Ann Genovese

Unravelling Identities: Performance and Criticism in Australian Feminisms

The following article is an exploration of the non-linear and non-unified identities that make up Australian feminism. The main premise is that the divergent strands of rational and romantic thought, central to the project of liberalism, are inherent in the characterization of Australian feminisms. As a result, there have always been tensions between feminists, centred around politics of self-identification. These tensions continue to exist, but to be articulated in different ways in different decades as a result of the ever changing relationships between feminist, state and media/public discourses. These ideas are explored through comparing two key moments in our recent past in which differences between feminisms were declared. These two events - the Mary Daly visit to Australia to promote Gyn/Ecology in 1981, and the debate engendered by Helen Garners The First Stone in 1995 - are taken to be performative metaphors through which the continuities and discontinuities of the nature of Australian feminisms can be subjectively explored.

Metaphor of Redemption, Myths of State: Historical Accountability in Luhrmann's 'Australia' and Trevorrow v 'South Australia'

The current revisioning of the nation-state in terms of questioning accountability for violence committed against Indigenous Australians was opened up by a shift in Australian historical scholarship that began to argue nation-building was inseparable from genocidal intent. This historiography has been part of a wider post-imperial turn that has refused nostalgia in order to understand how race was constructed as part of the imperial mission, and continues to refract and reiterate upon colony and metropole alike. This historiography has helped show how myths about the Australian state inform an Australian national consciousness, and has centralised the disruption of those myths, as well as the disruption of the idea that the political community was removed from any past practices of ‘the state’. Such historiography suggests a story of the state in which the narratives of coloniser and colonised are mutually constitutive, and in which the colonisers are asked to take accountability for the hurt of those who suffered, and continue to suffer, because of the policies of child removal in the past. The public debate that emerged in response to that historiography has been both responsive and resistant. I want to reflect on that historiography, how it emerged, how it operates in film and in law as important sites of public reckoning about race, and what that suggests for a nation-state caught between a denial of, as well as a desire for, redemption from its past shame.

Family histories - John Hirst v. feminism, in the Family Court of Australia

I am a child of the 1970s. I grew up in Adelaide in the Dunstan decade. My earliest political recollection is of my parents discussing the dismissal of Whitlam in 1975. I believed university education was my right (as it had not been for my parents). I started university the year before university fees were reintroduced. I am part of a peculiar, and now I realise, very fleeting, generation that thought debates about social equality and the role of the state were status quo, that equality was a central tenet of legislative programs. Most importantly, I was part of that generation of feminists who were taught by those who had fought many of these campaigns in the 1970s and early 1980s. I reaped the benefits of the inclusion of diverse strands of feminist ideas and debates about equality, and difference, in identifiable courses that were still called ‘women’s studies’. I understand, because of this peculiarity about my education and my age, that I have garnered an expectation of the integration of feminist ideas and campaigns with state reform. Yet now, in my 30s, living in an entirely different political moment, I understand properly that these products of a particular brand of liberalism should not necessarily be so. They are real, but mutable. They are the products of liberal feminist, and socialreformist, ideas of the 1970s and 1980s about how to argue for formal and substantive equality measures for women, from the law, and also from the state. These measures were wide ranging, and designed to be inclusive of the different experiences of Australian women, and were caught under various policy banners of affordable childcare, access to education, job training and equal pay, protection of the person against violence, discrimination and harassment. They were enabled, therefore, by the collision of an invigorated feminist praxis and a particular economic and welfarist understanding of the role of the Australian social-liberal state as responsible for realising equal opportunity for classes of its citizens. The ability to see this collision in context has come with time, as three decades on we can compare the gains and ideas of this period with the moment we currently inhabit. As such, the outcomes of feminist engagement with the state during the recent past*the 1970s and 1980s*must begin to be assessed and contemplated through the lens of history. Time has allowed a new perspective, a purview focused not on minutiae of detail but on shifts in discourses: about the state’s role in protecting its citizens; about ideas of what equality can mean; and about the nature of feminism itself. We must begin, in other words, to historicise consciously the changes we experience and inhabit. We need to place emphasis, as Joan Scott has famously exhorted, on ‘how’ questions, questions which suggest:

Nineteen eighty three: A jurisographic report on Commonwealth v Tasmania

The question we ask in this essay is quite direct: did the Tasmanian Dams case change the conduct of jurisprudence in Australia? To reflect on that question, we stand to the side of the review of the events of 1983 as constitutional decision, and present the jurisprudence of Dams and 1983 in terms of the incidents of legal thinking in the conduct of the office of the jurisprudent. Writing as jurisographers, we reflect historically on the conduct of office of the jurist and jurisprudent, and the writing of jurisprudence. Our account here provides a brief chronicle and record of the patchwork of law projects and engagements that pattern the events of Dams into the scholarly work of jurists in Australian universities.

On Australian feminist tradition: three notes on conduct, inheritance and the relations of historiography and jurisprudence

This essay is a meditation on how Australian feminists inherit traditions of practice, and how they have reimagined disciplinary personae. I focus on Ann Curthoys as an exemplar, and her contributions to the creation of a field of feminist history. In particular, I draw out how Ann Curthoys has placed the conduct of relations with others, and how those relations might be experienced in time and place, at the centre of her history writing. I emphasise that this has been accomplished through interlocution, with those whom she read (such as Simone De Beauvoir), as well as with those whom she worked alongside to invent feminist disciplinary personae adequate to address the specificity of Australian conditions from the 1970s onwards. I argue that the inheritance of this Australian feminist tradition involves being trained to articulate and reimagine ones own practices, in order to write and show the conditions of ones own time and place. I reflect on this training, to offer a description of my own practices as a feminist historian of jurisprudence.

Inheriting and Inhabiting the Pleasures and Duties of Our Own Existence: The Second Sex and Feminist Jurisprudence

Abstract This essay considers the relation between the conduct and the personae of the feminist, the historian and the jurisprudent; and, the writing of history and of jurisprudence. It does so treating part of the relation between historiography and jurisprudence as engaged as an art of selffashioning, in the preparation for an ‘institutionalised social office’. The immediate purpose of this essay is to show how these arts of self fashioning came to be inherited by Australian feminism. In doing so, I will assert the centrality of Simone De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex in that tradition. I suggest that acknowledging this practice and its inheritance is important when considering how we might live productively the plurality of institutional life and the life lived – in law, and for our present.

Critical decision 1983: remembering Commonwealth v Tasmania

This special edition of Griffith Law Review began its life as a symposium to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the 1983 High Court decision Commonwealth v Tasmania. All anniversaries are occasions to reflect upon events. They offer a form of ceremony that includes the opportunity for participants and witnesses, and inheritors and custodians of the event’s legacies, to tell stories to a gathered audience. The activity of staging a ceremony to commemorate significant constitutional cases is to understand and address them not only as judgment, but also as a contested hearing that shaped and was shaped by the relationships between a polis and its law – as a public trial. The ceremony for commemorating and addressing the Tasmanian Dam’s case as a public trial was staged at Melbourne Law School on 28 June 2013. It followed the symposium held in May 2012 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Koowarta v Bjelke-Petersen. In my introduction to the special edition of Griffith Law Review drawn from the Koowarta symposium, ‘Critical Decision: 1982’, I noted that gathering together to show a decision as a public trial – as we also do hereinvolves two activities. The first is about record keeping. The following papers collect records of Tasmanian Dam’s as an event of public law and public participation, some of which were available at the time and open to review, and others created for the symposium, available only as a consequence of distance and reflection. By drawing these different sets of records of Tasmanian Dam’s together, this edition of Griffith Law Review gives form and meaning to the events of 1983 as a project of 1983. In doing so, ‘Critical Decision: 1983’ also acts as a record of our own time, and understands its purpose is to review, refresh, and publicise the judgment in the Tasmanian Dam’s case as of critical importance to accounts of Australia since the 1980s, and to make the law and its institutions central to those accounts. This combined task of record and review is a conventional practice for historians, and yet remains a tentative activity in the legal academy, particularly for

Australian Communist Party of Australia v The Commonwealth: Histories of Australian Legalism

Abstract In this article I structure legalism as a device to interpret how 1951 is remembered in law, in order to show what legal orthodoxies meant in their own time, and how that shifts to a different form of legalism in our own. In doing so, I will argue that the idea of legalism famously produced by the High Court judgment in 1951 has shifted its meaning as much as the ideological support of and opposition to communism that were expressed in the case. I will suggest that this history requires conscious incorporation in the commemorative narratives of ‘democracy vs. communism’.

On The Liberal Promise: A Conversation

Margaret Thorntons The Liberal Promise was published in 1990.1 In this interview, conducted at the ANU College of Law on 3 February 2015, Margaret Thornton discusses with Ann Genovese three broad, and interrelated, questions. One is the achievement of The Liberal Promise, the conditions of its production and publication and Margarets experience as a feminist scholar through that process. Another is how the book contributes and speaks to an Australian feminist jurisprudence. The third concerns the difficulties of addressing the obligations of our own recent feminist past — when it is so close, yet also difficult to see and hard to record.

Occasions and Events: Australian Feminist Jurisprudence at 25

) In 1990, three significant feminist texts of jurisprudence were published in Australia: Margaret Thornton’s The Liberal Promise, Reg Graycar and Jenny Morgan’s The Hidden Gender of Law and Ngaire Naffine’s Law and the Sexes. The Australian Feminist Law Journal (AFLJ), because of its institutional role, presents here for our readership a collaborative reflection on these books, on the occasion of their 25th anniversaries. The Liberal Promise, The Hidden Gender of Law and Law and the Sexes, at the time of their publication, were not in direct conversation with each other. The circumstances of law school life in 1990 required feminist legal scholars to devote energy to the creation, and maintenance, of spaces within their own institutions in order to imagine and teach feminist projects. Yet, what Thornton, Graycar and Morgan and Naffine brought to their own writing tasks was nevertheless shared: as a matter of transnational feminist intellectual exchange specific to the 1980s, and as a matter of the experience of feminist activism that was distinctly Australian. Thornton, Graycar and Morgan and Naffine each worked within those feminist traditions to write books that showed, in different ways, how law’s internal presumptions created subjects of law that were inherently gendered. To make visible what those subjects of law looked like, and to publicise how law’s own traditions created differential and gendered experiences of Anglo-Australian law as a matter of doctrine and theory, was an incredible achievement. Separately, and together, these texts showed many of us who were training to be feminist legal thinkers in the 1990s, and many others since then, that there was such a thing as an Australian feminist jurisprudence, and that it was a field of scholarship that was rigorous and politically implicated in institutional transformation. In this way, these three books form a shared past that is carried, as a practice of reading, into the present. What is offered here in AFLJ, in this special section ‘Occasions and Events’, is a record of inheritance about what we teach and learn, and how we do so in a place. Yet, it is also offered as a live and ongoing conversation about what we, as an Australian feminist legal community, imagine for ourselves through our intellectual relationships, institutional belongings and friendships. In this spirit, what follows are