Creating Feminist Culture: Australian Rural Lesbian-Separatist Communities in the 1970s and 1980s

The 1970s and 1980s witnessed the founding of a wave of rural lesbian-separatist communities across the Western world. In Australia, three large women's lands were established in rural northern New South Wales. This article explores the ways in which these communities sought to reimagine ways of being as women and as lesbians. Utilizing transnational and interstate feminist networks, their founders established them as collectives that overtly challenged capitalist understandings of property and human relationships with the land. Through an exclusion of men, lesbian-separatists envisaged these communities as a space in which women could break free from patriarchal structures. In their place, women explored new ideals of community and intimacy. Collective living allowed women to share daily chores and exchange political ideas and personal experiences. Breaking down monogamous relationship structures enabled women to explore non-monogamy and free sexual expression and allowed alternative practices of intimacy to emerge.