“A fully formed blast from abroad?”: Australasian lesbian circuits of mobility and the transnational exchange of ideas in the 1960s and 1970s
Abstract
Following the individual journeys of four Australasian women, Alison Laurie, Kerryn Higgs, Robina Courtin and Jenny Pausacker, this article explores the ways in which circuits of mobility traversed by many Australian and New Zealand lesbians during the 1960s and 1970s facilitated the transnational exchange of ideas around female same-sex desire. Through these circuits, Australasian lesbians played major roles in running the early London-based Minorities Research Group (MRG), contributing a perspective shaped by their experiences in Australia and New Zealand to the formation of this British lesbian community, and thrashed out their own lesbian feminist theory by borrowing from and adapting the models and praxis they encountered. This was a process which involved both the transmission and adaptation of ideas themselves and the creation of networks and practices of debate and communication which structured the development and flow of ideas in particular ways.References
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Alison J. Laurie, “‘We Were the Town’s Tomboys’: An Interview with Raukura ‘Bubs’ Hetet,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 14 (2010)
Alison J. Laurie, “My New Zealand Lesbian Studies Through Time and Times,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 16 (2012): 76-89.
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Lynn Walker, “The Embodiment of Ugliness and the Logic of Love: The Danish Redstocking Movement,” Feminist Review 36 (1990): 103-126.
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Callum Williams, “Patriality, Work Permits and the European Economic Community: The Introduction of the 1971 Immigration Act” Contemporary British History 29 no.4 (2015): 508-538.
Angela Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Angela Woollacott, “Australian women in London: Surveying the twentieth century”, in Australians in Britain: The Twentieth-Century Experience, Carl Bridge, Robert Crawford and David Dunstan (Melbourne: Monash University ePress).
Ngāhuia Te Awekōtuku, Shirley Tamihana, Julie Glamuzina and Alison Laurie, “Lesbian Organising,” in Women Together: A History of Women’s Organisations in New Zealand Ngā Rōpū Wāhine o te Motu, ed. Anne Else (Wellington: Daphne Brasell and Historical Branch, 1993).
Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand's colonial past (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2012).
Felicity Barnes, New Zealand’s London: A Colony and its Metropolis (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2012).
David S. Churchill, “Transnationalism and Homophile Political Culture in the Postwar Decades” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 15 no.1 (2009): 31-65
Amiel Courtin-Wilson, dir., Chasing Buddha: Life is not a sentence (2000).
Lois Cox, “That’s what I am: I’m a lesbian,” in Outlines: Lesbian & Gay Histories of Aotearoa, eds. Alison J. Laurie and Linda Evans (Wellington: Lesbian and Gay Archives of New Zealand, 2005).
Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott, eds, Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2008).
Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott, eds., Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700-Present (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Department of Statistics, New Zealand Official Yearbook (Wellington: Department of Statistics, 1966).
Department of Statistics, Commonwealth Bureau of Statistics, Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia (Canberra: Commonwealth Bureau of Statisics, 1966).
Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
Jennifer Ellison, ed., Rooms of their Own (Ringwood, Vic: Viking, 1986).
Linda Evans, “SHE, 1973-1977,” in Women Together: A History of Women’s Organisations in New Zealand Ngā Rōpū Wāhine o te Motu, ed. Anne Else (Wellington: Daphne Brasell and Historical Branch, 1993).
Shulamith Firestone, The dialectic of sex (New York: William Morrow, 1970).
Julie Glamuzina and Alison J. Laurie, Parker & Hulme: A Lesbian View (Auckland: New Women’s Press, 1991).
Julie Glamuzina, Outfront: Lesbian Political Activity in Aotearoa 1962 to 1985 (Hamilton: Lesbian Press, 1993).
Gary Hawke, “Economic Trends and Economic Policy, 1938-1992,” in Oxford History of New Zealand, ed. Geoffrey W. Rice (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Kerryn Higgs, All That False Instruction (Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2001).
Rebecca Jennings, “It was a hot climate and it was a hot time” Australian Feminist Studies 25 no.63 (2010).
Jill Johnston, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973).
Rieko Karatani, Defining British Citizenship: Empire, Commonwealth and Modern Britain (London: Frank Cass, 2003).
Alison J. Laurie, “From Kamp Girls to Political Dykes: Finding the Others Through Thirty-odd Years as a Lesbian from Aotearoa/New Zealand,” in Finding the Lesbians: Personal Accounts from Around the World, ed. Julia Penelope and Sarah Valentine (Freedom: Crossing Press, 1990).
Alison J. Laurie, “Lady-Husbands and Kamp Ladies: Pre-1970 Lesbian Life in Aotearoa/New Zealand,” PhD Thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, 2003.
Alison J. Laurie, “’Filthiness’ became a theory: an overview of homosexual and lesbian organising from nineteenth century Europe to seventies New Zealand,” in Outlines: Lesbian and Gay Histories of Aotearoa, ed. Alison J. Laurie and Linda Evans (Wellington: Lesbian and Gay Archives of New Zealand, 2005), 10-18.
Alison Laurie, “A Transnational Conference Romance: Elsie Andrews, Hildegarde Kneeland, and the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association” Journal of Lesbian Studies 13 no.4 (2009): 395-414.
Alison J. Laurie, “‘We Were the Town’s Tomboys’: An Interview with Raukura ‘Bubs’ Hetet,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 14 (2010)
Alison J. Laurie, “My New Zealand Lesbian Studies Through Time and Times,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 16 (2012): 76-89.
Sara MacBride-Stewart, “Peripheral Perspectives: Locating Lesbian Studies in Australasia” Journal of Lesbian Studies 11 no.3/4 (2007): 303-311.
Nicole Moore, The Censor’s Library (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2012).
Fiona Paisley, Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural internationalism and race politics in the women’s Pan-Pacific (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009).
Radicalesbians, “The Woman Identified Woman” (1970).
Robert Reynolds, From Camp to Queer: Remaking the Australian Homosexual (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002).
Leila J. Rupp, “The Persistence of Transnational Organizing: The Case of the Homophile Movement” American Historical Review 116 no.4 (2011): 1014-1039.
Leila Rupp, “Toward a Global History of Same-Sex Sexuality” Journal of the History of Sexuality 10 no.2 (2001): 287-302.
Chris Sitka, ‘A Radicalesbian Herstory’, http://users.spin.net.au/~deniset/alesfem/s1sitka.pdf
Lindsay Taylor, “Aspects of the Ideology of the Gay Liberation Movement in New Zealand” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 13 no.2 (1977).
Lynn Walker, “The Embodiment of Ugliness and the Logic of Love: The Danish Redstocking Movement,” Feminist Review 36 (1990): 103-126.
Graham Willett, Living Out Loud: A History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia (St Leonards NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2000).
Callum Williams, “Patriality, Work Permits and the European Economic Community: The Introduction of the 1971 Immigration Act” Contemporary British History 29 no.4 (2015): 508-538.
Angela Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Angela Woollacott, “Australian women in London: Surveying the twentieth century”, in Australians in Britain: The Twentieth-Century Experience, Carl Bridge, Robert Crawford and David Dunstan (Melbourne: Monash University ePress).
