Future Feminist Archives – Live in Wollongong

Wollongong Art Gallery proudly presents an exhibition opening on Friday 8 March at 5pm, with a celebratory march led by the performance group Femme Fatales and slam poetry by young local poets.

The exhibition celebrates the 1938 and 1979 Wollongong women’s marchers and their legacy of diverse yet united sisterhood.

Artists: Alison Alder, Belle Blau, Chiara Phillips and the Jessie St Women’s Library, the Future Feminist Archive Poster Project (various artists), Julie Freeman, Deborah Kelly, Wendy Murray, Fiona MacDonald.

Poets: Lorin Elizabeth, Isabella Luna and Kirli Saunders

Film: Screening 1973 WIN TV interview with Carmelita Steinke

The Future Feminist Archives project

The Future Feminist Archive project was launched in NSW forty years after the 1975 International Women’s Year. Despite the slogan of ‘A Life Not Just A Year’, it was clear that important feminist materials were scattered and disappearing. Archives Live! draws attention to feminism’s improvised ephemera which predated the digital revolution and is now vulnerable.

As curator Jo Holder said, “Archives matter, because they confirm what counts as knowledge right now, and in the future. Where are those old demo snaps and badges you once had? Isn’t it time you interviewed and recorded your mum or aunty? Diverse histories and herstories must be kept alive and in the public domain.”

The curators have commissioned artist-researchers to work with South Coast archives. The artists reveal practical experiments in co-operative and collective action that hold useful lessons for the present.

The story of one key event — the inaugural IWD march in Wollongong on 8 March 1979 — throws a bright light on how diverse community groups could work more closely together in the face of #metoo , the vulnerability of unemployment or casualised work, the Uluru Statement from the Heart and the pressing need for better health, education services.

“It’s a communication thing,” Dolly Potter said, some forty years ago, speaking from her years of experience as President of the South Bulli-Corrimal Miner’s Auxiliary.

South Coast women have always been a part of industrial action on the South Coast, and were mainstays of the local Cooperative Societies, which built a strong community DIY ethos with the catch-cry of ‘Each for All and All for Each’.

After the hunger and evictions of the Depression by 1938 the first Southern District Miners Women’s Auxiliary formed at Scarborough, and auxiliaries and guilds multiplied across the southern coalfields between Dapto to Helensburgh and beyond to Lithgow and the Hunter coalfields.

The headline banner carried by the 1979 marchers proudly proclaimed the little-known fact that South Coast women have been celebrating International Women’s Day since the early 1930s – the longest continuous record in Australia. This banner has been reprised and updated for this Friday’s event.

The Illawarra Mercury – then… and now

For 1979 IWD around 200 people stepped out along the traditional May Day route from Lang Park (South Beach) up Crown Street, turning down Keira Street to finish at the (now demolished) Rest Park opposite MacCabe Park. They marched to show their shared concerns, from campaigns for the provision of quality nursing homes and aged care, support the rape crisis centre at Wollongong Hospital, promote the needs of Indigenous women and their communities in the South Coast, and to champion the ACTU Working Women’s Charter to inform women (again in all community languages) of the role, rights and potential of women in the workforce and trade union movement.

Archive Live! artist Fiona MacDonald uncovered this story below in the Illawarra Mercury, along with a wealth of valuable press photographs from the Mercury, which she has used in her artwork for the exhibition.

It was the marchers’ grooming and dress sense rather than their actions that caught the eye of “Ichabod’, a self-proclaimed Mercury columnist and defender of community standards. Under the headline ‘A PORE SHOW TO ENRICH YOU’, and ‘Female Rights Prettied Up’, Ichabod suggested that the marchers sit more demurely with knees together, take deportment classes, cleanse their pores and “do something about your toenails”. The marchers did nothing of the sort, and a week later, the Mercury issued an apology and listed of all the groups that been derided for joining Wollongong’s first International Women’s Day March.

For further information on the exhibition and on Friday’s march reconstruction event contact the exhibition curators Jo Holder: 0406 537 933 and Catriona Moore 04882901

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