Biography, Event, Politics, Source

There’s a Snake in my Caravan – Part 1

There’s a snake in my caravan and I don’t know what to do. A nasty dull-black sinuous thing that has made its home in the back of a large electric fridge that’s in storage, with other furniture, in the caravan annex. It has bitten my dog (which barely survived) and forced me to install my latest batch of hijacked hitch-hikers in the front bedroom of the little old farmhouse where I live. If I could pluck up the courage to get after it with the ’12 bore’, the only result would be a dead caravan. The snake would then settle down to a snug winter and a productive spring in its comfortable, new, all mod. cons. accommodation. I can envisage the scene sixty years from now: my daughter, Amanda, then seventy-five, leaning on her walking stick while gesturing expansively at a tangled heap of alumium and steel, a tatter of canvas still fluttering defiantly through the bracken and weeds, as she explains to her hijacked hitch-hikers ‘there’s a snake in the caravan, so you’ll have to stay up at the house’.

With just a cursory glance and a swish of its tail that snake has  reduced me to utter powerlessness. Inadequate, ineffectual, I fall into the pit of what must be the ultimate of peculiarly female ‘downness’: I am no longer in control of my life. My caravan, the private space in which I write, is denied me. Yet this feeling of powerlessness is all too familiar. In 1971 I was a suburban housewife, the mother of five children. The youngest, then seven years old, was severely retarded and epileptic. Then I became pregnant again.

In those days, one could get a legal abortion only on grounds that the pregnancy presented a danger to the physical or mental health of the mother. Unaware that I would have qualified for a termination on medical grounds, and having lived the previous seven years on the brink of a total breakdown, I signed myself into a mental institution. I did not have an abortion. I was told that I was ‘too sane’. I had not come in dripping blood. They suggested I ‘have her adopted’. This decision, made by others, was the beginning of my conscious desire for real control of my life.

 I had been married for fifteen years. The fifth child was placed in an institution for the intellectually handicapped just one month before the youngest was born. Married life was soured even before the handicapped child, whose illness created a social and economic barrier to our ending the marriage. The marriage disintegrated with frighteningly violent scenes.

Being of mixed racial origins, my identity resolved and focussed on my Aboriginality more and more throughout the years. Childhood and marriage (to a first cousin on the Aboriginal side of the family) led to an incredibly isolated existence providing no real protection against continuing racist barbs. However, during 1971 I was increasingly active in the Aboriginal land rights movement, visiting a number of Aboriginal reserves throughout New South Wales. At easter, 1972, I attended the National Land Rights Conference in Alice Springs.

The land rights movement would not have survived had it not been for the role of Aboriginal women. The Gary Foleys, Paul Coes, Mick Millers and others fought long and hard throughout the 1970s, and into the 1980s. But the strength of nameless hundreds of women, tempered by years of direct conflict with bureaucracies (police, welfare agencies, schools) in defence of their children, played an important role in the development of Aboriginal organisations and the general demand for land rights. Yet while the land rights issue has passed from the hands of the young male miltants of the late 1960s and early 1970s to the National Aborignal Conference (predominantly mature males), Aboriginal women have consistently demanded that the needs of women be taken into account in land rights. So far, little has been achieved.

In April 1972, I took the baby and left my home in Sydney’s outer western suburbs, daughter joined me, and in December 1973 the remaining children came to Canberra for the christmas holidays, and stayed.

I participated in the activities which saw the brutal but  triumphant demise of the Aboriginal Embassy in Canberra in August 1972, and stood as an independent ‘Black Liberation’ candidate in the 1972 federal elections in the ACT [Australian Capital Territory]. In 1973 I became the first non-matriculated mature-age student at the Australian National University.

As a child I had been fascinated by the distant white gleam of buildings at the University of Queensland at St Lucia. I gradually realised that working-class kids don’t go to university. At least not unless you were a ‘real brain’. High school didn’t enter my thinking because, in my day, you didn’t enter high school until you were thirteen or fourteen. I left school at fourteen, beginning a ‘career’ in factory process work. Years later I realised how lucky I was to be in school at all. Until 1948 (the year I was ten), any principal could refuse to accept any Aboriginal child into his school.

When a friend first suggested I go to university, I laughed. I laughed again when Liz Reid suggested it in 1972. After dropping out for a year in 1975, I completed my degree in 1977 at the age of forty. Six years after arriving in Canberra, I worked for more than two and a half years as a project officer in the Department of Social Security’s ‘Aboriginal Unit’. The frustrations of working in the bureacracy, together with health and other problems, led to my resignation in January 1981. For the next two years I lived in ‘rural retreat’ near Grafton.

To grasp the real impact of women’s liberation on my life requires an awareness of the tremendous dynamism of the women’s movement in 1972 and my relationsip with the Bremer Street Women’s House in Canberra. Early in 1972 Bobby Sykes and I were invited to speak to a group of Canberra women about land rights, the Aboriginal Embassy, and other issues of concern to Aboriginal women. It was the day Canberra Women’s Liberation took formal possession of the Bremer Street house. This was my introduction to Women’s Liberation. One week later, I arrived in Canberra, penniless, with a five-month-old baby – to stay. After three weeks, still penniless, Amanda and I moved into the Bremer Street meeting room, having passed from hand to hand among some of the ‘sisters’ in a vain attempt to find a less incovenient niche for us.

The atmosphere at Bremer Street in 1972 was electric. Hardly an evening passed without some sort of meeting, with twenty to sixty women. Consciousness-raising was a twice-weekly event. General meetings, action groups, and the embryonic Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) had a weekly time and space. Days were filled with the comings and goings of newsletter production, the prepartion of leaflets, classes in screen printing, the establishment of the feminist library, or just dropping in.

I was an active participant. Not only by choice, but also because baby Amanda and I couldn’t go to bed until the meetings ended. We stayed for about six weeks. Then, when I lost my recently acquired public service job as a temporary clerical assistant because of my activities in the Aboriginal Embassy, I also lost my accommodation in a government hostel. Amanda and I returned to Bremer Street.

Pat Eatock (c) 1987

Pat Eatock was born in December 1937. She graduated BA in 1978 from ANU (Australian National University), majoring in history and philosphy, with sub-majors in history and sociology, including specific units on urban Aborigines and Women’s Studies. She has published articles and papers on Aboriginal attitudes to abortion and contraception;  racism and sexism;  and campaigning for political office.

This is an extract from ‘There’s a Snake in My Caravan’, published in Different Lives – Reflections on the Women’s Movement and Visions of its Future, Penguin Books, Melbourne, Australia, 1987 (Jocelynne A. Scutt, ed.).

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,