PLAY ON! The Hidden History of Women’s Australian Rules Football by LENKIC & HESS

PLAY ON!  The Hidden History of Women’s Australian Rules Football

Brunette Lenkić and Rob Hess

Echo Publishing, 2016, 324 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

It was feared, over a hundred years ago, that allowing women to play Australian Rules football would be a slippery slope to giving them the vote and other rights enjoyed by men, say Brunette Lenkić (footy fan) and Professor Rob Hess (sport historian) in Play On! The Hidden History of Women’s Australian Rules Football.  It was to take a century, and then some, of Australian women footballers’ “resilience in the face of indifference, ridicule, hostility and limited support” for them to  win their right to play football.

 

Women’s football has had a long, but strictly second-class, history.  Early twentieth century games were scratch matches, one-off novelty affairs between work-based teams (mostly seamstresses and sales staff from retail stores), used as a gimmick by businesses to market their millinery, including athletically-unfriendly skirts, in fund-raising matches staged as fund-raisers for the war effort or forsupport for the unemployed during the Depression.

 

Playing footy from women’s sheer love of it (including their “often overlooked” love of the ‘unladylike’ physicality of Australian Rules football) was not a consideration and many barriers to regularisation of the women’s game remained.  The Vatican’s 1934 outlawing of women’s soccer as ‘unwomanly’, enforced by Mussolini’s fascists, flowed over into official Catholic distaste for women kicking the oval-shaped ball as well as the round ball whilst Protestant churches, as late as the 1960s, were still denouncing women’s football as a ‘Godless trend’ violating ‘the Christian concept of womanhood’.

 

Religion also decreed against sport being played on Sundays, one of the few timeslots available for women to fit regular club-based matches around the male, even the most junior boys’, football schedule.  Access to ovals and other facilities continued to be monopolised by men whilst the press was condescending, mocking, trivialising and patronising in its coverage of women’s games, only reluctantly acknowledging the women’s competitive spirit, skill and athleticism.

 

Routine sexism dogged the women’s game.  In 1947, one woman player recalled the women’s teams running onto the field to ‘a chorus of wolf-whistles’.  Revered icons of the men’s game like the legendary and tough captain-coach of Richmond (Jack Dyer, aka ‘Captain Blood’) said that women were physically and mentally unsuited to football, ‘their minds would be bewildered by the rules’, injuries could ruin their ‘chance to become mothers’, and the hardening of their muscles would ‘spoil the shape of their legs’.  Women, who had long kept the men’s game going through volunteering rarely had the favour returned by men.

 

As post-sixties feminism challenged all aspects of a male-dominated society, women’s football gradually made progress.  Feminism was invoked by the founder of the organised Victorian women’s competition, and the sexist headwinds slowly abated though not without occasional oppositional gusts – a commercial television channel filmed one training session of a women’s team in WA in 1988 but edited it as “a blooper reel set to circus music”.

 

Momentum for women’s football has continued to grow, however, with a real spurt from 2007 when the Australian Football League (AFL) Commission, the game’s governing body, formally got behind it.  The decision was based less on high-minded, abstract equalitarian principle, than on commercial grounds, however.  Uniquely amongst the football codes, Australian Rules has always appealed strongly to women, with females accounting for 45% of current AFL attendees whilst 284,000 women and girls now play organised competitive football.

 

As a “business enterprise”, the AFL has sniffed market potential and revenue from television rights to the women’s game.  A televised Footscray-Melbourne women’s exhibition game in 2015 rated its boots off, drawing half a million viewers, more than watched a lacklustre Adelaide-Essendon game the same weekend.  Television networks have caught the heady whiff of advertising dollars.  It may have taken crude capitalist calculation to make a go of women’s football but a formal, financially-viable, eight-team, unionised (two hundred new members of the the AFL Players’ Association face their next frontier – pay parity) elite national women’s competition, finally becomes reality in 2017.  Up There, Kaz!

THATCHER STOLE MY TROUSERS Alexei Sayle

THATCHER STOLE MY TROUSERS

ALEXEI SAYLE

Bloomsbury, 2016, 324 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

‘How does it aid the revolution, you trying to be funny?’.  The left-wing Liverpudlian, Alexei Sayle, the future star of the BBC’s comically demented The Young Ones, was flummoxed by this question posed to him by an exiled Arab revolutionary in Sayle’s London flat in 1971 in which the General Congress of the deadly serious Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf was being held.

 

Sayle, the son of working class communists, was a “practising communist” himself but also loved clowning around, he writes in Thatcher Sole My Trousers, his follow-up memoir to his childhood reminiscences in Stalin Ate My Homework.  For fun and politics to cohabit, concludes Sayle, he would have to divorce from the organised left, a process made easier by his particular party of choice, the dogmatically Maoist Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), a party which was obsessively paranoid (with ample justification) about being infiltrated by police spies and which correspondingly treated all potential recruits as such.

 

Sayle was also steered towards cultural, as well as political, individualism, which he pursued through anarchist cabaret (which included “throwing things at the audience – darts, chairs, fire extinguishers, seafood …..”), a solo stand-up act and a manic TV comedy series.  Sayle, unimpressed by traditional comedians with their punchline-dependent, sexist and racist gags, wanted “smart, relevant, popular comedy” that was aggressive, challenging and a bit wild but still socially engaged – “basically I talk about politics, social hypocrisy, consumerism, the legacy of post-colonialism, the fissiparous nature of ultra-hard-left political groupings …. with a great deal of physicality, allied to a kind of surrealistic overview, evocative, perhaps of the French Situationists”. 

 

Sayle, however, “didn’t think stand-up comedy … could change anything” - he sided with Peter Cook who satirised his own early comedy club as wanting it ‘to be like those cabarets in Weimar Republic Germany that had done so much to stop the rise of Hitler’.  Sayle did, however, continue to count himself on the left, staying true to its “core values of workers’ rights, social justice and equality”.

 

This included donating his hyper-energy to gigs supporting the Nicaraguan revolution and Amnesty International (getting the call from John Cleese for The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball) whilst poking (mostly) good-natured fun at left-wing benefit gigs themselves where the humour had to pass an audience ‘political correctness’ test for “possible sexism, neo-colonialism, and adherence to the theory of dialectical and historical materialism”.

 

Sayle also toured the country, laying into Tory Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher’s, 1984-85 war against the miners - in response to the massed forces of government, judiciary, police and press, “the left deployed me and Billy Bragg” (and The Style Council and Wham!).  Sayle was quite the Gramscian, an optimist of the will, a pessimist of the intellect.

 

Sayle’s comedy (in one episode of The Young Ones, he is “a train driver giving a speech to Mexican bandits about the revolutionary biscuits of Italy”) isn’t to everyone’s taste (‘as funny as a funeral’, said one eminent football manager) but, like his memoir, he sets both left wing politics and anarchic comedy marching together in some semblance of rough harmony.

THE RADIUM GIRLS Kate Moore

THE RADIUM GIRLS

KATE MOORE

Simon & Schuster, 2016, 465 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Those smirking denigrators of the ‘nanny-state’ who gripe about ‘occupational health and safety gone mad’ would do well to read Kate Moore’s The Radium Girls about a time when a nasty industrial poison, unregulated by business-friendly governments, destroyed countless American women’s lives.

 

Discovered in 1898, radium’s spectacular luminescence made it a popular craze.  It could, said its promoters, not only make you glow in the dark, but cure cancer (it did destroy tumorous cells) and all manner of human ailments.  US business entrepreneurs cashed in, at their head the watch dial industry whose profits increased by the bucketload from government contracts for night-time illumination of military instrumentation during the first World War.

 

Because of their nimble fingers, teenage and young women (and girls, some as young as eleven) were employed by the thousands for the intricate work of painting tiny dials.  They embraced their new jobs.  Paid on a piece-work basis, the more dials (and thus more radioactive radium) they handled, the better their earnings.  The most efficient and profitable (and dangerous) way to apply the radium-paint was ‘lip-pointing’, where moistened lips were used to bring paint-brush bristles to a fine taper.

 

The continual, close oral contact with bone-loving radium meant that the jaw was the first to go from radiation-induced necrosis (bone decay), after having lost all the teeth, followed by other crumbling bones, severe anaemia from destruction of red blood cell production in bone marrow, and cancer of the bone.

 

The radium-painters had been assured that radium was safe, despite management being aware of its dangers and, in fact, introducing some safety standards for their technical and scientific laboratory workers.  As the radium-painters fell sick and died, however, they continued to be lied to, and about.  Their health problems were blamed on ‘improper diets’, syphilis from sexual promiscuity, pre-existing health conditions, and workers’ compensation fraud.

 

Management’s allies included pro-business government bureaucracies, state legislatures, company doctors, and radium researchers, most of whom either worked for radium companies or for prestigious university departments which were funded by industry.

 

The radium-painters could only rely on a few conscience-troubled defectors from the above ranks, some lawyers (who acted from a mix of sympathy and the commercial lure of their standard 30-40% cut of successful compo claims), and the Consumers League which campaigned for better working conditions for women.  Trade unions (especially the conservative, male-dominated American Federation of Labor) are absent from the book - the radium-painters were too often deferential towards authority figures in business suits and lab coats.

 

Out-of-court settlements in front of business-linked judges cut the companies’ compensation losses whilst exempting them from any precedent-setting legal guilt.  It took two decades before a jury court vindicated the women as victims of industrial poisoning by radiation.

 

The real turning point for the radium industry, however, wasn’t so much the women workers but a wealthy male industrialist who died from drinking Radithor (a radium-infused tonic water) to treat an injury (‘The radium water worked fine until his jaw came off’, was the newspaper headline).  Radium medicines were banned, then laws introduced for all workers for safety standards for radium and other radioactive substances.

 

Radium’s legacy (it has a half-life of 1,600 years) still endures, however.  The contaminated factory and waste land-fill sites remain a radioactive source for above average community cancer rates, whilst costing taxpayers millions of dollars for government clean-ups.

 

The intimate human drama of the radium-painters monopolises most of Moore’s attention (she is a theatre director, not a historian) but the narrative reveals an early, grim chapter in the real cost of all subsequent variations (weapons, reactors, mining, waste dumps) on the disastrous nuclear theme.

THE PANAMA PAPERS Obermayer & Obermaier

THE PANAMA PAPERS: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money

BASTIAN OBERMAYER and FREDERIK OBERMAIER

Oneworld, 2016, 366 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

‘Only the little people pay tax’ was the gloating boast of the American billionaire property tycoons, Harry and Leona Helmsley.  Like this happy couple, write the Munich-based investigative journalists, Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier in The Panama Papers, wealthy tax cheats have a particular liking for off-shore tax havens.

 

Their book recounts the release in April 2016 of the greatest ever leak of confidential data (2.6 terabytes, 11 million documents) - the entire internal database of Mossack Fonseca (MF), a major Panamanian law firm which specialises in providing shell companies in notorious tax bolt-hole countries to enable the secretive rich to dodge paying tax on the income generated from their wealth.

 

Shell companies are dummy, paper entities which are impenetrable to government financial and criminal investigators through hiding the identities of the real owners of financial and property assets behind anodyne company names fronted by pro-forma ‘nominee directors’.  MF’s go-to glorified company director was a lowly-paid MF employee who was, on paper, in charge of over 25,000 shell companies but whose job was to robotically sign any bit of paper required to keep MF’s famously shy clients out of the tax headlights.

 

Like its founder, a wartime SS officer turned CIA informant to save his Nazi hide, MF is not fussy about the company it keeps.  MF knowingly helps, or prefers not to know about, those amongst its tax-averse clients such as gun-runners, drug dealers, Mafiosi, people-traffickers, child prostitution racketeers and other out-and-out criminals whom MF demurely refers to as its more ‘ethically challenged’ customers.

 

MF’s more ‘respectable’ clients include the Lesser Rich (real estate agents, dentists, etc.) and the Greater Rich such as the embezzling dictators, despots and heads of state; government ministers and their close circle; film directors and movie stars; chess grand masters and Formula 1 racing-car drivers; top-end football club owners, managers and star players like FC Barcelona striker, Lionel Messi; and bucketloads of other billionaires.

 

The tax haven rort is technically legal, note the authors, though the distinction between lawful tax minimisation and illegal tax evasion is easily lost on poor working saps who can not opt out of the tax game because they lack the will (believing, as they do, in such antiquarian notions as tax fairness), the opportunity (because they are compulsorily taxed at source each payday) and the means (adequate capital to be able to afford their own lawyer-accountant enablers or the fees charged by shell company providers like MF).

 

As the MF leak source (known as ‘John Doe’, for safety’s sake) said, ‘what is legally allowed is [itself] scandalous’.  What is legally allowed could easily be disallowed, he adds, were it not for the fact that ‘tax evasion can not possibly be fixed while elected officials are pleading for money from the very elites who have the strongest incentives to avoid taxes’ like the ‘high net worth’ individuals that MF caters to or the multinational corporations serviced by other shell company providers.

 

Thus, Jean-Claude Juncker (Luxembourg’s former Prime Minister and now President of the European Commission) defends his country’s tax haven status.  Thus, the UK is compromised as a tax enforcer by hosting a tax haven in the British Virgin Islands, as is the US by accommodating tax haven rat-holes in Nevada, Wyoming, Delaware and Florida.  The wealthy have little to fear from governments of and for the wealthy.

 

The ‘half century of political failure to address the metastasizing tax havens spotting Earth’s surface’, lamented by Mr. Doe, looks set to continue if left up to rhetoric-rich but action-poor politicians.  Any push must come from the 99%, amongst whose ranks will be those remaining journalists of integrity, motivated by an outraged sense of financial justice.

 

The Panama Papers was the result of a global collaboration involving four hundred journalists from eighty countries.  Whilst the Western journalists’ greatest fear was of being ignored, other journalists faced  the opposite problem of being noticed only too well by trigger-happy criminals and autocrats.  All the journalists rose to the challenge, however, to lift a corner on the lid of the great tax haven swindle.

UNNECCESSARY WARS, Henry Reynolds

UNNECESSARY WARS

HENRY REYNOLDS

Newsouth, 2016, 266 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

 

Australia’s first war (the Boer War in South Africa, 1899-1902), notes the historian, Henry Reynolds, in Unnecessary Wars, was intimately bound up with the uniting of the six Australian colonies into a single nation within the British empire.  This conjunction of militarism, nationalism and imperialism was ominous and Australia has never broken the habit of being at the military beck and call of its imperial managers.

 

War, says Reynolds, has become “the central and defining national experience” of Australian society.  For 58 of the last 76 years, Australia has been involved in war, whilst the national obsession with all things military, especially the endless, government-sponsored commemoration of past wars, “normalises war”, making it easier to get involved in every new one.

 

Australia’s pre-Boer-War military expeditions followed Britain into the Sudan and China but did not involve all six colonies and resulted in no real combat experience, and were thus found wanting as occasions for a national-military ‘coming-of-age’.  Both outings did, however, set a precedent of unquestioning Australian involvement in imperial wars.  The Boer War strengthened this tradition.

 

The war was Britain’s fight against two small Dutch republics (the Transvaal and the Orange Free State) with the aim of annexing them (especially their gold mines) to the British empire.  It was “an imperial war of conquest” with all the brutal baggage which that concept entails.

 

Conveniently far away and vigorously censored, “the horrors of battle and the brutalisation of the Afrikaner civilian population” were hidden from Australians at home, as was the role of the Australian troops in Britain’s scorched earth war strategy.  Forty towns were razed and 30,000 farms destroyed, whilst Boer women, children and the elderly were detained in concentration camps – over-crowded and starved tent cities where 28,000 civilian Boers perished (22,000 of them children) along with 14,000 of their African servants and labourers.  One in five of the total Boer population was wiped out.  Australian soldiers took part in the general pillage and destruction, dragged the Boers onto wagon trains for transportation to the camps, and authored their own war crimes and atrocities.

 

Britain’s need to project military power meant that war was a constant companion to empire – “Britain was fighting somewhere in the world almost every year during the second half of the 19^th century”.  War would automatically involve its colonial assets as suppliers of soldiers to defend Britain’s global reach.  In turn, war would politically and culturally bind the dominions to empire in blood sacrifice.  The Boer War was Australia’s loyalist blood oath - Arthur Conan Doyle (the British Sherlock Holmes author) enthusiastically wrote that ‘on the plains of South Africa … the blood brotherhood of the Empire was sealed’.

 

The Boer War served as “martial grooming” of Britain’s colonies which was to fully mature a decade later in the human abattoir of 1914-18.  The murderous scale of the first World War relegated its South African predecessor (with its paltry ‘sacrifice’ of 600 Australian soldiers) to the shadows but the Boer War has recently been fully readmitted into the approved Australian militarist narrative.  Australia’s Boer War troops have been given the required propaganda treatment, morally cleansing their direct involvement in incarcerating and terrorising Boer civilians, and burning and looting their farms.  Australia’s Boer War soldiers have been officially elevated to the rank of ‘Fathers of the Anzacs’ and formally enrolled in the religiously venerated ‘cult of the digger’.

 

Subsequent Australian wars have been likewise sanitised and depoliticised.  Elite and popular attention is focused on how the Australian soldiers fight (heroically, yet compassionately, ‘punching above their weight’) and not why they fight (stealing land, markets and resources).  Not up for polite discussion is Australia’s auxiliary role in fighting the unnecessary wars of ‘our powerful friends’ against countries which pose no territorial threat to Australia against people we don’t know in places we can’t find on a map.  Australia’s fortunate continental remoteness and size have been recast as “liabilities not strategic advantages” and neutrality or ‘homeland defence’ have never been considered as official options to war.

 

War is seen as so “natural and inescapable” that contemporary Australian governments find it easy to go to war despite its costs, legality and morality.  There is, however, an honourable tradition of anti-militarist dissent that has accompanied every war, from the Boer War on.  Reynolds’ book is a worthy part of the resistance to the khaki tide.

INK IN HER VEINS: The Troubled Life of Aileen Palmer by SYLVIA MARTIN

INK IN HER VEINS: The Troubled Life of Aileen Palmer

SYLVIA MARTIN

University of Western Australia Publishing, 2016, 328 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

In 1939, a young Australian woman grabbed the international headlines when she threw red paint from a thermos flask onto the doorsteps of 10 Downing Street, whilst distributing leaflets hidden in copies of the Ladies Home Journal, to protest the blood that the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had on his hands for selling out Spain and Czechoslovakia to European fascism.

 

Aileen Palmer was fined five shillings for her dissent but worse was to come for her rebellious ways, as the University of Tasmania’s Sylvia Martin discusses in her biography of the anti-fascist, communist, poet and lesbian.

 

The daughter of the prominent, left-wing Australian literature figures, Vance and Nettie Palmer, Aileen joined the Communist Party of Australia in the early 1930s, spurred by Depression-era economic crisis, fascism and war.

 

Palmer was in Barcelona as a translator for the upcoming Olimpiada Popular (‘the People’s Olympics’), organised by Spain’s left-wing Popular Front government to counter the forthcoming Nazi Olympics in Berlin in 1936, when the fascists’ assault in Spain abruptly cancelled the proletarian games.  Joining the volunteer International Brigades as an interpreter for the British Medical Aid Unit, Palmer put her political convictions, linguistic skills (fluent Spanish, French, German) and youthful drive at the service of the Spanish Republic against the Franco/Hitler/Mussolini military attack.

 

The up-close pain and death that came to her with each lorry-load of bodies was a harsh initiation into adulthood for the teenage Palmer.  Between savage offensives, however, time dragged and tempers frayed in the personality-chafing, close proximity of her medical team.  Class tensions (working class ambulance mechanics versus Cambridge-trained doctors) and political tensions (Communist versus non-Communist volunteers) exacerbated the difficulties.  Yet Palmer always regarded Spain as the political highlight of her life.

 

Although her return to Australia after the second world war saw Palmer continue her political and literary activism (against nuclear weapons and the Vietnam War), she was increasingly blighted by mental health problems.

 

Post-traumatic stress disorder from her war experience (‘the unbearable noise within’ her head, as a sympathetic sister poet put it) combined with bipolar disorder to create manic-depressive mood-swings and psychotic episodes.  This pot was kept brewing by the “tangled web of the Palmer family’s emotional dynamics” in which Palmer felt “submerged resentment” towards her parents, who under-valued their daughter’s chosen art form of the poem.

 

To further compound her psychological distress, Palmer’s lesbianism remained clandestine, deemed by contemporary social mores “to be sick or unnatural”, making her sexuality feel distasteful even to herself.  Palmer’s ‘shock treatments’ (including Electro-Convulsive Therapy) involved harrowing convulsions, coma and memory loss, and often made her mental state worse rather than better.

 

Palmer died in 1988 in a psychiatric nursing home, aged 73.  There were no obituaries, no tributes.  Sylvia Martin’s book (although overly-reliant on heavy chunks of Palmer’s diary) puts this to rights for Aileen Palmer, socialist and ‘poet of conscience’.

NAZIS IN OUR MIDST: German-Australians, Internment and the Second World War by DAVID HENDERSON

NAZIS IN OUR MIDST: German-Australians, Internment and the Second World War

DAVID HENDERSON

Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2016, 197 pages

Review by Phil Shannon

Australia’s then conservative Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, said that it would be “absurd to intern refugees and anti-fascists when they were on the Allies’ side” but, writes La Trobe University historian, David Henderson, in his case-study history, Nazis in our Midst, this is exactly what happened in Australia during World War 11 as German Jews and anti-Nazis were detained along with Nazis in Australia’s five internment camps.  Most of the 1,500 German-Australian internees were the innocent victims of racial prejudice or espionage hysteria simply because they were German.

 

Military intelligence justified blanket internment because they saw refugees as ‘excellent cover for agents’ or as susceptible to blackmail by Hitler’s Nazi regime threatening their relatives in Germany.  The Australian press was vigorously pro-internment - ‘this is no time for squeamishness in dealing with foreigners in our midst’, honked the Hobart Mercury, for example.

 

Both the Menzies and Labor governments used broad internment powers to respond to a public sentiment that had reanimated latent World War 1 Germanophobia with paranoia about Nazi fifth columnists.  In this toxic atmosphere, the wildest denunciations about disloyalty were treated by the security agencies as good coin, including gossip, rumour, personal animosities, conflicts between neighbours, professional rivalries, even a fondness for German music composers.

 

Appeals tribunals offered scant scope for remedy.  These quasi-judicial bodies had a legal veneer but the hearings were held in secret, specific allegations by (mostly anonymous) informants were not disclosed and could therefore not be tested under the usual rules of evidence, a presumption of guilt applied to the internee, and judges could only make non-enforceable recommendations to the Attorney-General for an internee’s release.

 

The appeals process was “at best an unequal struggle, at worst a sham”, says Henderson, noting the discrepancy between a war ostensibly fought for liberty, democracy and the rule of law versus the legal-face-saving travesties of justice that accompanied internment.

 

The outcomes for those unjustly interned (years of monotony, morning roll calls, weather extremes, overcrowding, social stigma and long-term “damage, trauma and loss”) were vastly disproportionate to any actual domestic Nazi threat.  There were fewer than a couple of hundred full-blown German Nazis in Australia, whilst any nationalist hankering for Germany amongst Anglicised German immigrants was largely sentimental nostalgia.

 

No matter how diligently the Auslandsorganisation (the foreign arm of the German Nazi party) cultivated recruits from Germans living in Australia, their returns were meagre.  The Nazis’ takeover of Australia’s German Clubs (including celebrations of the Führer’s birthday and Hitler’s beer-hall putsch, swastika flag-flying and Nazi salutes) yielded few political gains amongst the Club membership, although the visible display of Nazi rituals and propaganda mistakenly fed suspicions amongst Australian authorities that German-Australian communities were “outposts of the Third Reich”.  They weren’t.  No German-Australian internee was ever convicted of espionage or sabotage, whilst only 77 internees were deported after the war.

 

Henderson generally strives for non-committal ‘balance’ in his treatment of internment but he does bloody his knuckles against historians who suggest that the Australian security agencies’ obsession with the Red Menace rather than fascism led to a rushed implementation of dragnet internment of Nazis which also netted the innocent.

 

Henderson’s message is clear - beware governments who grant themselves broad, sweeping powers and ask us to trust that they will not abuse them, he says.  The political temptation to be seen to be doing something muscular at the time of a ‘national security’ crisis will almost certainly result in harmful overreaction.