Sara: Welcome everyone, to this episode of the FiLiA Podcast. My name is Sara, I'm one of the volunteers, and I am joined today by Susan Hawthorne. And we're going to be talking about her new book, Vortex: the Crisis of Patriarchy, which was launched I think in November 2020, by Spinifex Press.

 Susan, thank you so much for joining us again on the FiLiA podcast. Can I ask you to please introduce yourself, and your work generally, to any listeners who might not already be familiar with you? 

 Susan: I was thinking about this before, and it's really hard to cover almost 50 years in a brief bio, but some of the things that have been important to me: that I joined the Women’s Liberation Movement in 1973, and it was like walking into a new universe. I suddenly felt like I had arrived. That I had come to a place where I existed and that I didn't feel like an outsider.

 But over that almost 50 years, I have worked in a rape crisis centre as a volunteer, that was my first bit of activism, apart from doing a bit of night-time graffiti. I was in student politics. I worked with unemployed people, people who'd been, young women and men who'd been unemployed for maybe a year or two, maybe more. I worked with Arabic speaking women, teaching them English. I had Aboriginal students, who were secondary school students, but also then I went to work at university level for a year with Aboriginal students.

 And then I got into publishing, so I did quite a lot of different things on my way to get into publishing. And I got a job at Penguin where I got the job, I think, because I was knowledgeable about women's writing, and they needed somebody, because Dale Spender had just said to them, “I want to do this book series,” and they wanted to do it, so they needed somebody who knew something.

 And the irony was that, I hadn't met Dale at that stage, but then it turned out she was a great friend of Renate Klein, my partner at the time. So I didn't even know that this was happening. So I worked at Penguin for four years. I had also been involved in running women's writers weeks and book festivals of various kinds, including, in 1994, the International Feminist Book Fair.

 And we set up Spinifex in 1991, and of course that's been… most of my time has been taken up either with co-running the press or writing or other literary things, but I did find time to join a couple of women's circuses also on the side, which was great fun. I think that actually kept me sane in lots of ways, cause you have to be fit and so, you know, you don't go to the gym, you go to the circus and you do, what, fun things like aerials and handstands. And yeah, it's great. 

 And I did my PhD while I was at the peak of my circus time. And again, that was really good for me. I know, you think I'm weird. 

 Sara: No, I think it's brilliant. I think… I mean, honestly, part of me was really like, “oh my gosh, tell me more about this circus thing.” But today we're not going to be talking too much about the circus, even though it makes an appearance in the book. So any listeners…

 But we're going to be talking about your book, Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy, and I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about why you wrote this book, and for the listeners who are, you know, hopefully going to be reading this book soon, what it's about, but could you outline some of, like, the key messages of the book for our listeners, please?

 Susan: I started writing it because a couple of overseas publishers wanted me to write a short version of Wild Politics, which was the books written out of my PhD, which subtitle is ‘Feminism, Globalisation, and Biodiversity’. And it was a great idea to write a short version, but I started doing it and discovered that actually I had new things to say, and that I didn't just want to rehash what I had written back in the early 2000s. And too much had changed to just do that.

 I then got a two-week residency in Bursa, in Turkey, and that was really good. Partly it was really good cause it was Ramadan at the time. We lived in this tiny little town called Gülyazı. There was nothing to do. Absolutely nothing to do. So I had to write and I had to do the work.

 It was good because even though it was only for two weeks, it gave me a lot of headspace time, and basically I worked out the structure of the book then. And realised that I wasn't rewriting an old book, I was writing a new book, and some of the things that happened in between times were that I had started to write again about disability, and I wanted that to be really upfront in the book. 

 Because the two areas that tend to be left to the final chapters, or left out altogether, are issues around disability, or anything about lesbians. So I wanted those to be key chapters in the book. I also wanted to have a chapter on violence against women, and in particular prostitution and the way that that connects to militarism and globalisation and all of those things.

 I kind of rewrote some things from my Wild Politics book in the chapter on biocolonialism and bioprospecting, but I updated it and I broadened some of the things, but a lot of that knowledge comes from working on my PhD in that area.

 Then I have a chapter called ‘Deterritoriality’, and that's about - and breaking the spirit, and I've got land refugees and trauma. That was actually, I had nothing like that previously. I hadn't written in the area particularly, but I had read very widely and I wanted to draw together ideas about how colonisation is very much linked to the ways in which people suffer trauma.

 I wanted to talk about dispossession and being homeless in different sorts of ways, and that applies to refugees, it applies to colonised indigenous peoples, it applies to women who've worked in the sex industry. So that brought together that whole range of things.

 And then an area that I've worked on a lot has been the torture of lesbians. And you know, because I gave a talk on that at FiLiA. And that kind of built up and came out of the previous chapter, and so I wanted to talk about the way in which lesbians are left out of the analysis, the way that we are erased, and the ways in which these are acts of colonisation.

 Then I go on to talking about how the trans lobby has had a terrible effect on the Women’s Liberation Movement and on women in general, and the ways in which it is being used to produce violence. And not just… I mean physical violence, but also verbal violence, and changing of the vocabulary.

 And I also wanted to talk about the money trails. And once I started looking at the money trails with the trans lobby, I then went back through all of the chapters and looked at how it affected that. So that then, that added to that side of things.

 And then, in Australia, in a year like 2020, I certainly could not ignore climate change, or what I now call climate catastrophe. And while I was writing the sections on the bushfires, it was actually happening, and every time I looked it up, the numbers, the huge areas of land that were being burnt were just increasing day-by-day. And I don't think any area has ever been burnt to such an extent. Even the Amazon. I mean, just all across Australia, there were fires last year.

 And then I've also lived in areas of drought. I grew up on a farm. My mother and I had long conversations about the drought and the effect on people. And I live in the tropics now, where I've been through two Category 5 cyclones, and I've also been in a flood, also in the same area where my parents were.

 So, there have been, you know… and I think most people in Australia have been through something. One of those things, it's a flood, or it's a drought, or excessive heat, or fires, or cyclones. It's just the way of the country, in a way. And we have a government who is completely, well, not oblivious to it, but turning in the opposite direction and doing absolutely nothing. And I feel very ashamed to have such a Prime Minister as the one that we have at the moment.

 And then I try to finish on a positive note in my book with a chapter called Sovereignty and the Spirit of Nature. 

 Sara: Yeah, I mean, I have to say it was a very wide-ranging read, and I'm not sure I understood, like, quite all of it, but it's one of those books that you read and you want to go back to and you want to try and unpick various other things, because it's so rich, right? There's so many different layers, even in just that introduction that you've given to us.

 But I thought what I'd do is start, first of all, with the title of the book and to ask about this question of the term ‘Vortex’, that you define in two different ways in the book, and could you explain what you mean by conceptualising this crisis of patriarchy as a vortex and how that ties in with this work? 

 Susan: The book is called Vortex cause I woke up one morning and I said to Renate, “the book is going to be called Vortex: The Crisis of Patriarchy.” She said, “but nobody will know what the word vortex means.” So I went off and I looked it up.

 So I found out that there were two possible meanings, where I looked up, which was a Cambridge dictionary. It was either a massive water, air, or water, that spins around very fast and pulls objects into its empty centre, and in a literary sense it means a dangerous or bad situation in which you become more and more involved, and from which you cannot escape.

 And I like the fact that there was an environmental meaning and there was a literary meaning, because I wanted to incorporate both of those bits into the book. But as I went on, the other thing that I discovered about the vortex was basically that there's an emptiness at the centre, and I think that that's one of the things that applies to patriarchy.

 And then they go around and accus others, you know, like they say of Australia, that it was ‘terra nullius’, you know, empty land. There was no such thing. It had been filled with people for 65,000 years at least. Possibly a hundred, possibly 120,000 years. This is typical.

 I mean, patriarchy lies, creates distortions, and then act on those distortions to dispossess people, basically. And then I discovered that at the centre of all of the things that I was looking at, there was this kind of emptiness, that I think is really important to remember. 

 Sara: And I think maybe on the subject of emptiness, that one of the themes in the book is this theme of the Cassandras and the Trojan Horse, and of course the Trojan Horse was thought to be empty. And so I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that, which runs through the whole book.

 Susan: I'm going to read a little bit right from the beginning of the introduction, which is an extract from a book I wrote back in the eighties and nineties, and it goes:

 “We talk of Cassandra. Belief is as important as knowledge. For what is knowledge if no one believes us? There have been many times when destruction could have been avoided, when the future was glaring at people. That was the fate of Cassandra.

 Though her ears had been licked by a serpent, no one would believe her prophecies. They laughed at her story of the wooden horse and the city fell. They laughed even as they died. There have been many Cassandras, many of us.”

 So that draws on the story of Cassandra from Greek mythology, and Cassandra was the daughter of King Priam and Queen Hecuba. Now, Queen Hecuba was a real extraordinary woman too.

 And they were having a mad war with the Greeks, because Paris had run off with Helen. who was from Greece. Paris was a bit of an entitled young thing too, and Helen actually didn't like her husband Menelaus, so it was kind of good to get out from there. And she was a Spartan princess, so she was pretty smart.

 Anyway, during the war, the Trojans were doing pretty well. And the Greeks didn't really know how they were going to defeat them, because they couldn't breach the walls. They couldn't get into the city, and in order to win the war they needed to get through into the city.

 Odysseus, who's a real smartass, he came up with an idea to deliver to the Trojans a horse as an offering, and then have all the Greek ships sail off away from the shore, cause they'd been there for 10 years - you know, almost as long as the war in Afghanistan. They'd been there for 10 years and pretend to leave.

 But instead of doing that, inside this horse were a whole lot of soldiers, and including Odysseus as well. So they put the horse outside, they disappeared, and the Trojans thought, “ah, it's all over.” And Cassandra said, “no, it's not. Don't open those gates. Don't let the horse in.”

 She couldn't specify why, but she said, “it'll be really dangerous.” Anyway, they did, because as usual men don't listen to women. So they opened the gates and let the horse in, and the men in the horse just stayed still for however long they had to until it got dark, and once it was dark and everybody was in bed, they came out and they started to burn the city. They ravaged the city.

 And you know, Cassandra could have said, “I told you so,” but of course it was too late for that. And actually she was captured and taken as a slave by Agamemnon, who was the brother of Menelaus, you know? And so the story goes on, but she was not believed.

 And the reason, the reason why she wasn't believed, was that in the temple, at some point during the Trojan War – or, no, before the war - Apollo wanted to rape her, and she said, “no.” And so, you know, this is the MeToo moment of Greek mythology. She said, “no.” And so he said, “well, you know, I know you can see into the future, but nobody will ever believe you.” That's the story of Cassandra.

 And the Trojan Horse, as I use it in the book, are instances where promises are made, let's say to women who are prostituted and then they call it sex work. And they say, “you will be famous, you will be rich, you will be all of these things.” And in fact, it all turns out badly, because in fact, what most women who are in the sex industry happen to is that they get traumatised.

 Sometimes they get addicted to drugs, sometimes they are killed, sometimes… all sorts of terrible, bad things happen to them. So that's an example of a Trojan Horse. And it's true of many other instances in the book. And I say, when you're reading the book, I say, “this is a Trojan Horse.” 

 Sara: Absolutely. And I think it's a very powerful thing to come back to, in the way that you do specifically, also because in this case, the radical feminists or usually the women speaking against something are acting like the Cassandras. 

 Susan: Yes. And women, feminists, are never believed. I mean, radical feminists have been saying a whole lot of things for a long time, and nobody ever listens. 

 I mean at Spinifex Press, at the beginning we would say to ourselves, “we're always five years ahead.” Then we started saying, “we're always 10 years ahead.” We're now, you know, 20 and 30 years ahead because still nobody is listening.

 And some of, you know, many of our authors have said things that have turned out to be correct. Surprise, surprise. I mean, radical feminists have a very clear idea of structural violence, and the way in which those structures work, and what it is that we need to do to change that.

 The main thing, of course, is to dismantle patriarchy. There's a really big job. And we have to dismantle capitalism, we have to dismantle racism, and all of the other oppressions that affect us. 

 Sara: Yes, and I think certainly your book makes a really compelling case, not only outlining the problems, but I think you add into it a lot of, kind of, suggestions for how this could be done. And I think that's a really nice thing to have in the work too, because it can seem like these problems are almost insurmountable, at times. 

 Susan: Well, I think it's important to be creative, and I think it's important that we understand what we can do, and how we might bring our creativity to change the situation, to shift it sideways, in different ways.

 And of course, there's no single way, because there are so many things that need to be done. And that's also important cause radical feminists work in all sorts of different situations. You know, we don't just go for equal pay, you know, that's part of our program, an important part, but it's certainly not the only thing. 

 Sara: What I quite like is the way that… the description of yourself as a synthesiser, and being able to, kind of, put these things that could seem quite disparate, going from very different sources of knowledge.

 So from describing your own experiences, for example, with epilepsy, in Chapter Two, which is entitled Less Than Perfect: Medical Wars Against People with Disabilities, to, kind of, more, like, problems with, let's say something like the ?? principles in Chapter Seven which is, you know, breaking the spirit of the Women’s Liberation Movement, the war against biology.

 And so I suppose one of my questions is, how did you choose what specific things you were going to focus on in your book? Given that there's so much. And also, could you talk to us a little bit about some of the tables in your book that compare various different concepts?

 Susan: In terms of how I got to the particular chapters, most of them are because I've been intensely interested in those areas over a very long time. In terms of the second chapter, having grown up with epilepsy and having tried to deal with that various times, and my first book looked at having epilepsy, but also being a lesbian. 

 And my readers, they came at it with different ways. They said, “oh, I always knew you were a lesbian, but I didn't know about the epilepsy.” And others would go, “oh, I always knew that you had epilepsy, but I didn't know you were a lesbian.”

 So it was also that thing of, you know, can you belong to just one group? Can you be oppressed in just one way? No. Most individuals are oppressed in multiple ways, and you know, that's something that radical feminists have noticed a long time ago, even long before the word ‘intersectional’ came along.

 Then I've been reading about prostitution for a long time. I've been working in different ways in the area of violence against women, starting with my rape crisis work, you know, when I first came into the women's movement, and thinking about it.

 And also writing a lot about, well, about war, and the way in which war is used to create prostitution outside military camps, and all of those sorts of things. And that was actually the first chart that I did for the book. And it started with columns; ‘militarism’, ‘fundamentalism’, and ‘the sex industry’. And I added later, ‘capitalism’, because I wanted to see if the military, fundamentalism, and the sex industry shared anything, and that was what I discovered that they did.

 So working across the very first one, ‘the new recruit’. So you move him away from family and community. Well, you have military bases with fundamentalism. You take in an already traumatised young man, often displaced, abused, refugee, and you put him in a place where all he hears is what's around. And it doesn't matter whether it's a madrasa or whether it's a camp run by Daesh or others. And in the sex industry, you take in already traumatised young women and men, displaced, drug addicted, abused, victims of war or violence.

 When I decided to add capitalism, I wasn't sure if that would work, but then I realised it did, and there I wrote, “take in an overly protected young man who has a sense of entitlement, or traumatised young man who wants to make up for trauma.” And then, you know, they all get provided with various kinds of dream, of fame or wealth, or whatever.

 And the capitalists add promises of material reward, but so do the prostitutes. And so the fundamentalists, say, add promises of heavenly reward. And in militarism you add porn, and so forth, and then you allow them to be available underground. All sorts of things that become available to you if you live in that. And so I just went on down the columns, and every time I found that they were pretty much the same. It's just a matter of emphasis really.

 And it finishes with, “handout medals to dead heroes.” For the capitalists, give publicity to the super rich through Forbes 500 and Rich Lists. For the fundamentalists, give publicity to the martyrs. And for the sex industry, make them believe that one day they can become immortalised, even snuff movie actors, a famous model for pornography or fashion.

 So these are all the things that are on offer. It's not much, I mean, the Forbes 500 is certainly the best of them, but. it's, yeah, it's pretty scary really.

 Sara: That one does make a really compelling case when you line them up like that. I mean, I thought a lot of these were really very thought provoking, because it's interesting to see them done in this, kind of, columnar fashion where you can just, kind of, read across. 

 Susan: I thought it offered away into my thinking, in a way, because, you know, you're reading, reading, reading, and you think, “oh God, what's all this about?” So in a way, I'm providing a bit of a map for what I was thinking and why I came to these conclusions, I guess. 

 Sara: Yes. And it's definitely something that I found myself going back to, as a reader, and is definitely something that I want to be, kind of, rereading, having read the full book. Because I have a feeling that this is one of those books that, like I said before, you want to then - in terms of having followed that journey – you then kind of want to go back and reread the text knowing what you know at the end, if that makes any sense.

 Because I think it follows that sort of interwoven structure, where it will become… like, on a second reading a lot of different things will make even more sense, having followed your synthesising through to the end of the book.

 Susan: Yeah. And I mean, that is how I think. You know, I'm also a poet and so as a person who writes poetry, part of that is finding patterns and synthesising things and the like. And in non-fiction... I mean, it is something that is done in a lot of non-fiction, but in more academic non-fiction, it tends to be more analytical and I think we need both things. 

 I think we need the analytical, but I think we also need ways of synthesising, and ways of seeing the connections between things. To show that the ways in which people with disabilities are treated, is very similar to the ways in which indigenous people are treated, is really quite similar to how refugees are treated, and women, and lesbians, and the land. The whole planet. 

 Sara: Because I think that one of the other things that you do very well in the book is to argue that these are not, these shouldn't be seen as, completely separate issues. And that a lot of times, you know, someone might make a particularly good analysis of something, but they'll miss out really quite relevant people or things, oftentimes women or lesbians, or basically all of the issues that you bring up in your book, but they don't really, kind of, connect everything.

 Susan: And I also include quite a bit of autobiographical information because that's also part of it. I mean, this in a way, is the book of my life, in a sense. I mean, it does follow through the different things that I've done and the connections that I've had.

 You know, like in the chapter on trans, yeah, I first encountered this several decades ago, but was really, really hit by it when I was in the women's circus and suddenly this trans fellow wanted to join the women's circus. And I say in the book that, you know, there are balances that you do where you stick your head between somebody's legs.

 Well, and as well as that, this circus had been set up to work with women who had been victims of sexual assault at some point in their life. So suddenly they're saying, “oh, we have to let him in, you know, we have to let this trans guy in,” well, he’s more trans woman, “because, wouldn't be fair.”

 But they had all these other rules that also kept people out, kept different groups of women out, and yet they were making this special thing for him, and this was something that was happening in 2000, so what we've got now is a big escalation of what happened back then.

 Sara: Actually, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about - I suppose you've covered it to some extent already, but… One of the things that, because I don't know very much about Australia, so one of the things that was really interesting for me was learning about the context of, kind of, the Australian situation.

 And I was wondering how that has shaped your work, and specifically in terms of highlighting human rights violations against Aboriginal and indigenous people. But also, like you mentioned before, your own experiences, I suppose, of this connection to very big natural events, shall we say, in terms of the fires that you were talking about before, and the cyclones and the droughts and the flooding.

 So how has that sort of, you know, like, do you think this, specifically Australia, has influenced your work in a particular way?

 Susan: Yes, definitely. Where you grow up influences how you see the world. When I was a child, nobody ever mentioned the Wiradjuri people, who were the local people. There were a very large group of people who lived almost all, I mean, across very large sections of New South Wales. And it wasn't until after I'd left university - I had met a number of Aboriginal people, but it wasn't until becoming a feminist that I understood the politics of it better.

 And at one point I learned Warlpiri, which is a central Australian Aboriginal language. I didn't learn it for very long, but it really had a huge impact on me, just in terms of understanding how words are put together and the sounds and what things are important. Like, there's a verb that means that you're either going away, or “come.”

 And there's an ending, there are endings, you know, that indicate whether you're going away or whether you're coming towards, which is very useful if you are a group of people who move about from one place to another. And there are things like that. So that certainly had an effect on me.

 And then I worked, at university, in Koori(e) teacher education program for the first year. I had also worked with Aboriginal artists, playwrights, and authors and so forth. So I mean, over the years I have increased my knowledge, and tried to contribute to the visibility, particularly of Aboriginal writers. And that, you know, that's an important part of what I do. It's not the only thing, but it's a very important part.

 And then in terms of the natural environment, I mean, in some ways these things are connected. Because land, or as Aboriginal people say, ‘country’, is an essential part of living in Australia. And Aboriginal people have a sense, not of ownership of land, but as land as a relationship.

 And that I think, you know, it's just, it's a completely different way of looking at the world. If we all looked at land as a relationship, a whole lot of things would have to change. You couldn't have absentee landlords, for example, because, you know, you have a relationship with the land, that means you have to be there.

 But in addition to that, in Australia, it does have this crazy climate, which is getting more and more catastrophic. We have much hotter days here now than we used to have, and we're expecting cyclones this coming season. We don't know when they'll come, but there are some forming out over the Pacific Ocean at the moment, and Fiji is being hammered. It might come or it might hit the West Australian coast. We don't know.

 There have been big floods in the south of Queensland just the last couple of days, and in northern New South Wales. So it's already happening. And then we've had all these fires and floods. And my parents used to own a farm near a town called Wagga Wagga, and I was there during a period when there was a big flood.

 And I don't hear the sound of flooding waters or know there's a flood coming without getting palpitations, and thinking, “got to get out of here! And we're not hanging around!” I have been caught in a flood once, a few years ago, in far north Queensland, and that was pretty scary.

 Sara: And I think you write in the book too that, you know, that that sound and that experience stays in your body. 

 Susan: Yes, yes, yes, it does. It's like also a cyclone. I had been through one of them, and I remember hearing something like a cyclone and just sliding down a wall in an art gallery, and you know, realising that this was still my reaction to that.

 I wouldn't label it trauma, but I would would say it was a visceral reaction, it was a bodily reaction. And I wouldn't call trauma to a huge degree, because I laughed about it fairly soon afterwards with the friend that I was at the art gallery with, who kind of looked at me, “what's going on?”

 But in terms of post- the cyclone that had caused that, in terms of the post-cyclone, people up here we just talked endlessly for about six months. And we didn't talk about anything else for about six months. And I think that is a response to trauma. Some people were really traumatised, some people just needed to talk. So people react differently. 

 Sara: Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. And I think it is one of those things that is really… because of this kind of imagery of the Vortex, and things spinning out of control and the degree to which it inflicts harm.

 So given the fact that there is a link to that climate change and these sorts of events, it does seem to me like that's an additional source of, let's say, trauma, then, or traumatic events being inflicted because of this patriarchal force. 

 Susan: And I guess the reason I wouldn't call it trauma was that in all those instances where I was in a dangerous situation, I was able to come through it reasonably well. Doesn't mean that the house wasn't damaged or whatever, but I didn't sustain any injuries.

 I mean, that's different from people who've been, say, through an earthquake, that tremors and tremors and tremors and, you know, they're completely rattled for months and months because they can't sleep, and things like that. Or people whose houses have burnt down and their next door neighbor has died in the fire.

 You know, there's a different level of trauma there, I think, that needs to be respected. Not every strong experience is traumatic, and I think we need to be able to tell the difference between what is trauma and what is just going through a really incredible experience in your life and learning something from that.

 Sara: Thank you for clarifying, cause I think those nuances are really important to understand too.

 So I'm going to move on to my next question, which is: so, as a reader, I felt the crescendo, the, kind of, most, like, hard-hitting chapter was Chapter Six, which was Colonisation, Erasure, and Torture: Wars Against Lesbians.

 Although I thought that the whole book was very, kind of, urgent, and had a lot of insightful analyses and was written with a very, kind of, like, “we do need to do something about this,” I thought this was definitely the most, kind of, viscerally hitting chapter, and also the one where I felt like you spoke very much directly to the reader, in a different way maybe than in some of the other chapters

 Because you ask us, directly, questions whether we care about the torture of lesbians, and I'm going to quote you now, “if campaigns for the safety of lesbians cannot be shaped, and many of us have borne the brunt of attacks from both our enemies and those we thought were our allies, then what are we fighting for when we take up any social justice issue? Are we wanting just partial freedom, freedom for some and not for others? If this is so, what are we changing? Are we serious?”

 And so I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about the significance of that statement, and indeed Chapter Six as a whole, and why you frame attacks on lesbians as the canary in the mine? And why does it seem like there is such a lack of interest, which means that there's a kind of extra urgency in you raising this for the reader?

 Susan: Well, I think probably because I have lived as a lesbian since my early twenties, I'm now in my late sixties, and as a result of that I have experienced the world in a particular way. It's an experience that is different from what people of my same age group experience, if they're heterosexual.

 There are many, many differences. One of which is, for quite a lot of lesbians, there is a sense of shame. And I don't mean that… I mean it in the sense that it's often really difficult to be upfront as a lesbian. Lots of women think, “will I lose my job if I come out?”

 This is certainly the case back in the 1970s and ‘80s and ‘90s, little less so now, but that's also because us lesbians have been doing a lot of groundwork during that time. And I think there is still quite a bit of nervousness among many lesbians about being out.

 Certainly, the same sex marriage laws have done something. But what bothers me about that is that it homogenises us, and I think that one of the reasons that that gets past is cause lesbians and gays have great parties. You know? “Let's go along and have a great party.” And it bothers me that that could be a reason.

 And as well as that, when I was in Uganda in 2002 and I went to a session called Radical Feminism in Africa, and I thought, “ah, fantastic!” I was really thrilled. And in that session I asked a question about, “what's going on for lesbians.” I can't totally remember my question, but after the session, a woman came up to me, all I know is that her name was Christine. She said, “be very, very careful. In this country, they torture lesbians.”

 Now I had heard of lesbians being incarcerated and called mad. I had heard that lesbians were beaten up on the streets, but I had not at that point heard about lesbians being tortured. And when she said that to me, I thought to myself, “I think I have to do something about this.” And so I started, slowly, writing about it.

 And so from 2003 up till, well, I mean it continues in a way, not as intensely, but through certainly the next 15 or so years, I did a lot of research on what happened to lesbians in different countries. And I mean, it is truly appalling the ways in which lesbians are treated.

 Not only by the so-called prison guards, but also by other prisoners. So if there are men in the same prisons, often the lesbians will be targeted to be raped, in South Africa, in the Western Cape. So, so many lesbians have been targeted to be raped in order to convert them from being lesbians. Now, the distorted thinking there really is too much for me. I think, if you rape a woman, do you really think that she's going to want to have sex with men? It just doesn't make sense, but a lot of stuff doesn't make sense.

 And hundreds, probably by now thousands, of lesbians in the Western Cape have been raped. Corrective rape is what it's called. And it's the only instance, where I saw a program on TV in Australia talking about that, that's the only example in the mainstream media that I have seen about the kind of, level of violence metered out against lesbians.

 And often, you know, when when a lesbian is killed, it's not made clear that she's a lesbian. Whereas when a gay man is killed, it's always, always, because he was gay. The media don't want to use the word “lesbian” and a lot of young people don't want to use the word “lesbian”, but I think it's a fabulous word. It's probably the most powerful word in the English language.

 And I will continue to use it, for myself, and I will continue to write about lesbians, and I will continue to try and do what I can to make it a more obvious subject to talk about. But I haven't had any mainstream media interest in my book, and I suspect that's probably one of the reasons why, that and the following chapter on trans.

 But I had to have the chapter about lesbians first, so that people could see where this is coming from and draw their own conclusions. I don't want to tell people how to think. I want people to think for themselves. I want them to think about, “what are the ramifications of lesbians being erased, lesbians being cut out of political discourse, what does that do?”

 “If we can't talk about the experiences of lesbians, well, what sort of society are we in?” Just as I said, “are we serious? Do you care?” And then I finished the chapter with “how to interview a lesbian refugee” and all the things you need to be ? and, you know, I think that brings up a lot of issues too, like what sorts of assumptions are you making?

 And I've written in the chapter about lesbian refugees and that huge difficulty that they have, being recognised even as lesbians, you know, if they have a child, “oh, well you're obviously not a lesbian,” Hmm, yes… 

 And my friend Consuelo Rivera-Fuentes, you know, I mean her work in this area is just incredible. Her writing about her experiences in Chile in the 1970s under the Pinochet regime, extraordinary, extraordinary work. And I think what enormous courage she had, a) to get through that, and b) to be able to write about it and speak about it, yeah, but she's my heroine.  

 Sara: Yeah, I mean, she's amazing. And I think we've actually, we had the honour of podcasting her as well, at the FiLiA Conference, but that was an incredible panel and yeah, no, she's brilliant.

 But so are you, Susan, and thank you for all your work in this area and for that chapter, honestly. I think I've kept you for quite some time, so I'm going to try and ask, maybe, if you would consider reading us one of the poems in your book?

 Susan: Well, I'm going to read two poems. I'm going to read one that's more happy and one that's not so. So these are both poems in the very final chapter, which is called Sovereignty and the Spirit of Nature. And the chapter opens with a poem called Sybils, and it's from my book Lupa and Lamb. And the Sybils were the great prophesiers of Rome, and you can see them in the Sistine Chapel.

Phemonoe the poet
says it is time to cease
prophesying

the future is now
time is
turned on itself

there
          then
here
          now

the known a memory
the knowable invented
our million mouths singing

So I'm trying to say, you know, we really need to do this together. Cassandra prophesied, but we need to act. And I think whatever we do, we should do it together. And then right at the end of my book, I have a sort of poem. It's called, You Can Never Get Enough. 

You can never get enough

from capitalism

from tech

from porn

from prostitution

from industrial farming 

from the animals and plants you want to turn into  

super producers

from animals in transhuman experiments 

from forests 

from the drying rivers 

from the oceans and land you intend to mine 

from underground artesian basins 

from war-­torn countries whose oil you want 

from prisons for profit

from the bodies injured by technical advances 

from the defeated whose women and children you want 

from the body you want to harvest or transform 

from all of us 

from the planet the sky the air we breathe

That's really a bit of a summing up of my book in a way. 

 Sara: Yes, and they're both beautiful. I suppose I should try and finish on a bit of a positive note, and I was wondering what sort of - well, given that's how you end too - what, sort of, general advice you might have for feminists of how we get to the place that you hope for, because at the end you give us this beautiful vision that I'm really like, I wish, yes, let's live in that place. But how would we begin to, sort of, tip this?

 Susan: Well, when I first joined the women's movement, I joined a consciousness raising group. At that stage, I had no idea what a consciousness raising group, and nor did any of the other women. But we had heard that what you do is, you get together and you talk to one another for maybe an hour a week. So we did that.

 It was at university. A lunchtime on a Thursday, or a Wednesday, or something like that. Some of us got together and we started to talk about our lives. And when you talk about your lives in a group like that, you actually start to figure out, “oh, that happened to you too, did it? Oh, you mean it's not just me,” and I think that was a great lesson for all of us at that point.

 And I stayed in... over the year, I think I moved to another consciousness raising group, or the people changed cause people left, women left university, and things like that. And I think I probably stayed in consciousness raising groups for five, six years, not quite sure anymore. They then transformed into writing groups and so on and so on.

 And so now what I'm saying here is we all know more than we think we know. And the thing about being in a group, sometimes it leads to activism. Sometimes it leads to creativity. Most of the people I know who were in consciousness raising groups went off and did something. It didn't matter what they did, but they did something and they generated that energy for doing things through being in consciousness raising groups.

 I was in another group, some years later, there were just three of us, and one woman was an artist, and another woman was a mathematician, and I was just starting to write my first novel, and we had a fantastic time. We just talked endlessly about our own obsessions and, you know, that was fantastic.

 After a few years, we ran out of conversation and then we went and did Aikido classes together. So, you know, these things happen. Things change, and then we stopped all together. At some point we got bored with Aikido or we felt we were good enough, or who knows? Who knows? I can't remember anymore.

 But what I think that that coming together, talking, doing, acting, believing in yourself, understanding that it's systemic, that our analysis has to cover the systemic ways in which things happen. And you do discover that you are not the only person feeling these things.

 And young feminists and young lesbians these days, they don't seem to have it. And just, “get out, find two other people, three others, four others. Start a group, start talking.” That's what I would say. I think it's the best thing.

 And those of us who are in our sixties, I mean, you know, we've been there, done that, but we all remember how important that was. And many, many women in my age group are still involved in different group activities. It's a bit hard where I live because it's in the rural country area and there are not a lot of lesbians nearby. But I have a lot of contacts, you know, through email and Zoom and all sorts of other ways these days. Phones. 

 You know, one of the best places for women over 50, let's say - just an arbitrary thing, sort of arbitrary - Facebook is great for women over 50 because we don't do all that stuff that happens for the 15-year-olds who are on Facebook.

 And I mean, that's very tough. And I know a lot of women, a lot of younger women, who've left social media cause they can't deal with the violence of it and the rudeness and all of those things. The verbal violence. Yeah. 

 Sara: So the answer is to go speak to other women. 

 Susan: Yep. Absolutely. Regularly. 

 Sara: Well I think that's definitely sound advice, for sure. Thank you so much for talking to us today. And for women who are interested in your book and your work, where can they go to find out more?

 Susan: It depends a little bit on what country you're in. So let's start with Britain. In Britain and in Europe, you can contact Gazelle Book Services and they have all our books. You can even look up Spinifex, and trawl through our various books, but you can put the word “Vortex” in or you can put my name in and the book will come up, and you can order either directly from them or you can insist that your local bookshop order them. That's a good way to do it. Or you can just, you know, go through the various online retailers who I won't give any extra promo to. 

 If you're in North America, that is USA, Canada, and Mexico. Then you can go to ipgbook.com and do the same thing. Just look for the book and you can order directly or through bookshops or online.

 Now, if you're not in those two areas, UK, Europe, and North America, then Australia is the place to come to. You come to the Spinifex website, which is www.spinifexpress.com.au. We do regular mailings to Australia and New Zealand. We are more than happy to send copies elsewhere. There is a postage charge, of course, but we can't really help that. But you can find our books there.

 And no matter where you are, you can sign up to our newsletter. Subscribe to the Spinifex Press newsletter, that is, cause that gives you all the details and keeps you informed. And we're starting to do new things. We actually have a new website this year. It's completely different from how it used to be. And. yeah, it's great. So we're quite pleased that 2020 has knocked us out.

 And you can follow us on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. You can also follow me on Facebook. I do a little bit of Instagram and Twitter, but Facebook really is better for me. I like to be able to have words, not just pictures, but I on Twitter, I really just retweet. But if you tweet something nice to me there, I'll probably retweet it. It might take me a week or two to see it, whereas Facebook, I'll see every day. 

 Sara: Well, thank you so much and I do recommend subscribing to the newsletter. I am subscribed and it is lovely. And thank you so much Susan Hawthorne, for joining us and talking about your book, and of course all of your work in so many different areas. Thank you.

 Susan: Thank you.