My Hiatus

Having conversations with friends.

King Charles Bridge, Prague.

I’ve not been writing for a while and I’ve been on a kind of holiday. The kind of holiday where you go around the world the wrong way to see people you love and hope to fit in a bunch of things that just aren’t realistic.

Meanwhile, in the world of politics, the Labour government was turfed out by the people of Queensland, the Deeming V Pesutto case, which I’ve been following closely, came to closing arguments and the day I returned to Australia, I woke from a jet lagged day nap to find that Trump won the US election. 

The last leg of my journey was 38 hours, from my London bus to clearing the cumbersome customs and quarantine systems in Brisbane Airport.

The trip was a budget one for me, as I was gifted an Air Canada credit but I didn’t want to go to Canada, I wanted to see my friends and family in the UK, This meant I went to the UK via Canada without stopping in Canada except to connect flights. Hence the crazy travel time. 

In the UK I tried to do some gender-critical related political things and was invited to several events that I either couldn’t attend or chose to spend time with family and friends instead. I went to the Battle of Ideas conference for one day at the invite of the very kind Venice Allan. I was able to meet some people like Venice, Mr Meno and Gillian Phillips. Unfortunately by the time the social event started my jet lag hit like a sack of wet flour on my head, and I had to head back to my accommodation.

One of the objectives of the trip, was not only to hang with friends and family, but to get a bit of distance from the politics I now swim in so enthusiastically. All my UK friends and family voted for Starmer and hope to see things improve under him for the poor. My friends and family are what I would call old-fashioned lefties, certainly my cockney family, who were working in unions in London for decades.

Most of my British cousins are in their late 70s and early 80s now, and were born into generational poverty. They believe, not without reason, that collective political action in the labour movement has pulled their families out of this systemic class poverty. Many of my cockney family are now quite well off with affluent children and grandchildren and of course, no longer live in London.

We drank beer and they told me stories about their uncle Jimmy who was my father, who migrated to Australia in the 50s. I grew up with a range of tall stories and cautionary tales that resonate through the ages, I enjoyed hearing them retold with some level of exaggeration.

I teased my family when they expressed “tory” opinions about immigration being out of control, and men not being able to magically turn into women. The cousin I stayed with in Hastings still gets a paper every day and when I noticed it was a ‘Tory paper’ (The Daily Mail), I commented with a dry look over my cup of tea, he told me he bought it for the sport.

I know my pommie family will never vote Tory, and knew they wouldn’t abandon me when I told them I had been voting Tory in Australia for several years, and thought that both the Labor Party and the Labour Party had abandoned the working class. They did not disagree with me on much really, but a Tory they could never be.

I told my family and friends that I was now single issue, and had abandoned Labor because they had abandoned women. In accordance with a long-established cockney creed, I was the daughter of Uncle Jimmy and politics was put aside for the drinking of beer and the telling of stories.

After a week in London and Hastings, I travelled north to get quite an insight into the village life just outside of Durham.  I enjoyed talking to women in coffee shops and chippies and discussing with my friends the kind of politics I was writing about. 

I was genuinely shocked when my friend of 23 years asked me why I didn’t like “trans people”. My friend and I have a long friendship and talk mostly about our everyday lives and challenges, I hadn’t explained to her the kind of feminism I was now interested in inevitably conflicts with the “trans” concept only by claiming that women exist.

Most of my friends and family in the UK are what most people would call “comfortable”, they are all concerned about the rising cost of living for people on lower wages and young people. Most people I spoke to already felt betrayed by Starmer but don’t see the Tories of much of an alternative. 

I had a few days in the North playing housewife while my friends worked and was able to go to the supermarket and buy groceries to make dinner. The groceries there are a lot cheaper than in Australia, even with the punishing exchange rate to the Australian Dollar. They also have a wider choice of supermarket chains.

While the visible homelessness in Britain is shocking, and the NHS is cracking at the seams, people seem to maintain a decent standard of living outside the ridiculously expensive lifestyle in London, and generally can access quality and affordable healthcare, compared to many countries.

While I was disappointed to miss several opportunities to meet with the terven of “TERF island”, I liked to be among ordinary people, talking about their ordinary problems.  My friend from the North, who is Scottish, came with me to the Czech Republic to visit my old university friend and his family.

While at university I became friends with a young man who had escaped Czechoslovakia with his family as a teenager and had returned to Czech for the Velvet Revolution and then returned back to Australia to complete his honours thesis when he and I became friends at university. My friend worked for a number of years in Australia before he and his wife decided to raise their family in their home outside of Prague. 

As my friend gave us a tour of Prague he explained about the protests and celebrations he had witnessed as the Iron Curtain fell in Europe, and the joy he had when his country was again free to join the West in the capitalist dream. Like me, he is an old leftie, and openly acknowledges the benefits of capitalism, and the economic disparity that capitalism brings.

Having said that, as we walked through Prague, and the smaller towns that he grew up in, we took up old arguments about politics. He, like my British family, holds on to ideals of the old left and understands that the new left are insane, but maintains resentments and bias toward the right.  The extreme right in former eastern block countries, seem to be a greater force than they are here in Australia, although this is far from my area of expertise.

I called him an individualist and a fascist, for failing to see the problems of women’s reproductive and sexual labour being placed unfettered in the marketplace, he called me a conservative and a bible basher, we laughed and shared a tearful farewell.

As I talked to so many friends and family I disagreed with on politics, I found it strange that so many people will abandon friendship for politics, it's such a counterproductive thing to do.

So the purpose of my hiatus and long, long journey is still being worked through in my mind and I will share some of my lessons. On my return, I feel small but mighty. My Czech friend commended my choice to speak out and write but said he didn’t think I would make the least bit of difference. But even as he said it I knew it wasn’t true. 

The place, that had the most impact on me was Newcastle, its such a lovely northern city and I went to the Newcastle Discovery Museum where they had a “Discover Her Story” event on, with installations of remarkable women from Newcastle or associated with Newcastle.

Among the magnificent cathedrals and breath-taking works of art, it was the ordinary women of Britain, past and present, that had the biggest impact on me, and who strengthened my resolve to commit my life to the security and empowerment of women and girls. I have no intention of wasting my time or failing in my endeavour.