Updated: January 29, 2012
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PEACE ACTIVISM

On this page: Zara Wildenaur, Edith Morgan, Hellen Cooke, Yvonne Smith, Women's Health in the North, Thelma Prior, Pamela Curr, Marion Harper, Joan Coxsedge

Zara Wildenaur

They were very volatile times, in Poland in the 1930's. My older brother escaped and came to Australia. I remember his German work- mates speaking of their envy at his 'going away' party.

I came out later, landing at Brisbane on the 23rd August 1939. The rest of my family perished.

I joined the Country Women's Association. They weren't really interested in peace issues at the time, but there was nothing else until the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).

This picture was taken at a WILPF demonstration when I was visiting a friend in Melbourne in 1953.

We still have religious and ethnic hatred and war, why? I believe most people want to live a peaceful life, but they don't have the structures to work through, such as, for example, a Department of Harmony. Not that, necessarily, but something similar. OPAC 2004

Edith Morgan

- My dad was a socialist. He had an immense effect on our family. He was very clear on some issues, for example, the antiwar stuff in 1914 when they had those first world war posters like the "WHAT ARE YOU DOING FOR YOUR COUNTRY?" posters.

I wasn't alive then, of course. He was quite involved in the anti-conscription campaign. He was a strong figure in the union. He used to work down at Spotswood and if people were in trouble they would say "go and talk to Coldy, he'll know what to do (our name being Coldicutt).

Peace was the issue at that time. Dad took us all to Festival Hall when the Dean of Canterbury (the Red Dean) was here, who was a strong socialist advocate of the Soviet Union, and so forth.

- ... I got involved in many campaigns through the Communist Party during and after the Second World War. Then I joined the Union of Australian Women, too. I was there at the inaugural meeting.

A strong nationalist feeling came in Australia after the war, an interest in Australian literature and films. There was that wonderful play that has never been properly shown. It was a musical, "Reedy River", written by somebody called Dick Diamond, I think. There was a strong peace campaign.

There was some contradiction between where we had been fighting fascism and peace. It was very difficult for some, that issue, because it was very important fascism was defeated. I think people generally, even those who would be strong antiwar activists like Joan Coxsedge, would have been out there in campaigns against Hitler.

Hellen Cooke

There was a small amount of money available from the Government for the International Year of Peace and the Non- Government Organisations came together to decide how to use it.At these meetings I found out that people who come together for peace are not necessarily peaceful. In fact, some young men wanted to take the word peace out of the International Year for Peace.

We weathered a few meetings by sticking to the agenda and these young men got bored with us and left. But then the head of the Returned Soldiers' League came in. He, again, seemed hell-bent on removing the word peace. A friend of mine, an ex-headmistress, had enough of this - she spoke up and said 'Will you be quiet?' He was.

Stella Cornelius - a member of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) - came in. She was an absolutely unflappable woman. The RSL man said she must not criticise the men involved in the war games we were having at that time. He called these men 'the brave boys who would fight the wars'.

She just said, 'Yes, I really want to help the brave boys. I don't believe their lives should be risked wantonly, so I propose that before we have war games we should have peace games - serious peace games'.

She won me over. I still correspond with her. So, Helen Caldicott and Stella Cornelius became two heroines of mine.

Yvonne Smith

- Going back in time – when the Vietnamese people were struggling for independence, the UAW had been in touch with the Vietnam Women's Union. They sent us much information about the nature of their struggle – we knew what was happening and were active in support for them.

And although it was a very important issue – it was to become even more so with the conscription of Australian young men – my feeling at the time was that the antiwar struggle had taken over the UAW at the expense of women's specific issues and problems.

I hadn't formulated what those problems were as the Women's Liberation movement did later, such as challenging the role of the family, the sexual revolution etc. but I just had an uneasy feeling that we were becoming the women's adjunct of the peace movement.

When Save Our Sons was formed following the introduction of conscription this single issue organisation was able to take on the role that was needed. That was great. Once again a lot of UAW women supported them.

Women's Health in the North

- OLDER WOMEN'S DISCUSSION - We are in the middle of a revolution of the most pernicious kind which is trying to undo the culture of peace and justice put into place by the likes of us.

To develop a culture of peace, you must first develop resistance against those who create monopolies, oppression and war. To peacefully (even though we're angry) exist, we need to set up alternatives - to peacefully undermine the pyramid.

The older women who participated in the focus group saw the notion of peace in global terms: I asked my group yesterday what their idea of peace was, said one woman, and nearly all of them said world peace.

Community, both local and global, was a crucial element in the women's definition of peace. Peace to me means safety - my children, my home, my community, offered one woman. If I feel safe personally, I will be at peace. And if everybody I know and love is safe, then I have peace. If everybody in the community was safe, then how peaceful would that be.

For this group of women who equated their personal peace with global peace, a sense of disempowerment was the main issue that prevented peace.

To become a peaceful person, you need first to sort out the problems confronting your everyday life, said one woman.

I'm not sure what's happening to me, said another, but I can't accept that all the bits and pieces that we do individually and locally for peace or on behalf of peace make a difference. Women's Health in the North

- Education, information and a sense of injustice will prompt action in the individual, then in the community and ultimately instigate social change.

Peace is made and it is fought for. It is not something you can just sit back and expect. We are a complicated species and we are both competitive and cooperative and we need to keep these two parts of ourselves in balance. Political action needs to be appropriately activated.

Thelma Prior

- In 1956 I was elected by my workmates to represent them at the Second World Peace Conference. The workers at my factory helped to pay my fare. Peace was something these girls understood - many of their people had been killed in the war.

I nearly did not get back to Australia. On arrival back in England, I, with two other delegates had to go to Court at the Old Bailey to contest the Australian Menzies Liberal government's Order of Deportation.

The English judge told the Australian government that they did not want us - so we were allowed to come home. We had our Australian passports taken from us in Perth.

Pamela Curr

Most of the people in Australia were opposed to going to war in Iraq. Even when war commenced, still more than half were opposed to it and nothing that has happened since then has made them change their minds.

That war has not made the world safer. There has been a lot of spin-doctoring about the reasons why we went to war. But there are enough intelligent people in this country - even though they are informed by this biased media - who have come to their own conclusions.

That again is the role of the left, the dissidents, the activists in our society. To stimulate people to look outside the arguments put before them and to come to intelligent conclusions.

At the moment I am working with the Victorian Peace Network. I am also the national spokesperson for the Greens for refugees, but even if I weren't, I see myself as one of the many refugee activists.

Some of us are aligned to groups and some of us are not. We are all in communication through email. This is a campaign that has been connected through email.

Marion Harper

I needed to go to work. Jim had become a tram driver. The pay was not very big and we had a lot of expenses with 4 children, as a result of my involvement in the peace movement, through the Party, I became involved in the Unitarian Church.

Victor James was the minister of the church at the time and I was involved in the planning of the big meeting with the Red Dean at the Exhibition Building. I became very involved with Frank Hartley, Victor James and Alf Dickie - who were the three ministers who worked together in the peace movement.

As a result of working with them, Frank Hartley offered me a job in the Victorian Peace Movement. So I worked for the peace movement for quite some time. Early on there were some great campaigns there. It was interesting.

Joan Coxsedge

The 1980s was the era of women's peace camps and I was very privileged to take part in three of them. The Women for Survival Peace Camp took place in 1983 outside the gates of Pine Gap near Alice Springs to draw attention to the presence of this very secretive electronic surveillance base which is run by and for the United States. Part of a global network, it sucks up information like a giant vacuum cleaner and operates completely outside normal governmental and legal constraints.

The camp lasted for a week and was creative and colourful and full of determined women prepared to have a go. I would have dearly liked to stay longer but had to return to Victoria to take part in an 'Equal Opportunity' debate!

Earlier in that same year, when I was in Washington DC visiting some anti-snooping comrades in CounterSpy, I was invited to join a weekend of protest at a women's peace camp at Seneca Falls in New York State. The governor had declared a 'state of emergency' and called out the national Guard, so I saw the US security state at first hand and it wasn't a pretty picture.

The following year, I went to Greenham Common, the famous Women's Peace Encampment. In 1981, a group of gutsy women had marched from Cardiff to this US cruise missile base in Berkshire and set up a permanent presence around its edge, quickly becoming a symbol for peace activists around the world. Greenham Common was non-hierarchical and and had no traditional structures.

There were various gates around the perimeter named after the colours of the rainbow, each with its own political flavour, allowing women to join the grouping of their choice. I took along a swag of food and ciggies and a great deal of admiration for their incredible courage. Apart from police brutality and cruel harassment from local yobs, the weather conditions were often horrendous. And yet, these women, ordinary mortals like us, stayed there for years.

Whatever happens, like the women of Greenham Common, we must continue working for a better world. I want my grandchildren to live in a society that has a spirit of independence, that puts people before profits and looks after the environment.

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