The Roughest Day: An Australian Story

By Caroline Delahunt

Australia mid way through the century. Lesbians are unaware, or living in secret, or targets for derision or persecution. But the world outside is changing, and the world inside Australia is starting to catch up. This is one Australian lesbian's story of her unique (or perhaps in some ways typical) journey from the 1960s to 2017, set against the

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hilliard Hudson
• Release date: Feb 10, 2021
• ISBN: 9780995356863

Caroline Delahunt

Caroline Delahunt is one of the pen names of Helen Menzies, who is a writer, editor and writing tutor. She lives in a storybook village on the idyllic Central Coast of New South Wales - think dogs, chooks, kookaburras, a boat, an inland waterway in front, a national park and the ocean behind. Before moving there Helen's long writing career included being Rupert Murdoch's first female sports reporter. Since moving from Sydney she has written a memoir, a trilogy of young adult books set in the 1950s, and has edited two major collections of short stories written by members of her twice-yearly Life Writing courses. Her most recent books, The Body in the Bridge, and The Roughest Day, are available as both print and ebooks.

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The Roughest Day

title

Published by Hilliard Hudson

helenmenzies.com.au

First published 2020

© 2020 Caroline Delahunt

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright restricted above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

i1

ISBN 978-0-9953568-6-3 (eBook)

Designed and typeset by Helen Christie, Blue Wren Books 

Front cover illustration by VectorCreator, shutterstock.com 

Back cover illustration by Judy Ferguson 

Printed and bound in Australia by DB Bookbinders

Come what come may, time and the hour runs through the roughest day.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

DISCLAIMER:

Most of the names in The Roughest Day have been changed, so people are at liberty to tell their own stories, or to tell the same story in their own way.

Jill Johnston

All women are lesbians except those who don’t know it yet.

Gustave Aimard

There is something more powerful than bayonets. It is the idea whose time has come and the hour sounded.

T.S. Eliot

The end of all exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.

Sheila Rowbotham

The oppressed without hope are mysteriously quiet. When the conception of change is beyond the limits of the possible, there are no words to articulate discontent so it is sometimes held not to exist. This mistaken belief arises because we can only grasp silence in the moment in which it is breaking. The sound of silence breaking makes us understand what we could not hear before.

Contents

Pre 1960s

Call Me Tom

1960s

School Days

At 17 …

BYO

On Sickness

Alan

Collateral Damage

Straight Talking

A Small Step a Giant Leap

1970s

Coming Home

Alea Iacta Est

International Women’s Day 1976

The March of the Women

1980s

The Power of the Press

How it all began

The View from the Hill

Way to Go

The Answer’s in the Stars

Faith/Love

Slipping Away

Morning has Broken

Five Year Plan

1990s

Oxford Dreaming

Bloody Old Fool

Illumination

2000s

At 42

For Bronwyn

Great Tom

Pip

2010s

Gains and Losses

Farewell the Hurly Burly

It was an iconic feminist slogan in the 20th century: The Personal is Political.

But …

In practice, the personal and the political were two trains, running on parallel tracks, but at different speeds. Sometimes one or the other dragged behind, sometimes one or the other shot ahead.

Take this case in point: It’s Australia, it’s mid way through the century, and lesbians are unaware, or living in secret, or targets for derision or persecution. But the world outside Australia is changing, and the world inside Australia is starting to catch up.

This is one Australian lesbian’s story of her unique (or perhaps in some ways typical) journey from the 1960s to 2017, set against the social revolution that swept across much (though not all) of the world.

An Australian Story.

On being lesbian.

The Political:

---

Pre-Colonial Australia

There is no written record of lesbianism in Australian indigenous societies. What this demonstrates is a lack of written records, not a lack of lesbians.

Colonial Australia

Early laws in Colonial Australia — 1788 onwards — were based on the then-current laws in Britain. Lesbianism was never illegal in Britain or its colonies. The story that Queen Victoria excluded lesbians from anti-homosexuality laws because she didn’t believe there were such females is apparently a myth. The laws at that time did not pass Parliament and so were never presented to her for Royal assent.

Pre 1960s

The lesbian rights movement did not get organised in Australia until the 1960s. International events provided the background:

1928: Jonathan Cape published Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and then suppressed it after being threatened with criminal proceed­ings. The Home Secretary declared the book gravely detrimental. It was certainly gravely detrimental to generations of lesbians (it was the only publicly known novel about lesbianism) who were shown that they could only end unhappily.

1952: The American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual listed homosexuality as a sociopathic personality disturbance. This was not removed until 1973 — two months after the Australian Medical Association had done the same.

1955: Daughters of Bilitis founded in San Francisco — the first national lesbian political and social organisation in the USA.

1956: The United Kingdom Sexual Offences Act defined what it called sexual assaults between women as a criminal offence.

An Australian Story.

On Being Lesbian

The Personal:

---

CALL ME TOM

1956 it must have been. Rita Osgood from the other side of Short Street and I were avidly following the lead-up to Grace Kelly’s wedding to Prince Rainier in our mums’ copies of the Women’s Weekly. We were 11 years old. We were best friends, and I was a member — an honorary boy — in Rita’s brother Icky’s bike gang.

One afternoon as the gang was riding round the streets of Summer Hill throwing stones at Patty Munday and the other Catholic kids on their way home from school, a motor bike roared up to us. The rider, in full leathers, swaggered up, tore off her helmet and said: My name’s Elaine but you can call me Tom.

Two days later when my mother and I were walking down Station Street the motor bike went racketing past, nearly running us down, and I said to my mother: Her name’s Elaine but you can call her Tom. My mother said: Hmmmm.

The very next day my mother enrolled my brother and me in Frank Guthrie’s swimming squad at Enfield Pool. From then on we trained before and after school, which meant the end of Icky Osgood’s bike gang for me, though it didn’t stop me becoming a lesbian.

1960s

1963: The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan — explored the causes of frustrations of modern women in traditional roles.

1967: 40 police broke up a Lesbian and Gay Ball in Brisbane, Queensland. Found nothing to charge anyone with, but took down the names and addresses of all 170 people present.

1968: The first homosexual rights group in Australia — the Homosexual Law Reform Society — was formed in Canberra, in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT).

1968: The Adelaide Women’s Liberation Movement began at the University of Adelaide in South Australia — Anne Summers was one of the founders. The first protest was against the Miss Fresher concept, a beauty competition for first year female students.

1969, 28 June: Police raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York. The Stonewall Riots, in response to the raid, were a series of spontaneous violent demonstrations by gay men and lesbians. They were the single most important event leading to the gay liberation movement.

1969: In Melbourne, Glen Tomasetti adapted an old union song into Don’t Be Too Polite Girls, to support the case for equal pay being heard in the High Court. It was picked up nation-wide and became a rollicking feminist anthem:

Don’t be too polite girls, don’t be too polite

Show a little fight girls, show a little fight

Don’t be fearful of offending in case you get the sack

Just recognise your value and we won’t look back.

All among the bull girls, all among the bull

Keep your hearts full girls, keep your hearts full

What good is a man as a doormat or following close at heel

It’s not their balls we’re after, it’s a fair square deal.

SCHOOL DAYS

My head is cradled on my right arm. Young blades of grass juicy with spring tickle my cheek. The curve Inside my elbow has the biscuit smell of clean sweat dried by the sun. I’m panting at first. I’ve thrown myself down after running running running to explode my joy onto the world, to show it, to shout to the gods that after all these years I’ve found it, and to expel enough of it from my veins to make possible the ordinary business of living. I close my eyes. I feel the tug of my muscles, the long lean length of me, my gasps pushing my lungs against the curving bones of my ribs, the heady satisfaction of having stretched beyond where I had been before, of having been taught by her and learnt well, and earned her admiration.

I hear the others talking quietly, laughing softly as they help her gather up the balls, the javelins, the witches’ hats, the coloured bands. They are separate from me but I’m safe among them, their voices cushioned by the indrawn breath of late afternoon, their murmur­ings as soothing as pigeons cooing or the cropping of cattle. Then they are gone.

I half open my eyes. The sun eases lower in the sky — each blade of grass casts a shadow obelisk. I close my eyes. She comes and sits beside my head among the wild freesias that dot the grass — the aching poignancy of their scent washes over me.

If she touches me my life will be different forever. I don’t know what that means, touches me, but I know the months of her gentle teasing caring have been leading to this moment, and that it is natural and right and proper that she touches me. I feel my pulse throbbing where my temple rests on my arm. I feel underneath me the earth breathing in and out.

I turn to her and smile. She puts her hand on my head. Her movement releases again the perfume of the freesias. Her hand presses the warmth gathered in my hair down through my head to my cheeks, my throat, along my arms — the hairs above my elbows tingle — to my heart. I picture her hand on my head, the hand I know better than my own, care for more than my own, the tapered fingers, the oval nails with clear polish, the veins under the surface, the strength of it, a competent hand. What will happen next? I can’t imagine wanting anything to happen next, just this moment to stretch across the minutes, the years, the rest of my life, this declaration for the first time, of love.

I’ve heard she is going away soon, to be married, also I know natural and right and proper. It is beyond imagining, my life without her, so I don’t. I shiver. My eyes fill with tears.

You’re getting cold, she says. It’s late, I’ll give you a lift home. She lets her fingers drop into my hair and just once runs them from forehead to crown. The tracks of her fingers burn deep, like desire lines across the grass in a park, ignoring the paths. Then she moves away from me. I am stroked again by the piercing scent of freesias which I know, even then, will forever more plunge me at once into the painful and perfect beauty of spring, and of first love.

AT 17 ...

At 17 I stopped competitive swimming. I didn’t say I wouldn’t, I just said I didn’t want to go to the Sunday morning carnival about which Mrs Barton, Glenda’s mum, had rung the night before to say: Everyone’s expecting you to win the 220 yards butterfly. I cried and cried. The fear of failure was always greater for me than the desire for success, and the need for love stronger than the need to win. My parents never really forgave me — their self esteem was hanging on that 220 yards butterfly — but for once our inability as a family to talk to each other or confront issues served me well. I was left in peace at home alone, while my parents carted Robert to training and to swimming carnivals. I put rock ’n’ roll 78s, thick and black like grooved liquorice, on the turntable and sang along at the top of my voice with Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers, Ricky Nelson, Pat Boone and of course Elvis — and practiced my kissing on the satin-wood Balinese heads my father had brought home from one of his voyages.

On Saturday nights