Feminist protest in the desert: researching the 1983 Pine Gap women's peace camp

Abstract

This article examines the rich symbolism offered by the central Australian desert, and what happens when it becomes a site of feminist protest, as happened in 1983 when Australian women mounted a women-only peace camp at the Pine Gap military facility. The desert holds iconic status as both the ‘centre’ of Australia and ‘the middle of nowhere’, evoked as the ‘heart’ of the country and yet represented as dangerous and deadly. Its ambivalent meaning for white Australia unsettles Pine Gap as a site of protest, and also differentiates it from more traditional protest sites like urban streets, as well as from the most famous women's peace camp at Greenham Common in England. This account is made more complex by my own formative relation to central Australia, where I lived as a child and left in 1983 around the same time as the protest. The impact and limits of situated knowledge and feminist writing practice thus form part of this research as it also intimately addresses the formation of my feminist self through the remembering and remaking of meanings for this landscape of my childhood.