Hybrid Feminisms: The Australian Case

Hybrid Feminisms: The Australian Case Chilla Bulbeck Australian feminism, having always provided fertile ground for transplantation of "international" (TJ.S. and U.K., and latterly French) feminisms, has certain indigenous features, notable among them being its capacity to graft those others on to its own growth and at times produce new species. Antipodean feminism may be imaged ... not as an island colonial outpost but positioned at the crossroad of world trade routes and inhabited by settlers who are, paradoxicaUy, born traveUers.1 The arguments in this paper owe much to the insights provided by a coUeague, Barbara Sullivan, who identifies two streams of Australian feminism, "official feminism" and "clearing house feminism."2 Her notion of clearing house feminism as a hybrid form provoked me to consider the ways in which all Australian feminisms might be seen as grafts; each transplants disparate growths to produce something new. Australian ferninisms have been nurtured in a thin coastal shver of our continent, a liminal space bounded outwardly by the oceans of the world and inwardly by a hostile interior. Across the seas lie the other feminisms which influence our home-grown brands, inwards dweU the white Australian archetypes, the indigenous Aborigines, and the AustraUan bushman and his "mates." The first feminist graft I explore is AustraUan feminism's imaginative rewriting of its interior, an AustraUan herstory of colonization. The second feminist graft has emerged in the coastal stiver itself, the place where most Australians dweU. About two-thirds of Australians hved in areas classified as urban in 1890, a proportion matched by the United States only in 1920 and Canada not until 1950.3 These coastal cities have nurtured what Hester Eisenstein calls "official feminism."4 It is a response to a possibly unique historic conjuncture, a reformist Labour government combined with a flowering of ferninism.5 The term "femocrat" has been offered to the international feminist lexicon6 and identifies the successes of feminist bureaucrats appointed to senior levels of the bureaucracy to advance the cause of women. The third feminist graft looks outward and reflects Australian feminism's openness to international debates and ideas. As a "clearing house"7 for various currents of international work, Australian feminism © 1994 Journal of Women-s History, Vol 6 No. 3 (Fall) 1994 International Trends: Chilla Bulbeck 113 has participated in the transition from the feminism of "things" which characterized the 1970s to the feminism of "words" in the 1980s.8 This graft finds its home in women's studies courses in academia. "Indigenous Feminism": Decolonizing Australian Women Many of the historic struggles by the Austiahan women's movement have been rephcated in Europe, Asia, the Americas and parts of Africa: struggles for the vote, an education, entry into the professions, decent wages for women's work, protection from male sexual aggression.9 Nonetheless , the timing and pattern of each country's struggle is different. White Australians are preoccupied with their "identity," in part due to a short national history of less than one hundred years. The leitmotif of much Austiahan history is colonization: colonization or tiansformation of a hostile continent to replicate EngUsh country scenes; colonization or destruction of the oldest surviving culture in the world, that of the Aborigines10 to make way for white "civilization"; colonization or embourgeoisement of the convicts and their jailers to become citizens of emerging male democracies from the 1850s. Anne Summers's Damned Whores and God's Police^ an early influential text (along with Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch), developed the thesis of women's subordination based on their colonization, akin to the manner in which the land and the Aborigines were colonized. She also described women as the handmaidens of civilization . Austiahan women were divided into bad prostitutes or whores (who arrived with the first fleet as convict women) and good women, who as God's Pohce were to marry and civilize Austiahan men and control and divert bad women.12 In keeping with radical feminist arguments of the 1970s, Summers insisted that all women were prostitutes because they exchanged sexual services for economic returns, whether inside or outside marriage. Aborigines now form less than two percent of the Austiahan population and, before the 1970s, they were...