"I have another duty, equally sacred, a duty to myself " Dora: A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen,1879
1. Welcome to Our Foremothers - "Here is one story ..."
2. First Owners
On this page:
KOORIE STORY: Pre 1863.
SOCIAL STORY: Melbourne 1863.
3. Sara and Sheyda Rimmer
On this page:
OUR STORY: Sarah Curry
KOORIE STORY: 1864 Corandarrk - Diaspora, the Start;
SOCIAL STORY: The Immigrants Home, 'The Fortunes of Mary Fortune'.
4. Smythesdale Goldfields
On this page:
SOCIAL STORY: Women on the goldfields - 'What a Woman on Ballaraat Can Do'; The Sandhurst Impersonator; the Sinking Cathedral.
5. The Egalitarian Idea
On this page:
KOORIE STORY: Resisting Oppression - Louisa Briggs;
SOCIAL STORY:
Enlightenment Thinking; Education; the Education Act. 1872.0's-80's - Free, Compulsary and Secular Education; Not Equal if you are Aboriginal
6. A Fair Go
On this Page:
OUR STORY: Sarah's 'Fair Go'.
KOORIE STORY: Struggles; Coranderrk Petition.
SOCIAL STORY: A Fair Go, the 1882 Tailoresses Strike, the Woman's Suffrage Society; the 'Mother of Womanhood Suffrage' - Louisa Lawson; Orphans & Institutions.
7. Going Backwards
On this Page:
KOORIE STORY:
the Half Caste Amendment Act oy Murphy; Coranderrk.
SOCIAL STORY - Reaction; 1890’s Economic Depression; Women's Paid Work.
8. Running Free
On this page:
OUR STORY: "NO DAUGHTER OF MINE ..."; Hard Yakka.
KOORIE STORY: Indigenous Exclusion.
9. Women Were Not Quiet
On this Page:
Social Story: The Hospital Run By Women For Women;The Victorian Lady Teachers' Association; The 1891 'Monster' Suffrage Petition - Vida Goldstein.
10. Building Peace at Home WW1
On this page:
OUR STORY
KOORIE STORY - Coranderrk Closure
SOCIAL STORY - Conscription; White Feathers; The Zurich Women's Peace Conference; Free Trade
11. A World Not Fit For Heroes
On this page:
OUR STORY
KOORIE STORY: Australian Aborigines League; Cummeraaginja; 26th January, Day of Mourning - Beryl Booth, Margaret Tucker.
SOCIAL STORY: Economic Depression; Making Do - Yvonne Smith.
12. Another War - WW2
On this page:
OUR STORY Our Family
KOORIE STORY: There's Work When We Need You - Nora Murray.
SOCIAL STORY: Pulling Together - Edith Morgan; After the War - Things Weren't All Rosy - Joyce Stevens.
13. Howard's Way - the 1950's
On this page:
OUR STORY
KOORIE STORY: Maralinga - Joan Wingfield, Gwen Rathman; More Protest - Warburton Ranges; Lake Tyers; More Protest;
SOCIAL STORY: Camp Pell; Conformity & Hidden Poverty; The Communist Party Dissolution Bill..
14. A Life Well Spent
On this page:
OUR STORY - Sad times
SOCIAL STORY: Hypocrisy; Hope
Our Foremothers is published by
Women's Web Inc.
Telephone: 03 9486 1808
www.womensweb.com.au
womensweb@iprimus.com.au
© Geraldine Robertson except for study, social justice and feminist sharing.
Our Foremothers |
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13. HOWARD’S WAY – the 1950’s
On this page:
OUR STORY
KOORIE STORY: Maralinga - Joan Wingfield, Gwen Rathman; More Protest - Warburton Ranges; Lake Tyers; More Protest;
SOCIAL STORY: Camp Pell; ; Conformity & Hidden Poverty; The Communist Party Dissolution Bill.
I call this time “Howard’s Way” because Prime Minister John Howard often says what a good time it was. I don’t see it that way.
It started off well for us. I remember going to a political meeting with Papa. Robert Menzies was speaking at North Melbourne Town Hall. Papa heckled. He had a deep, loud voice, as did Robert Menzies, and as much as Papa heckled, Menzies responded.
The next thing I knew, Papa pulled me out of the meeting, warning me to always be aware of my surroundings and sensitive to possible riots when I was in a crowd. He told me to look for the signs and leave the minute I saw them. I looked back and saw the men fighting and police rushing in.
But Papa was whistling to himself on the way home! In fact he seemed quite pleased with himself and the world in general. I thought that the world of politics was very strange, indeed.
Soon Uncle Charl got other work and a house for himself and his family, Uncle Bill went overseas and Uncle Bob got himself other work.
Papa told Nana that as she had left the country she loved when she married him, he would now move with her to the country. He bought another café business in the main street of Leongatha – a country town – and they moved there.
Nana was pleased to have a garden to work again. She had missed it. All she had at the café was pots of ferns, (and a hundred or so caterpillars I had collected from a peppercorn tree at school and taken home in a shoebox). The caterpillars that escaped overnight ate those.
I remember staying with Nana and Papa at Leongatha and going to the Leongatha school. On the way home some children, including Italian WW2 refugee, were abused, called “Catholic dogs” and stoned.
I hadn’t experienced religious hate before. My father was Catholic, so was his mother and my Uncle Bob employed the parents of these so-called dogs.
Nana used her nursing experience to help the women in childbirth, as they were used to having women with them, so she, clearly, liked them.
I had spent the best Easter I ever had (and still have ever had) at an Italian – Catholic – family. They had taken a door off its hinges and put it on trestles, there was so much food. And what food! I had never tasted anything like it. It was mouth-watering.
The adults played games with the children and there was such laughing and singing I still smile at the memory.
These were dogs? I would like to say I stood up to the bullies, but I was too scared. It worried me, though.
When I went home I decided to notice things more. For the first time I really felt the deprivation, discrimination and poverty that existed at that time.
MARALINGA
It sent shivers up and down my spine, just the way Dad described it. It was just horrific.
I mean, he describes it like a black mist that rolled through, along the ground, through the tops of the trees, and...silently it moved.
It totally confused animals. Animals were so used to dust storms, and the noise that dust storm brings, and stuff like that, but this was a black mist that came silently across the land, where people were effected by it.
... It was not even 24 hours after the test that people started becoming very, very sick.
... Soon after Maralinga, Dad lost his sight. And so his whole world changed.
Karina Lester, Interview with George Negus ABC 5.4.04
My people were forcibly removed from their land in the 1950's because of the bomb testing at Maralinga and the rocket tests at Woomera. We were put in trucks and buses and scattered thousands of miles throughout the south of Australia.
I should say that not all my people managed to escape Marylinga. A few of them died because of the actual bomb tests.
Some who were in the area when the bombs were tested suffered blindness, my relatives can talk of that. Some of them suffered skin diseases, cancers and thyroid problems, unknown diseases, and they are still suffering today ...
Joan Wingfield, cited in Daughters of the Pacific Zohl de Ishtar Spinifex 1994 pp 145-6They can never really know how many Aboriginal people were killed at Maralinga because they didn't do a census. They wouldn't know. They couldn't know. We weren't even considered.
And that's the thinking. All Indigenous people are expendable, and our culture is expendable. That's why they can dig up uranium, mine our land - they don't have any respect for it.
... Because they think they are better than us. But they're not. Because we don't think like them. We don't think that we're better than anyone else.
That's the first area of fault: when you think you're better than someone else.
Gwen Rathman, cited in Daughters of the Pacific Zohl de Ishtar Spinifex 1994 pp 145-6
The Aboriginal community was active:
1940's and 1950's
(There were) protests against the rocket range in Central Australia and the fate of one thousand Aborigines in the Warburton Ranges. The establishment tapped into the communist bogey paranoia of the time, and public interest died down.
The Victorian 'Aborigine Act' repealed legislation which had made it an offence for non-Aborigines to 'consort with the Aboriginal natives of Victoria'.
Cummerangunja Pty Ltd was registered. The Board agreed in Principle to cancel the leases of white farmers on the reserve.
There was much work towards national co-ordination of Aboriginal action and around the petition calling for a refurendum to change the constitution which prevented the Commonwealth from taking control of Aboriginal affairs.
Taking Time, Yvonne Smith, Union of Australian Women.
More Protest
Lake Tyers was the scene of another struggle. As early as the 1950s residents began to fight for ownership of the reserve and mounted a successful campaign that would span two decades.
They forwarded petitions to Parliament, staged protest marches in the streets of Melbourne and harnessed the support of the Victorian Aboriginal community through the Victorian Aborigines Advancement League. In 1970 the reserve was handed over.
www.abc.net.au/missionvoices
After WW2 was over the war jobs were gone and the cost of housing forced people to go to Camp Pell to wait for public housing.
Nora and John Stewart Murray were among those who lived at Camp Pell in the early 1950's.
They lived there in a tent with 5 children for 20 months before being relocated to public housing. moreland.vic.gov.au/pdfs/Moreland
People lived in places like Camp Pell and under bits of tin at Dudley Flats. www.womensweb.com.au
Camp Pell
Three thousand people, (including a thousand children), lived in such poverty that scurvy was a problem as well as pneumonia, rheumatic fever, scarlet fever and impetigo.
In one are, four hundred people endured leaking huts, only one hot shower which was three hundred yards away, one cold shower, five kitchens, and nine coppers to wash the clothes and inadequate drains that blocked when it rained.
Women’s Web stories actions www.womensweb.com.au
Conformity & Hidden Poverty
Camp Pell was in Royal Park, near where I lived. It had been an army camp and was now used to house people waiting for public housing. Even though I was a child I knew the conditions were appalling.
I saw my schoolmates who lived at Camp Pell often suffered.
They sometimes:
- had no shoes;
- had only a flimsy summer dress and thin cardigan in the middle of winter;
- had no lunch, and it wasn’t because they had forgotten it.;
- thought fruit, even an apple, was a luxury;
- suffered from malnutrition - and this was 5 minutes walk from the Victoria Market;
- had to leave school early each day to go to work to help the family financially;
- always seemed to be tired after lunch; and
- did not have the strength I had, even when they were much older.
2 mothers, Carlton SLV
Camp Pell had become infamous during the war because of the Brownout Strangler – a serial killer who turned out to be an American serviceman stationed there.
Melbourne’s Reaction
Melbourne became a city gripped with fear. Police issued warnings to the public. People became weary of being out late at night. Milk cans were put out long before dusk.
Few women dared to come out after dark, and some businesses let women go home early. Young women began leaving vital war jobs to stay with relatives in the country until the whole thing was over. enet.org.au/historyonline/brownout/brownout.htm
It was finally condemned in 1954.
The Camp Pell tenants who had been fighting for better conditions were now fighting evictions.
When their furniture was taken out of one door of the hut, they would surround it then put it back through another door.
This action meant they had some bargaining power with the Government, and I remember how grateful they were to the Communist Party, which helped them.
The Communist Party Dissolution Bill
Many people who didn’t like Communism liked and respected individual Communists.
In 1950 Menzies introduced the Communist Party Dissolution Bill which gave power to the government to publicly declare any citizen a Communist and to bar him or her from holding office in a range of public organisations, including trade unions.
The act was contested in the High Court where it was declared unconstitutional. Menzies then sought power to outlaw the Communist Party through a plebiscide in September 1951. (It) was defeated. australiansatwar.gov.au