by Anne Summers
‘How dare you,’ I’d raged at him. ‘It was my story.’
‘He wanted to talk to me,’ was the lame response. ‘What was I supposed to do!’
‘You were supposed to tell him that I needed to be there. You should not have talked to him. It was my story.’
The relationship was over that night but its death knell had sounded a few weeks earlier, in Vancouver, on Valentine’s Day. I’d just arrived from Sydney and, flicking through a local underground newspaper, discovered Ti-Grace Atkinson was to speak about ‘Romance and Romanticism’ the next day. This was irresistible. I knew that Atkinson, from New York, was the most radical of feminists. She’d famously said ‘feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice’, which was massively disconcerting to lots of women. The University of British Columbia lecture theatre was packed, mostly women, mostly wearing overalls, the uniform in those days of radical lesbians, and they literally howled in disappointment when Atkinson appeared. She presented as the archetypal feminine, wearing a pastel floral dress, blue-tinted spectacles, and red dyed hair. Her speech enraged these women further. ‘It is no coincidence that February 14, the feast of lovers, is also the anniversary of the martyrdom of the two St Valentines,’ she began. ‘Love is martyrdom. It drains energy, takes strength from the revolution’. Afterwards, young women flooded to the microphone to dispute what she’d said, to defend their love for each other—and to challenge her to come out. ‘You’re a dyke,’ they yelled at her. ‘why won’t you admit it?’ My boyfriend and I did not care if Atkinson was a lesbian, out or otherwise, but her speech had jolted us. ‘All love was draining,’ she had said, ‘our emotions have been colonised.’ I guess our relationship was already tottering and Atkinson’s words that night gave us the rationale for drawing back from each other. We never used the word ‘love’ to each other again.
Within a short time he had met someone else, another Australian woman in the US and married her almost immediately. I was hurt, but it toughened me up. From now on, I vowed, I was going to take charge of my life. I’d be less dependent on boyfriends and start to really make something of myself. I needed to be proud of what I had already accomplished and to face the future boldly. The women I’d met in America seemed more confident, not shy about showing the world what they could do. It was time for me to become my own person, whoever she might turn out to be.
I was going to stay in mainstream journalism. I wanted the immediacy of writing about the world as it was now. I enjoyed being able to interview people, to get their stories, or at least their sides of the stories I was chasing, and I liked the almost instant gratification of weekly publication. Academia held no allure but I did have one final obligation to Henry Mayer, my professor in the department of government at the University of Sydney. I doubt that I could have written Damned Whores and God’s Police without Mayer’s intellectual encouragement and his practical assistance, and I wanted to show my gratitude. Henry Mayer had been a ‘Dunera boy’, one of 2542 German Jewish refugees and others who, mostly wrongly, had been classified as ‘enemy aliens’ and deported from London, under conditions of appalling privation on the Dunera, a converted passenger ship. They’d arrived in Sydney in September 1940 and then been interned at a prison camp in Hay for the rest of the war. Like so many of the Dunera boys, Mayer was phenomenally successful in his chosen career. He was nominally professor of political theory, but he also wrote a pioneering book about abortion in Australia, created the field of media studies, and was fascinated by the ‘new’ movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s: the student movement, the women’s movement and the gay liberation movement. He regarded them as serious politically, with solid intellectual foundations and having the capacity to be transformative in ways that the ‘old’ politics could not. The government department in the early 1970s swirled with unorthodoxy. Dennis Altman, Lex Watson and Sue Wills, early writers about gay liberation, were there and Warren Osmond and Peter King and many other advocates of New Left politics. Henry Mayer had provided me with an academic home that was both convivial and challenging, but he had an academic reputation to tend to, and that was partly measured by how many degrees he could deliver. Mayer had protected me for several years, signing the forms that meant I received the Commonwealth Scholarship living allowance and could survive and keep writing without needing to take more than occasional tutoring or seminar work. Now, in return, I had to deliver him a doctorate. The university had never before accepted an already-published book as fulfilling the requirement, but Mayer set to work to create a precedent. I undertook to do whatever the Dean of Arts required—short of his initial, ridiculous, and later withdrawn, demand that we have the entire book typed so it could be submitted as a conventional thesis. I tendered a hardcover copy of the book, together with some additional research and several supplementary papers that were typed and bound like a normal thesis. That seemed to satisfy everyone. But then the chief examiner, the renowned historian and folklorist Ian Turner, had died before he could write his report, so a replacement had to be found and given time to read the material. It was not until mid-1979 that I finally received the degree.
In September 1978 I was back in the US, but this time in the Midwest and about to experience a very different America. I had been awarded the journalist’s scholarship I’d applied for from the World Press Institute, the WPI as it was known, a body funded by US media organisations to give foreign journalists exposure to American society. The WPI was based at Macalester College in St Paul, Minnesota, which lay adjacent to the city of Minneapolis, the two places being known as the Twin Cities. It was a huge adjustment for me. For the first time in my life, I had to live in a dorm, use communal bathrooms and line up in the student cafeteria for stuff that I could not bring myself to call ‘food’. Against that, we had pretty free access to rental cars and so were very mobile; along with a few of my more adventurous new colleagues, we wasted no time in getting to know the bars of Minneapolis. The eleven of us on the program that year were a very diverse group that included two men who worked for state-owned newspapers, in Burma and Zambia; the first-ever woman journalist in Nepal; two whose countries were either an authoritarian state or under military rule (South Africa and Uruguay); and several freelancers. I was hugely challenged by the fact that everyone thought of themselves as journalists. To my mind, a journalist worked for a free press and was constrained only by one’s editor and one’s audience. Could the same term apply if you worked for the state, or were subject to censorship? There were also immense cultural and other differences between us, and several in the group had only minimal English. It was going to be an interesting time.
We spent the first few weeks in Minnesota getting acquainted with its quite extraordinary people, politics and climate before embarking upon several months of countrywide travel. Minnesota had long been a crucible for ultra-radical politics, and leaned towards the Democratic Party in electoral politics, producing such national leaders as Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale. Politics was a prominent and, to me, alluring part of the WPI agenda. Our exposure to mainstream American politics included attending a press conference with President Carter; watching the Chinese Vice-premier Deng Xiao Ping arriving in January 1979 at the historic state dinner in Washington that marked the US recognising China and the first visit of such a high-ranking Chinese official; and observing Ronald Reagan in Minneapolis in 1978 during his nation-wide travels trying to secure support for the presidential nomination. We also were given entrée to alternative political organisations, such as Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH in Chicago and some local Native American groups. Interestingly, no women’s groups were included on our itinerary, even though this was 1978 and the second-wave women’s movement had been underway in the US for close to a decade. But we did meet with an extremely broad array of people, including the CEO of America’s biggest farm-machinery corporation, the entire editorial board of the Chicago Tribune, and the man who gave the daily press briefings in Henry Kissinger’s State Department.
I ended up leaving the program a few months early, in February 1979, because Max Walsh, managing editor of the Australian Financial Review, had made me the irresistible offer to be the paper’s political correspondent in Canberra, but my time at WPI turned out to be extremely good training for the Canberra Press Gallery. Although at the time I often chafed about the way we were treated, herded—like sheep, I complained—on and off minibuses and private planes, into boardrooms and briefing sessions, running to schedules that we had no say in drawing up, up early to be at airports, and then hanging around in bars late at night because we had nowhere else to go. Meeting the people who ran America. The only difference from what I would find myself doing subsequently in Canberra was that we did not have to file stories each day, although I did keep a detailed journal of our activities, and to earn extra money since my salary was stopped while I was with WPI, I wrote freelance articles for the papers back home whenever I could.
Leaving the program early meant I missed out on the visit to the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command and the briefings on Soviet weapons capabilities. Nor did I get to meet David Duke, National Director of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. But in those five months, I had the most extraordinary exposure to the very best—as well as some of the worst—of the United States, and I knew that I could never again arrive at those simple broad dismissive judgements I had made during my first visit in 1977. America was a disarmingly complex country, and it was impossible for me not to become totally engaged with the place. But it also frightened me.
Macalester College was situated on Grand Avenue, just a block away from Summit Avenue, one of the Twin Cities’ great boulevards that stretched for 10 kilometres from St Paul to the Mississippi River, where St Paul meets Minneapolis. On my first morning I went for a walk under its grand canopy of elm trees admiring the historic houses, many of them grand mansions. Sadly, the trees were under threat from Dutch Elm disease and were circled with red paint, meaning they were soon to be torn down. It would be 80 years before their replacements grew to the same height. St Paul was not a city that was well-known to most Australians, but I knew that both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Kate Millett had been born there. Millett had left the city in 1965 after her graduation, but no doubt her English major at the University of Minnesota helped spark the radical thinking in Sexual Politics, her 1970 book that opened my eyes to the misogyny that lay at the core of the writings of Norman Mailer, D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, three writers I had previously admired so much. It was extraordinarily disturbing for me to realise how much self-loathing was required for me, a woman, to actually like, even venerate, books whose essential premise was denigration, if not pure hatred, of women. Once I came to this realisation I could never again ignore such misogyny, in literature or in life.
Fitzgerald had written his first novel, This Side of Paradise, while living at 599 Summit in 1919. After it was accepted for publication he had supposedly run down Summit Avenue, grabbing strangers and telling them, ‘I’m famous’. Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir’s lifelong companion, had done a similar thing in 1937 when the venerable French publishing house Gallimard finally accepted his first novel, Nausea. ‘Today I walk the streets like an author,’ he said.1 I had also felt transformed in 1975 when Penguin Books published Damned Whores and God’s Police. Now I, too, could say I was an author, a member of that special, select and, to me, admirable group of people who turned words into books. That was now three years ago. I wondered whether I would ever feel that way again. Would I still be able to write books now that I seemed to be funnelling myself full-time into journalism? I did not know, but later that week I bought, for $35 from a woman who lived on Summit Avenue, an original Corona portable typewriter with old-fashioned parchment coloured keys edged in silver. It was very light, with a built-in carrying case, the kind that war correspondents would have used. I could picture Martha Gellhorn using it to bash out stories during the Spanish Civil War. The spacing was a bit erratic, but I didn’t mind. It made me feel both literary and journalistic; through this machine, I felt connected to writers who had gone before me. This American journey was going to take me somewhere, I was determined, and it would have to be through my writing.
It was September when I arrived and fall, as Americans refer to autumn, was in all its glory. I had never seen such colours. In evergreen Australia, deciduous trees are relatively uncommon and except for cold-climate cities such as Canberra, it is rare to see turning leaves. Nowhere in Australia are there trees with the range and depth of colour, from palest blond to brilliant scarlet, that I saw in Minnesota that year. Then as the leaves fell and the weather turned, I found myself experiencing a Northern Hemisphere winter for the first time. The American Midwest is so cold that people dig up their rose bushes and store them, wrapped in hessian, in their basements until the spring. There are days when it is too cold for children to go to school, and there are covered walkways between all buildings downtown so that it is rarely necessary to expose oneself to the elements. You drive from heated garage in heated car to your heated destination, which is invariably an underground carpark that sits below whatever building you are visiting. I quickly learned what cold weather felt like. My face hurt, my ears and nose turned red, and one day when I unwittingly walked with wet hair from the Macalester dorm to the rental car parked just across the street, I was amazed to find my hair had frozen by the time I opened the car door. After a few weeks of this, I began to wear makeup again for the first time in years; it was one layer of protection against the cold. As were the puffer jackets the WPI provided for us all; we looked ridiculous, like Michelin Men of varying heights and colours, but we were warm. We soon learned how to drive in the snow, how to look for treacherous black ice and, above all, how to keep ourselves protected from weather that could kill you. It was gruelling enough for me but for my companions from warm countries such as Jamaica, Zambia and Burma, it was sheer misery.
In October the WPI program took us to South Dakota, to inspect the Pine Ridge Indian reservation. I had never seen a worse place. While the poverty-caused squalor was probably comparable to the extreme deprivation I had seen in some remote Aboriginal settlements, the difference here was the weather. Already the temperatures were heading for sub-zero, and winter had not even begun. I saw that none of the ‘houses’ had insulated walls, or any form of heating, or even any glass in their windows. One cold-water tap served several dwellings. We met with the chairman of the reservation, Chief Elijah Whirlwind Horse, but there was little he could say to put any kind of spin on this dire situation. It was not surprising to discover there were severe problems with drugs and alcohol on Pine Ridge. I had already had some contact with Native Americans while I was in St Paul. The WPI had arranged for us to go north to an Indian reservation to observe a weekend of ceremonies, including spending time in a sweat lodge, which was a teepee-like structure that had been converted into a sauna. We’d also attended a pow wow in a suburban hall. I had found it sad. It seemed almost demeaning that these tribal elders, wearing full ceremonial regalia, were conducting their ancient dances on the hardwood floors of an assembly hall, where on another night bingo would be played or young girls would meet to rehearse their debutante dances. I had gone outside the WPI program to make contact with American Indian Movement (AIM) leaders in Minnesota; I was keen to learn more than we were being spoon-fed on the official program. We met Curtis Baldeagle and Clyde Bellecourt, two long-time activists, and their lawyer, Ken Tilsen. I soon learned about the political struggle, the ‘survival schools’ that taught only an American Indian curriculum, and other strategies for restoring pride and developing political potency. But I decided to investigate further, now that we were on the ground in this place that was so rich in American Indian history. I knew that Russell Means was imprisoned in South Dakota, so I did what I would have done in Sydney: I called the State Penitentiary. As luck would have it, the warden, Herman S. Solem, had ‘been in Sydney in ’44’, and he promptly granted my request to vis
it the next day to interview his most famous prisoner.
Means was notorious for many things, but his current claim to making history was that he was the only person in the US serving jail time for a crime—‘riot to obstruct justice’—that no longer existed on the statute books. (Means had claimed self-defence when he was charged for having fought back against a baton-wielding FBI agent, and within weeks of his conviction, the offence was removed from the statutes.) Not that that was seen as a reason to release him, nor to protect him while he was imprisoned. A few weeks before I met him, another inmate had stabbed him. Means was, I believed at the time, a political prisoner. His recent imprisonment was the result of continuing FBI harassment for his involvement in the siege at Wounded Knee where on 27 February 1973, Means had led the occupation and seizure of hostages at a white-owned store named Sioux Enterprises. Wounded Knee was a small town in South Dakota where in 1890, US cavalry troops massacred 350 members of the Lakota Sioux Nation, including its Chief Big Foot, an atrocity that is said to have ended the official resistance of American Indians to the occupation of their lands. The 1973 siege lasted more than two months and received massive media attention, which led to high-profile supporters and civil rights activists flying supplies into the besieged town. ‘The country is still good at ignoring Indians, but for a time Mr Means and the American Indian Movement punctured that invisibility,’ reported the New York Times in an obituary for Means four decades later. ‘By raising hell for 71 days in one of the most remote corners of the continent, on behalf of an abused and forgotten people, he and his allies captured the attention of the world.’2 In January 1974, when Means attended court in St Paul for what would ultimately be an unsuccessful prosecution for his role in the siege, he wore traditional clothes and was accompanied by the actor Marlon Brando. The previous year Brando had refused to attend the Academy Awards to accept his Best Actor Oscar for his performance in The Godfather. Instead, Sasheen Littlefeather walked onto the stage. She declined to accept the statue, saying Brando did not want it, then read part of a speech he had written for the occasion: ‘I would have been here tonight to speak to you directly, but I felt that perhaps I could be of better use if I went to Wounded Knee …’3 He then went on to attack Hollywood for being ‘as responsible as any for degrading the Indian and making a mockery of his character, describing his as savage, hostile and evil … When Indian children watch television, and they watch films, and when they see their race depicted as they are in films, their minds become injured in ways we can never know.’4