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Last Updated: January 29, 2012
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RESISTING FASCISM

On this page: Jane Morgan; Pamela Curr;; Jo Wainer; Hellen Cooke

fascism: any system of extreme right-wing or authoritarian views Oxford Dictionary

Jane Morgan

- At the end of my sons' primary years I needed to change my life. I knew that the late nights spent working on completing a job was not sustainable with a young boy attending high school.

I needed a proper job that would pay regular money and I needed the support of my family in raising an adolescent person. I did get a job at Fitzroy Council in the Women's Support Program. This was a very stimulating time, working with a team of women and providing a feminist service to women and their children living in the high-rise flats. The program we ran was primarily a group program with women learning from one another and changing their lives in very elemental ways.

During this time the union was very strong in local govern- ment and achieved many great things for workers. There was a strong feeling of unity within the union members and lots of fun we did have. It was this involvement in the union at Fitzroy that led to my being so incensed at the brutality of the attack on the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) by Peter Reith and the Liberal Party. When this happened a close friend of mine and I virtually abandoned our work and lent our numbers to the people flocking to the docks in support of the Unionists under attack.

Management at work were not very happy with us, but what could they do but sack us? This is not, in fact, a very easy thing to do. What happened at the docks was a remarkable and uplifting thing. It really proved that the 'People United Will Never Be Defeated'. For the two weeks or so of the shut down a new community was structured on the road leading to the wharf. There were thousands of people coming and going. Other hundreds just staying and not going home till Reith and his tools were defeated.

To sustain this number of people was a mammoth task and it happened through people as individuals and a community uniting to defeat a common enemy. There was: - the group of young people ('ferals' I think they were termed at this time) who set up a kitchen and provided free and very cheap meals to whoever showed up;
- the musicians who provided their services free to see us through the long and cold nights;
- the workers with welding gear joining together iron girders as barricades against the police;
- a whole union movement united to provide things like toilets and coordination to ensure no entry was left unmanned at any time and no protester was left hungry or unappreciated or unprepared;
- Edith and Molly who stopped the train and sent that poor train driver probably off for years of trauma counselling;
- the night of standing all night long in solid formation being buzzed constantly by police helicopters and the police arriving the next day in huge numbers to break the picket and having to turn tail knowing they didn't stand a chance.

We were in a war zone, but a happy war zone in many respects, because we were united.

Pamela Curr

Civil rights, human rights, workers' rights and the peace movement. They are the four areas I work in. But you can't do everything. Annie once said to me

"you have to focus on where you will be most effective".

But when you are an activist, you just see so much. It is as if a lens is lifted from your eyes so you actually see the injustice. You see things happening that are going to lead to injustice and you want to engage with it. I am trying to stay within clear paramaters, but of course, I sometimes get a call from somebody about something and I may have something useful in my toolbag. I see activists as having a bag of tools. We all have different bags of tools - this is why it is good to work together. I think it has been very encouraging to see, over the past few years, that people are working together more, putting their political differences to one side to focus on the concerns they share and to work together.

That has worked very well in the Victorian Peace Network. There may be forty or fifty of us sitting around the table. There are people from churches, from left-wing groups, from student groups, from ethnic groups, from other community groups and from the unions - all sitting together trying to work out a way to oppose a government decision to take us to a war that we knew was unjust. This also happened in the Fairwear campaign. You could go to a protest and find, say, a Christian brother holding the banner at one end and someone from a far-left political group holding the banner at the other end.

I think we need to see more of that.

"War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.": John F. Kennedy

... 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.

Recently I went to the Rural Australians for Refugees conference in Albury. There I met people Ihad been talking to for the last two and a half to three years by email and on the telephone. I met them face to face. It was fantastic. There are a lot of us who have become friends but never met each other, because of our concern for the refugees.We often talk about what activists do for causes and for groups, but I think we sometimes forget what they do for us. The asylum seekers, in coming to this country, have allowed us to see another way - another view of life.They have also allowed us to see at first hand the incredible strength that people have to struggle and fight back. They give us an example of how we must struggle.

For many Australians life has been fairly easy. We come up against these people who have faced a death struggle. They really can inspire us and show us ways to endure - because that is what we have to do. So I think we need to remember, as activists involved in struggles and fights for others, what these people are giving back to us. It is more than a 50-50 exchange.Also, I would say there are more women than men working as activists in the refugee movement. That may come about because women have a tendency to see the humanity in people first and the politics and other things second.

We are not only doing this for the asylum seekers. We are also doing it for ourselves, because if we allow a political situation to exist in this country where one vulnerable group is picked off, we then are allowing the next vulnerable group to be picked off too - and so on.

Jo Wainer

I continued to work at the ABC and Bert continued to challenge the abortion laws (he did get to do his test cases) and to force the Victorian Government to hold an inquiry in to the relationship between police corruption and abortion, the Kaye Inquiry.

It blue the lid off abortion in Victoria. For the first time ever the media started using the word, and for eighteen months abortion was on the front page pretty well every day. No longer could Melbourne, and Victoria, pretend that this didn't happen. It was very confronting: Melbourne sees itself as such as respectable place, but for the first time ever women told their stories and that, basically, changed the climate. It was pretty hairy for us, we were disturbing a very lucrative industry. People were sent to kill us and we lived a cloak and dagger existence.

Eventually Bert was bankrupted. The Tax Department bankrupted him for $1,300 he had forgotten to pay in taxes. They took his land, they took his car and the goods out of his surgery. His landlady was Catholic and her Bishop rang her and told her she had to throw him out. He had nowhere to live and was staying with his sister. Her house was fire-bombed and half burnt down. He was bankrupt and had had his first coronary, so we bolted to Queensland to recover. We settled in Caloundra, which was then a sleepy little village of 5,000 people - it is now a megalopolis. He became a country doctor and we joined the Children by Choice Association there, the lobby working to change abortion laws in Queensland.

They were a very fiery and innovative group of women. They didn't have any chance in Bjelke Peterson's time to change the law so they organized a referral service for women, so women could get abortions. They had it so systemized they would buy bulk seats in the aircraft to fly women to Sydney and Melbourne at discount prices. They would funnel the referrals to whichever doctor was behaving the best in terms of prices and competency. They employed doctors and set a shopfront and clinic a to assess the women. They did a wonderful job.

Bert applied to be the medical superintendent of the hospital in Caloundra. The hospital had been built as part of an election promise. It had never been opened as they couldn't find a doctor to run it. Bert's experience in the army was that he ran the military hospital in Brisbane and he also ran the field army hospital - he was certainly over-qualified to run a fifteen bed country hospital. I remember very clearly the Minister for Health and the Minister for Police having a public fight over who had the right to refuse Bert this job! So he set up a private practice.

Hellen Cooke

After the United Nations International Year of Peace all sorts of grants were taken away. People wandered away and took up other issues and tasks. It was as if they said "we have done that, now we will do this". I was still an acolyte, or student, of being an activist and I was puzzled. I ended up being in the hot seat where, I felt, I had no right to be. And I still had trouble with acronyms.

Looking back at the Canberra Program for Peace I realize what wonderful people they were - extraordinary people.

There was a small amount of money available from the Government for the International Year of Peace and the Non Government Organizations 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 criticize 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.

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