Review of Dingo, Rabbit Proof Fence and a flim clip by Jonathan Safran

At our last gathering we discussed a film, video clip and a book about the legacy of colonialism in Australia and Aboriginal Australians’ struggles for social justice.  The book was Dingo by Sally Dingo.  It tells the story of the Dingo family from Sally's perspective as a non-Aboriginal woman, who married into the Dingo family.  The book follows several members of the family as they live, travel and work in towns and on stations in Western Australia.  By tracing the trials, tribulations and resilience of the Dingo family, the author exposes the contentious history of Western Australia. 

We also discussed the film, RabbitProof Fence.  This extraordinary film follows the experiences of several Aboriginal children forcibly taken from their parents to be ‘re-educated’ and assimilated into white Australian culture.  Similarly to Dingo, the film showcases a broader part of Australian history through the lives of individual people.  By tracing the personal stories of Molly Craig, Daisy Craig Kadibill, and Gracie Fields, the film tells the story of the stolen generation.  Thousands of ‘half-caste’ children were taken from their families and forced to give up their language and cultural ties. 

The third item we discussed was a filmclip by Jonathan Safran.  In the clip, a group of Aboriginal people approach a house in Melbourne with a sign on it that says ‘We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people as the traditional owners of the land’.  The Aboriginal actors, directed by Safran, tell the tenants of the house that they are there to move in since they saw the sign.  It is supposed to be a comedic attempt to expose white people’s empty rhetoric about reconciliation and justice.  But it misses the mark as the Aboriginal people in this clip come across as pawns in Safran’s joke.  Of course symbolic gestures alone are inadequate to ensure meaningful change.  I don’t know that anyone would argue otherwise, but the easy target of belittling symbolic gestures – such as plaques on buildings, Welcome to Country ceremonies, etc. – does not mean that these gestures are replaced by bolder, more meaningful, action.  It means that they are replaced by the silence that pervades much of non-Aboriginal Australia’s approach to dealing with the history and legacy of oppression that continues today.  It would have been far more interesting to hear from the actors themselves and their take on the signs, their part in the clip, and Safran’s attempt.  This would have, no doubt, contained a range of responses spanning both comedy and tragedy.  Increasing the range and scope of Aboriginal voices heard on radio, TV, in movies and in books is long overdue.  Creating the space for people to tell their stories, what they have endured, and how they’ve survived, such as those highlighted in Dingo and Rabbit Proof Fence, are an essential part of achieving social justice.

Book review - ‘Flight Behaviour’ and the ‘Lives of Girls and Women’

Whilst there are many obvious differences between these two novels, there are a few pertinent similarities or connections which make a joint book review interesting. Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Flight Behaviour’ takes a snap shot of a young woman’s life in rural USA during a freak climate change event: the catastrophically-altered migration path of the beautiful Monarch Butterfly (a fictional but possible event, according to the author’s research). Alice Munro’s ‘The Lives of Girls and Women’, contrastingly, narrates the progression into womanhood of a young woman from rural Canada, in a more gradual, biographical style. The pace and the style of storytelling in the two books are quite different, but similarities arise when we look into how both authors explore the opportunities and expectations placed on these young women in their small country towns.

From the first pages of ‘Flight Behaviour’, Kingsolver depicts her main character, Dellarobia, as being very unhappy with her current life- with its rural poverty, mundane daily chores and uninspiring husband. It is only slowly, throughout the book, however, that we are given to know the circumstances that led Dellarobia to this place in her life. In highschool Dellarobia was hailed as a smart girl, with a bright future and college prospects. These plans were stopped short, though, when she became pregnant in the last year of highschool. With little other options or family support, she married the child’s father and assumed the farm-wife life that was set out for her. Munro’s main character, Del Jordan, similarly, was considered a bright girl, who was expected to go to college and ‘escape’ the country life. Her plans fell short when she became infatuated with a less than supportive boyfriend in her final highschool year and failed to gain a much needed scholarship to college.

The two main similarities between the lives of these two women (apart from their names) are, firstly, the limitations that poverty can place on life choices (eg the need for a scholarship to go to college for Del), and, secondly, the limitations that society’s expectations can place on the lives and roles of women. Despite being intelligent girls with college prospects, both Del Jordan and Dellarobia found their desired futures altered by their relationships with young men. For Dellarobia, pregnancy meant a quick marriage and an automatic assumption that college was no longer an option. For Del Jordan, the expectations of her boyfriend that she was the ‘right’ wife material (eg one who would naturally give up her study time to have lunch with his family etc) meant that she failed her scholarship exams.

While the influence of Del Jordan’s boyfriend’s expectations was certainly more subtle than the influence of family expectation for Dellarobia, both stories explore the way that education (and the future this can bring) is often assumed to be incompatible with the life of a ‘wife’. These two books, then, raise very interesting questions about the ways that society’s norms mould not only the lives of girls and women, but also their own resistance to these pressures. These are themes that, unfortunately, are not confined to small country towns in North America where these two books are set.

Bluestocking Bookclub – 4th August 2013

The second Bluestocking Bookclub get-together will be on Sunday August 4th at 12pm at The Village Bar in Subiaco. We have a book, a film and a documentary this bookclub session. The book is Sally Dingo’s ‘Dingo: The Story of Our Mob’; the film is ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’; and the documentary is ‘John Safran vs God: episode 2’. Read and watch any of these, and come along on the 4th for some discussion, coffee/lunch and a bit of fun.

Details:

12pm Sunday 4th August

The Village Bar at 531 Hay St, Subiaco

RSVP here by Monday 29th July

 

Dingo: The Story Of Our Mob

Author: Sally Dingo. Book review by Goodreads.com

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/693927.Dingo

Emerging from her middle-class existence in a sleepy Tasmanian town a young white woman marries a charismatic actor and the turbulent Dingo tribe. Lovingly embraced by her new Aboriginal family, they begin to yarn to her and she begins to write their memories down... This uplifting story, which spans three generations of an Aboriginal family's long struggle to find dignity and worth in a culture not their own, has been embraced by Australians everywhere. …

John Safran vs God – Episode 2

Review and clip provided by the National Film and Sound Archive

http://aso.gov.au/titles/tv/john-safran-vs-god-episode-2/clip1/

John Safran identifies a tendency among left-wing people in inner Melbourne to put signs on their houses acknowledging the Wurundjeri people as the traditional owners of the land. He gets a group of local Aboriginal people (Lou Bennet, Corleen Cooper, Dennis Fisher, Jermaine Hampton, Michael Penrith) to help him test the sincerity of this sentiment.

Rabbit-Proof Fence

Film review by David Stratton

http://www.sbs.com.au/films/movie/1073/rabbit-proof-fence

The year is 1931, and, after over 100 years of colonisation ... Governments faced with what they see as a problem with half-caste children, establish a policy of removing such kids from their aboriginal mothers for their own good … [including] three little girls, 14-year-old Molly, her 8-year-old sister, Daisy, and her 10-year-old cousin, Gracie, from their mothers in the community of Jigalong. … The resourceful Molly seizes an opportunity to escape, taking her sister and cousin with her, and the children begin the long journey north, following the rabbit-proof fence, and pursued by an aboriginal tracker and a white policeman. … It's an amazing, true story – and, when we see the real Molly and Daisy, now elderly women, at the end of the film, it's a truly magical moment …  it's an important, and beautifully made, saga which provides plenty of food for thought.

Bluestocking Bookclub 2013

From mid-2013 Bluestocking is running a bimonthly Bookclub. We’ll post up the books 1-2 months in advance and invite everyone to a discussion session at a café on a Sunday morning over coffee. New book suggestions are more than welcome!

The first Bluestocking Bookclub get-together will be on Sunday June 9^th at 9:30am at Cranked café in Leederville. The books to read are: Barbara Kingsolver’s ‘Flight Behavior’ and Alice Munroe’s ‘Lives of Girls and Women’. Read either of these books- or both if you’re feeling adventurous – and come along on the 9^th for some discussion, coffee/tea and a bit of fun.

Details:

9:30am Sunday 9^th June

Cranked café at 106 Oxford St, Leederville

RSVP here by Monday 3^rd June

See below for more information on the books, and post your own comments about the books!

  

From www.goodreads.com :-

“Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

Flight Behavior takes on one of the most contentious subjects of our time: climate change. With a deft and versatile empathy Kingsolver dissects the motives that drive denial and belief in a precarious world. …

Dellarobia Turnbow is a restless farm wife who gave up her own plans when she accidentally became pregnant at seventeen. Now, after a decade of domestic disharmony on a failing farm, she has settled for permanent disappointment but seeks momentary escape through an obsessive flirtation with a younger man. As she hikes up a mountain road behind her house to a secret tryst, she encounters a shocking sight: a silent, forested valley filled with what looks like a lake of fire. She can only understand it as a cautionary miracle, but it sparks a raft of other explanations from scientists, religious leaders, and the media. The bewildering emergency draws rural farmers into unexpected acquaintance with urbane journalists, opportunists, sightseers, and a striking biologist with his own stake in the outcome. As the community lines up to judge the woman and her miracle, Dellarobia confronts her family, her church, her town, and a larger world, in a flight toward truth that could undo all she has ever believed.”

“Lives of Girls and Women

by Alice Munro

[A]n insightful, honest book, ‘autobiographical in form but not in fact’, that chronicles a young girl's growing up in rural Ontario in the 1940's.

Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father's fox farm, where her most frequent companions are an eccentric bachelor family friend and her rough younger brother. When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women- her mother, an agnostic, opinionated woman who sells encyclopaedias to local farmers; her mother's boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence. Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All along she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-town life. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demonstration of Alice Munro's unparalleled awareness of the lives of girls and women.”

Cohousing and other innovative habitats

Having a neighbour babysit, a friend around the corner to drop in for a cup of tea, no noisy cars and choking exhaust fumes, shared dinners, communal gardens... where is this utopia? 

At the September Discussion Group we spoke about cohousing. Cohousing is an intentional community, meaning a group of people plan and manage shared living arrangements that generally comprise private homes and some shared facilities, such as gardens, kitchens and recreational spaces. The idea originated in Denmark in the 1960s by groups of families that were dissatisfied with the existing housing options, and sought to establish a living arrangement that would meet both social and physical needs. The idea has risen in popularity in recent years, particularly in the promotion of 'eco-villages' that also seek solutions to environmental concerns by sharing energy needs and reducing people's reliance on cars for transport.

Australia's cohousing communities are listed on the cohousing website, which provides details of the two currently operating in Perth. SomerVille EcoVillage is in Chidlow, and is set in 162 hectares. It comprises 10 clusters of residences, each with a car-free common area at the centre, and a 20-hectare car-free zone in the centre of the village. Owners can purchase land in the community and must build their dwellings to specific sustainability requirements, and the community also has shared gardens, farms, laundry and living areas. Pinakarri is in Hamilton Hill, and has a land area of less than one acre with 15-20 dwellings. It is funded by both public and private funds, and offers affordable rentals as well as private ownership. Again, it has shared gardens, farms, laundry and living areas as well as holding shared meals on a self-rostered basis and a monthly open house community dinner.

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These innovative habitats seek to address a range of social and environmental issues and are based on the premise that by working collectively individuals can achieve more than they would otherwise. In the midst of Perth’s current housing crisis, with only 2% of rental properties vacant, such projects could not be timelier. However, cohousing does not necessarily have to involve spending large sums of money to buy into a cohousing estate or even the collective ownership by a group (which can be problematic as a result of the legal issues associated with shared ownership- this should become easier if the new cooperative law is passed in state parliament). Sharehousing can be a way of creating intentional communities, with weekly dinners or Mojito Mondays providing a social event for housemates. Choosing to rent or buy a property in close proximity to friends, family, and work/study locations is another way of intentionally designing your living arrangements around social, environmental and consumption concerns. Taking down fences between properties (obviously with your neighbour’s consent) is also a means of structuring your living space so you can share it with others.

However, these options may not available to everyone, particularly our newest Australians. The First Home Project is a unique and inspirational form of cohousing, where a family of three have sought and received community support and funding to buy a large property that can fit three families at one time to provide medium term accommodation and an inclusive community for recently-arrived refugees. 

So if neither a 3x1 in Perth’s rolling suburban sprawl or an inner-city dog-box are appealing or affordable, perhaps cohousing offers some alternatives.

Discussion Group: Cohousing and other innovative habitats

Suburban sprawl getting you down? Inner-city living unattractive and/or unaffordable? Come to this month's Bluestocking Discussion Group to explore innovative ways to build communities. Our discussion will first look at the concept of cohousing and its emergence, and examples in both Australia and elsewhere. We'll then look at "intentional neighbourhoods" and other efforts to build communities within the boundaries of standard property rental and ownership regulations, and also some of the issues facing such ventures.

Location: The Moon Cafe, 2/323 William Street (corner Newcastle), Perth
Time: 6pm, Sunday September 9th
RSVP: in the comments here, or on the Facebook event page. 

Discussion Group: Bluestocking Week 2012

Celebrating Bluestocking Week

 August 2012

At the Discussion Group last Sunday we celebrated the start of Bluestocking Week for 2012, enjoying a delicious dinner and delving into discussions about what ‘bluestocking’ represents for women, education and society today.

Below is a blog by one of our members, ‘Lizzy Unpronounceable’, with some fascinating insights into the history and significance of the Bluestocking ‘movement’. Thanks Liz!

Lizzy’s disclaimer: This post is very brief, and so skirts around a lot of issues. It is also focused on English and Australian higher education.  History of bluestockings in non-English speaking countries such as Japan would be pretty fascinating, and I invite others to comment with any information about such movements.

'Bluestocking'

It is ironic that the term 'bluestocking', now used to exclusively refer to women in academia, was actually coined in this sense in 1756 in reference to a man.  Benjamin Stillingfleet was the first Bluestocking; the term referenced his eccentric behaviour of wearing his blue woollen stockings to a high society literary gathering, rather than fine white silk stockings as was expected.  The literary gatherings were hosted by Elizabeth Montagu, a member of the literary elite who was wealthy enough and well connected enough to encourage the growth of a circle of fashionable intellectuals.  The group (the membership of which also included Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, Hannah More, Samuel Johnson, and Edmund Burke) become known as the 'blue stocking philosophers' after Stillingfleet's faux pas, and Montagu's house became known as the 'Blue Stocking Lodge'.  Stillingfleet's blue stockings were taken on as a sort of symbol of unconventional behaviour, just as the idea of women being interested in and able to participate in intellectual pursuits was unconventional.  The term came to refer only to women engaging in intellectual pursuits, and then to women lobbying for (greater) access to higher education and as a derogatory term for supposedly unfeminine, unwomanly, and worst of all unmarriageable women engaging in academia and higher education in conjunction with women's rights more generally.

Bluestockings and women in higher education

Elizabeth Montagu and her intellectually minded friends were operating at a time when women were completely excluded from higher education.  Universities were elite institutions, and higher education was not nearly as accessible in the 18th century as it is now in the 21st century.  However, while men were excluded from the academy on the basis of class or wealth, women were excluded because they were women.

Girls were notionally expected to be educated up to a point, either through the contemporary equivalent of primary and secondary schools, or home schooling by a parent or governess.  However, schooling was limited by the teacher's own level of education and by the parents' willingness to bear the financial burden, particularly when the child reached an age where they could start to earn an income.

There were avenues that women could follow if they were academically minded, for example enjoying religious and literary scholarship by joining nunneries, or self instruction through reading their way through fathers' or husbands' libraries.  Girls could learn vicariously through their brothers when they were home for the holidays, relying on second-hand information remembered from the boys' own classes.  However, until the 1800s, there were no social structures for girls' continued schooling or for encouraging women to engage with academia.

In England in the 1800s, teaching colleges started to spring up, providing women a way to qualify for one of the only respectable careers available to them.  Colleges and universities started to allow women to attend out-of-hours public lectures.  In America, a number of colleges admitted women from about 1830 onwards, and women-only colleges like Vassar and Smith were established in the second half of the century.  In Australia, the first universities were established in the 1850s, and women were excluded from them until 1881.

Once women were admitted to universities, there was still no guarantee of equal access to educational experiences.  Some universities still excluded women from certain courses, effectively funnelling women into education and home economics.  There are examples of lecturers refusing to lecture when only the female students had bothered to turn up to class, and of tutors setting different problems for female students, or marking them differently.  Oxford and Cambridge allowed women to matriculate, studying the same degree courses as men, from the second half of the 1800s.  However, women were not awarded degrees until 1920 and 1948 respectively.  After winning the fight to occupy academia, women had to fight to participate in academia.

A range of bizarre beliefs about women and women's capacity to learn plagued the bluestocking cause.  One commonly held medical belief was that women's reproductive 'apparatus' would be endangered by the redirection of energy from the ladyparts to the brain.  Anti-bluestocking arguments asserted that the act of studying would lead to a withering of the womb, and would make women barren, weak or sickly, mentally ill, and possibly eventually cause death.  Those whose education did not rob them of their reproductive abilities and physical and mental strength were attacked for marrying later in life or not at all, and anti-bluestocking arguments morphed into concerns about low birth rate leading to humans dying out.  Another argument against higher education for women was a little closer to reality.  There was little demand for women with degrees in the labour market, and so what use was a university education to a women whose post-degree options were often limited to a career in teaching or homemaking?  For many women, university life was a brief respite from familial duty, and once the classes ended, so did their access to the academic world.

Arguments that supported women's higher education were not all that enlightened either, and tended to focus on the benefits of an educated thinking woman to society and to their menfolk.  That is, an educated woman would be better placed to pass on that education to their sons.  Education for the betterment of women as individuals did not seem to be taken as a compelling argument.

Bluestocking and Suffrage

Restricting women’s access to higher education was also a way of restricting women's access to other freedoms, particularly suffrage.  As male student riots in Cambridge in 1897 demonstrated, people were motivated by an underlying fear of gender equality that manifested in attacks against women's education, women's suffrage, and even women's right to ride bicycles – all symbols of the freedom and equality that first wave feminists were fighting for.  Arguments against women being allowed to vote often centred on their supposed inability to think rationally and their childish or uninformed opinions.  Voting while female was a danger to society, as women were not in a position to know enough about the world to make meaningful decisions about it.  Increased equality in higher education was a slippery slope that would eventually lead to equality in many other areas where men enjoyed privilege.  Give women degrees and soon they would expect equal access to employment, income, and suffrage.  With hindsight, we can now happily say that they were spot on about that, at least.

In 1949, women accounted for 20% of all university undergraduate students in Australia.  A government briefing paper from 2003 put women's engagement in higher education at just over 50%.  However, echoes of the historical bluestocking experience are still evident when looking at the subject areas that men and women tend to pursue.  In 2002, women were still more likely to engage in arts and humanities, and far more likely to pursue education than men.  Men were slightly more likely to enrol in physical and chemical sciences, and far more likely to pursue information technology and engineering.  This is also true across the globe, as women are vastly more likely to graduate with a degree in an education area than one in engineering or computing [UNESCO have released an atlas of global access to education].

In less than 200 years, women have gone from complete exclusion from higher education to making up more than half of the global student body.  However, 19th century ideas of biological 'fitness' for certain areas of academia still inform both women and men's choices about higher education.  Women still tend to pursue higher education in traditionally 'feminine' fields seen as requiring communication and nurturing skills, and are actively discouraged from pursuing areas that are perceived as requiring 'masculine' abilities of logic and rational thought or of manual dexterity and strength.  'Bluestocking' as a label has changed from a badge of honour to a vicious pejorative, and back again.  Women's education is now seen as an integral part of economic and social growth, recognising the potential for women as change agents.  Far from bringing about the end of the human species, Bluestockings started the ball rolling for equal access to higher education and academia, a cause that we must still actively pursue.

Further Reading

Aleman, Ana M. Martinez & Renn, Kristen A. (2003) Women in Higher Education: an encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO [http://books.google.com.au/books?id=dqVP7mU5vuEC]

Carrington, Karry & Pratt, Angela (2003) How Far Have We Come? Gender disparities in the Australian higher education system, Information and Research Services, Department of the Parliamentary Library. [http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/Publications_Archive/CIB/cib0203/03CIB31]

Eger, Elizabeth (2010) Bluestockings: Women of reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism, Palgrave MacMillan,

[http://books.google.com.au/books?id=DRA2uAAACAAJ&dq]

Kamm, Josephine (1965) Hope Deferred : Girls' Education in English History, Routledge [http://books.google.com.au/books?id=yW_TWf7RwiMC]

Robinson, Jane (2009) Bluestockings: The remarkable story of the first women to fight for an education, Viking. [http://books.google.com.au/books?id=LV7Opc061ZYC&dq]

UNESCO eAtlas of Gender Equality in Education (2012) [http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/leading-the-international-agenda/gender-and-education/resources/the-world-atlas-of-gender-equality-in-education/]