CART (2)Memorial Service for Faith Bandler
Great Hall Sydney University
24/02/2015
Friends of Faith
I am going to talk today about Faith and feminism.
I am going to pay tribute today to a part of Faith Bandler’s life that is not as widely known as the many other things for which she is rightly famous and for which she is remembered and honoured.
Fighting for women’s rights was a constant in Faith’s political life.
And, as with almost everything she did, Faith’s feminism was very focused and very political.
However else she defined herself, and whatever other causes she adopted – and of course there were very many over her long life – Faith’s feminism was intrinsic to who she was.
Even when other people overlooked this – or were totally unaware of it.
There were times in her life – some of them difficult times – when being a woman became her primary definition of her identity and her self.
And, as with many of us, for Faith being a woman and being a feminist were synonymous.
Faith had the standard 70s feminist bookshelf: Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, the Doris Lessing novels, my own book and – perhaps most important of all – Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.
This 1963 work was one of those landmark, breakthrough books. After you’d read it, the world was never the same. For many women, it was a life-changing work.
It seems to have been so for Faith.
She and a group of friends would meet together every week to talk about a different chapter of the book.
Faith’s copy of The Feminine Mystique “was underlined and things [were] written in the margins and it was very well read from cover to cover,” her daughter Lilon told me. “Not really like her at all”.
Faith was of a generation who considered it permissible to write one’s name on the title page or frontispiece of a book – and in Faith’s case, to note “Read” once she had completed it.
But that was all.
“She rarely wrote IN them,” Lilon told me.
So this book meant a lot to Faith.
I had the opportunity late in Betty Friedan’s life to ask her, looking back, how she defined herself.:
First I am an American, she told me.
Second I am a Jew
And, third, I am woman.
I DO NOT presume to know how Faith Bandler would have answered that same question.
I think it is very likely that she would have thought of herself in terms of her nationality, her race and her gender. Whether she would have put them in the same order as Betty Friedan, I cannot say.
But I think what I can say is that for Faith her race and her gender (or, as we used to call it, her sex) were inevitably inextricably intertwined.
WHEN we think about the life of Faith Bandler we should remember this:
She was the daughter of a slave, who married a Holocaust survivor.
She might have lived on the North Shore and shopped at David Jones but she was intimately aware, from the experiences of those close to her, of the terrible episodes of kidnapping and genocide that are part of our recent past.
Faith was also a woman of colour, living in Australia, who was neither Aboriginal nor a Torres Strait Islander.
Her colour, combined with her politics, made her a person of interest to Australia’s domestic intelligence agency.
ASIO started its five-volume file on the young Faith Mussing in 1950, initially because of her involvement in the Peace Movement, and would continue to have her under surveillance until 1977.
In the beginning, ASIO could not figure out if Faith was “Aboriginal” or “a negress”.
In July 1950, a memo to the Director advised “the young lady who spoke at the meeting and who I described as a negress is FAITH MUSSING.” There is a hand-written annotation: “She is not a negress but a Polynesian, a very different thing”.
A few weeks later, another memo quotes “Electoral particulars” which state that she was born in Murwillumbah “so there is some doubt as to her being of the Polynesian type, unless” – the writer of the memo mused – “she was born there of Polynesian parents and lived in that area for some time”.
It is noted on another page that Mussing’s parents had worked for “Mr Anthony MHR”.
Perhaps this connection deterred ASIO for a time.
After all, Larry Anthony was the famous Country Party patriarch, whose son Doug and grandson Larry went onto hold his federal seat in parliament, thereby establishing one of Australia’s pre-eminent political dynasties.
But in 1952 the racial commentary resumes, with Faith described in another ASIO memo as “not a full-blooded white”.
Then, in a report on Australians attending a Youth Festival in Berlin in 1951, Faith Mussing is described as “partly Polynesian and partly Indian and it is possible that one of the grandparents was a Kanaka”.
“She is aged 34 but looks younger,” writes an ASIO commentator, “and it is considered that the colour of her skin caused her to swing towards the peace movement”.
ASIO was right about that.
The colour of Faith’s skin was a major factor in radicalising her.
If you have been discriminated against, ostracised, marginalised and in all sorts of ways been treated differently because of your skin colour, in all likelihood you are going to want to change the world that treats people of colour that way.
Similarly, if you have been discriminated against, patronised, paid less and in all sorts of ways treated differently because of your gender.
If you have experienced both, you are a powerfully motivated person.
And Faith Mussing indeed experienced both when she and her sister, Kate, joined the Women’s Land Army in 1942 as replacement labour for the men who had enlisted in the war.
Along with the other young women, they were sent to work on farms in New South Wales. Faith later commented how, as women, they had been exploited, being paid less than men and receiving no additional benefits after three years of service.
She also noted that the Aboriginal workers – women and men – were paid less than she and the other young women were.
“I found myself thinking about the Aborigines, for some reason or another,” she wrote many years later.
Faith Bandler’s triumph in the 1967 referendum and her active involvement in a number of Aboriginal organisations led many Australians to assume that she was Aboriginal.
In fact, as Aboriginal politics became more radical, in the 1970s, non-Aboriginals were excluded from organisations that had once welcomed members who were white as well as those who dark skin came from other ancestries.
In 1975 Faith made a submission to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships on the discrimination and exclusion suffered by South Sea Islanders. She used as an example the exclusion of people like herself from the newly formed National Aboriginal Consultative Council.
She “felt her exclusion from the Committee keenly,” wrote Marilyn Lake in her authorised biography of Faith.
It was at about this time, in the early 1970s, that Faith became active in the emerging radical women’s movement.
Earlier she had been a member of the Union of Australian Women (the UAW), a left-wing organisation formed in 1950 that had directed its energies to working-class women’s needs and had campaigned on national and international issues, including Aboriginal rights and anti-apartheid.
It was also the organisation that kept celebrations of International Women’s Day alive in the years before that became, first, a feminist and then, today, a mainstream celebration of women.
The UAW, for all its important work, seemed decidedly stodgy when women’s liberation arrived.
The focus on personal emancipation combined with an aggressive pursuit of rights to abortion, contraception and other confronting issues was liberating and energising for many women in the early 1970s.
In 1972 the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) was formed. It was the more moderate sister to Women’s Liberation, set up to campaign for more immediately achievable goals (or so we thought) such as equality in education and pay, child care services and – bottom line issue – safe and legal abortion.
Faith Bandler was an early joiner of WEL.
She was in her mid-50s, a good generation older than the majority of WEL members who were in their 20s.
Though not all of them. A few were even older than she was. Faith became fast friends with Edna Ryan, then in her late 70s, a veteran feminist and trade unionist. She had as peers women like Joan Bielksi and Dorothy Symonds who were closer to her in age.
One of the things about WEL was its easy embrace of women of all ages and backgrounds and Faith felt right at home.
Faith was also on the board of Sisters, a feminist publishing company in Melbourne and on the board of The Women’s College at the University of Sydney.
In 1984 she was one of four women who took part in a televised debate on the subject of “Different Concepts of Women’s Liberation” at the London Book Fair.
Faith’s feminism was broad, encompassing involvement in many issues she cared about it. And it was long-lasting. It was part of who she was.
Until two years ago, Faith had never missed the annual lunch started in 1989, and held each year in the NSW Parliament House, to honour Jessie Street.
Faith had learned about politics from two experts, both of them women.
Pearl Gibbs was one. The other was Jessie Street.
Pearl Gibbs was an Aboriginal woman who is best remembered for being the driving force behind the National Day of Mourning, on 26 January, 1938 – the sesqui-centenary of Governor Phillip’s landing.
In the mid-1950s she encouraged the young Faith Mussing into active Aboriginal politics.
Jessie Street, the famous feminist, was another who saw the potential in Faith and who became her active mentor.
We hear a lot about Faith’s relationship with Jessie Street.
We know of course of Jessie Street’s famous admonition to Faith to “just go and do it” – telling her to get the 1967 referendum up and running and passed.
Which, of course, she did.
Faith always acknowledged Jessie’s astute political skills. Jessie knew how to organise. And this was a skill she passed on to her young mentee who in turn educated a generation of young women and Aboriginal people on how to make things happen.
“My enduring memory of Faith from early WEL days was how wise and seasoned she was,” WEL member Helen L’Orange told me last weekend. “We were rather naïve activists and she gave us very sound advice about how we should run campaigns, approach pollies and so on”.
But Faith also learned something else from Jessie Street: and that was the importance of women having a political voice.
Jessie was of course the only woman member of Australia’s delegation to the conference in San Francisco in 1945 that established the United Nations.
Only one per cent of the delegates to the conference were women, women were not allowed to speak during the plenaries and no women were involved in the policy-making sessions of the conference.
Despite these hurdles, Jessie Street and the other women delegates succeeded in ensuring that sex discrimination was outlawed in the United Nations Charter (and so we can thank her for Australia’s Sex Discrimination Act many decades later), and that women would be eligible for all jobs at the UN.
This example of working from a position of disadvantage was not lost on Faith.
FAITH has always been characterised as “a gentle activist” – indeed that is the title of Marilyn Lake’s 2002 biography of her – but Wendy McCarthy remembers her from the early days of WEL as “passionate and feisty”.
Faith could be angry, and she has written of her bitterness about how hard it was to gain political recognition and understanding for South Sea Islanders.
That campaign ran parallel to her work for women. In some cases, her women’s work intersected with her work with women of colour.
Faith was active in WEL’s campaign for abortion law reform in the 1970s and she was especially concerned that Aboriginal women would have access to safe legal terminations. In the 1980s she gave support to Aboriginal women’s health centres.
Above all, Faith the feminist was an activist who understood politics.
She knew how to campaign and she knew how to win.
And she knew that she – and we – had to be there if we were going to make things happen.
As Faith said in her memorable 1999 speech, Faith, Hope and Reconciliation:
“If not now, when?
If not us, who?”