Working with the Media

The Australian women's peace camps did not exist in isolation. They were supported by the women's peace organizations in the different states and territories and by their much wider networks of supporters.²⁷ As noted already, it was from this base that other local actions were launched both at the time of the camps and in the intervening and following years.

Other creative ways in which their ideas and interests were circulated were through postcards, T-shirts, fliers, banners, brochures, and posters.³⁰ After Pine Gap, a booklet of photographs was produced, a photographic exhibition was organized, and a film was made at the Cockburn Sound peace camp to raise awareness of the protest activities. Public meetings were held in the lead-up to the camps.³¹ Support also came from prominent politicians, who were willing to speak in support of the women's peace movement, including in Parliament. For example, Kay Hallahan, Labor member of the Western Australian Legislative Council, provided assistance to WAND in the lead-up to the Cockburn Sound peace camp when P. H. Wells, a Liberal member, claimed that WAND was discriminatory in their activities by not providing information to male members of the parliament.

a group of women with a real concern about nuclear disarmament... putting out very good information and particularly drawing young women together in order to explore how we can move towards nuclear disarmament.³²

Clearly, then, the women peace activists were reaching out to networks beyond their traditional supporters, and they were attempting to inform the wider Australian community about their concerns about war and violence.

While their own networks and other allies attempted to take their mes­sage to a wider audience, the women's peace activists were also aware of the need to engage with the mainstream media.³³ At both peace camps (and within the state-based women's peace organizations) media collectives were established to promote and manage relationships with the media.³⁴ As described in the information kit provided to all participants at the Cockburn Sound camp, the media collective was “a buffer between the media and the camp” and (female) media representatives were to be allowed in to the camp only on certain days and only under escort. The media collective was responsible for maintaining communication with members of the media, including writing press releases, providing other information about the aims and activities of the camps, and nurturing relationships with sympathetic journalists. Consistent with the philosophy of collectives and in opposition to what was considered to be masculinist and hierarchically oriented politi­cal processes, consensus decision making was used and tasks were shared. Hence, the media collective was to be “responsive to the needs and feelings of the whole camp,” and spokeswomen were to change daily. Individuals could speak for themselves, but they were expected to make it clear that they were not speaking for the peace camp as a whole.³⁵ These processes were not without their difficulties, partly because of the large numbers of women involved (there were up to 1,000 women at each of the camps, although the media collectives were much smaller groups of around a dozen women), the time it took to discuss and come to decisions, and the varied knowledge and skills held by the activists, all issues not uncommon to other collectives.³⁶

The most controversial aspect of the relationship between the media and the peace activists was the latter's decision to allow only female journalists into the campsites.

The women-only nature of the camp did not simply raise the interest (and ire) of journalists.

With a great deal of trepidation this cowardly reporter donned her best gardening gear for an inside look at the Sound Peace Camp... So, with quaking heart, and visions of the lesbian element keeping guard, I pushed my way through the bushes for “come what may”... On one side is the strong lesbian element, butch hairstyles and boilersuits and on the other those who genuinely wanted a peaceful protest.⁴²

Instead of emphasizing the toughness of the women (characterized by butch lesbianism), an alternative view of the women-only nature of the peace camps focused on their helplessness. This approach provided ample opportunity for cartoonists to ridicule the camp participants with images playing on the women's implied powerlessness and weakness. In one cartoon published at the time of the Cockburn Sound camp, two women peace activists are depicted running away from a mouse while a burly man looks on. As they run, one woman asks the other: “Do you think it would com­promise our position if we asked him to defend us?”⁴³ This stereotyped form of femininity, requiring the aid of men to defend women's safety and well-being, was obviously being challenged by the mere existence of a women's peace camp. Here were groups of women protecting themselves (with the “lesbian guard”!) and also attempting to promote the protection of others not through means of war and violence but through peace. The camps further challenged ideas about women's location in society by pur­posefully situating themselves in public space in contrast to the typically feminine (and private) domain of the home. These women, instead of being “on the home front,” were occupying the “battle” ground, a space tradition­ally inhabited by men as warriors.

A further way that the women challenged stereotypical ideas of feminin­ity concerned their appearance. While the reporter quoted above was not alone in referring to the hairstyles and clothes of some of the women (“butch hairstyles and boilersuits”), others also made references to their lack of cleanliness and the unhygienic conditions under which they were living, conditions deemed to be most unladylike. For example, the Cockburn Sound camp was described as “a grubby little event,” and it was suggested that its participants should at least look “as if they bathed once in a while.”⁴⁴ Despite the difficult living conditions, the media expected that the women, principally because they were women, should maintain acceptable levels of feminine hygiene and cleanliness.

By challenging stereotypes about the ways that women should live their lives, the peace activists created what Barbara Brook has called “enormous crises of interpretation,” and these were further evident in other portrayals of the women.⁴⁵ The media gave considerable attention to the perceived reasons for women's involvement in peace activism, often in polemical terms. While less stereotypically feminine women were highlighted from very early on, there was also a focus on women who were deemed to be promoting more maternalist goals. Some journalists glorified individual women activists by making reference to their maternal status, including a woman who was identified as a “grandmother” and another who was described as breastfeeding at the time of her interview. In stark contrast, the media also made much of women, particularly “aggressive young women,” who were more “like screaming savages” and had, at least in the eyes of the reporters involved, lost all their “natural” female, let alone maternal, sensitivities.⁴⁶ Such references purposely demeaned the women but were not unique to Australian representations of women's peace movements.

However, even when journalists depicted the women activists as “mater- nalist” peace activists (“those who genuinely wanted a peaceful protest”), they typically did not take them seriously. The press seemed surprised to discover that they were not just going to sit around discussing the nuclear risks to their children and grandchildren for the duration of the camps. They (like the “screaming savages” and the “aggressive young women”) were also there to take action, and those actions included making forceful state­ments about the risk of nuclear war and the wider social environment in which it took place. Moreover, these statements were accompanied by activities that were considered “unfeminine” and, at times, illegal or, worse still, contradictory: how could these women profess to be peace activists when they used “violence” to seek peace? Not surprisingly, what was con­sidered “violent” was another source of tension between the peace activists and the press, and indeed, among the wider public.⁴⁸

In terms of how the Australian media presented them, the greatest con­demnations were reserved for the activities of the women that violated the military bases, and particularly their fences, near the peace camps. Margaret Laware, in her analysis of protest actions at Greenham Common, notes the use of strategies of subversion to destabilize the fence surrounding the mili­tary base there and, in doing so, to “undermine its symbolic significance as a marker of military space.”⁴⁹ The most obvious subversive use of the barrier was to remove it by cutting it and going through it or by climbing over it, in acts that Laware has named “reclamations.” She argues that these strate­gies appropriated the fence and impacted on the authority and power of the military base.⁵⁰ Through “violating” such fences, the women activists, both at Greenham Common and at the Australian peace camps, highlighted the existence of the military bases (and the functions of the enclosed mili­tary space) and, perhaps more importantly, disrupted (if not corrupted) the significance of these places and spaces. The peace activists decorated the fences with ribbons, banners and placards and graffitied the adjoining road with peace and antiviolence slogans, appropriating them for their antiwar purposes. They made explicit reference to their reasons for doing so: “We women at Cockburn focus on the gate as symbolic of militaristic barriers. We accept our responsibility to act against the injustice, the immorality, the affront to humanity represented by these barriers.”⁵¹ Moreover, the presence of hundreds of women conducting their daily lives as well as protesting by singing, engaging in street theater, and dancing within close proximity offered a visual tribute to the “reclamation.”

The press, however, did not see such actions as “reclamations.” Instead, typically, they saw them as acts of violence, which resulted in them ques­tioning the legitimacy of the women's protest. Over the course of the peace camps, sympathy in the media for the women's positions declined. Alternatively, having identified that some of the women were peace-loving mothers and grandmothers, who would not compromise their pacifist prin­ciples by participating in “violent” protests, when “violent” protests did occur, some journalists (erroneously) concluded that that there must be divi­sions in the camps. This led to newspaper reports suggesting that women were leaving the camps in large numbers because they were dissatisfied with the choices made by their activist colleagues.⁵²

The media further questioned the peace activists' motivations and undermined their validity by alluding to the possibility that the women were Soviet stooges. For example, Michael Barnard in the Northern Territory News stated that Women for Survival had “labyrinthine links” with “hard- Left groups and individuals” including “a number of communist-led unions” and “outright Soviet-policy apologists such as the Australian Peace Committee.”⁵³ In the Centralian Advocate, Bernie Kilgariff, Northern Territory Senator, in discussing the Pine Gap camp, was reported as sug­gesting that the funding for the “so-called peace movement” was linked to Soviet sources.⁵⁴ While most reporting did not overtly make such links, letters to the editor made these claims, especially in the newspapers local to the two peace camps in the Northern Territory and Western Australia. For example, a “grandmother of five and great grandmother of one,” a resident of Safety Bay, a suburb adjacent to the site of the Cockburn Sound camp,

wrote to the Daily News that “she was born in England in the Great War, married and had my children in the World War, and I’d rather die in the next war than live under communist rule.”⁵⁵ Another letter-writer, “a peace­ful mother of three,” a resident of a northern suburb of Perth, asked: “Does the women’s movement have a date yet for their camp in Moscow?”⁵⁶ In effect, the implications were that the women were untrustworthy or, at the very least, naive.⁵⁷ Worse still, they could be agents of the “enemy” in the Cold War, reflecting wider attitudes that the women were mindless and could be duped by others. In making these links between the peace activists and the USSR, the women were treated as enemies that could be complicit in initiating a war led by the USSR, and thus, the peace activists were placed in the position of being at war against their fellow Australians. This obviously turned the real reason behind the peace camps on its head and justified all manner of condemnation.

At both Cockburn Sound and Pine Gap, the local papers were the most virulent in their criticism of the peace activists, which was strongly reflected in the letters to the editor written by members of the local com­munity. This is perhaps not surprising given that the local economies relied heavily on the continuation of those very things about which the peace activists were protesting. The Pine Gap base provided employment to Alice Springs’ residents and contributed to its economy through the supplying of the base and its staff. The U.S. Navy was calculated to contribute in the order of $14 million per annum to the Western Australian economy at the time.⁵⁸ Moreover, both camps were held in small, isolated communi­ties that were unfamiliar with peace activism or the activities of the women’s movement, and this, too, could have added to local distaste for the camps.

Of course, while all such negative press was disappointing from the point of view of the women at the peace camps, the “chief paradox” of their situ­ation was, as noted by Julie Emberley and Donna Lan drey in relation to Greenham Common, that “the media are crucial to the camp’s effectiveness in consciousness raising on a mass scale yet remain its worst enemies.”⁵⁹ Without press coverage, the peace activists’ messages could not circulate and the camps would have been a failure. To this end, the peace camps staged numerous events to take advantage of the media attention they were receiv­ing. While there may have been a generalized view among the peace activists that “the media are far from neutral bystanders... they may not work directly for the ruling class [but] they certainly do not work for social move­ments,”⁶⁰ it did not prevent them attempting to work with the media to get their messages across. Indeed, there may have been much greater success in doing this than realized at the time.