Memoirs of Our Nervous Illness: The Queensland Police Special Branch Files of Carole Ferrier as Political Auto/Biography

Abstract

In their memoirs, American feminists Robin Morgan, Karla Jay, and Brenda Feigen note how their activism in the late 1960s–early 1970s brought them to the attention of the FBI and/or the CIA, with resultant voluminous security files. This surveillance suggests that the new political movement of women's liberation was, from its beginnings, perceived as a risk to society, joining older political threats such as communism. Surveillance of women's movement activists also occurred in Australia by both federal and state agencies. In this essay we use one particular example of the security police file — the Queensland Police Special Branch file of the Australian socialist-feminist activist and English literature academic, Carole Ferrier — to explore just how security agencies tried to understand and record the life of a socialist-feminist in the 1970s and 1980s. That is, what did they make of this radically new form of politics and political subjectivity? In this article we position the secret police dossier as a form of political biography, and hence expand the forms and subject matter typically included within the genre. We argue that not only can the Special Branch file be read as a form of biography of Carole Ferrier, but also as an unwitting autobiographical text of the Special Branch.1