Don’t prick your finger on a spindle

Before the witch hunts, women participated in many professions – they were brewsters, blacksmiths, teachers, court poets, merchants and craftsmen. Beginning with the Renaissance, a combination of social, legal and cultural forces changed this. Fear of being labelled a witch meant fewer women would work outside the home to earn a wage, leaving them vulnerable to impoverishment without the financial support of a man. This systematic exploitation of feminised workforces is one we’re still living with hundreds of years later.

Coat tales

We throw a spotlight on everyday menswear in twentieth-century Australia here because even though commentators have often conjured quick impressions of it in passing, it has less often been a subject of contemplation in its own right. Exhibitions and discussions of dress in Australian contexts have focused more on the feminine and spectacular. This emphasis means that the more mundane ways in which social and economic power relations played out through menswear have largely slipped from view.

No scrubs

WHEN FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE’S band of thirty-eight nurses set sail from Folkestone, England, on 21 October 1854, each woman was...

Standard issue

The first thing nurses get us new admissions to do is change into a gown – standard issue. It’s not what I’d call comfortable, exactly; it’s not even about dignity. It’s about access. If your condition suddenly becomes critical, doctors need to get to your body fast. Even so, when I’m allowed to leave later that afternoon, I tear off the gown and pull on the clothes I arrived in.

The little black book of black dresses

We see black in so many ways: as boldness, as strength. We see it as playing grown-ups, as a coming of age, as an expression of grief, as mourning, as a power to reclaim from those who took from us the selves we once wanted to be. As I sit now, to finish this essay, I can no longer recall what happened to my first little black dress, how old I was when I stopped wearing it, who I might have given it to, or why it was so emblematic in my mind of black dresses as a whole, when in reality there were likely many other black items in my wardrobe from many years before. 

Killing me softly

Camellias, carnations, chrysanthemums, daisies, daffodils, dahlias, gardenias, hibiscuses, lilies, magnolias, pansies, peonies, poppies, roses, tulips and more: perhaps we wear them complacently or ironically – or consider any symbolic associations as feeble, irrelevant or outdated – yet we cannot totally outrun, or outpunch, the connotative powers of a floral dress. Nothing signifies a well-behaved, compliant woman with no rough edges or anger-management issues quite like a pleasant and inoffensive arrangement of petals on a skirt. The signifier, however, is often a disingenuous and deficient representation of the signified.

Operation Totem

In the 1950s and 1960s, hundreds of atmospheric and underground tests were conducted in Australia, with devastating consequences for First Nations peoples and for the military personnel involved in the tests. And yet the debate about Peter Dutton’s plan to put Australia on a nuclear track barely mentioned this calamity, or indeed the deep antipathy towards all things nuclear to which it gave rise. Struggling to put Dutton’s policy in context, one looked in vain for even a passing reference to Dr Helen Caldicott, Moss Cass or Uncle Kevin Buzzacott; to the Campaign Against Nuclear Energy or the Uranium Moratorium group; to the seamen’s boycott of foreign nuclear warships in Melbourne in 1986; to the massive antinuclear marches of the 1970s and 1980s; to Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta and its resistance to the dumping of radioactive waste. Indeed, one looked in vain for any sense of nuclear as a uniquely dangerous technology, or of the ‘deadly connection’ (as Jim Falk called it) between uranium mining, nuclear reactors and the development of thermonuclear weapons.

A nation’s right to remember

In a 2023 article published in The Guardian, the Australian War Memorial’s newly appointed chair, Kim Beazley, acknowledged, ‘We do have to have a proper recognition of the frontier conflict.’ In an interview with Beazley on the ABC’s 7.30, journalist Laura Tingle reported that of the 27,000 metres of new space in the expansion, the pre-colonial gallery, which includes the Frontier Wars, would make up less than 2 per cent, and asked, ‘Will that be sufficient?’ Beazley’s reply was, again, ‘we need to have that recognition around the country’, while he emphasised that other institutions should play a role in the telling of Australia’s Frontier Wars. A charismatic sidestep.

The coward

At the beginning of my research, I knew little about Anne. I knew that my aunt had been married to an Anglican reverend. I knew she was Dad’s half-sibling, from my grandfather Staniforth Ricketson’s first marriage. I knew that she lived in the country at Mount Macedon. The final thing I knew for certain: my aunt died a sad and violent death. She perished on 16 February 1983, the night of the Ash Wednesday bushfires. Her husband, the Reverend Bill Carter, drove away from their cottage without her. In his panic, he left his wife behind and saved himself as the flames closed in.
Stories of cowardice, unlike those of courage, make us deeply uncomfortable. Coward is a label we generally affix to those we call monsters: terrorists, paedophiles, predators. But cowardice does not just exist at the extremities of behaviour – it is both more quotidian and more human than that. 

Man’s Labyrinth

Max Weber foresaw the iron cage of rationalisation coming for us all: that industry and its social institutions would become so technically efficient that a worker would become a ‘specialist without spirit’ and a consumer a ‘sensualist without heart’. People could have everything they’d ever wanted, in theory, but the cost would be their humanity.

Weber conceived of this as a prison of capital when workers were in factories and those factories increasingly required employees to take on smaller and more specialised roles. This stretched into the bureaucratic sinew of large businesses and corporations, naturally, and into the administration of states, municipalities and even sufficiently large Zonta clubs.

The fire this time

When I think about this period now I see that my life has been one long exercise in walking back from a bridge and talking down a fire. The bridge has always been what is the point of this and the fire has always been an overwhelmingly destructive energy that threatens to consume everything. One is an anger turned inwards while the other is directed outwards, the building is burning and there is nothing to save in all of humanity.

One continuous showdown

The driver picks me up from Mumbai airport and drops me off in front of the hermitage entrance, at the foothills of an ancient fortress. Decades earlier, when the guru and his wife purchased the land, they kept panther-watch at night. I’m in the right place, aware of my own monster still prowling about