Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to how to avoid a happy life, the podcast. This podcast is a companion to how to avoid a happy life, a memoir by Julia Lawrenson, published by Fremantle Press. But you don't need to have read her story to enjoy the podcast.
This episode was recorded on Whajak Noongar Budja, and we acknowledge the continuing custodianship of this land and the great storytelling traditions of the noongar people.
This episode is called nineties activists. I'm Danae Gibson and before we start this podcast, I'm going to talk a little bit to Julia about why this topic.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: I wanted to write about being a nineties activist because my daughter, who's now in her twenties, and her friends occasionally condescended to me a little bit when they were going through their hardcore activist, protesting, marching kind of phase, as if I hadn't done any of it before.
[00:01:06] Speaker C: And I thought it was one of those things that gets lost in history.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Because it is marginalised and on the fringes and in opposition to the mainstream. You don't often hear about the protests of previous generations unless they were really outstanding. But in my day, we did a lot of protesting. It was just part of what we did in our early twenties. So I wanted to reflect on that and reflect on the way I was thinking about it at the time when I did it.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: It had a social impact as well as a political impact. Well, probably, in fact, more than a political impact on the way we built our own communities, didn't it?
[00:01:54] Speaker C: It did.
[00:01:55] Speaker B: That was the place where you met people, where you'd have yarns afterwards. So after a march or whatever, you'd all go to a local cafe or someone's house and continue on. And that was really the way that we built communities in those days, before social media, it was an in person.
[00:02:16] Speaker C: Front up kind of business.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: Early nineties in Perth in Western Australia, a lot of law reform was yet to come, wasn't it?
[00:02:23] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: Yeah, it was. A lot of it, including gay law reform. That was one of the things that I think we still had some archaic laws in place. And there was a lot of fear, actually.
[00:02:36] Speaker C: You know, in the first protests, I.
[00:02:38] Speaker B: Think I was at either the or one of the first gay pride marches in Perth, and we held it during the day. ASIO was there. You know, it's hard to imagine now what a frightening thing it was because we didn't know how people were going to react and it did not. I mean, I don't even know that we had any media coverage, but it.
[00:03:03] Speaker C: Was an act of bravery. To do it.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: And, you know, and afterwards we heard about the stories of other people who'd done it in Sydney, you know, in the sixties and seventies. And it was.
[00:03:14] Speaker C: It was really something quite special.
[00:03:18] Speaker A: How to avoid a happy life nineties activist.
[00:03:25] Speaker C: Nineties activist as a child, my preferred mode of protest was whinging.
I did have outbursts of righteous indignation from time to time, but mostly I took to complaint, to articulate my sense of the unfairness of seventies outer suburban life.
And even before anything much had happened to merit it, I found much to be annoyed about not having siblings when I wanted them. Not being able to stay up watching horror movies all night with my cousin and being told off for things I didn't do by teachers.
While I could be trusted to verbalise these grievances, large or small, I no more expected my complaints to change the nature of things than I expected Anna from Abba to turn up at my door and take me back to Sweden with her. I might have hoped for it, but I knew it was unlikely to transpire. And while I railed against the things that were unfair, my railing was short lived.
I never followed up with any action.
I would go to bed furious over one thing or another, but wake up unable to hold on to the previous.
[00:04:44] Speaker D: Day'S injustice at any time.
[00:04:47] Speaker C: An offering of Milo and toast and vegemite would be enough to dull my outrage. I was all piss and wind.
[00:04:54] Speaker D: As my grandfather said, being naughty by.
[00:04:58] Speaker C: Going against orders of any kind was not something that came naturally.
The most exciting things I remember as a child, tossing aerosol cans in fires, sneaking away from school grounds on a log that had fallen across the Canning river, trying to hit bats at night with rocks thrown at streetlights, were all activities that I undertook upon the encouragement of others. I discovered then that doing what you weren't supposed to do was deeply thrilling.
But I could find no impulse in myself to do them without either encouragement or an audience. Protesting against collective indignities or unfairnesses, however, called up something different in me than being merely rebellious.
During my high school years and when I was in an adolescent psychiatric hospital, I represented my fellow students and residents to protest all sorts of things.
Sometimes these things were trivial, such as.
[00:06:03] Speaker D: Suspensions for uniform infringements at a school.
[00:06:06] Speaker C: Where lunchtime fights on the oval or.
[00:06:08] Speaker D: Bashings after school were normal. Sometimes they were more serious, such as.
[00:06:14] Speaker C: Requesting that the head nurse intervene to stop our psychiatrist from feeling us up during sessions.
In all cases, my protests fell on.
[00:06:23] Speaker D: Deaf ears, which began developing in me.
[00:06:27] Speaker C: A loathing of authority and authority figures.
But when I stood up for things that involved other people, I felt a courage that I would not have had if I was acting on my own behalf.
[00:06:42] Speaker D: I wrote letters to the editor in.
[00:06:44] Speaker C: Year ten protesting some anti gay sentiment expressed in previous letters to the editor.
[00:06:50] Speaker D: Possibly undoing my advocacy by saying they.
[00:06:54] Speaker C: Couldn'T help being gay because they'd been.
[00:06:55] Speaker D: Made that way because they were molested.
[00:06:58] Speaker C: This reflected my understanding of queerness at the time, based on a sample size of two.
[00:07:04] Speaker D: Still, the intention was there.
[00:07:07] Speaker C: I received tacit encouragement to stand up for what was right from two sources, my training in the christian doctrine of martyrdom and by my policeman grandfather. My youthful religious experiences were an odd combination of mild suburban uniting, church exclamatory.
[00:07:26] Speaker D: Wheatbelt Baptist woe filled Lutheranism, and the.
[00:07:30] Speaker C: Soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar.
I believed that if you weren't suffering for your beliefs, you weren't doing it right.
My policeman grandfather, too, had an uncompromising stance toward morality.
He drummed into his children and his grandchildren that if you knew the right thing to do, you did it, no matter what the personal consequences.
He himself was sent to the north west of Western Australia for the last ten years of his career as a policeman because he would not stop speaking about the corruption he saw in certain people.
His colleagues called him farmer Frank because.
[00:08:10] Speaker D: Of his tendency to call a spade a fucking shovel.
[00:08:14] Speaker C: Once I landed in university at 19, the activism of the early nineties gave me an avenue to act on the various injustices I was now learning to put into words.
In my second semester, my housemate Bridget and I found ourselves joined by a woman called Boudica, who had spent the preceding three months living on a tree.
[00:08:38] Speaker D: Platform to prevent logging in Tasmania.
[00:08:41] Speaker C: She bought with her veganism, permaculture, gardening, and an entree into both the environmental and women's activist communities, which I had seen from a distance but had been.
[00:08:53] Speaker D: Too nervous to contemplate joining.
[00:08:56] Speaker C: I began attending student union meetings. The first, held in the biggest lecture hall in the university, was filled with humanity, students on one side and vet and commerce students on the other. I don't recall what the issue was, only that it was one which led to ordered but impassioned arguments from proponents of both sides. I began hanging out in the women's room, in part because I had, in the course of the student union meetings, developed a crush on the women's officer. In the women's room we discussed matter of gender and politics while studiously ignoring the coffee cups which were developing mould. Because refusing women's work was a political, if slightly unhygienic, act. We held study groups on this or that issue ecofeminism, domestic violence, women's safety on campus, postcolonialism, safe sex and separatism, and I began attending marches.
My first was an early gay pride march held in Perth one afternoon in October 1990.
As I recall, the organisers were so nervous about the possibility of reprisal or police brutality that the marches were more subdued than you might imagine.
We sat on the steps of the cultural centre afterwards, listening to the history of the stonewall marches and being implored to fight for change.
I remember someone pointing out to me the ASIO folk who were following and documenting.
[00:10:32] Speaker D: I marched in reclaim the night, piggybacking my housemate bridget in a colourful cheesecloth top, dancing joyously.
[00:10:40] Speaker C: Afterwards, at a women's only event in Northbridge, there was a protest against the Iraq war, later the first Gulf War, logging and other topical marches.
I was not convinced that the marches achieved anything by way of raising consciousness or changing people's minds. The crowds appeared mostly indifferent and occasionally sneering. Late 20th century australian apathy was alive and well, and unless there was positive press coverage, I wasn't sure what effect they were having.
[00:11:15] Speaker D: But they were great for community building.
[00:11:17] Speaker C: And making you feel as if you were part of something bigger than yourself.
Then I entered the more exciting because more risky realm of civil disobedience.
A bunch of us engaged sporadically in.
[00:11:32] Speaker D: Political graffiti at the university.
[00:11:35] Speaker C: After a few midis of port one Friday evening, we graffitied something to do with the university's management on the sandstone.
[00:11:42] Speaker D: Walls, we graffitied stop signs around Perth.
[00:11:47] Speaker C: So that they read stop child abuse.
We spray painted curse this gun that it may go flaccid on the limestone wall underneath the World War Two naval gun on Buckland Hill in Mosman park, preferring biblical diction to clarity. Also at the university, we held a sit in of the vice chancellor's office. I am embarrassed to report that it wasn't about accepting donations from fossil fuel companies or the university's reluctance to implement.
[00:12:19] Speaker D: Recycling or some other worthy cause.
[00:12:23] Speaker C: It was about the introduction of parking fees for students. In our defence, we recognise that this was a shift towards the corporatisation of university education. However, I worried that it trivialised protest of standing up for the voiceless, the overlooked and the powerless, which is what we thought we were doing the rest of the time. Besides, the same people who protested were the same people who were already trying to alert the world to climate change and the evils of car usage. After this, I reflected that some people involved in protests seemed to enjoy the oppositional nature of it and or had their eye on their own futures in political parties. Besides, my own tendency to psychoanalyze myself and everyone else made me suspicious of.
[00:13:14] Speaker D: My own motives for protesting.
[00:13:17] Speaker C: Sometimes I too felt that I was protesting a more generalised sense of grievance rather than wanting to exhort change in government policy.
Whinging in its adult form.
My misgivings did not stop me from.
[00:13:34] Speaker D: Enjoying the antics of my fellow protesters.
[00:13:37] Speaker C: One of my housemates, Luca, impressed us all during a protest against the development of remnant bushland at Perth's Hepburn Heights.
The protest was the most well organised one I'd come across, involving lawyers and lobbying, as well as the usual marching and shouting.
There were acts of vandalism, pouring sand into machines used for clearing, as I recall, as well as timetabled protesting by sitting in front of bulldozers.
One of the bulldozer drivers tried to intimidate the protesters by lifting the bucket above their heads and moving slowly forward.
Luca, in full view of spectators and the media, stood his ground.
When the dozer kept going forward, Luca leapt up, hung onto the tines on the lip of the bucket and then dangled above the ground while the operator swore from his cabin about dirty, stinking hippies.
I attended a few forest protests, but they weren't covered by the media so I couldn't see the point. However, I had joined an animal activism group.
We had marched in protest of live sheep exports, and then, one winter's day in 1990, the call came for volunteers.
[00:14:58] Speaker D: To protest an actual sheep ship.
[00:15:02] Speaker C: The organiser had alerted the media and purchased the chains and padlocks with which to affix ourselves to the ship.
I had recently shaved my hair off, hoping to look serene like a buddhist nun, but actually looking more like Sinead.
[00:15:18] Speaker D: O'Connor, with poorer bone structure.
[00:15:20] Speaker C: And so I donned a rainbow coloured cheesecloth scarf and prepared to suffer on behalf of the speechless sheep.
We met in Fremantle and walked to the wharf. The odour of piss dung and Lanolin was thick in the air as we made our way to the ship, chains heavy in our backpacks.
[00:15:42] Speaker D: Unfortunately, we were unable to actually get.
[00:15:46] Speaker C: Onto the ship on account of the sheep who were being loaded. As we arrived, we had to make do with wrapping chains around our wrists and then around the railings of the gangway up which the sheep were being herded.
We tried to appear aggrieved and righteous in front of the assembled news cameras, but all I felt was awkward and.
[00:16:09] Speaker D: Uncomfortable the sheep were alarmed by the.
[00:16:13] Speaker C: Chains and the chanting and they bleated as they scrambled up into the reeking ship.
The wharfies cursed us as they worked. One standing at the top of the gangway threatened to step on my fingers.
I was saved by the providential appearance of my wharfy stepfather, who barked, oi, leave off. That's my stepdaughter. My arrests made the evening news and the morning papers. This gave me a brief but enjoyable bit of cachet at the university.
It also gave me a criminal record for trespass, which I had to explain away at every subsequent job interview until I applied for a spent conviction some decades later.
The most awkward of these explanations occurred at parliament, where I applied for and got a job in 2007.
When the police clearance came back with trespass under convictions, I nervously composed an email to parliament's HR department explaining the circumstances.
I reassured them that I hadn't stolen underwear off a clothesline or nicked a telly for a drug habit. No, I had been arrested for raising consciousness of the cruelty of live sheep.
[00:17:35] Speaker D: Export, a cause which I still supported.
[00:17:38] Speaker C: Even if I no longer wanted to chain myself to anything. I was relieved when the HR person replied with as long as you've had a good wash by then you'll be fine.
After being given a fine and placed on a good behaviour bond by an irritated magistrate, I was relieved that civil disobedience was off the cards for the immediate future.
I applauded my fellow protesters for keeping up the good fight, but I found the adrenaline expended in the lead up to protests and the exhaustion that followed were not compatible with my disposition. In October 2009, nearly two decades after my sheepship capers, I was sergeant at arms in the West Australian Legislative assembly.
The sergeant is the constable of the house in charge of security and for conveying the speaker's orders to the state security police.
The sergeant has, but is rarely called upon to use powers of imprisonment on behalf of the House. Nevertheless, the capability is there. The parliament decided to hold a sitting in the regional town of Bunbury. At the Bunbury entertainment centre, a group of protesters, some dressed in animal costumes, held up placards calling for the sacking of the then CEO of the Forest Products Commission for what they claimed was the destruction of native forest coops in the southwest.
This was harmless enough, but when uncostumed protesters entered the public gallery after question time and staged a sit in, proceedings.
[00:19:22] Speaker D: Were halted and I was called upon.
[00:19:25] Speaker C: To eject them from the premises on.
[00:19:27] Speaker D: Behalf of the speaker.
[00:19:29] Speaker C: I walked over to the protesters and asked very loudly if they would leave.
As I did so, their collective odour wafted in my direction indicating that the environmentally sound practice of not bathing had carried down through the decades. The protesters had jammed themselves between the chairs, but rookie mistake. They hadn't chained or glued themselves to the furniture so it was easy for the burley security staff to remove them.
I considered giving them advice on effective protests for future reference but figured it would be in direct breach of my employment contract.
They return to their costumed protesters outside and I return to keeping parliamentarians in order. It was a harder job than preventing the live sheep trade.
How to avoid a happy life the podcast was produced by Danae Gibson who has my eternal gratitude and recorded at RTRFM. The video for it was edited by Fremantle Press. Music was written by late night shopping Nikki Jones and Shaun Salmon. The podcast includes voice work by Nikki Jones and Zoe Warwick. Thank you all for listening.
