Diversity in leadership: Australian women, past and present

This book provides a new understanding of the historical and contemporary aspects of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women’s leadership in a range of local, national and international contexts. Overview While leadership is an over-used term today, how it is defined for women and the contexts in which it emerges remains elusive. Moreover, women are exhorted to exercise leadership, but occupying leadership positions has its challenges. Issues of access, acceptable behaviour and the development of skills to be successful leaders are just some of them. Diversity in Leadership: Australian women, past and present provides a new understanding of the historical and contemporary aspects of Indigenous and non-Indigenous women’s leadership in a range of local, national and international contexts. It brings interdisciplinary expertise to the topic from leading scholars in a range of fields and diverse backgrounds. The aims of the essays in the collection document the extent and diverse nature of women’s social and political leadership across various pursuits and endeavours within democratic political structures

It’s all about the story : Personal narratives in children’s literature about refugees

Stories are one way that experiences, ideas and culture are shared with children in educational settings. Commercially published books are the standard means in schools for sharing stories. Qualitative content analysis was carried out on 30 personal narrative-based children's picture books. While the range of stories told in books is vast, our research focuses on refugee stories for children in light of the contemporary political and public focus on refugees and the forced movement of people around the world. Scholars have identified that books about refugees for children can be useful to explore the topic of refugees, but also caution that they can perpetuate simplistic and stereotypical understandings about forced movement in the world. In our research we examine personal narratives and propose that educators should use stories and books written and illustrated by children as a means to bring refugee children's voices into formal educational spaces. We argue that this is a respectful approach that counters a deficit model of refugee children; it highlights refugee children's authentic voices and stories told on their own terms. Additionally, it offers a counter-narrative to dominant refugee stories in the public sphere and presents understandings of forced migration and its legacies from children's perspectives. We suggest that to effectively examine refugee experiences through literature, educators should use a number of texts to begin conversations in classrooms, and stories by children who have experienced forced migration should be featured

‘WE WILL INVENT OURSELVES, THE AGE OF THE NEW IMAGE IS AT HAND’: Creating, Learning and Talking with Australian Feminist Filmmaking

We became very evangelistic trying to tell as many women as possible about this thing that we had discovered, and in those circumstances we began making a film to use for propaganda purposes. (Anon. 1974, 86) I'd been interested in film for years and years, but it never occurred to me that I could actually do anything other than carry something for somebody. (Anon. 1974, 84) These statements are from ‘Great Experimentation’, a woman's story included in A Book about Australian Women (1974). While the identity of the woman is not disclosed, she tells of her recent life, relationships, pregnancies, increasing feminist awareness and interest in filmmaking. The book includes the text of ‘some individual experiences of being a female person in this society’ such as this one, as well as photographs of ‘painters, sculptors, writers, poets, filmmakers, printmakers, photographers, designers, dancers, musicians, actresses and strippers … women's liberationists, Aboriginal spokeswomen, activists, revolutionaries, teachers, students, drop-outs, mothers, prostitutes, lesbians and friends’ (Jerrems and Fraser 1974, 3). In this one compilation about Australian women, at the height of the Women's Liberation Movement, filmmakers are conspicuously present. As expressed in ‘Great Experimentation’, film was recognised as an important means through which newly considered political messages could be disseminated. As part of achieving this, some women were able to realise their potential for creative work with film. Films provided an avenue through which feminist messages were presented to many audiences throughout the country and internationally

Disparate Voices? Framlingham as a site of resistance

[Extract] Patrick Wolfe, in his engaging article ‘Nation and MissegeNation: Discursive Continuity in the Post-Mabo Era,’ has detailed the ways in which the settlercolonial logic of the elimination of Aborigines has operated within Australian society. Wolfe documents how this logic of elimination has been operating from the invasion of this continent to the supposedly enlightened legislation and legal decisions being made today. In this article I use Wolfe’s theoretical analysis as the basis to explore and try to illuminate the ways in which this settler-colonial goal was both supported and undermined in a particular historical and geographical context by a variety of actors. The specific site under investigation is the Framlingham Mission, which is located near Warrnambool in southwest Victoria. And it is though the written records from the Board for the Protection of Aborigines (BPA) between 1922 and 1934 that the voices of many actors remain with us today. These records provide an insight into people’s thoughts and beliefs regarding incidents at Framlingham that were being discussed and debated at the time.2 I am interested in what the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal voices contained in these records have to say and how they work to undermine or support the colonial logic of elimination. Before looking at specific examples of this, I will briefly outline both the ideological and local context of the Framlingham Mission to position this analysis within broader historical framework

Feminist film on women's experiences of violence

[Extract] Since October 2017, #MeToo has gained prominence in public declarations and conversations about sexual harassment, assault and violence. Time Magazine identified those speaking out as "The Silence Breakers" and collectively named them Time's 2017 "Person of the Year". The women actors in Hollywood who publicly spoke of experiences of sexual harassment in their workplace were the catalyst for this use of #MeToo, but it has expanded to provide "an umbrella of solidarity for millions of people to come forward with their stories"

Letters, films and friends: Women's involvement in the Victorian film society movement

Betty Jope of the Federation of Victorian Film Societies in 1967 jotted this on the bottom of correspondence to Beverley Burke of the Sydney Film Festival.' It is understandable that Jope questioned their collective sanity, given the substantial amount of work that some film society members contributed to the operation of the movement. While there are voluminous papers of the Federation of Victorian Film Societies (FVFS), in contrast there is only passing reference to the film society movement in publications about Australian film.' This collection of material forms the basis of this article, which explores women's involvement with Victorian film societies in the 1950s and 1960s

The politics of picture books: Stories of displaced children in twenty-first-century Australia

This article uses cultural representations to write refugee history. It examines twenty-first-century picture books about displaced children, alongside published responses to them, to explore how refugee experiences and histories are constructed, both for and about children, in an Australian context. The visual literary form of picture books as political texts is examined as a space for discussion and dialogue. Published responses to them, however, more commonly reveal rigid interpretations of imagined readers, invoking binary divisions between displaced and non-displaced children. Through these sources, questions of humanisation and (de)politicisations in refugee history are considered

Entertaining children: The 1927 Royal Commission on the Motion Picture Industry as a site of women’s leadership

[Extract] Mrs John Jones, president of the Victorian Women’s Citizen Movement, presented the above evidence to the Royal Commission on the Moving Picture Industry in Australia in 1927.² Jones compared the exploited children with exploited ‘natives’—both presumably requiring protection in the form of benevolent control. And it was a particular type and class of woman who could provide such control and guidance. For the women reformers, and also men, who appeared before the commission, the cinema was understood as a public arena in which a novel visual language was spoken

“I feel I am at the stage now of really learning something”: Esma Banner, post-Second World War migration worker and photographer

Australian woman Esma Banner (1910–2001) was a keen amateur photographer who worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the International Refugee Organisation (IRO) between 1945 and 1951. While posted in Germany, Banner kept a diary, wrote over 100 letters to her family, kept official reports, took photographs and collected art and craft by Displaced Persons (DP). In particular, photography and family were important to her. She said in a letter home: “You are all always in my thoughts – every picture I take is for you”. This article primarily focuses on visual materials in Esma Banner's personal papers. Banner's collection substantially documents her professional relief work with UNRRA and the IRO, and through this, her interactions with other relief workers as well as displaced children and adults can be seen. Here Banner's photographs and albums are read alongside published materials, letters and diaries to reveal a range of political, personal and gendered understandings of post‐Second World War reconstruction work. The material also provides some insights into the experiences of forcibly displaced children and adults. Banner's photographs are used to reflect upon the place of visual and personal sources in writing histories of post‐Second World War reconstruction

Beyond the silver screen : A History of women, filmmaking and film culture in Australia 1920-1990

Beyond the Silver Screen tells the history of women's engagement with filmmaking and film culture in twentieth-century Australia. In doing so, it explores an array of often hidden ways women in Australia have creatively worked with film. Beyond the Silver Screen examines film in a broad sense, considering feature filmmaking alongside government documentaries and political films. It also focusses on women's work regulating films and supporting film culture through organising film societies and workshops to encourage female filmmakers. As such, it tells a new narrative of Australian film history