Hecate articles from November 1998

Hecate archives from November 1998

Editorial.(history of the Australian feminist periodical 'Hecate')(Editorial)
November 1, 1998... Hecate's twenty-fifth birthday is almost upon us. And we have an adopted sister, the Australian Women's Book Review, ten years old this year. Hecate began in 1975. It seemed like a good idea at the time; it was International Women's Year and we...

'Lovable natives' and 'tribal sisters': feminism, maternalism, and the campaign for aboriginal citizenship in New South Wales in the late 1930s.
November 1, 1998... The NSW Aborigines Protection Board had administered the gazettal, management, leasing, and revocation of reserve lands, the distribution of rations, and the control and dispersal of the Aboriginal population since the late nineteenth century....

Connie, walking in the Adelaide arcade.(poem)
November 1, 1998... Connie, walking in the Adelaide Arcade new hip joint nylon ball a new woman She hasn't smelt anything for years or had an appetite now she's walking up one After 15 years her sense of smell comes back She doesn't know what it is -...

The fernery.(poem)
November 1, 1998... Mrs Coglin lived in an underwater world green light came in the fly wire screens covered in creeper: inside, she moved around in the dark knowing exactly what was where gently navigating like a trout around obstacles that were now part of her,...

Her majesty's subject.(poem)
November 1, 1998... candy-striped sandshoes leopard-skin raincoat three plastic bags contain her worldly belongings one of them with Union Jack on it - what has that ever done for her? 'Christ!' she yells and is asked to leave the Mission her free cup of...

Cows in my street.(poem)
November 1, 1998... There are a few cows in the field down the road where I live in the quiet of summer morns I can hear them from bed, deep bone rattling baritone wails whilst winter brings the stench of brush and fodder packed tightly - muck in the heel...

Tidal heat.(poem)
November 1, 1998... billow, billow silk water parachute take me down, to rise waves send you outward exposing thigh - white like sand beneath toes it's summer here and hot, so hot moisten me with heat wash me seascape of lurching rocks leering as my cloth skin...

The centre.(poem)
November 1, 1998... Red earth and hazelnut rocks litter this place where the streets are a furnace of burning nights too hot to sleep soundly as the silence hides the crickets' disquiet protesting the dry lifeless landscape where lizards bake naked in the heat of...

The dress.(short story)
November 1, 1998... On the clothesline is hanging a small, wet dress. The cut is simple - short sleeves attached to a straight bodice and a skirt which flares for a full 360 [degrees] from the waistband. It is a dress in which you could dance and twirl with...

Circumstantial ambiguity: dreaming de Beauvoir.(short story)
November 1, 1998... What possessed you, Simone de Beauvoir, to devote yourself to the world of the masculine, though your project was to annihilate everything that it had led women to accept? A simmering beau voir, your name might have said it all, woman on the...

'Bandit Queen' through Indian eyes: the reconstructions and reincarnations of Phoolan Devi.(motion picture)
November 1, 1998... Located at the intersection of gender and caste oppression, women in rural India have for centuries generated their own coping mechanisms of compromise and challenge. Phoolan Devi has come to symbolise an extreme, not necessarily of oppression...

Egg stories.(short story)
November 1, 1998... I once slept with a boy who had a sewn-up navel. 'That's odd,' I said. 'How come you've got no navel?"I'm a surfer,' he said. He was also a rich boy who ran one of his daddy's chain of jewellery stores. 'It stuck out,' he said, 'and rubbed on...

The blue bowl.(poem)
November 1, 1998... On my birthday I tipped my present upside down. My friend screamed, fearing I had broken the eggs I tore the paper off in fear To hold an egg is divine. My five porcelain eggs sit in a blue ceramic bowl I hold them then I place them back,...

Wanted.(poem)
November 1, 1998... Housekeeper for dynamic household. Minimum qualification, degree in psychology. Counselling skills advantageous. To begin in the kitchen, the cupboards live in a state of increasing accumulated chaos. They never remember what they need,...

The 'c' word.(poem)
November 1, 1998... 1. Me and My Shadow There's a shadow on my CAT scan. A black hole into which my future disappears, like water down a drain. It's the exact size and shape of my pain. I think about shadows. How they follow you around. How they're the...

Barefoot day.(poem)
November 1, 1998... I went barefoot then and never minded the bit of sun-baked bitumen, the sting of scorching sand running down to surf. Because the day is shining I go out to her, feel her touch my skin brush against my clothes. I went barefoot then and...

Snap-shot.(poem)
November 1, 1998... Strolling on Sunday past beds of canna lilies that blazed their violent oranges and reds, you turn to face the camera, blocking me completely out of the picture. It was always like that. You up front, me hiding behind. You telling me how I...

The healing powers of your average suburban lawn.(poem)
November 1, 1998... The neatness of a freshly cut lawn is as peaceful as a church outdoors. The roof has gone missing. We throw up our hands as high as clouds to sing: 'The world is blue and warm.' A job well done and the grass is young and...

Nothing like the real thing: (post)colonialism and travelling.(Australia)
November 1, 1998... It took me several years to be able to explain - as a young, white working class woman critic - why (post)colonialism is unsettling. I had to leave Australia and set some distance between the work that I was doing on race and colonial violence,...

A story well told.(excerpt from the novel 'Lucia's Story')
November 1, 1998... 'Your grandfather fell in love with me the first time we met. I was just a girl.' The love story of Giovanni and Lucia, in the early 1900s in Sicily is as familiar to their grand-daughter, young Lucia, as the taste of fresh bread and...

Articulating the future and the past: gender, race and globalisation in One Nation's self-construction.(Australian political party)
November 1, 1998... (Racial) discourse invariably draws on a cultural density of prior representations that are recast in new form;... racism appears at once as a return to the past as it harnesses itself to progressive projects;... scholars can never decide...

Aborigines have different ideas about property.(short story)
November 1, 1998... There is a man on your train with one eye like a fish. Bloody and fishy like they are, the fish all slapped up together at the market. Shiny and soulless like they are, the sides of their raw wet heads. You can hardly stop looking at it,...

A 'red revolutionist and ranter': Jean Devanny in the early 1930s.(lone woman activist of New South Wales)
November 1, 1998... You are our heroine, comrade good and true Sweet and so noble, pure right through and through Fighting so gallantly 'gainst capitalistic laws Suff'ring as Red Rosa did for the workers' cause.(1) 'Jean Devanny of the "struggle",...

Argy Bargy.(short story)
November 1, 1998... An academic supervisor says I use 'often' too often. He says you should use often only sometimes as it is a rather vague term. You should never use often as I do - always. I say I don't use often always, but yet more than sometimes because it's...

Two feminist vegetarian dykes.(poem)
November 1, 1998... two feminist vegetarian dykes went picking mangoes one day - went to a farm far away - dykes picking picking from morning till night - with blistered hands and hatted heads - they piss under trees are discreet with their meds - dykes damning...

This other Eden.(poem)
November 1, 1998... From what the Old Masters have left us it appears light was different then. It glowed yellow on foreheads and left shadows in drapery. The light is more everywhere now. We live with electricity and suburbia goes on forever. Cars, roads,...

Sentencing.(poem)
November 1, 1998... my pen marks the paper making silent shapes of sounds stains that fill emptiness with feeling language hollowed out to only skin hanging limp between us in trailing wisps our sentence. Cary McDermott

Her kind.(short story)
November 1, 1998... Anne sat bolt upright in her pebble bed at the bottom of the Brisbane river and stretched out her long thin arms. She yawned and a couple of frogs slid out her mouth. A school of trout, hungry and bored, noticed something bright as a fluro...

Singing the revolution blues for Alice.(short story)
November 1, 1998... I. In one of the dead giveaways, she never wore dresses, ever. But you might easily have said she was just covering up those lucky legs of hers (lucky they don't snap off and stick halfway up your arse!). Blackfella shanks. 'Razor legs'...

Gununa is the land of my dreams that's rich in culture with its background.(excerpts from an Australian aboriginal woman's writings; Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpeteria; preface to the excerpt)
November 1, 1998... Elsie Roughsey, or Labumore in her native Lardil, is most well-known in the greater Australian community for her book, An Aboriginal Mother Tells of the Old and the New (McPhee Gribble/Penguin, 1984), an autobiographical account of the...