Hecate articles from May 1999

Hecate archives from May 1999

Clean, white girls: assimilation and women's work.
May 1, 1999... Nothing is inherently dirty; dirt expresses a relation to social value and social disorder. Dirt is that which transgresses social boundary.(1) The cult of domesticity became indispensable to the consolidation of British national identity,...

Hard yards.(short story)
May 1, 1999... The story so far: We are at the Brisbane home of Mum King and her children, Darryl, Leena and Jimmy King. Leena's on-again off-again boyfriend Roo has come back to confront his demons within the King family after discovering the truth about his...

First night at the graveyard shifter's.(poem)
May 1, 1999... You leave-- I hug to my knees a curl of a smile. Wait for sleep to smooth me lead me room whichever room: through the man next door who loves so fat and wide his arms will barely show me; racing school mates' brothers down wide breathless...

To our hometown.(poem)
May 1, 1999... I let her drive. I like this time, seeing the land, now other people's land and lives: a man standing on the back of a ute feeding oats to sheep; a farm house with old fig trees; pet goats straining through a fence; a mailbox tank painted with...

Night cats.(poem)
May 1, 1999... They are the Night Cats. Their almond eyes glow like tiny pairs of golden lanterns and their tails swish in the mild mid-winter air. Look there!-- a fine mist rising from their pedigree coats as they walk. They know they are the Night Cats, for...

Waiting for gentlemen callers.(poem)
May 1, 1999... The outside light was on. We could turn it off I said to my daughter, tucked up in bed. Oh no, she said, I'm waiting, I'm waiting for gentlemen callers. They can come at any time and we must be ready. We? I inquired. Both of us, she said firmly...

Psychiatry.(poem)
May 1, 1999... the black ants are working in their usual way silence duty efficiency unceasing grain by grain the thoughts are building higher wider small mountains with narrow tunnels a swarm of ants and thoughts like honey but dark too dark too see past...

Harriet.(poem)
May 1, 1999... I know this night frail as buckram found in a binding of a grandmother's book looking at the invisible the moth makes flyng to its cloth she speaks grandmother whom I hardly knew pale haired in hospital one hand over the other ...

Iconological observations.(Manet's painting)
May 1, 1999... If my life were a painting, I know which one it would be: Manet's Le dejeuner sur l'herbe. Of course, it wouldn't look exactly like Manet's, it being a modernist painting, and me, me being a postmodernist girl; but in the manner of art, I could...

Love quest.(short story)
May 1, 1999... 1. Custard Man Where's your mother? Isn't she coming to pick you up? A big coat stood outside the school gates. He had already eaten two of my girlfriends down by the sewerage pipe, licking their knees in the reeds and chewing up their hem...

Shaking a few tales: the dialectics of hybridity and Beth Yahp's 'The Crocodile Fury.'.
May 1, 1999... The croc doesn't burn up the past, he sifts through it like treasure.(1) [H]ybridity marks the emancipation of the diaspora from "China" as the transparent master-signified of "Chineseness": instead, "Chineseness" becomes a signifier...

Fitting in.(poem)
May 1, 1999... (Inspired by the EEO forms) You have to tick a box they said. So we know where to put you And you have a place. The first box said woman. I looked inside And saw all the great stirrers. Germaine Greer waved and said: 'You'll be right...

Myself at fifty. An inventory.(poem)
May 1, 1999... let us start with the head * yes of course the head ever full of fancies and the hair on the head * white * scraggly * thinning white early * never any temptation to dye it so no worry now about when and how to stop a subject of conversation *...

True happiness.(short story)
May 1, 1999... At night in the hostel, where I am sharing a room with three others, the Japanese girl falls asleep in her clothes after eating a banana and a small can of tuna. The woman in the lower bunk is naked under the sheet, the sheet tucked between her...

Journal of a biography: writing Eleanor Dark.
May 1, 1999... A is for ASIO files, and how the woman who didn't want to be seen was watched, how while the novelist was taking notes someone else was taking notes about her. She never writes about this. How did it affect her? That long period of silence,...

Seed.(short story)
May 1, 1999... Before, the rhythmic burring of cicada song would have made her still and sleepy. Chrissa put down the Lego house she was building and looked out through the heart-shaped leaves that grew from the vine, twined up posts and across the verandah...

Women and the republic: dancing to a different tune?
May 1, 1999... The move to see Australia become a republic is taken by and large by the feminist community as a fait accompli. It will happen, we tell each other. We agree, it is politically progressive. It is time Australia severed its ties to monarchy and...

The house.(short story)
May 1, 1999... The house at number 1 Nott Street was located at the far end of a small dead-end street in West End. It was in an industrial area and during the day workmen watched the clients arrive in taxis. A small chain-wire gate barred the entrance at the...

Metcard is here.(poem)
May 1, 1999... We attacked them with araldite and hot coca-cola that made them pour out the coins they collected. We boycotted them and sat on trams without any tickets. We watched our station-masters sacked and the cash windows boarded up and painted...

Walking wombs.(poem)
May 1, 1999... Part 1 To plug a gaping void in the market place, diligent social workers manipulated family circumstances, doggedly matching babies of single fertile women to married, highly deserving, sterile couples, God's police, smug guardians of...

Anaemia.(poem)
May 1, 1999... I've lost the plot the script the page the whole bloodless book. No attention span must be - an appalling laziness? No! It's anaemia: bad patron saint of pale frustrated languishings. Anaemic - take iron. Not enough blood or guts to take a...

Dravidian curls (fragments from an unfinished narrative).(short story)
May 1, 1999... (fragments from an unfinished narrative) In the menacing shadow play, forces complementing each other dance in each other's momentum. Rajani Thiranagama, The Broken Palmyra ... the pantheon where the "spirits" in so many...

In the forest.(short story)
May 1, 1999... You're in the forest. Little Red Riding Hood hangs her cloak on a tree and becomes nameless. She covers her legs, head and arms with mud. She leaves the path. She takes the picnic basket and walks in the opposite direction to her...

New angels for storms of progress? Two historical novels of Australian feminism.
May 1, 1999... The historical legacy and achievements of the second wave Australian women's movement have, as in other western countries, recently been subject to critical and pessimistic assessments in both academic and popular writing. These assessments...

Lemons.(short story)
May 1, 1999... Light - bluer in the southern summer. A retreat found from the fading room of one grandmother in the many gardens of the other. A gift I give them sometimes: bringing them together. The two unrelated women - except by polio, and both passed...

The critical reception of 'Bobbin Up.'.
May 1, 1999... Well before the upsurge of feminism Dorothy Hewett homed in on embattled female lives. The book abounds with portraits of working women... These varied existences form the collective hero(ine) of a novel whose social message has lost nothing...

Christmas Eve in Queensland.(poem)
May 1, 1999... They come spilling out of the schoolhouse on Christmas Eve men in shirtsleeves and serge trousers women in printed cotton with permed hair drunk stumbling wound round with streamers shouting kissing the air they essay a few dance steps throw a...

Forget-me-not.(poem)
May 1, 1999... mostly I remember the trip home that wet Friday night in the blue mountains train I remember a middle-aged lady a bit overweight who sat in the corner of the carriage opposite me I want to go home! I want to go home! she chanted all the way out...

Butterfly flesh.(poem)
May 1, 1999... Shapechanger: white mulberry... I don't know where you go, your embryo feet broken and bound. Like blackened corpses inside cocoons of silk, they leave no step. I wish you had left that garden of bliss, of still pond and mosquito squirm,...

Autobiographical writing as healing process: Alice Masak French in conversation with Christine Watson.(Interview)
May 1, 1999... Alice Masak French is an Inuk woman from the Western Arctic region of Canada, an area in which ninety-five percent of the population is Aboriginal. The Canadian constitution officially recognises three differing groups of Aboriginal peoples:...

Defeating gravity.(hippies in the 1970s)
May 1, 1999... I suppose we would be called hippies or 'artistic types,' but I think of us as Angels who fell to Earth. It was 1971 and we were beyond cool, innocent in our joyful acceptance of otherness. And the most other-worldly of our little group, living...

QJY 263949.(poem)
May 1, 1999... The old $5 note is made out of paper: deep pink, white, and crisp, it holds its folds. Caroline Chisholm looks out, many faces and the Family Colonization Loan Society behind her. A ship's sailing in from the white to the pink, to Sydney....