An Antipodean variant...
1.
Thoughts on the misuse of Shoalwater Bay, Central Queensland, Australia
I grew up on a farm in bushland north-west of Yeppoon, about two miles from the sea as the crow flies. I loved the country where I lived so much that a sense of its sanctity has never left me.
During the mid-1960s, when I was still at school, a cousin visited our farm on leave from military manoeuvres at Shoalwater Bay. He was out from England with members of his paratroop regiment.
In those days the cousin in uniform cut a glamorous figure, and I did not question the wisdom of what he was doing. However, in less than two years my awareness was to undergo such a radical transformation that I became one of the thousands from the University of Queensland campus to march in the Viet Nam moratoria of the late 1960s, five months pregnant as I was at the time, but so outraged at the implications of that war for the civilian population of Viet Nam that I was prepared to risk being roughed-up and arrested by Bjelke-Petersen's police.
In the mid-1960s there was little environmental awareness in the Australian community as a whole, and it would not be a misrepresentation to say that there was little sensitivity to social issues either, especially those pertaining to Indigenous communities. Judith Wright and Oodgeroo Noonuccal had yet to find a wide audience for their ideas on social and environmental equity; the 1967 Referendum had yet to take place. During the first half of the 1960s, Indigenous children were still being forcibly removed from their mothers; whales and many other native species were still being slaughtered to the point of extinction. It was in that climate of environmental ignorance and lack of social awareness that the Shoalwater Bay military training area was first set up.
There have been some changes since then in terms of our growing awareness of the need to respect and respond to our environment and the people who have taken such good care of it for countless millennia. Ignorance of these issues is no longer a credible excuse for inaction or wrong action. The designation of the Shoalwater Bay area as a military training facility is the legacy of an outmoded mindset, and while other aspects of the set of attitudes that engendered it have been challenged and in many cases revised, those pertaining to militarisation and its structures and strictures appear to have gone in the opposite direction, and to have fossilised into anachronisms.
Well might one ask why it should be necessary, in this first decade of the new millennium, to keep re-engaging in struggles for the integrity of the environment and those who wish to live at peace in it and with it. Well might one ask how it is possible, in a state that calls itself a democracy, to invite a foreign power to wage war on our sovereign state's natural beauty, employing the most destructive assault weapons and tactics ever invented, in the name of peace. But the world, as we know, abounds in contradictions. While these are not necessarily of our making, if we passively accept their more sinister implications, they may become the agents of our unmaking.
2.
The Sound Women's Peace Camp: Cockburn Sound, WA, December 1984
More than fifteen years after my own awakening to these issues in the late 1960s, I was prompted to cross the continent, alone and on my own resources, to take part in the Sound Women's Peace Camp at Cockburn Sound, WA, in December 1984.
The Sound Women's Peace Camp was a week-long event, attended by several thousand women, to protest at the permission given to US nuclear-capable Trident submarines to enter Australian ports. The New Zealand government had simply refused to host them. Not for the first time nor the last, in Australia it was left to people power to compensate for an unhealthily conciliatory decision on the part of the government.
Cockburn Sound is a naval base, and during the week of the peace camp, which took place on land occupied by holiday cottages belonging to a union, the area was swarming with federal police, who had their work cut out trying to film literally thousands of women and children engaged in multiple activities. These included daytime peace marches and a Reclaim the Night procession through Perth's red light district, as well as the partial occupation of a government building in Perth by women crouching inside the model of a Trident submarine that they'd helped to make from wire and papier mache. I was one of those women. While those on either side of me were dragged out and arrested, for some unknown reason I was left as its sole and very scared occupant.
Women driving their own cars were stopped for vehicle checks and fined on the pretext of traffic offences. Hecklers drove past the encampment in hoon cars, yelling obscenities and throwing bottles and other projectiles over the perimeter, and were allowed to do with impunity while the police turned a blind eye.
Round-the-clock vigils were held in the port, at the razor-wire entanglement that deterred would-be trespassers from entering the naval base. Women on those vigils wove coloured wool in spider-web motifs into the razor wire, in emulation of Central and South American folk art. For the overnight vigils, some took sleeping bags and slept beside the razor wire. The night I joined the vigil, I woke up to see the toe of a boot a few inches from my eyes. Two members of a local university's Young Liberals association had come down to Rockingham to argue the toss with us. Since the camp was off-limits to males (and I never discovered whether this was inspired by Lysistrata's example), the only place the visitors could engage the women was at the vigil. A lively debate ensued, but at least they had come to engage in dialogue, not to heckle.
Within the encampment, women organised themselves into neighbourly groups, and took it in turns to cook the evening meal. The groups contained generational and occupational cross-sections. My neighbours included grandmothers and children, and we cooked in a large wok over a gas-cylinder.
The unionists' holiday cottages were reserved for children, and child-care volunteers were on duty twenty-four hours a day. When I volunteered for night-shift in one of the children's huts, I had a memorable conversation with my co-volunteer, a young German woman who had migrated to Australia and married an Australian before becoming what was then termed a radical lesbian separatist. Her frank and funny account of that personal journey over the kitchen table while the children slept had me alternately wide-eyed and in stitches.
Obviously, with so many women in the camp, activities such as the vigils in the port and child-care duty were voluntary, but I had gone there to be part of what was happening, so I volunteered for whatever was going. I heard about other activities that I would also have liked to experience, such as the morning encounters with dolphins at a nearby cove.
While I remember details of my journey to and from the peace camp, I don't remember how I first heard of it. Although there was media coverage of the build-up to the event, we didn't have a television, nor did we read newspapers regularly. I had done some voluntary work for PND (People for Nuclear Disarmament), so that was my probable source of information.
I didn't know another soul who was going, and was not able to avail myself of the coaches and trains conveying large numbers of women from the eastern states to WA, as I couldn't afford to jeopardise my casual job by asking for the extra time off that land travel would have entailed. My mother vociferously opposed my decision to go, and nobody actively encouraged me.
The return from WA was delayed by an air-traffic controllers' strike which looked set to continue until after Christmas. After spending a couple of nights on the living-room floor of a peace-camp supporter in Fremantle, I cashed in my air-ticket and set out to cross the Nullarbor by coach.
Culture shock set in when the driver played Slim Dusty at full volume, egged on by some lady bowlers in the front seats who kept feeding him jelly beans. What was more perturbing was the way they went into a scandalised huddle to exchange gossip about the peace camp, of which I caught occasional snippets, such as "hairy!" and "rolling around in the bushes together!" The groundswell of disapproval escalated ominously when our coach pulled in to a petrol station at the same time as a couple of eastbound coachloads of women from the peace camp.
During the night I was elbowed awake by the woman sitting next to me. We were passing through Kalgoorlie, where female sex-workers used to sit in neon-lit shop-front windows, waiting for clients. "I knew yer wouldn't want to miss it!" said my sharp-elbowed neighbour.
It is ironic that I managed to travel all the way from Brisbane to Cockburn Sound for the sake of a safer, kindlier, demilitarised future for my young children and the Australia their generation would inherit, but that I wasn't able to travel to Shoalwater Bay's Peace Convergence activities.
However, I take solace in the fact that the spirit I saw in action at the Sound Women's Peace Camp has not been extinguished in the intervening years, while lamenting the fact that there is still so urgent a need for citizens to be vigilant and to pit their bare hands and pure hearts and sane minds against a corporate, multinational, militarising Goliath.
If nothing else, I have come to understand that peace in our world, in our times, is not a given. You always have to earn it; to work for it, sustain it, and safeguard it, and to pass on the awareness that such commitment is necessary. Until such time as human consciousness embraces peace and its processes on a global scale, there is apparently no other way.
In the meantime, I shall be taking up the cudgels (in a spiritual sense) in the cause of a more peaceful, just and harmonious Australia for my grandchildren's generation.
August 2007