Month: September 2026

My Space

personby Gillian Polack
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Last week on Facebook, Yaritji Green asked the history of the space I live in. I answered her post directly, and then I realised some of you might be interested, so I’m copying it here.

“I live on Ngunnawal land*, currently owned by the Federal Government and managed by the ACT Government. I don’t own any land, but I lease the space along with many others. I don’t even own the structure of the building – I am part of a body corporate. I own the possessions in my flat, though, and so that flat is my space, even though it’s on the land of others
It was first taken from the Ngunnawal people by farmers and the occasional bushranger. The family that farmed this particular valley is still in the region and one of their ancestors wrote the first Australian Gothic novel. So this valley has consistently been science fictional since White settlement. Then the government took it, when we Federated and the regional was made into the capital.
This space has layers. The most ancient is the geological with a faultline running alongside my flat. Until quite recently, this was part of the Bogong Trail, for corroboree near Yankee hat in the Brindies**, so that was the most stable layer for humans. I don’t know how long the Bogong Trail was used or enough about other uses of this little valley, but we have clear evidence of it being 900+ years, in some paintings near Yankee Hat. My block of flats is the most recent layer. It was built in the 70s, before self-government in Canberra, and my flat was owned by the builder of the whole complex and then by a young couple and then by me. it still had the 70s carpet and kitchen when I moved in.
This has been my place since 1991. Me and my books.”
I am now remembering… the first thing that comes to mind is an Auntie (I won’t use her name because she’s no longer around, but it’s the same first name as the poor child who was murdered last December) who taught my Israeli dance class the dances of this country. Specifically this country: she was a Ngunnawal elder and these were her tradition. She was willing to teach us women’s business, but young Irwin refused to recuse himself.
“You can teach me anything,” he said.
“You’re male,” Auntie said, “And so you deny everyone the learning.” and so we only learned the dances.
Irwin explained his view to me afterwards. In his world, he had the right to learn everything. Mind you, in his world, also, he was a missionary. Totally lovely, and very very Christian.
I remember three steps, but I do them very badly.
One of the things I’d like to do this year is get to one of the bush tucker workshops at the National Museum. Since I cannot do this without a friend who has a car, I’d love to hear from anyone who’d like to do this with me. I can cook using local foodstuffs, but I only know them as adaptations of European foodways and they’re a lot more than that. I need to re-learn from someone with the right knowledge and that is (among others) a guy who does workshops for the national Museum.
For me, living anywhere requires constant (and respectful) learning. I wish the same applies to those who hate. It’s been bad this week.
*Canberra, Australia, just in case a reminder helps.
**Canberra slang for the Brindabellas, a local mountain range. If you know Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career, this is where she grew up. Mt Aggie is named after her aunt Agnes.

The Importance of Writers

personby Nancy Jane Moore
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I first encountered Gloria Steinem in the 1960s in the pages of Glamour magazine. I don’t remember what she was writing about, though it was a number of articles over a couple of years – she wrote for them regularly, though I have not yet seen a mention of that particular magazine in the obituaries.

I can’t tell you who else wrote for Glamour back then, or much of what else was in the magazine. It was aimed at selling beauty products and clothes to young women and most of the articles promoted that in some way. It was, in many ways, the antithesis of MS. magazine, which Steinem and others started a few years later.

But I noticed Steinem from the first piece of hers I read. It was smart. She clearly had something to say. And after that, I sought out issues of the magazine that had an article by her.

I was a young teenager, but I disdained the magazines aimed at people my age. After all, I was already reading adult fiction and had been since about the age of 10. (Young adult fiction was laughable back then. Sue Barton, Student Nurse. I outgrew that by the age of 8.)

Even Seventeen seemed too childish for me, but Glamour (which was probably aimed at people in their late teens, early 20s) struck me as sophisticated without being out of reach, like Vogue was.

And yes, I read more serious magazines as well. The New Yorker (albeit mostly the cartoons). The Atlantic. The Texas Observer. But I was a young girl trying to figure out where I fit into the world, so I turned to Glamour as well.

Having read a lot of her work, I took Steinem very seriously when she got involved in second wave feminism and started MS. I continued to take her seriously throughout her life. Continue reading “The Importance of Writers”…

No, Everybody Doesn’t Know

personby Madeleine Robins
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I once almost got into a fight with a Beefeater in the Tower of London when I dared suggest that Shakespeare might have been wrong about Richard III killing off his nephews.  Shakespeare’s version of the story has become enshrined as something “everybody knows.”  And “everybody knows” is a problem if you want to get something right.

I was thinking about this while re-reading Black London,* a terrific and fascinating book by Gretchen Gerzina about the history of Africans in England.  Early in the book Gerzina tells of going into a bookstore looking for material about people of color in London.  The saleswoman told her, with a touch of asperity, that everyone knew that there were no blacks in England prior to the end of WW II.  

In fact, there were so many blacks in England during the reign of Elizabeth I that she issued an edict ordering them to leave the country (it was largely  ignored).  And slavery, which we in America tend to think of as our own “peculiar institution,” was legal in England until as late as 1772.  There were African slaves in England–most of them domestics–because up until that point there had been no specific law against slavery.

What changed? A slave named James Somersett, brought by his owner to England from the Massachusetts colony, was beaten and left to die by his owner, Charles Stewart.  Instead, he was rescued, taken to the hospital, and when he was well, apprenticed as a free man.  By chance, a year or so later, Stewart saw his erstwhile slave, hale and productive, and demanded that the man be returned to him. A huge legal battle ensued, with public opinion vocally divided. The judiciary was forced to make case law, finding that, while colonial laws might explicitly permit slavery, there was no Parliamentary act or common law that made slavery in England legal, and that it was therefore illegal.

Somersett was freed, as were the 10,000 or so African slaves in England.

The slave trade continued, making port cities like Bristol and Plymouth into centers of commerce;  slavery in the British colonies flourished. But the abolitionist movement, stirred to life by the Somersett case, struggled against economic interests, and in 1807 the slave trade in England was abolished. It took almost thirty more years (1834) for the institution itself to be banned throughout the Empire.

That means that during Jane Austen’s lifetime there were black people in England.  It’s clear (particularly from Mansfield Park) that Austen was well aware of the slave trade as it was practiced in the British colonies, and her letters suggest that she was part of the abolitionist camp. Austen did not live a cosmopolitain life (she disliked London and Bath) but it is not unlikely that she encountered black Britons–those persons who had lived in England as domestics for decades, or had come to Britain after the American Revolution (many slaves were promised freedom by the Crown if they fought for England, and some took the offer and wound up there after the war–albeit not always very happily).  There was a tendency among white Britons to lump all people of color together, but at the same time freed slaves were arriving from America, immigrants from the British colony of India were arriving too. My favorite is the Bengali entrepreneur who introduced the word “shampoo” — meaning head massage — into the English language. He was considered “black.” He operated a spa (Mahomed’s Steam and Vapor Sea Water Medicated Baths) which offered a combined Turkish bath with massage (sounds great). As the British Empire spread its influence, there were more and more persons of color in England. The clerk Gerzina encountered at the bookstore may have cited “everybody” in her opinion, but she was dead wrong.

Whenever I hear someone saying “everybody knows,” I’m pretty sure I’m in for a whopping historical error.


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* Yes, I’m researching for Sarah Tolerance #5...