In the early 1980s, the Australian women's peace movement staged two major protests: in 1983,

the Pine Gap Women's Peace Camp, held in central Australia, highlighted the presence of the United States Pine Gap military base near Alice Springs, and in 1984, the Sound Women's Peace Camp, held south of Perth, Western Australia, focused on visits by U.S.

As the historians Marilyn Lake and Joy Damousi have argued in their accounts of Australia at war and Australians' resistance to war, women have been “confirmed in their position of marginality,” unlike men, who “whether as combatants in overseas wars or as anti-war activists... were the pre-eminent subjects of history.”¹ Indeed, Australia's national history is built around (male) participation in war, with Australia’s record in World War I heralded as “the birthplace of the nation.”² Women’s involvement as noncombatants, on the other hand, has typically been understood in terms of passivity, powerlessness, and weakness. The Australian women’s peace camps of the 1980s (and, indeed, other expressions of women’s peace activ­ism across the twentieth century) challenged these perceptions and added an important gendered dimension to Australian understandings of war.

Given the importance of masculine involvement in war and warrior culture to Australia’s national identity, it is perhaps unsurprising that wom­en’s peace activism has not been a strong area of Australian scholarship. Malcolm Saunders and Ralph Summy provide a historical overview of the Australian peace movement from the Boer War until the early 1980s and make mention of the women’s peace movement contributions over that time but with little attention paid to the latter period.³ Early twentieth­century women peace activists received some attention in the literature, including that by Joy Damousi, who has written on socialist women’s oppo­sition to war,⁴ and others, such as Marilyn Lake and Judith Smart, who have documented the work of feminist peace organizations during World War I.⁵ Consideration has also been given to Communist women’s involve­ment in antimilitarism and to “banning the bomb” after World War II.⁶ The Vietnam War was to be the next rallying point for women’s peace activism, and Australian scholars, including Ann Curthoys, Barry Young, and Siobhan McHugh, have documented women’s involvement in opposing conscription as well as the war itself.⁷ Through their radicalization and subsequent involvement in women’s liberation, this conflict, more than any other, has contributed to shifts in the understanding of gender in Australia.⁸ Verity Burgmann and Brendan Cairns have discussed the wider nuclear disarmament movement of the 1980s of which the women’s peace camps discussed here were a part.⁹ Others have discussed aspects of the women’s peace movement, including the nature of their activities and their goals,¹⁰ but how their efforts contributed to wider understandings of gender and war have yet to be fully addressed.

To make sense of the antiwar activism undertaken at the Australian women’s peace camps and to see how it has contributed to awareness of noncombatants’ experiences of war, I turn to media reports and other press commentary.

The relationship between the women and the media seemed, at the time, largely characterized by, at best, ambivalence and, more often, antagonism, reflecting to some extent particular views about women in Australian soci­ety. This was not totally unexpected because the women activists at Pine Gap and Cockburn Sound were aware that their predecessors had experi­enced similar ridicule, abuse, and attacks from those who did not agree with their points of view.¹² However, in this chapter, I argue that while many of the portrayals marginalized the peace activists and trivialized their activities, there were also several reports that took the women seriously and pointed to the strength and subversive power that they were wielding through their protests. In effect, I suggest that the “mixed messages” presented about the peace activists were part of a wider shift in the ways in which women were being understood in Australian society in the 1980s. Hence, I reveal not only the nature of the women's peace activism, their position as noncom­batants, but also how media portrayals of them and their activities reflected and informed wider Australian understandings of gender.