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Something of a Sisterhood
My mother – English, living on Sydney’s North Shore and not
at all “out” about my sexuality – had an eighty-year-old friend
who came to Alice Springs on holiday. After her visit, my mother,
interested because this is, after all, my home town, asked for her
friend’s impressions. “Oh, lovely,” came the reply. “I really
liked Alice Springs. You know, m’dear, there seems to be something of
a sisterhood in that town.”
“Something of a sisterhood” – I love that phrase to
describe the visible, some say socially and economically powerful,
community of single women and lesbians who live in the Alice. If the
rest of Australia has a 10 per cent gay population, then 15 per cent in
Alice Springs are lesbian, with a few brave gay men hanging on at the
fringes.
Why
women? Why Alice? Why so out in the open? It’s a phenomenon worthy of
an anthropological PhD, preferably written by one of the “girls”. Times
have changed since, a decade ago, an unwitting ABC reporter asked me
to make a doco about the lesbian community in Alice and received the
rebuff: “No, don’t patronise me with your heterosexual privilege.” So
here goes with my own theory:
Lesbians, unencumbered, at least in my generation, by children, were always more at liberty to go bush than their
heterosexually-married sisters. The Northern Territory has been a refuge
from the constraints of corsets, stilettos and the good-girl manners of
the city since the first white woman arrived one hundred-odd years ago.
Women in trousers are the norm out here.
In 1983, when a women-only protest took place outside the gates
of the American military base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs, there was
more of a sisterhood than usual. We were a thousand women, singing,
dancing, crying, laughing, loving and battling for world peace.
The local press, recently acquired by Rupert Murdoch, noticed
that many of the women were gay and pushed the sophisticated view that
the protestors were Russian-paid, feral lesbians. Although nobody much
believes the Russian-paid bit any more, many of the “old school” in
Alice Springs remain convinced that the protestors were feral lesbians.
The women who came here were stunned by the beauty of
Australia’s desert heart. Many were also fearfully concerned at the
plight of Indigenous Australians and chose to return to Alice as
doctors, lawyers and teachers.
By the early 1990s, the lesbian community had become numerically
large enough to ensure continual regeneration. It’s what the
mathematicians call a “critical mass”. As for it being visible to
outsiders, personally I have never noticed it. Perhaps that is because
it is harder to see a forest when you are one of the trees.
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