Hybrid Feminisms: The Australian Case

Australian feminism, having always provided fer- tile ground for transplantation of "international" (TJ.S. and U.K., and latterly French) feminisms, has certain indigenous features, notable among them being its capacity to graft those others on to its own growth and at times produce new species. Antipo- dean feminism may be imaged ... not as an island colonial outpost but positioned at the crossroad of world trade routes and inhabited by settlers who are, paradoxicaUy, born traveUers.1 The arguments in this paper owe much to the insights provided by a coUeague, Barbara Sullivan, who identifies two streams of Australian feminism, "official feminism" and "clearing house feminism."2 Her notion of clearing house feminism as a hybrid form provoked me to consider the ways in which all Australian feminisms might be seen as grafts; each transplants disparate growths to produce something new. Australian ferninisms have been nurtured in a thin coastal shver of our continent, a liminal space bounded outwardly by the oceans of the world and inwardly by a hostile interior. Across the seas lie the other feminisms which influence our home-grown brands, inwards dweU the white Australian archetypes, the indigenous Aborigines, and the Austra- Uan bushman and his "mates." The first feminist graft I explore is Austra- Uan feminism's imaginative rewriting of its interior, an AustraUan herstory of colonization. The second feminist graft has emerged in the coastal stiver itself, the place where most Australians dweU. About two-thirds of Australians hved in areas classified as urban in 1890, a proportion matched by the United States only in 1920 and Canada not until 1950.3 These coastal cities have nurtured what Hester Eisenstein calls "official feminism."4 It is a response to a possibly unique historic conjuncture, a reformist Labour government combined with a flowering of ferninism.5 The term "femocrat" has been offered to the international feminist lexicon6 and identifies the successes of feminist bureaucrats appointed to senior levels of the bureaucracy to advance the cause of women. The third feminist graft looks outward and reflects Australian feminism's openness to international debates and ideas. As a "clearing house"7 for various currents of international work, Australian feminism