Hecate articles from May 1994

Hecate archives from May 1994

Editorial.
May 1, 1994... Back in 1973, Sheila Rowbotham wrote in Women's Consciousness, Man's World: "when the ruling class grows sanctimonious about the preservation of the family they mean in fact the need to preserve the division of labour which best secures profit"...

Wheelflower. (poem)
May 1, 1994... From the woodcut by Margaret Preston (1928) The borders are vigilant. Such solid bars suggest problems of containment. Caught just before ignition, fire wheel trees are hard to tame. Outside the border, the mother tree's ablaze. The...

Eve plays her Wilde card and makes the straight flush. (author Eve Langley's transgressive works reminiscent of Oscar Wilde)
May 1, 1994... In her two published novels, the Prior Prize-winning The Pea Pickers (1942), and its sequel White Topee (1954), Eve Langley engaged in subversive gender games and resignifications, including cross-dressing and picaresque adventures that could...

Brae city. (short story)
May 1, 1994... It was an atmosphere, a mood. Each Sunday our mother would take us for a drive in the family ear. It was usually around 5 pm, when the boredom of a weekend in a small country town became intolerable. We drove to the edge of town. There were...

The room. (short story)
May 1, 1994... It seemed to be a room at the very edge of the earth. It wasn't necessary to look out the window to realise there was a drop on the other side: you felt it; you expected it. He opened the door, while she stood unmoving--the ugliness descending...

Interview with Yu. (poem)
May 1, 1994... you said you come from china i did but why you write in english well it's just a matter of preference i guess what did you write poetry fiction nonfiction or other things i wrote some poems did you publish any not at all why not well i don't know...

My Italian husband. (poem)
May 1, 1994... Feeling sorry for myself, I thought of the husband I might have had, if my mother had never left the land of olives and ruins for sugar and distances. His touch would recognise mine, we'd speak in symphonies. His words I'd know sweet as lemon...

Making colours. (poem)
May 1, 1994... Purple is the colour of love's enactment. Red is the colour of love's desire. Blue the colour of love's longing. Our love was purple made with little red and much less blue. Maria Catina Fresta

Rapunzel. (poem)
May 1, 1994... Supposing Rapunzel, enticed into a magic circle, had turned her anxieties to stone. Placing them one upon another, round and round, she built a tower and found herself encased in fears with only one small window, very high, through which to view...

The shelf. (poem)
May 1, 1994... If the vinegar insists I will shut the door and screw the lid down tight so the darkness will be complete. Outside, they will still be playing games while the furniture sweats and the oven burns itself out. They may not even notice I am gone...

The main road to purple. (poem)
May 1, 1994... The main road to purple is cobbled with harsh stones but bloomed at both ends opening on to a green sky of serrated clouds and internalising factors Grass blades in appealing limes and emeralds descend from above the sun and a day-moon travelling...

On women joining unions: Anna Booth, activism and altruism. (Australian union leader)
May 1, 1994... A widely accepted view both inside and outside the union movement in Australia is that some women refuse to join unions, some join but are inactive, and there is Anna Booth. For years, Anna Booth has contradicted every cliche on women unionists:...

The colonial yoke. (short story)
May 1, 1994... My grandmother left me a collar ghostly with age. She discarded her keepsakes before going into the Old People's Home where the senile have greeted her and made her one of their own. She had a clear mind, my grandmother, brittle with images of...

The gums of Namatjira. (poem)
May 1, 1994... Gnarled and timeless they survive an inhospitable clime for here they belong as do the Koori people these gums of Namatjira. In youth their slender trunks grow swift and tall precisely formed lords of all. Even in old age the eucalypt stands...

The colour of my van. (poem)
May 1, 1994... I picked the colour because it's beautiful. Of all the little thumbnail squares of colour on a six-page fold-out chart it was the only colour which was clear, which was not muddy not a half-tone not a dim shade of something better. It is called...

Making sense of foreign words. (poem)
May 1, 1994... As a backfisch I journeyed the world in Bauhaus landscapes of Klee, and I dreamt a friend's arm around me while listening to my Aunt Lisa's Kaffee Klatsch, sundaily. Her Biedermeier sofa was covered in crochet, lovely kitsch green, and one...

Why sex makes me laugh.
May 1, 1994... What I'd like to know is this: if sex is supposed to be the ultimate expression of love between two people, a solemn and sacred act, why are most of the words we've invented for it so comical? Take for instance, nookie-nookie, humpy-pumpy,...

Embodying the 'new' sporting woman.
May 1, 1994... The body is dangerous. The deliberately muscular woman disturbs dominant notions of sex, gender, and sexuality, and any discursive field that includes her risks opening up a site of contest and conflict, anxiety and ambiguity. . . The most...

Spider's people. (short story)
May 1, 1994... It starts on a Thursday, at a dinner party Merry wishes she'd got out of. She is standing up to go, anywhere, nowhere, the bathroom even, when the pain begins. Like a metal claw, slowly unclenching in her belly. To the left. Sickening. She leans...

Slices of flats. (poem)
May 1, 1994... There's a beach in there somewhere the fiats square and block- like the Playschool house layered like a cake layered like the sheep carrier ships passing by my window high the wrong direction wind and the young girls who walk so heavily above...

U. (poem)
May 1, 1994... Yu R Hard Yu C A Man & Yu No Yu Kan Hav Him & So Yu Play With Him 4 A Whyll Larf & Look So Prit tee Yor Kunt Is A Wepon & Yu Use It As Wun Yu Suk Them In Chu Them Up Spit Them Owt Yu R A 90s Gerl A Lib Er...

Re/membering. (poem)
May 1, 1994... i seeing my granny amputated verandah wheelchaired-- no more no-blink bravado bordered now/the horizon --her vagrant smile dawdling/pale cows winter sunned withered mouth shrunken tight smarting always with shocked mis/conceptions how...

Black cockatoos. (poem)
May 1, 1994... Three black cockatoos hang on a thin leafless tree The long sweep of their tails curves over and under the branches which bend to their weight without breaking Their serrated heads, jagged cries shatter the clear air as they fly off towards...

Mudflats at twilight. (poem)
May 1, 1994... Sunset swoops over the sky. The tide is out. Mudflats crab deep. As we stand on the jetty my daughter and I, water smooth as silk slips over the mangrove swamps. In the silence before mozzies we hear cassia petals fold themselves into night and a...

Autumn rhythms. (poem)
May 1, 1994... Now it's march we march for women the Irish, for people for peace. We march, walk, stroll over falling leaves down paths, laneways, streets, roads. We stride across barbed wire fences, boundaries, borders, observation posts. Now it's Autumn we...

Leaving home. (poem)
May 1, 1994... I'd been so busy I didn't notice their going. It was as if they were away at camp or visiting with friends. They would return here one day to their beds in their rooms, still known as Helen's room or Jane's. I didn't notice their going as I...

Closet verse. (poem)
May 1, 1994... There's the poetry you write for others well dressed verse open for inspection seeking admiration then there's the poetry written behind closed doors closet verse dredged from uneasy depths where each word peels away from you like skin sliced...

Talking with Ruby Langford Ginibi. (Australian author) (Interview)
May 1, 1994... Ruby Langford Ginibi will soon publish her third book, My Bundjalung People, the story of her journey back to her country in Northern New South Wales. Ginibi researched a large proportion of the material for the book while writing Don't Take Your...

Waves of sleep. (poem)
May 1, 1994... Each morning I slip into my skin under a long shower shedding waves of sleep. I reach through the cleared spaces of rooms and tables, grab at the air, it is all mine. Later their smiles will hook me from the corner of my eye, try to trip me up....

Written on the body: Jean Devanny, sexuality and censorship. (Australian author and politician)
May 1, 1994... Jean Devanny's uncertain status as a woman and a writer in the Communist Party of Australia from the 1930s through to the 1950s is figured dramatically in her account of her expulsion in her autobiography, Point of Departure. As Devanny tells it,...

The dream. (short story)
May 1, 1994... I dreamt of my mother last night. In my dream she was standing beside a dirt track and holding a young girl by the hand. She seemed to be searching for someone or something. Her dress was a washed out yellow with splashes of faded red. Not at...

'Feloniously, wickedly and against the order of nature': a research agenda for gay studies in Queensland.
May 1, 1994... Writing gay and lesbian history is a political act that undermines the dominant ideas about sexuality of the wider community, and alerts us to differences in gender and sexual attitudes in the recent past. Gay and lesbian history is the most...

A necessary murder. (short story)
May 1, 1994... It was a tiny soldier's settlement house in a ratty street. It backed onto a brown, choked creek. It had been advertised as one-bedroom but it had a sunroom which was an enclosed porch, the windows of which were dressed in vertical, beige slats...

From Montage. (poem)
May 1, 1994... The open album stares back at me. Defiant. A photograph of my father. The photographer captured, framed, off centre. Black and white. The middle aged father belly no longer fat, protrudes over the top of pants, a spilling over. Hair...

Steaming. (poem)
May 1, 1994... We were talking and it was raining. She was talking and it was raining and we were at a table under a large umbrella at one of those cafes that spill out onto the street. A street where the devious and the pure, the gay and the loose, all these...

Rejection. (poem)
May 1, 1994... I'm home from climbing mountains on my own There's a letter, the usual rejection-- I think these poems are effective but have decided not to publish . . . Well it's kinder than some-- says my poems are EFFECTIVE! (evidently not e-ffective...

Woman in a dinghy. (poem)
May 1, 1994... The river tonight is still, relecting pink city-lit clouds, stars, indigo, a pretty mirror to row across. River, you are deceptive as a smile. this calm hides a woman's weighted body, slimy things with teeth, centuries of night. Such a tiny...

Honor Lelepa's secret. (poem)
May 1, 1994... Honor Lelepa knows a secret the old woman one the one about the number of times a white horse was seen crossing these skies of pearls out here in brown Matthias land Melanesia the land where never, have been horses. Honor Lelepa knows a secret...

A brand new Sydney Opera House (after Harrison). (fiction)
May 1, 1994... To Captain Doc Murray, one of the best, blackbirding whitey boys. We will build it together my earthly presence and those lost souls of the Carl incident of 1872, for which you were tried for mass murder. It will be in the same town, not...

Fiction in English. (includes bibliography) (Women writers of Malaysia and Singapore, part 2)
May 1, 1994... Writing in English is a very controversial act in Malaysia and Singapore. In her article "Voices from the Hinterland" (World Literature Written in English 28.1) Shirley Geok Lin Lim tells us that many people in these countries view English "as a...

Three little pieces. (fiction)
May 1, 1994... The Actress She is old now, and tired and worn out, she says. She lies with her eyes shut. They say every time she opens her eyes she is a new character. She is re-living all the old movies. They call her by one stage name or another. Since...

Fourth Women in Asia Conference Report.
May 1, 1994... This well-attended conference was held in Melbourne on October 1-3 1993. Jointly sponsored by Melbourne and Monash Universities, the Fourth Women in Asia Conference can be regarded as a great success for the organising group, the Women's Caucus...

Bring a Plate: The Feminist Cultural Studies Conference. (conference report)
May 1, 1994... The title of this conference (held at the University of Melbourne on 10-12 December 1993), read as a pleasant change from some of the more self-consciously erudite ones around. I asked whether I should arrive bearing sandwiches, only to learn the...