EDITORIAL
By Carole Ferrier

A question is posed at one point in Sylvia Lawson's essay collection reviewed here: 'What do you mean by your country?' And what, the writers and readers of this review journal might ponder, is meant by 'Australian' women in our title? This land mass began to be called 'Australia' just over a hundred years ago, at Federation. Forty-plus years of indentured labour (mainly in Queensland), a situation close to slavery for the South Sea Islanders who were named Kanakas, ended then, largely for the wrong reasons, with the establishment of the White Australia Policy. This policy still lurks in the national consciousness, insofar as there is such a thing, and has emerged again in terms of how non-white asylum seekers have been treated through the 1990s, and up to now. The few hundred intercepted refugees who have tried to come here on boats have triggered a massive campaign of closed borders around this land mass, and there has been a denial to nearly all of them of any possibility of becoming Australian. More than half are from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, all regimes that the Australian government has publicly denounced as repressive of human rights. But along with thousands more with visa irregularities (but oddly, not many of anglo-origin) who have been rounded up, the refugees have been locked in detention centres run by the discredited ACM (an American private prison operator), mostly far away from the cities where more organised support might be found from those who do not want 'Australia' to present to the world outside an ugly, very white face with a gun behind it.

Angela Davis sees contemporary society and globalised capital as a 'prison industrial complex.' The detention centres contain people from outside this 'Australia' refused refuge; the prisons contain people from within it who are rejected by it (or who sometimes reject it themselves), mainly the most disadvantaged in this culture. The Indigenous inhabitants (although they could not officially call themselves 'Australian' until the 1960s) make up a high percentage of the incarcerated population, for some reasons clarified by Ros Kidd's article in this issue; she tells how her knowledge of the history of white/Aboriginal race relations has meant that 'my sense of myself as a member of a just society is fractured.' Many others have reported the same feeling in relation to the treatment of the Tampa and other boats of refugees - that they no longer feel comfortable to be 'Australian' as it is currently being constructed in these times. John Howard was re-elected on the slogan 'For all of us.' This invoking of a shared commonality of interests involves the suppression of difference and diversity, a turning back of 'Australia's' movement towards being a 'multicultural' society, in which varying ethnicities could be a source of interest and joy, not a source of fear.

The shadow of recent international developments hangs over this issue, and many of the reviews express their awareness of it. Not so much September 11, as the subsequent responses - a brutal bombardment of an already war-ravaged country, a massive redirection of national wealth in the developed Western First World towards the buttressing of capitalist interests, and huge budget allocations for the identification and pursuit of a 'Terror' somewhere out there beyond the borders.

What is this Terror that governments in the West seem to be pushing into our hearts and minds? Does it spring in part at least from guilt that is repressed about the misery of the lives of those upon whom capitalism feeds like a vampire to maintain itself, and benefit some? One of the really terrifying things, Helen Caldicott's recent book The Nuclear Danger: George W. Bush's Military-Industrial Complex reminds us, is nuclear war. Pine Gap near Alice Springs is an American-controlled base essential for the prosecution of the American-dominated New World (Law and) Order. During the Gulf war, Colin Powell was instructed to prepare a plan for possible nuclear strikes on Iraq. Pine Gap would have been used for this, as it was for the 'conventional' wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. Australian foreign policy has had these alliances and these bases for decades but they are currently being dramatically upscaled. The last (and only) time nuclear weapons were used it was supposedly to stop fascism. But the current surveillance, secret policing, and government prioritising of burgeoning military might, bear increasing resemblances to the early days of fascism in the 1930s. Is 'Terror' in Australian uniforms not terror at all? Does counter-terrorism (to which this year's Budget in May re-directed massive funds that could have been spent on welfare and education) actually produce anything other than an escalation of what it supposedly sets out to combat? The turn in most of the West over the past few years, and greatly accelerated since last year, to conservative governments, surveillance and militarism, has been compared to the 1950s; more recently however the similarities beginning to be drawn are with the 1930s and the rise of fascism.

Arundhati Roy in a recent article in the New Statesman has named the situation in Gujarat in India specifically as `incipient, creeping fascism' particularly in relation to the persecution of India's Muslims. But she seems to underestimate the degree to which this might also be identified throughout the West. She suggests that George Bush and the Coalition Against Terror created `a congenial international atmosphere' for its rise, although for 'years it has been brewing in our public and private lives.' But she seems to be blind to the way in which it could also be seen to be being prepared for in the West: one minor concession after another made to economic rationalism, gradually adding up to a whole shift of direction, a whole new worldview. John Howard's role in this in Australia is discussed by Nathan Hollier in the politicsandculture journal that you can also find on this website.

This issue of the Australian Women's Book Review contains an interview with Kate Jennings who has in some ways followed in the tracks of Christina Stead who left Australia in the late 1920s for Europe and America, marrying an American banker, Bill Blake, writing about the world of high finance in House of all Nations (1938), and living in New York for long periods. Her posthumously published novel, I'm Dying Laughing was about attacks on the American left, especially cultural workers, during the McCarthyite days. Along with many other Australian women intellectuals, Stead has been important in offering incisive critiques of capitalism and imperialism, and their concomitant ethnocentrism and sexism. Australian women were among the first to get the vote and the socialist-oriented Women's Liberation Movement of the 1960s made huge gains in terms of services for women and other progressive social policies, and women's visibility in public life. Particularly offensive to many feminists has been the suggestion that the war in Afghanistan was made in women's name to liberate them from oppression. Violence is also being enacted against minority women here (most visibly in the detention centres that have been described as 'concentration camps') in the name of 'Australian' women.

Virginia Woolf says in Three Guineas (1938): 'as a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.' Women in Australia could combat the destructive potential of globalising and increasingly militaristic capital by thinking about this view too.

Review articles are anonymously refereed.

Contributors are paid $60 per review, $90 per review article.

This is the fourth issue of AWBR since it became an internet magazine. AWBR is published twice yearly in May and November (and appears at the same time as the two issues of Hecate per year). It is Australia's only women's review of books (on or off the net). We publish reviews by Australian women of both Australian and, occasionally, other texts, and welcome new reviewers.