Women's Web Women's Stories - Women's Actions
Welcome | Actions | Stories | Reviews | About Us | Links | Dialogue | Things to Buy
Actions

Last Updated: November 1, 2009
Contact us: wmnsweb@iprimus.com.au

PEACE - ARMS ACTIVISM

On this page: ASIO-Anti Terrorism; Josie Lee; Hellen Cooke; Yvonne Smith; Edith Morgan; Thelma Prior; Pamela Curr; Marion Harper; Joan Coxsedge; Zara Wildeneur; Women's Health in the North;
See also: Save Our Sons/Vietnam War

ASIO-ANTI TERRORISM

... For the umpteenth time, we warn that true security will never be achieved with harsh laws - or bombing runs. They only make things worse, as we can see from the expanding horror of Iraq. Unless we address the growing poverty and gross inequalities bedevilling our world, then we will continue to reap the consequences.

Before rushing ahead to accept legislation which is turning this country into a police state, we urge you to heed the words of eleven Nobel laureates who attended a Nobel Peace Prize Centennial Symposium in Oslo in December 2001. They stated: 'The most profound danger to world peace in the coming years will stem, not from the irrational acts of individuals, but from the legitimate demands of the world's dispossessed.'

The sad irony is that thirty years ago, the world's richest nations pledged 0.7% of their GDP to help the world's poorest. It has now slumped to 0.22%. And Australia? We rest our case.

Joan Coxsedge Joancoxs@tpg.com.au
Gerry Harant Gharant@primus.com.au
March 2005

JOSIE LEE

Over the past four years I have done a lot of student work at Melbourne University. I was lucky enough to fall into student activism with a group of amazing people who Where and are very careful about consensus decision-making and talk about a variety of issues. So at university I got involved in a lot of issues other than forests. I learnt a lot about ideas surrounding non-violence through practices such as consensus, without necessarily knowing that was what they were at the time.

In the current political climate with the war in Iraq etc I have taken an interest in peace studies. A few activists whom I knew a little about and whom I thought were quite inspiring decided to do a non-violent direct action training workshop at Common Ground, which I keenly attended.

I had heard about the Free West Papua movement and as part of the non-violence direct action weekend we decided to organize an action at Australian Defence Industries (ADI) at Benalla in regional Victoria to highlight Australian involvement in the oppression and murder of the West Papuans, and the Archenese as well as to protest Australian participation in the war in Iraq. ADI produces weapons - from bullets to rifles to heavier equipment. It has an exclusive arms supply arrangement with the Australian Defence Force (ADF).

Questions to the Australian parliament tabled by the Greens in 2005 have confirmed that the weapons made here in Australia are being shipped to Indonesia, Israel and other states through military aid arrangements. A body associated with the ADF shipped at least 14 shipments of military aid including weapons, ammunition and military equipment and at least 207 shipments of dual use (military and civilian) goods in the years 1999-2000. We believe these weapons are likely to be used by the Indonesian military (the TNI) against the West Papuan people. This was the link I had clear in my head when we decided on this ADI action at Benalla.

There were two parts to our protest. The first involved going to the streets of the township of Benella to communicate with the local people about the issue. We wanted to open up a space for discussion of their thoughts on war and weapon production, because the reality is that people make weapons and those same people have the potential to refuse to do so.

We wanted to create a space where people can begin to give themselves permission to think about their involvement in the production of war. Having said that, we understand that these people do it to support their families, obviously, so we didn't want to be too confrontational nor act in a manner that wasn't respectful of their circumstances. It is a difficult issue. I think we created a comical and non-threatening space for dialogue. For example, we had people walking around in white pesticide body suits with pretend metal detectors, saying 'have you seen any weapons around here?' So we had people dressed up to look like a caricature of ASIO agents, with dark glasses and dark suits saying 'have you seen a plant growing weapons around here?'

We also did a lot of strategic questioning ('are you aware that ... ?' or 'what do you think about ... ?') and we did some visual displays, rather than pushing our ideas on people. However we couldn't resist having a banner, which was a little bit more confrontational, that said:

'WARNING: WEAPONS LIKE THESE COULD BE USED TO KILL PEOPLE LIKE YOU'.

Then we went across to ADI. We had warned the police in advance that we were doing this and they allowed us on the property to a certain line. ADI is set well back, a couple of hundred meters, from an isolated road. You can't see the weapons plant from the road.

We wanted to symbolically transform this plant into a positive space for peace and a socially constructive space for feeding people, not hurting them. We brought along sweet potatoes and pumpkin with the idea of planting a vegetable patch on ADI land and symbolically planting a seed of hope. We sat around in a circle. People brought art materials and we drew things and talked about our visions for a more peaceful world; we shared stories about experiences where people have been oppressed or had violence committed against them. We also shared stories of hope.

Then we set up a display. It had an aboriginal flag because we are all aware of wanting to respect the people whose land we were occupying and who also might not be happy with a weapons plant on their traditional land. That was important to the group. A few of us decided to walk on to the property beyond where we were allowed as we wanted to make a statement, to intervene in the production chain of war. As we walked, with the rest of the group we sang songs of hope, justice and equality. As a result Jason MacLeod, Adam Breazley and I were arrested for trespass.

The police treated us well - it was very amicable. Our process had been as pacifistic as we could make it so there was no fear and everyone (including police) always knew what was going on. We believed this was important, as fear and violence are often closely associated. This process however raised some questions in terms of how much one is working with the police and the system and how much one is really intervening in the system when the process is so transparent.

We have discussed this a lot since. But I think for what it was it was a good experience. In participating in these actions, some of the ideas we have been exploring, and I certainly have, is the idea of privilege, the privilege that the majority of Australians experience as normal and the idea of sacrificing that privilege to make a statement.

We are defending ourselves in the tradition of pacifism. We see the court as a place for our voices to be heard - not our lawyers.

The case is being heard in two parts and the final part coming up soon**. For me, the privilege I will lose in terms of difficulty in entering certain countries (perhaps Indonesia) and the hassle at airports of having to reveal your 'criminal record' is the least I can do. You can't be aware of injustice in the world and turn your back on it. I will continue to be active, to use my time and energy to create a more compassionate and thoughtful world. It is important to me to continue to do that.

**The case went very well. We argued a case of 'necessity', which means we believed it was necessary for us to commit our crime to prevent a greater crime from being committed. It was an argument that was very useful for use to explain our motivations for action, but apparently is very difficult to win in the court of law. In any case all the defendants had an opportunity to speak our minds and argue our case.
Also Jacob Rumbiak, West Papuan refugee and independence campaigner
( http://www.newint.org/issue321/interview.htm for more about his life story) and Donna Mulhearn, Human Shield in Iraq, were given a forum in the court to tell their stories about human rights abuses they observed or experienced, at the hands of what they believed were Australian weapons, in West Papua and Faluja (and Iraq broadly) respectively. They made graphic and humbling statements that moved the courtroom full of observers.
In the end the Magistrate, Peter Power said our evidence wasn't sufficient to prove the necessity argument. However throughout the case he showed consideration for our position as self defended, was very fair with his decisions and allowed a wide range of questioning for the witnesses. To finish he very respectfully acknowledged each defendants motivations with praise, found us all guilty, but no conviction was recorded on our records in exchange for a 6 month bond and $450 worth of fines which he decided we should pay to UNICEF to support their programs in Cambodia (a project for which he has created a donations drive and rallied support for amongst other magistrates in the Children's Court of Victoria, the court in which he works the majority of the time).
We felt that Mr. Power gave us just about as little 'punishment' as could be afforded within the law. Interestingly early in the proceedings, Mr. Power volunteered the information that he is an ex-Defence Force employee who coincidentally worked for the transmissions department that spied on Indonesian radio transmissions during the process of occupation of West Papua in the late 60s and early 70s. Ah, the webs we weave. I wonder.

Hellen Cooke

There was a small amount of money available from the Government for the International Year of Peace and the Non- Government Organisations came together to decide how to use it.At these meetings I found out that people who come together for peace are not necessarily peaceful. In fact, some young men wanted to take the word peace out of the International Year for Peace.

We weathered a few meetings by sticking to the agenda and these young men got bored with us and left. But then the head of the Returned Soldiers' League came in. He, again, seemed hell-bent on removing the word peace. A friend of mine, an ex-headmistress, had enough of this - she spoke up and said 'Will you be quiet?' He was.

Stella Cornelius - a member of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) - came in. She was an absolutely unflappable woman. The RSL man said she must not criticise the men involved in the war games we were having at that time. He called these men 'the brave boys who would fight the wars'. She just said, 'Yes, I really want to help the brave boys. I don't believe their lives should be risked wantonly, so I propose that before we have war games we should have peace games - serious peace games'. She won me over. I still correspond with her. So, Helen Caldicott and Stella Cornelius became two heroines of mine. In those days I was actually helping to lead the peace movement, but in my own mind I was pursuing it.

... There were great peace marches in Canberra. We dealt with any disturbances ourselves because, as they were peace marches, they had to be peaceful. The march might be against the law, but it was always peaceful. This seems to have been forgotten in later years, when we had people who would nip off and do actions by themselves to grab media attention, but that would negate the message the main body of the protest wanted to communicate.

This was very much in evidence when the unionists crashed through the doors of Parliament House during the 1989 protest. I was there that day, listening to all the talking and part of the enormous number of people who had come to protest. All of a sudden these people burst through the door of Parliament House. The police were brutal in repressing them. They felt they had the right to go in and grab people and mistreat them - and they did. After this I was sick. I had a strange illness for two years. I thought I was alone in my suffering, but after talking about it with other people who had been in the protest I realised that everyone had illness. It seemed to me that it was some type of psychic malaise from the time of the protest when we had all felt quite disempowered. We felt we had made good protests but against the world arms trade we knew we had managed to do nothing - so we punished ourselves for it. Anyway, I found myself a good homeopathist and came out of that and I was part of the 1991 protest. This was even bigger, in the main peaceful, wonderfully diverse and varied.

Around about the mid-eighties I became involved with WILPF. Again, I volunteered to help with the newsletter and found myself quite rapidly becoming editor. I did that until the International Congress in Sydney. One of the things about being involved in the international movement, particularly the women's peace movement, is that there is the opportunity to travel to different places and have different experiences. In Sydney there were many more aboriginal, Maori and Islander people. They took over workshops and led them off in completely different directions, so I got a completely different view of what peace is about. From then I found myself working more and more for WILPF. The objectives were so broad, it didn't really matter what took my interest, and I could work for that and be active in that. I was not constrained.

For the 1991 protests people had come together from all over Australia and from all walks of life. I persuaded WILPF to act outside the AIDEX protest itself because there were enough people there. I thought we should be in the Civic Centre, where we would catch the eye of people who were just passing through. We took bamboo poles and slung them across our shoulders like Chinese coolie women. There were four different placards in large letters on each pole. The letters had been coloured in by some of our children.

They were simple phrases that would stay in people's minds such as:

ARMS MAKES US POORER NOT SAFER

We intended that people would have to come to some conclusions as they puzzled out the meaning. We stood in the Civic Centre during the main peak hours, enduring the down drafts from the high buildings.

In the main we had a very good response. It was hard work and sometimes we suffered abuse, but we were winning people over - at least to thinking about it. We particularly got a wonderful response from busloads of children who were going to and from school. They would peer out, read the slogans, open the windows and cheer and thumbs-up to us. It was very heartening to have this response from primary and secondary age children.

After AIDEX 1991, as after AIDEX 1989, people in Canberra seemed to be in a state of shock. Even people who had not been involved in the protest at all. Almost everybody who lived in Canberra knew somebody, or was related to somebody who had been in the protest, it was so widespread and well attended. I think this was so throughout much of Australia, certainly in the capital cities. We were in a peace network at that stage and we decided we should try to do a type of reconciliation action. We would ask people to come and tell their stories and we would just listen and record them. This would involve us in a lot of planning, but we had a precedent, before the International Year of Peace, when people like Dorothy Green (the great peace activist and poet) had been involved in touring around Australia, listening to people's stories about peace.

We got a really good idea of what the protest had been about for people across Australia when Nancy Shelley, who was the main protagonist here, went across Australia to Sydney, Adelaide and Newcastle. Here, we tucked ourselves under the Ecumenical Council in the ACT, which made us quite respectable. In fact, it made us quite invulnerable when we decided we would seek every possible experience. We were able to front up to Sir William Keyes, the head of the Australian Defence Forces, and the Chief of Police (he forbade any police to talk to us but he talked to us himself. A couple of police did talk to us, though).

We spoke to the arms traders, when we could, and we spoke to politicians, unionists, and of course, to the activists who were there. We also spoke to people who had been employed on the arms trade stalls - soldiers and people who had a job for the first time - who were quite traumatised (not by the terrible weapons being sold, but by the protesters). Nancy Shelley did the write-up from all the transcripts of interviews. I did the research to place the events in context, I designed the cover and named the book Piecing It Together. I have re-discovered the mid-1800's Australia Felix and the international hopes for ending war, social injustice and inequities, and I have formed an e-mail group of WILPF to restore to mind the history that was covered up by the ruins of noble war.

Lately I have been participating in non-violent direct action, non-violence training, legal information and then the action against Australian Defence Industries (ADI) at Benalla. ADI makes 'Product and Components' which are mainly sold to the government, i.e. we, the people. Somehow, someway, a proportion of this product became available for the use of the Israeli Army in their dispossessing work in Palestine, and the Indonesian Army also find Australian made 'Product and Components' useful for oppressing and raping the land and peoples of Aceh, West Papua and the islands between. Just this morning Radio National had a news brief that the UN Human Rights Commission had served notice on Caterpillar (the USA firm that makes and supplies bulldozers to Israel to raze olive groves, houses and the occasional peace activist), that it may be party to an international crime.

It will be a great day when the weapon makers, including the product and component makers, are called to account. My hope is that an international criminal court will soon prosecute companies and nations that supply the materiel of torture and dispossession, as well as the militaries and nations/companies who use them.

Yvonne Smith

- Going back in time – when the Vietnamese people were struggling for independence, the UAW had been in touch with the Vietnam Women's Union. They sent us much information about the nature of their struggle – we knew what was happening and were active in support for them. And although it was a very important issue – it was to become even more so with the conscription of Australian young men – my feeling at the time was that the antiwar struggle had taken over the UAW at the expense of women's specific issues and problems.

I hadn't formulated what those problems were as the Women's Liberation movement did later, such as challenging the role of the family, the sexual revolution etc. but I just had an uneasy feeling that we were becoming the women's adjunct of the peace movement. When Save Our Sons was formed following the introduction of conscription this single issue organisation was able to take on the role that was needed. That was great. Once again a lot of UAW women supported them.

Edith Morgan

- My dad was a socialist. He had an immense effect on our family. He was very clear on some issues, for example, the antiwar stuff in 1914 when they had those first world war posters like the "WHAT ARE YOU DOING FOR YOUR COUNTRY?" posters. I wasn't alive then, of course. He was quite involved in the anti-conscription campaign. He was a strong figure in the union. He used to work down at Spotswood and if people were in trouble they would say "go and talk to Coldy, he'll know what to do (our name being Coldicutt).

Peace was the issue at that time. Dad took us all to Festival Hall when the Dean of Canterbury (the Red Dean) was here, who was a strong socialist advocate of the Soviet Union, and so forth. - ... I got involved in many campaigns through the Communist Party during and after the Second World War. Then I joined the Union of Australian Women, too. I was there at the inaugural meeting.

A strong nationalist feeling came in Australia after the war, an interest in Australian literature and films. There was that wonderful play that has never been properly shown. It was a musical, "Reedy River", written by somebody called Dick Diamond, I think. There was a strong peace campaign. There was some contradiction between where we had been fighting fascism and peace. It was very difficult for some, that issue, because it was very important fascism was defeated. I think people generally, even those who would be strong antiwar activists like Joan Coxsedge, would have been out there in campaigns against Hitler.

Thelma Prior

- In 1956 I was elected by my workmates to represent them at the Second World Peace Conference. The workers at my factory helped to pay my fare. Peace was something these girls understood - many of their people had been killed in the war.I nearly did not get back to Australia. On arrival back in England, I, with two other delegates had to go to Court at the Old Bailey to contest the Australian Menzies Liberal government's Order of Deportation. The English judge told the Australian government that they did not want us - so we were allowed to come home. We had our Australian passports taken from us in Perth.

Pamela Curr

Most of the people in Australia were opposed to going to war in Iraq. Even when war commenced, still more than half were opposed to it and nothing that has happened since then has made them change their minds. That war has not made the world safer. There has been a lot of spin-doctoring about the reasons why we went to war. But there are enough intelligent people in this country - even though they are informed by this biased media - who have come to their own conclusions. That again is the role of the left, the dissidents, the activists in our society. To stimulate people to look outside the arguments put before them and to come to intelligent conclusions.

At the moment I am working with the Victorian Peace Network. I am also the national spokesperson for the Greens for refugees, but even if I weren't, I see myself as one of the many refugee activists. Some of us are aligned to groups and some of us are not. We are all in communication through email. This is a campaign that has been connected through email.

Marion Harper

I needed to go to work. Jim had become a tram driver. The pay was not very big and we had a lot of expenses with 4 children, as a result of my involvement in the peace movement, through the Party, I became involved in the Unitarian Church.

Victor James was the minister of the church at the time and I was involved in the planning of the big meeting with the Red Dean at the Exhibition Building. I became very involved with Frank Hartley, Victor James and Alf Dickie - who were the three ministers who worked together in the peace movement. As a result of working with them, Frank Hartley offered me a job in the Victorian Peace Movement. So I worked for the peace movement for quite some time. Early on there were some great campaigns there. It was interesting.

Joan Coxsedge

The 1980s was the era of women's peace camps and I was very privileged to take part in three of them. The Women for Survival Peace Camp took place in 1983 outside the gates of Pine Gap near Alice Springs to draw attention to the presence of this very secretive electronic surveillance base which is run by and for the United States. Part of a global network, it sucks up information like a giant vacuum cleaner and operates completely outside normal governmental and legal constraints.

The camp lasted for a week and was creative and colourful and full of determined women prepared to have a go. I would have dearly liked to stay longer but had to return to Victoria to take part in an 'Equal Opportunity' debate! Earlier in that same year, when I was in Washington DC visiting some anti-snooping comrades in CounterSpy, I was invited to join a weekend of protest at a women's peace camp at Seneca Falls in New York State. The governor had declared a 'state of emergency' and called out the national Guard, so I saw the US security state at first hand and it wasn't a pretty picture.

The following year, I went to Greenham Common, the famous Women's Peace Encampment. In 1981, a group of gutsy women had marched from Cardiff to this US cruise missile base in Berkshire and set up a permanent presence around its edge, quickly becoming a symbol for peace activists around the world. Greenham Common was non-hierarchical and and had no traditional structures. There were various gates around the perimeter named after the colours of the rainbow, each with its own political flavour, allowing women to join the grouping of their choice. I took along a swag of food and ciggies and a great deal of admiration for their incredible courage. Apart from police brutality and cruel harassment from local yobs, the weather conditions were often horrendous. And yet, these women, ordinary mortals like us, stayed there for years.

Whatever happens, like the women of Greenham Common, we must continue working for a better world. I want my grandchildren to live in a society that has a spirit of independence, that puts people before profits and looks after the environment.

Zara Wildenaur

They were very volatile times, in Poland in the 1930's. My older brother escaped and came to Australia. I remember his German work- mates speaking of their envy at his 'going away' party.

I came out later, landing at Brisbane on the 23rd August 1939. The rest of my family perished. I joined the Country Women's Association. They weren't really interested in peace issues at the time, but there was nothing else until the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF).

This picture was taken at a WILPF demonstration when I was visiting a friend in Melbourne in 1953. We still have religious and ethnic hatred and war, why? I believe most people want to live a peaceful life, but they don't have the structures to work through, such as, for example, a Department of Harmony. Not that, necessarily, but something similar. OPAC 2004

Women's Health in the North

- OLDER WOMEN'S DISCUSSION - We are in the middle of a revolution of the most pernicious kind which is trying to undo the culture of peace and justice put into place by the likes of us.

To develop a culture of peace, you must first develop resistance against those who create monopolies, oppression and war. To peacefully (even though we're angry) exist, we need to set up alternatives - to peacefully undermine the pyramid.

The older women who participated in the focus group saw the notion of peace in global terms: I asked my group yesterday what their idea of peace was, said one woman, and nearly all of them said world peace. Community, both local and global, was a crucial element in the women's definition of peace. Peace to me means safety - my children, my home, my community, offered one woman. If I feel safe personally, I will be at peace. And if everybody I know and love is safe, then I have peace. If everybody in the community was safe, then how peaceful would that be. For this group of women who equated their personal peace with global peace, a sense of disempowerment was the main issue that prevented peace.

To become a peaceful person, you need first to sort out the problems confronting your everyday life, said one woman. I'm not sure what's happening to me, said another, but I can't accept that all the bits and pieces that we do individually and locally for peace or on behalf of peace make a difference. Women's Health in the North

- Education, information and a sense of injustice will prompt action in the individual, then in the community and ultimately instigate social change. Peace is made and it is fought for. It is not something you can just sit back and expect. We are a complicated species and we are both competitive and cooperative and we need to keep these two parts of ourselves in balance. Political action needs to be appropriately activated.

Back to top