Mixed Messages: Gender, Peace, and the Mainstream Media in Australia, 1983–1984

Abstract

In the early 1980s, the Australian women’s peace movement staged two major protests: in 1983, the Pine Gap Women’s Peace Camp, held in central Australia, highlighted the presence of the United States Pine Gap military base near Alice Springs, and in 1984, the Sound Women’s Peace Camp, held south of Perth, Western Australia, focused on visits by U.S. war ships and submarines to the Stirling Naval Base in Cockburn Sound. Both locations were remote from the major centers on the east coast of Australia: one in the central outback, the other on the west coast. While neither of these sites of the women’s peace camps lent themselves to wide public visibility, Pine Gap and Cockburn Sound were key locations for protesting the presence of war in a period of supposed peace. At this time, while Australia itself was not at war, through the porting of U.S. warships in Australian waters and the placement of U.S. military bases in places like Pine Gap, Australia played an important strategic role in maintaining the possibility of war and supporting U.S. Cold War policies. Significantly, and at least partly, because Australia was not at war, the populations local to Pine Gap and Cockburn Sound were largely unsympathetic to the presence of women protesting about war.KeywordsAustralian WomanDaily NewsCentralian AdvocateMixed MessageProtest ActionThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.