1995 Global Cultural Diversity Conference Proceedings, Sydney

Australia's Feminist Heritage: What it Means for Australian Identity

The Hon. Joan Kirner AM
Chairperson, Employment Services Regulatory Authority, Australia
Assisted by Srebrenka Kunek
Small Businesswoman, Creater of the 'Brides' exhibition in Ellis Island, New York

Hui Zheng is studying Industrial Engineering at a technical training college in New South Wales. She has lived in Australia for two years. She has a small child. She drives a taxi to pay for her studies. Hui is doing well academically and is actively involved on campus encouraging other women from non-English speaking backgrounds to maintain and succeed in their studies.

Emma Miller, an English migrant to Australia last century, did not get the chance to study. She was too busy raising a large family, working in sweat shop conditions as a seamstress and actually working with male unionists to improve workers conditions. She was famous, at the time for attending a union demonstration (there were many of them in the 1890s) and unseating the Queensland Police Commissioner, whose horse was pushing her back, by pulling out her hat pin, jabbing it into the poor horse and rapidly bringing the Police Commissioner down to human and horse hoof level!

Maria Pozos came to Australia from Spain in 1963 with a four-month-old boy. She started factory work to cure her loneliness when the little boy went to school.

Maria writes: "When I started work in the factory I see so many unjust things, and I was worried all the time, this is why I never keep me job. I've been sick every week because I couldn't stay any longer. The bosses say. "You bloody this, you bloody that." These are the things they say to us and in my very little English I answer, "Look I am a human being, I can take anything, but I don't want my dignity to be on the floor. You know I am a person, I came to Australia to work and to make a new life for me and my children. I don't say anything wrong to you, so why, why do you always abuse me.

"I disagree when people say migrants don't know much about the unions. I can tell you in Spain we've been fighting in the streets, we've been killed in the street, too, to implement a union, so we know what a union means.

"I think to prevent this exploitation we should implement English on the job. Without losing any pay because our pay is so little that we can't afford to get any reduction from it. This is one of the most important things apart from security at work. Australians say, 'Well, there is school at the night time, there is plenty of facilities. Why you bloody migrants can't go learn English outside?' But tell us, when! We are going in the morning at six o'clock to work and we finish work and we just like to get our children and go home and start our second job. So when are you going to learn English?"

To me these women are heroines: all part of our feminist history of choice and struggle, all shaping our national identity. But don't expect to find their contributions acknowledged in the media, our history teaching, our myths or even most discussions of cultural diversity. We in Australia have grown up on the history of male achievement, male contribution to our national identity.

Male history and achievement is important but it is not sufficient. It defines our manhood but not our nationhood. Silence not celebration embraces the contribution of most women to Australia's history and cultural diversity: immigrant, indigenous and non-indigenous women alike.

As Professor James Jupp, Director, Centre for Immigration and Multicultural Studies, Australian National University has pointed out, there is a need "for greater inter- cultural understanding for wider knowledge about those who have joined and changed the Australian Nation", people like Hui, Emma and Maria.

Unless when we talk about cultures we also talk about gender, we ignore our heritage and cannot describe our true identity.

Women of Anglo-Australian background have had to fight for their equality. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and women from non-English speaking background have faced additional discriminatory practices of dispossession and racism in addition to those based on gender.

It is time their stories were told and valued. Some attempts are now being made. I particularly draw your attention to the work of Sebrenka Kunek and the national and international success of The Brides, a multimedia installation which is at present at New York's Ellis Island Immigration Museum. For the first time the subject of Australian female immigration in the post World War II period is being presented in a venue of international significance. The work is a feminist critique with the particular focus on southern European women from Greece.

We have now reached a stage in our discussions of national identity in which the interlinking of the experience of migrant women past and present, and the mainly Anglo-Australian feminist movement can move from largely separate spheres to partnership.

As Mary Kalantzis' says in her article "Ethnicity Meets Gender Class in Australia": "Whilst not speaking feminism, the language of criticism and re-assertion of power, the practical struggles of many immigrant women are akin in critical spirit and outcome to feminism itself. Rather contradictorily, perhaps, this often involves a dramatic self-transformation, assuming some elements of the radically new culture of industrialism, whilst retaining what is powerful and positively human in traditional women's culture. And, as often as not, it also involves failure, isolation and oppression, as racism meets sexism and class immobility with a peculiar vengeance.

The wins that the feminist movement has had in Australia are important to all women. Our real wins include:

• the suffragists struggle to make Australia one of the first countries to enact the vote for women and establish their right to sit in Parliament;
• the right of women to inherit property;
• the setting-up of the Family Court and equity for women before the court;
• tougher laws against rape and domestic violence and the recognition of rape in marriage;
• the setting-up of women's support services including sexual assault centres and refuges;
• legislation to enshrine equal pay for equal work;
• paid maternity leave;
• abortion law reform;
• substantially increased and affordable child-care;
• equal access to quality education; and
• affirmative action, anti-discrimination, sexual harassment and equal opportunity legislation and due process in administrative law.

These achievements by women for women are all part of our heritage and enhance our modern national identity.

Women in Australia are now set to move on and tackle the next steps in attaining equality for women as part of our national identity. We intend to move from a position of having influence using the tools of power, the vote and the equality acts, to sharing power equally with men. This will require:

• telling the untold story of women's struggle and achievements;
• equal political representation of women and men in parliament within the decade;
• equal business sector representation of women in the boardroom, top and middle management levels and union structures. Currently only 2 per cent of private sector executive management are women;
• full participation of women in the debate that will reform the Australian constitution. This should include prior ownership of land by indigenous people and equality for all before the law, regardless of colour, race, gender or belief, and the right to freedom of speech and association;
• equal participation by women in the skills base of our nation;
• full recognition of women's contribution to the world of arts; and
• empowerment of women to play a key role in the new fields of information technology and global networking services.

But Australia's feminist heritage is not only about achieving greater representation of women in our parliaments, in business and in training.

Australia's feminist heritage is premised on the view of establishing an inclusive society, a democracy which is non-racist and non-sexist. It is based on a history of continuing struggle and activism. It is experienced in the politics of collective action and powerful networking. It values difference, and through respect for and understanding of differences, helps create a cohesive society.

Last year, having just retired from parliamentary politics after a twelve-year term which included two years as Head of State and Minister for Women's Affairs, I was asked by the Prime Minister to chair a committee to recommend to Commonwealth and State governments how Australia might celebrate the significant anniversary of the Centenary of Federation in the year 2001. This is the anniversary of the colonies of Australia becoming states and the states coming together as the Commonwealth of Australia.

It was exhilarating and enriching listening to people from all over Australia talking about what they have pride in and what is important to them. At times it was inspirational. Time after time we had women talk movingly about their experiences and how they wanted to build from these experiences to strengthen our nationhood. Take, for example, the words of Lillian Holt, Head of the Aboriginal Community College in Adelaide, South Australia: "I believe talking about racism in this country is about collective healing and we can all learn as a result of it. It is not about being anti-white, it is about being pro-humanity. For what has diminished me as an Aboriginal woman in this country has diminished all females, white and black."

Lillian's words could form a platform of action which unites all women in Australia to shape a new national identity.

Like our Prime Minister, I believe Australia, for the next six years to the Centenary of Federation, has before it an open moment, much like the open moment of the 1890s or in America after the Civil War and the 1930s Depression.

As Donald Horne, an eminent Australian says: "The Centenary of Federation presents Australia with a unique opportunity to strengthen our democracy. We have an opportunity to emphasise questions of active citizenship in a lively civil society."

Women from Australia's many cultures are well-placed to seize the moment and fully participate in shaping our nation for the next century. Though the open movement of 1995 is similar to that of the 1890s in the ferment of ideas that is taking place in Australia with major changes in the political structure, the economy and the technology of society, this time we must ensure the result is different.

The open moment in the 1890s was not fully taken up for all Australians so it led to a more exclusive society, exclusive of women, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders peoples, and immigrant workers from Asia and the Pacific. If we seize the moment in the 1990s we can shape a more inclusive society, a society which more accurately reflects the preferences and choices of all communities in Australia and a society in which all members, men and women, have equal power, recognise they have it and use it to create a better society for all Australians.

As women, as feminists, we assume full rights and responsibilities as citizens, not at the point of the vote or at a citizenship ceremony but as soon as we have decided to join in, whether we arrived 200 or 40,000 or 10 years ago or last week. Then we can insist our experiences become part of Australia's national identity, they are certainly part of our heritage. As women we participate in shaping Australia's national identity from separate histories, different beliefs, temperaments, commitments and class.

A good deal of what is important to us, will go on being separate in that part of our experience that belongs to individuals. But when we choose to come together, as we are today, we can agree to share with one another the other part of our lives that is public.

It is time for all women in Australia, whatever our cultures, to join together and insist on equal power within their communities, within their organisations and within the nation. And that means power in all fields, economic, social, cultural and political. And in insisting on our share of power we are bound together by common values:

• the value of equity;
• the value of diversity;
• the value of innovation;
• the value of democracy;
• the value of excellence; and
• the value of tolerance.

Each one of these values has been developed and strengthened by the experience and action of women acting together. The voice of women demanding action for equality, justice and freedom from violence is getting louder, nationally and across the world. I suspect it will reach a crescendo at the September Beijing Conference.

Each one of these values has been strengthened by the experience and voice of indigenous women led by strong voices like those of Lois O'Donoghue, Marcia Langton and Roberta Sykes. Their strength has enabled non-indigenous women to realise, at last, that the future of Australia is for all communities to negotiate, not for one culture to dominate. Open dialogue around shared values gives us cohesion in diversity; dominance divides us.

Again to quote Mary Kalantzis: "Dialogue between the mainstream feminist movement and non-English speaking background women would fruitfully open much feminism to critical scrutiny for its own cultural and historical role, and at the same time, open the lives of many non-English speaking background women to the positive things in the culture of liberal industrialism, without losing the profound sense of the social they have brought from cultural settings not so far down the track of industrialism. The solution to the complexity and contradiction is not 'vive la difference', it is critical dialogue and the forging of a new culture."

This new culture would grow from the significant experience of all women in Australia. It would link together our feminist heritage which has tended to be Anglo- Australian and the experience of migrant and indigenous women.

Women could then use their common values and combined strength to increase the numbers of women, particularly indigenous and women from non-English speaking background in our parliaments and local councils.

Franca Arena (NSW MP) was the first woman of Southern European background to enter parliament and I pay tribute to her courage, leadership and networking. She has now been joined by other women from non-English speaking backgrounds. But the process is too slow as Anglo and ethnic men maintain the old hegemony. The Labor Party's decision to set targets for attaining a minimum of 35% of parliamentarians being women by 2004 is a start. Now it has to be backed by money, professional support, networking and real opportunity.

And we currently have no representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Federal Parliament. It is time we considered seriously the Reconciliation Council proposal to allocate specific seats in parliament to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Unless we have Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in our parliament, as well as in their own autonomous regional authorities, we cannot have a truly representative democracy.

To conclude, I wish to return to my first point. To ensure that immigrant and indigenous women are fully part of shaping our nation's future we will have to:

• acknowledge their past unrecognised contribution, like the contributions of Hui, Maria and Emma;
• understand and act to remove the gendered basis of a number of migration policies and programs and restructure ethnic organisations to give women more power in decision-making;
• ensure that the skills of women in building Australia are acknowledged and that now, and in the future these skills, particularly of older women who have been the life blood of manufacturing industry, are upgraded so that they can have the opportunity of a career and appropriate influence remunerations in a modern skilled workforce; and
• insist that affirmative action in politics and business is for all women, not only some women.

Migrant women have been as important as migrant men in building Australia's heritage. Yet, because they came as so called dependants or "unskilled" labour they have not had the opportunity to succeed or influence in their own right as Anglo-Australian feminists have had. Instead, migrant women have created the opportunity for their daughters to know they are equal and to achieve equality in Australian society.

They have linked the old culture and the new; they have carried the double burdens of work and home to make their own and their children's dreams come true.

There has been no greater strength shown in world history than the strength of indigenous women, dispossessed of their children and grandchildren and of their land, maintaining the spirit of their families and insisting on survival.

It is time for the feminist movement in Australia to embrace the strengths and needs of all women in ways which empower all women and democratise the nation. It is time for our feminist heritage to be used as a basis for a more inclusive and more diverse feminist future. One in which every citizen:

• is valued by our society;
• contributes to our society;
• benefits from our society.

By 2001, we should proudly proclaim : "Australia: many cultures, both genders, one people."

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