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Feminists9 version
of peacemaking
By IAN WARDEN
I am advised that there were some
Strange Goings On up at the
ANU's Burgmann College during
last weekend's corroboree entitled
'The Power of Hope - Peace
making Confronts the Nuclear
Age'.
The event was jointly organised by the
Australian Council of Churches and the
Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace
and attracted divers persons, including
Christian feminists, radical vegetarians,
hippies, presbyterians etc.
The feminist "input", as it is usually referred
to these days, included a performance of a
shamelessly amended version of the Greek
legend of Pluto's rapacious abduction of Per
sephone so as to make some point about the
incidence of rape in war.
My informant, familiar with the legend,
spoke of the performance as "the rape of 'The
Rape of Persephone' " containing as it did some
feminist amendments, including the em
ployment of one of their sisters as the rapacious
Pluto and the failure to show that the legend
proper has a reasonably happy ending in that
Pluto is deccnt enough to agree to allow Per
sephone to spend part of the year in the
Underworld with him and another part of it on
the surface of the Earth with her mother,
Demeter. Their version, which somehow em
braced references to the Vietnam War and to
the fact that US soldiers in that war had been
"trained to rape", Finished with Demeter
whingeing about her lot.
The congregation at the ecumenical service
held in conjunction with the conference last
Sunday found themselves singing a hymn ap
parently amended to placate the sisterhood.
James McCauley's wilfully sexist lines
"Jesus in your heart we find, love of the Father
and mankind" had become "Jesus in your heart
we find, love of our God and humankind".
Later that day a participant in one of the
"workshops" arrived a trifle late to find that
those already present were wearing flowers in
their hair. For the most part they were wearing
daphne although at least one man had adorned
his locks with a jonquil. My informant fancies
that the jonquil was, the daphne having run out,
purloined from the grounds of the college where
it was supposed "to lighten the souls of the
undergraduates, if they have souls".
Later, these latter-day flower people were
asked to join hands and dance under the trees,
and lots of them did, although one dissenting
sceptic stood on the sidelines asking them to
lake care not to stomp on Burgmann's daffodils.
I sometimes feel the urge to join the peace
movement but it always chills my spine to think
that 1 would, one day, be asked to do things
like put a jonquil in my hair and then join hands
and dance under the trees. Messrs Brezhnev and
Reagan, much to their credit, would never ask
me to do anything so silly.
Much was made by the feminists at the
conference of the idea that women have a
unique part to play in the anti-war movement
since they are by nature the nurturing, life
giving, life-supporting sex with an innate abhor
rcnce or the death that is a concomitant or war.
I understand that a mischievous spirit, a
woman with Right to Life opinions, attended a
workshop and raised the point that while this
view might have a great deal going for it,
perhaps it should be qualified by the thought
that women were uniquely responsible for the
decisions that brought about the deaths of tens
of thousands of unborn babies in Australia alone
every year.
This was not a popular view and it was
argued against her, by people who were blithely
tackling the effortlessly easy question of how
to stop war, that the abortion issue was "too
complex" to be resolved.
Tony Brennan ... rare exception Help
Tony Brennan ... rare exception
Cling to one of
ACT's few stars
It is reported that the Canberra Arrows
soccer club is anxious to sell its star player,
Mr Tony Brennan.
Interviewed on television earlier this week,
Mr Brennan said that the news had taken him
by surprise and that he would rather like to stay
with Canberra.
All of this suggests that the supremos of the
Arrows are licking their lips in anticipation of
the loot that he would fetch. A sum of $50,000
has been mentioned which, while it would not
buy even the left ear of a good professional
soccer player in Britain, would enable the
Arrows to buy quite a few good Australians and
perhaps to hire the services of some Europeans
now in the twilight years of their careers but
still with some of their own teeth left.
My own view is that it would be a sad thing
if this happened.
The ACT is already singularly lacking in
stars. There is absolutely no one in the House
or Assembly whose pronouncements set the
pulses racing or who dazzles us with his or her
wit or matinee-idol looks, and, with the excep
tion of articulate megastar Frank Jones, there
is no one in the media to make us swoon and
marvel.
Even in our sports (with the exception of
some of the artful Americans in the Canberra
Cannons basketball team) wc have almost no
one who is worth going to watch in his or her
own right. There is not even an exceptional
racehorse or greyhound.
Brennan is a rare exception to this unhappy
rule and the ACT, let alone the Arrows, should
cling to him.
1 urge the Department of the Capital Terri
tory to intervene and to give the Arrows $50,000
with which to buy some old Scottish players who
might otherwise be put down. This would enable
the club to retain Brennan to play among them.
Whitherward
fare
unsightly joggers
I\^Y recent remarks about ACT joggers
(lo the effect that they are unsightly and
that, like the advertising hoardings
frowned upon by the DCT, they besmirch
an otherwise pleasing environment) have
provoked a Swinger Hill reader to upbraid
me and to send me a poem which says how
wonderful joggers are.
In a half-hearted attempt to appear open
minded on this issue 1 reproduce these appalling
verses below. They are not by my correspondent
but by one Charles Sorley.
We swing ungirded hips,
And lightened are our eyes,
The rain is on our lips,
We do not run for prize.
We know not whom we trust
Nor whitherward we fare,
But we run because we must
Through the great wide air.
The waters of the seas
Are troubled as by storm.
The tempest strips the trees
And does not leave them warm.
Docs the tearing tempest pause?
Do the treetops ask it why?
So we run without a cause
'Neath the big, bare sky.
The rain is on our lips,
.We do not run for prize.
But the storm the water whips
And the wave howls to the skies.
The winds arise and strike it
And scatter it like sand,
And we run because we like it
Through the broad bright land.
Leaving aside, forever, the question of
whether or not a wave can howl, it is surely not
the case that joggers don't know "whitherward"
they "fare", since one of my criticisms of them
is that they are always going whitherward on
the same old routes. Most of them choose to
go whitherward across the Commonwealth Ave
nue bridge, along the lake and back through the
Commonwealth Gardens, clashing, as they go,
with all that is natural or aesthetically pleasing.
Nor will it do for joggers to attempt to say
that they jog because of some mysterious,
romantic impulse which is as unfathomable as
the reason for the tearing tempest to fizz
through the trees, (or, the author might have
said, the reason why lemmings choose to jog
over cliffs). In fact joggers jog because they
have become too fat to get into their clothes and
because they have read magazine articles which
tell them that they must cither take some
exercise or drop down dead of one or more of
the various infirmities that afflict the slothful.
Gay workshops'
scintillating titles
THE Eighth National Conference of
Lesbians and Homosexual Men is being
held at the Australian National University
this weekend.
On Friday morning I tripped blithely across
the campus to the Union building to ask the
organisers which "workshops" a reporter might
attend and was disappointed to find that
"straight" reporters (as opposed to those from
the gay Press) probably wouldn't be allowed to
attend anything but a keynote address and a
forum.
"Why?", I wondered, and was told that "If
people are discussing their sexuality they don't
want the media reporting it".
I responded that The Canberra Times was
a sober, family paper, and that it was highly
unlikely that we would ever publish lurid and
lubricious accounts of homosexual sexuality in
our pious pages, but this cut no ice.
And anyway, is it really true that people do
not like to talk to the media about their
sexuality? It has been my impression that they
do want to talk about it and at inordinate length,
especially when they have a notion that that
sexuality is somehow being repressed. How one
wearied of the disabled going on and on about
These brumbies at Smokers Gap could become tasty brumby bourgignon. Help
These brumbies at Smokers Gap could become tasty brumby bourgignon.
their sexuality during their recent Year! What
bliss it is, at last, to have the International Year
of something (the Tree) which is not always
whingeing to the media, even though the sex
uality of trees is far more interesting (if much
less grotesque and hilarious) than the sexuality
of humans. But I digress.
It pained me to think of the workshops I
would miss, since the weekend's program of-
fered several scintillating subjects.
There was, for example, 'Gays in the ALP'
and yet, unaccountably, no workshops on gays
in the Liberal and National Country parties.
What is it about socialism, one wonders, that
gives its adherents the courage to come out of
the closet while their Tory and bucolic brothers
and sisters stay, timidly, within it? A further
workshop on 'Lesbian sadomasochism' was to
be conducted by a group called the 'Socialist
Lesbians' from Sydney. One looks forward to
the day, surely not far distant, when these gels
win ALP pre-selection for safe seats. There are
not nearly enough socialist lesbian
sadomasochists in the Federal parliament.
While there was no discussion of gays in the
NCP there was, however, a workshop on 'Gays
in the country', a special theme of the con
ference whose organisers made a special effort
to attract gays from the bush since, to quote
from the conference publicity, "many country
gays experience loneliness and despair because
of their isolation from other gays".
It further distressed one to have to miss
.workshops on 'Gay parents', 'Australian gay
archives', 'Bisexuality', 'Young gays', 'Older
gays' and on 'Is drag necessarily a patriarchal
putdown of women?' a question which has been
troubling me for quite some time.
I would not have wanted to go to 'Pedophilia'
except to see the person called (according to the
program) Emu Nugent who was conducting it
to ask him or her whether or not he or she has
brothers and sisters who are also named after
other examples of Australian fauna.
And this columnist would not have got a
guernsey for 'Black, Third World, immigrant
and refugee gays' anyway because the program
carries the stipulation that this workshop is
"closed to Anglos". I am conspicuously Anglo.
"Canberra's nightlife is very quiet - there
is no Oxford Street here", laments a leaflet
welcoming folk to the conference This seems
hardly fair to Woolley Street in throbbing,
cosmopolitan Dickson, which, after dark, boasts
a discotheque, a small caravan dispensing take
away food and some very interesting shop
windows. And McDonald's is only just around
the corner, too.
They eat horses,
don't they?
The Minister for the Capital Territory
has attracted considerable hostility with
his announcement that the brumbies at
Smokers Gap should be "controlled" with
Ihc blunderbuss.
He has said that "old, distressed and surplus
animals" should be bumped off.
It distresses me that anyone should express
hostility towards Mr Hodgman and 1 have given
some thought to how he might placate these
brumbyphiles or at least turn this apparently
unpleasant matter to his advantage.
To that end may I suggest to him that he
should press ahead with the culling of these
critters but announce that the meat will be
given, free or very, very cheaply to the un
employed and the poor and the needy.
We live in Hard Times and no one would
dare object to the shooting of an old, distressed
or surplus horse if that shooting was going to
put meat on a family table that normally would
not be graced by anything meaty at all.
There is the boring technicality that Aus
tralians do not (consciously at least) cat the
meat of the horse but in Hard Times perhaps
we should be less fussy, especially since peoples
far more sophisticated than ourselves (the
French and the Belgians for example) regard
gee gee as a considerable delicacy.
From a recent edition of The Times oj
London I learn that the French and the Belgians
spent the equivalent of about 10 million British
pounds on horsemcat last year, including the
meat of the Dartmoor pony.
According to The Times, one of the many
results of the recession in Britain is that ponies
and horses arc being eaten instead of ridden.
Even thoroughbreds arc being consumed and
this article claims that at the bloodstock sales
at Ascot in July, twoycar-olds were selling for
slaughter rather than for the chance of glory
on the track.
The Wardens arc seldom able to afford meat
these days and we would not turn our noses up
at rack of palomino, clydcsdale in black bean
sauce, sweet and sour appaloosa, Shetland
steaks or indeed brumby bourgignon.
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