Fearless Beatrice Faust Book Launch:
with Judith Brett and Sally Warhaft
On Wednesday 30 April, over 200 people gathered at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne to launch Judith Brett’s feminist biography, Fearless Beatrice Faust. Judith spoke with broadcaster and writer, Sally Warhaft, about who Bea Faust was in both the personal and the public, what we can learn from her, and what she might have thought of feminism as it stands today.
Beatrice Faust was a transformative feminist activist, writer and intellectual who founded the Women’s Electoral Lobby in Melbourne in 1972.
Judith Brett’s book celebrates, explains and questions Faust’s struggle to change both herself and her world. Drawing on public records and private writings, award-winning biographer Judith Brett creates a compelling and psychologically nuanced portrait of a gifted, argumentative feminist who refused to be a victim.
Fearless Beatrice Faust: Sex, Feminism and Body Politics is available now. Published by Text Publishing.
Featured speakers (in order of appearance):
- Mary Crooks AO, Executive Director, Victorian Women’s Trust
- Sally White, Founding member of the Women’s Electoral Lobby
- Chris Gordon, Events Manager, Readings
- Sally Warhaft, Writer
- Prof Judith Brett AM, Political historian
- Alana Johnson, Chair, Victorian Women’s Trust
Transcript:
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Mary Crooks AO:
Good evening. She says, hoping for a lull. And got it. Welcome, one and all. In the early 1990s, under the leadership of Duré Dara , who was then the Women’s Trust convener, the Victorian Women’s Trust became one of the first non-Indigenous organisations in Australia to acknowledge Country at our public events. We’ve done so ever since.
And standing as we are today on Wurundjeri land, it is such a simple and profound and gracious way of showing our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples for their stewardship, their custodianship for over 2000 generations of human civilisation on this vast and ancient continent. Indeed, how lucky. How lucky are we as Australians to be able to celebrate the oldest living continuing culture in the world. And if I had a lazy million or two, I would take out lots of advertisements to that effect.
It’s a welcome also not just to you all, but to Minister Thomas. Mary-Anne, welcome. I understand you’re here. I can’t see you. But it’s delightful that you’ve been able to join us tonight. And while I’m also welcoming strong women in the parliamentary arena, let me extend a warm welcome to to Fiona Patten.
Back, I think, in the first year of Covid in 2020, I was approached by a small group of women. Roslyn Smallwood, a founder of WEL, or in the group. Jocelyn Mitchell, a member of the first group. Iola Matthews a member of the first group of WEL, with Bea Faust. Along with Lesley Vick, through her association with Bea through abortion law reform.
These women came to me to see if there’s a way that they can bring to fruition a much needed biography in their mind of Beatrice Faust. They had managed to secure the extraordinarily talented Judy Brett to do the work. Largely, I might add, as a labour of love. In 2021, the Victorian Women’s Trust campaigned for funds in order to bring the biography to fruition. To meet Judy’s, research costs, permission costs, travel costs and in fact, to stage this launch tonight. We raised several thousand dollars from April to June in 2021. From 50 donors, women and men, who wanted to see this biography come to the light of day.
The rest, as they say, is history. So here we are tonight, and I want to dedicate the event to Rosalind, Jocelyn, Iola, and Lesley.
So tonight’s format. In a few minutes, I will introduce Sally White to make some brief comments on the day around the setting up of WEL. And then we’ll have this, what I think is going to be a remarkable conversation, between Judy as the author and between Judy and Sally Warhaft. And then Alana Johnson, the Chair of the Women’s Trust, will wrap up.
The conversation between Judy and Sally is being filmed by the the indomitable Stu Mannion. Again with donor funds enabling this to happen. So that everybody who couldn’t be here tonight but who wants to see this conversation will have the chance to sit back in their homes and watch this film, probably the week after next, onwards.
So let me introduce our first Sally. There are two Sallys on the program. So Sally number one. Sally White was a journalist, a journalism educator, and the author of four books. She started her journalistic career in the Australian Women’s Weekly, where she learned what many female journalists then spent their professional lives doing. She recalls with horror, having to write social notes.
After a stint at the ill-fated afternoon paper Newsday, Sally became only the second female reporter on the ABC’s flagship program This Day Tonight, after the legendary Caroline Jones broke that particular glass ceiling. Sally then went on to The Age as a senior reporter, where she was variously a general reporter, arts editor, science editor, and a feature writer. She was an active union leader and the first woman elected by popular vote as Vice President of the Australian Journalists Association in the mid 1970s.
What Sally hasn’t referenced in this biographical note, but I know from reading Judy’s fine, fine book, which I read last week, is that Bea Faust made a very strategic choice to enlist Iola Matthews and Sally White, in helping to activate the Women’s Electoral Lobby. Sally White.
Sally White:
Thank you, Mary. It’s rather exciting to be one of two Sallys. Although I was asked the other day, somebody came to me at a pre-polling booth and said, “Aren’t you rather old to be a Sally?” I don’t feel that I’m too old to be a Sally. But let’s get the show on the road.
The early 70s were a great, decade for slogans. The feminist catch cry, ‘the personal is political’, and the ALP election slogan ‘it’s time’ take on a secondary meaning when we talk about Bea Faust’s most important contribution to Australian women. The foundation of the Women’s Electoral Lobby. Bea put the personals aside when she determined to turn the particular concerns of women into political advocacy, and eventually to government action and legislation.
You know the topics. Most of them are still around. Contraception, abortion, childcare, family law, access to jobs, access to education, equal pay.
Now, I’m not really certain why I’m here tonight. Apart from being witness to that very beginning of WEL. One of the ten who sat on the floor in the sunny upstairs room in Bea’s Carlton house in February 1972. I didn’t know why I was there.
I didn’t really know Bea. Or why she picked me. We never talked about it because we got on with the job. Her pitch to us that day was that in general, women didn’t know enough about how politics worked and so didn’t feel confident enough to cast an independent vote that could enhance their wellbeing. They voted as their dads voted. Or their husbands.
I knew plenty of women like that. So when Bea put that idea to me of getting useful information about political decision making directly to women, it appealed to the communicator in me. When I reflect on it, I am convinced that WEL’s extraordinary success, and we never believed it was going to be as successful as it was, grew not from a brilliant, original idea. Because after all, the notion of surveying candidates on their attitudes to women’s issues had already been done in the US. But it came from Bea’s, let me say it, management style.
She chose women with skills and knowledge and then let them run with their interests and passions. Very occasionally she interfered. Like the day at one meeting when the call was being made for volunteers to organise the newsletter. Bea was standing beside Jocelyn Mitchell, who was one of the ten. She grabbed Jocelyn’s hand, pulled it up in the air. And Jocelyn, who confesses that she was rather timid in those days, didn’t say no. Thereafter, she made a great job of the newsletter, which was enormously important, keeping all that information flowing to these women who were involved in WEL.
In that first year, living rooms throughout Melbourne were commandeered for WEL activity. And everybody had a job. But sometimes the jobs changed depending on the need. And I often went to Helen Glazer’s house to keep the Glazer children, Sarah and Ben entertained while the survey team did the really hard work. They were researching and formulating the precise questions needed for the candidates survey. And later on they were involved in briefing the interviewers who were to go out on the road hunting in pairs. My job was to come afterwards, arranging publication of the survey results.
And I was nervous. A young journalist, even a sort of confident one, never went into the assistant editors office without an invitation. So I decided that I would take a leaf out of the male playbook and use the old boys network. The Old Boys Club. We now have that lovely non-gender specific term for exactly the same thing, which we call networking.
My father was a senior journalist, a former war correspondent. And at that time, when he came back from the war, a Cadet Counsellor at the Herald and Weekly Times. One of his cadets was Creighton Burns, the assistant editor of The Age. And so I bravely put the idea to Creighton to publish the results of the WEL survey. I shouldn’t have worried because Creighton had a very good political brain as well as a journalistic one. And he knew that the form guide was a great story, as it turned out to be.
There were, of course, tensions in that first year of WEL. Many women, particularly those who were working through their ideas in consciousness raising groups, thought that we were middle class, white and privileged. Well, true, most of us were. But we also understood women’s dilemmas.
We understood the frustration of the female tram conductors, conductresses who weren’t allowed to be tram drivers. We understood about the despair of the mother of four children with another unwanted pregnancy on the way. Or for a teacher who had to give up her job when she got married. Many of the women I met during those heady days in the early 70s say that WEL change their lives.
They became city councillors, parliamentarians, tram drivers, senior public servants, mature age university students, union officials. They became women who said what they wanted and were listened to. Now, I was already in a fairly demanding professional trajectory, and I don’t think that WEL changed my life as such, but it certainly enhanced it. I remember the easy bonds of the WEL sisterhood with great affection. Bea’s vision and energy unlocked the potential of hundreds of women, thousands of women, because it was time to turn the personal into the political. Having had even a small part to play in that adventure is a source of great pride.
Now, to wrap it up, another slogan. That’s where I started, always end where you begin. It’s one particularly dear to my heart.
It was the headline on the front page of The Age’s form guide to the Victorian candidates in the 1972 Federal Election. For those of you who have chosen unwisely to miss out on the Democracy Sausage by taking advantage pre-polling, this one does not apply to you. But for those of you who will cast a ballot on Saturday, remember our exhortation.
‘Think WEL before you vote.’
Thank you very much. And, if I may ask Chris Gordon, who’s a member of the Women’s Trust Board, to introduce what we’re all here for, the discussion between Sally and Judy.
Chris Gordon:
Good evening, friends, and thank you so much, Sally, for that history. And thank you to all being here tonight. I stand in front of you not only as a very proud board member of the Victorian Women’s Trust, but also, a bookseller with your very favourite, independent bookshop Readings. At the moment, we’re selling this book. You might have heard of it.
I’d like to introduce you to two women that need no introduction at all. Women that understand that words matter, that history matters. And when I was thinking about how I would introduce someone like Professor Judith Brett, I realised that all of you here in this room already know so much about her. So I went back and I went back and I read some of the interviews that she gave in her early days. And she says that she always wanted to go to university and there her parents had strongly believed in education and made so many sacrifices so that she could go there.
She did well. She was a terrific reader, apparently. Still is. She went to study honours at an arts degree at Melbourne University in 1967. She talks about how that was the golden years of Australian universities. She says that she actually only had 24 contact hours. And she said there was intense political activity on campus with opposition to conscription and the Vietnam War. And later the beginnings of the second wave feminism and sexual liberation. And this political context gave a radical edge to her studies.
And this is a quote that I want to share with you today that I think is relevant. She said that she “believes that intellectual work should contribute to a better informed and more just and equal society. This”, she says, “laid the foundations for my later writing as a public intellectual.”
Tonight our Judith Brett, our historian, our master of words will be talking with Sally Warhaftt, who, as we all know is a Melbourne broadcaster and anthropologist and writer. Dr Sally Warhaft, has got an extraordinary book that’s called We Say: The Speeches That Made Australia. She’s a regular host and commentator here at the Wheeler Centre, on the ABC and at Readings. One of my favourite quotes from Sally is that she says always that “memorable speeches define a people and a place. They define a nation.”
Can we please welcome two women that have made it their life’s work to ensure that words matter.
Sally Warhaft:
Thank you, each of the speakers for that terrific introduction to tonight. And welcome to you all. And welcome to Judy, here to celebrate this wonderful, wonderful book, Fearless Beatrice Faust. And it is such a pleasure for me to be involved in this launch. A huge pleasure. I was a tutor of Judith’s when she was still at La Trobe and it was one of the great working experiences of my life. I probably just should have stayed there. It was wonderful.
We’re here to talk about, Beatrice Faust, obviously. And I’m going to begin with that. Judy, for you to just tell us, having written the book, having devoted so much time with her presumably in your head. What sort of a woman you discovered her to be?
Judith Brett:
I think I discovered her to be tough, brave and vulnerable and extraordinarily intelligent. In the introduction to the book, I put a poem that she wrote in 1968 when she was in west Western Australia. And it was in Kate Jennings’ Mother I’m Rooted, which was a book of feminist poetry that Outback Press published, I think, in 1975.
In that she talks, she says, she’s walking along and the comrades see someone who’s confident, and she came over as very confident. But actually, she was like the Spartan boy with a fox gnawing away at her entrails as she walked. I mean, it’s a dramatic image. But there was, there was a lot of inner suffering, which I was interested, I think, in how that was, how she dealt with that in that historical period. So I came to admire her a lot, you know. I guess when I set out on the, you know, put my hand up to write the biography, I didn’t know a huge amount about her. I thought that I’d be writing a biography of a political activist, which I was, but I didn’t realise what a sort of complicated and argumentative person she was.
Sally Warhaft:
I mean, that sort of happened with Deakin too, didn’t it? If you’re a proper biographer you’re going to go everywhere you can, aren’t you? And you start, in her life, with this sort of defining feature of her life in a way, her inner life, and a lot of her outer life. Is the death of her mother when she was just 12 hours old. Tell us about about that influence in her life.
Judith Brett:
Well, I think it influenced her life in two ways.
In terms of the political activism. Her mother was, it was quite a late marriage. Her mother was a Catholic. She, and I presume Bea knows this from her father, you know, she didn’t want to use contraception. She got, she’d been advised not to get pregnant, because of health issues. She did get pregnant, and she was advised to have an abortion. She didn’t. And she died.
So it’s part of the complicated relationship that Bea had with abortion. Because obviously, at one level, she thinks her mother should have had an abortion and she would have lived, and then she, Bea, wouldn’t have lived, wouldn’t be here. So it’s part of the complicated, origins of her activism. The other impact on her is, in a way, more personal.
Her father was not a particularly emotionally competent man. He all of a sudden had this baby to bring up. His mother helped for the first 2 to 3 years of Bea’s life. But then she died. And Bea said that second blow was terrible. And then he acquired a well, he, you know, he had a series of housekeepers.
And then there was a stepmother. And Bea really disliked the stepmother. So she experienced her childhood as miserable, and she felt that she was unwanted. She had chronic health issues and she was, often in hospital. And she feels that they wanted her to die. Now, we don’t know, you know. But that’s certainly how she experienced it.
So this, if you like, there’s two sides of her that I was talking about. We can see both there in that very seminal event of her mother’s death.
Sally Warhaft:
And with all these difficulties she had, though. It’s just a thread right through the book that she just refused to be a victim in any way. And she didn’t like it in others.
Judith Brett:
That’s right.
Sally Warhaft:
And believed that, you know, that in every human situation you have a choice. And she described it and you write about it that to not take responsibility in life for whatever it throws at you is bad faith. I wonder if you could talk about that? I found that really interesting.
Judith Brett:
Well, I think, you know, she’s born in 1939, so she’s going to university at the end of the 1950s. And existentialism was a very important influence on intellectuals in the 1950s. And so the concept of bad faith came from Sartre, from John Paul Sartre. And the concept of human freedom. So that, in any situation, there is a choice.
And to say, ‘oh I have to do this because, I’m X or Y’ is actually to give up your choice. And so I think that was a really I mean, it’s partly relatively culturally specific to that period, the influence of existentialism. But it was also, it’s part of her as a, as a survivor, I guess. But yes, I mean, I think that’s this refusal to be a victim. And she had plenty of things to be a victim of in many ways.
I mean, she had chronic health issues from a baby. She had bronchiectasis chronically for her whole life. And she later on developed scoliosis and had very painful arthritis, which she had to manage. But again, you know, these were things that she would manage rather than give in to.
Sally Warhaft:
And what about her intellectual sort of style? I mean, she was really evidence based. She was always well-informed. But how would you describe her sort of style of thinking?
Judith Brett:
She’s very rationalist in a way. Her first husband, Clive Faust, was an honours philosophy student and she says that he taught her how to argue. And so she has this very, she loves an argument.
So, you know, it’s a concern with evidence, of being well-informed, and thinking through things rationally. So, when feminism comes along, she’s quite wary of what she sees as ideological positions. She always wants to, you know, think rationally. And she also thinks of her intellect, if you like, as sort of above or beyond gender. As not being a sort of gendered part of her.
Sally Warhaft:
We heard Sally one before talking about the the formation of the Women’s Electoral Lobby here and, you know, that it wasn’t so much the sort of brilliance of the idea because it had been done in America. But I actually thought it was a brilliant idea for Australia, and quite different here in Australia. And I think from what you say about Beatrice’s attitude to America, she would agree.
Judith Brett:
Yeah.
Sally Warhaft:
That just because it’s been done somewhere else doesn’t mean it’s not a great idea for a different, and perhaps more difficult place, to survey all the candidates. But, and Sally also touched on this too. But I’d like to hear more from you about how how she did it, how she executed it so successfully.
Judith Brett:
Well she, very much her focus was on practical, achievable reforms. And so in the run up, you know, this starts in early 72. Because the American survey had just been of the presidential candidates. So this was, the idea was to survey all of the parliamentarians. So a much bigger net, if you like. But there was a sense that, you know, there was a sense of change in the air.
Whitlam was the coming man. You know, people were pretty… a lot of progressive people were hoping for a Labor victory finally at the end in 1972. So in that sense it was good to be flowing with the change. But it was to focus on practical, achievable reforms and legislative reform. She was very aware, particularly, her initial political activism throughout the 1960s was in the abortion law reform movement. And that was very much focused on getting abortion out of the criminal law system.
So law reform was and regulation reform was what she was focused on rather than large scale, you know, consciousness raising, changing the way people, women thought about themselves. I mean, I think she thought that there was already plenty of women thinking about themselves in different ways. But let’s focus on things that are achievable.
Sally Warhaft:
She sounds so different to the other women of that time.
And, you know, particularly, I mean, obviously Germaine Greer and who was her, I think, they were at university in the same year.
Judith Brett:
They were at university together, yes.
Sally Warhaft:
That that she was somebody who, you know, she believed in marriage for herself, that she was incredibly practical. There was nothing about her that was sort of wildly attention seeking. And yet she would be willing to go on television in, was it 1968? And say, you know, I had an abortion.
Judith Brett:
Yep.
Sally Warhaft:
I wondered how much of that comes from, you mentioned before this sort of, she had a sort of, she described herself as androgynous. There was a lot of masculine sort of energy running through her. She grew up with these uncles. She didn’t have a mother. How that sort of connected with her, her very practical side.
Judith Brett:
Yes. I think, the concept of women’s liberation. I don’t, I think that Bea was, when she went to Mac.Rob at the end of year eight. She found a place where she thrived. They respected her intellect. There were women teachers there who were encouraging women to think about what they could be.
But I think also significant is that she didn’t have a mother, in the 1950s, a 1950s mother, you know, overseeing her grooming and telling her to be a good girl and, you know. So but she wasn’t, she didn’t have to break away. In a way. I mean, her father, she feels, was emotionally neglectful. But on the other hand they were relatively, you know, they were, they lived near the Caulfield Race Club and there was two semi alcoholic uncles and her and the stepmother. And I mean, it was pretty grim. And she wasn’t allowed to have a pet. And they’d tell blue jokes around the table listening to the races, you know.
So she grew up in that sort of masculine, you know, they weren’t, they were relative…you know, they were quite, they were well off enough. So she she didn’t have, they’re not… I mean, I found it interesting listening to tapes of her because she’s got a voice that sounds like she went to one of Melbourne’s eastern girls private schools. She must…. But I’ve found in her papers there was some elocution, books, you know, teaching you how to do your vowels. She must have produced a sort of a middle class looking girl and a middle class looking voice out of that background.
Sally Warhaft:
Her relationship with women seems like it was complicated.
Judith Brett:
Yes.
Sally Warhaft:
That, you know, she was a feminist, but never sort of truly part of the sisterhood. Is that how you would describe it?
Judith Brett:
Yes. Look, I think that’s partly because she always valued her intellectual independence. So she’s not just going to go along with things. She also likes arguing, which a lot of women don’t. I mean, I don’t particularly like arguing. For example, you know. if people want to have an argument, I mean, you know, but she liked that. She has good women friends. But she does fall out with them. But I think she also reacted…
I mean, there’s two things, I guess about about the women’s movement at the time.
One was there was a sort of a revolutionary end it which was wanting to overthrow the patriarchy. Talk about, you know, complete social remaking. She never believed that that would happen, and she didn’t necessarily think that it would benefit women. And she didn’t necessarily think it was a good thing. The other was that, she felt, I mean… I was talking about her early political formation. She was a humanist in the 1960s. And humanism is about men and women, and men and women finding sort of worthwhile living, worthwhile lives.
And she felt there was a strand of misandry in some of the women’s movement. She didn’t have much time for radical separatism. She liked men and so that also, I think, put her a little at a distance from the women’s movement. But it’s partly that she’s not a, she’s not a group person, you know. She’s, in that sense, she’s an intellectual who wants to work the things out for herself.
Sally Warhaft:
She’s best known for her work with the the Women’s Electoral Lobby, but she went on to have a to sort of get involved in lots of other causes as well as a commentator and a writer and so on. And particularly in some quite controversial sort of areas. Her views on rape, for example, were really quite out of tune with the rest of the feminist movement in lots of ways. What was going on there with her, do you think? What was that?
Judith Brett:
Well, I think that’s part of her rational, evidence based approach to problems. So she went on, I can’t remember now which television program it was, whether it was This Day Tonight or Monday Conference, with Susan Brownmiller, who’d written a book on rape. In which she argued that rape was a tool of the patriarchy and that all men benefited from rape and that rape, that heterosexual relations, all had this element of power in them. Bea didn’t agree with that.
You know, she wanted to, she wanted always, if there was generalisations about rape is X or Y, she’d come up with examples that were different. She was on this, television program and I think it was Ray Mooney who’d been in jail for rape. And he was now out and he was on it. And so Susan Brownmiller is asking him, you know, ‘why did you do it and all that?’ And he says, ‘Oh, I spent a lot of time thinking about this.’ And Bea says, ‘Were you randy?’ And he says, ‘Y’es.’ That is, she thinks sometimes rape’s about sex, not power, you know. That it’s complicated. So she wants to always complicate things. And I see that is tied to her rationality in looking for evidence.
Sally Warhaft:
It did seem like she would often use herself as evidence, but not necessarily… And and she wasn’t particularly compassionate to herself. I think that’s my impression of her as a person. And wasn’t necessarily to other people either, particularly victims of sexual crimes. That there was not a natural empathy in her. Is that, is that unfair?
Judith Brett:
Look, I don’t. And some people told me she was she was very kind. I think, look, she really liked sex and she, on rape she says, look, I don’t under… One of her arguments was ‘I don’t understand why people, why rape isn’t just seen as a form of assault.’ She said ‘I’d be much more upset if my head was hit, which is where my brain is, and I got brain damage. Than, than with what’s between my legs.’ You know?
So so there was that sense she had in that, because she found she liked sex. She found sex very easy. She found men very attractive. She could say, no. She wasn’t, she… I think there’s a way in which she didn’t really empathise with the way a lot of women experience sexual violence. And who can’t say no. She didn’t really empathise with that. I think at a very deep level, she couldn’t. And I think, you know, that this is also, she’s coming out of the 1950s into the 1960s when it’s a fairly sexually repressive period. So when the progressive energy is on trying to free people from guilt, from repressive sexuality.
Sally Warhaft:
And how did this sort of part of her commentary leave her with the Women’s Electoral Lobby?
Judith Brett:
Well, I don’t think it was, it sort of didn’t really intersect because she, you know, she starts the Women’s Electoral Lobby, and, you know, she has a continuing connection with it. The Women’s Electoral Lobby turned out to be far more successful than she’d imagined.
I mean, clearly there was all this pent up frustration amongst many women, tertiary, educated women who found themselves stuck at home with kids. Or, you know, as Sally was saying, having to leave their jobs when they got married or not being able to get into the senior public service. Because she’d tried something similar with abortion law reform in the late 60s to try to get a lobby group going to write to members of Parliament to get them lobbying, because the British Abortion Law Reform Association had done something like that.
So, it took off far beyond, I think, what she could have ever imagined. She also, in the early 70s, decided to become a sort of a freelance writer and public intellectual, as she called herself. And the issues that she wrote about were all to do basically with sexuality. Abortion, contraception, sex education, pornography, censorship, and later on, pedophilia. So that’s what she ended up writing about.
And to some extent, it was relatively separate. I mean, the Women’s Electoral Lobby certainly took up the cause of getting taxes off contraception and was extremely successful. Because there was a, there was a complicated, there was sales tax and luxury taxes and things on contraception. And the Canberra Women’s Electoral Lobby prepared papers for the tariff, because we still had tariffs in those days. For the tariff board to get those lifted. And, you know, they had a sympathetic Labor government so they were lifted. So that and sex education was also something that members of the Women’s Electoral Lobby took up. But the Women’s Electoral Lobby had a much broader brief in that motivated women could, in a sense, run with the issues that really mattered to them.
Sally Warhaft:
It’s her inherent sort of sympathy again, with men, with things like the pedophilia. Which was an issue. When I look at what she’s done, you know, you think, you form the Women’s Electoral Lobby and was so correct in so many important issues. And then there’s, there’s some issues there that are, really difficult. I mean, I find her views on pedophilia really, really hard to accept actually. That it’s sort of almost difficult that it’s the same woman, to me.
Judith Brett:
Well…
Sally Warhaft:
But, but she was able to have her say and of course, that was also such a part of her point, wasn’t it? The freedom of speech and and so on. She would have been just completely canceled today. There is no way I could imagine, that that she would have had a working life.
Judith Brett:
Because, I mean, the thing she’s saying. Similar to what I was saying before about her rationality and and evidence base, she says. What had happened. And this started happening the late 70s and the early 1980s, around the same time as homosexuality is being legalised. And there’s a sort of a number of moral panics around pedophilia, but they all focus on homosexual men seducing boys, basically.
And so she’s saying, look, there’s this, we keep talking about pedophilia, but actually there’s a whole lot of different types of sexual activity that are happening under that umbrella term. Most, pedophile relationships are actually incest. Of heterosexual incest of girls in the home, or with friends. Why aren’t we, why isn’t there a moral panic about that? You know? Isn’t there a difference between a five year old and a 15 year old? You know. That that there’s a, there’s a, a sort of den… because the legal definition of the child is 16. Now, this is in our society. In many societies, sexual relations between post pubescent people are not regarded as children, you know. So that she’s also wanting to be able to, us to be able to think about what’s going on there.
Perhaps there is sexual, you know, sexual agency possible in people under 16? So they’re not, they’re not sort of somehow saying it’s a free for all, but to try to tease apart something that’s become, in a way, it’s a moral panic. But also there’s a way in which the term pedophile was starting to operate like monster, you know. As if these are not people. As if they’re put outside of human relations and human moral relations and feeling.
I mean, it was in that period in the early 80s, there was the number of suicides of men who, I think probably, you know, I can’t remember the details, you know, but who, where there was not much evidence of activity, but… So, you know, the fact that, I mean, I think these are things that need to be able to be talked about.
Sally Warhaft:
As did she.
Judith Brett:
Yes. And I think, you know, she had a sort of bravery, I guess, in that she was prepared to talk about these things. But I don’t think she thought. I don’t…When I say bravery. To be brave, you have to be overcoming some fear. I don’t think she was overcoming fear. I think she just thought that this was the way public conversations should happen. We should look at evidence. We should be wary of generalisations. We should think about, different individual examples. And we should recognise the sexuality of people under 16.
Sally Warhaft:
Yeah, it, I suppose it was partly a feeling that she didn’t ever really looked at or, or very little in comparison to what was compelling men or their point of view, with the child. She didn’t seem to have a connection or to ask herself what children, I suppose would, you know, have felt so much.
Judith Brett:
I think she was interested in the, I mean, I don’t think she… I mean… it’s nothing that suggests that she thought sexual relations between adults and prepubescent children was okay.
Sally Warhaft:
Yeah.
Judith Brett:
She was a highly sexualised child herself. And certainly, as a teenager, she had a relationship with an older man. And she said it was erotic bliss. So partly, I mean, one of the things that I felt always with her was that much of her, the things that she engaged with were sort of driven by her own body and her own bodily experience, and she would use that.
So, you know, when we’re talking about is a 15 year old or a child, you know? Like they are legally now, but they haven’t always been, you know. So I think she was wanting people to think about that. And that again was because, you know, she didn’t feel that she was a child in that sense, in that relationship. She felt she had sexual, she had agency. Now, you know, there’s all sorts of explanations we can give for why she found that relationship so sustaining. Partly, you know, she was very lonely in her, emotionally in her family.
She was picked up just, you know, at the State Library. Public library, as it then was. She’d be there studying for her matric exam. Must have been a bit of a pick up place, I think. But, you know, this man who was probably, she thinks, in his late 20s, maybe early 30s, would talk to her about the French Revolution, which she was studying for her exams. As, you know, as well as having a bit of a sort of fondle in the car. And she didn’t, you know, she she didn’t feel harmed by it. But, I mean, I think you’re right. And there’s also a lot more, a lot more has come out since she was writing about this in the 90s. We know a lot more about the very complex ways in which people can be harmed.
Sally Warhaft:
What do you think she would make of the way these things are discussed now?
Judith Brett:
Well, look, I think she’d be pretty horrified by the cancel culture. Because it doesn’t seem to me, that she would think, it doesn’t help anything, you know? Like, why can’t we talk about these things? Things need to be open. It looks like there’s a sort of, Puritanism that seems, I think she would see, as part of the cancel culture. Which would look a bit like it was going back to when abortions couldn’t be talked about in the newspaper. They were called illegal operations.
Are there things that can’t be said? There seems now to be things that can’t be discussed. I think she would see that in terms of the world she’s come out of as going back to something where there’s a sort of implicit censorship.
Sally Warhaft:
I was reading the book, the whole way thinking, you know, the very obvious question to ask you was whether or not you’d met her? This is just the best story. I don’t think there’s a… so you can tell the story, Judith. Of your, what was it? The Victorian Literary Prize?
Judith Brett:
Yes. Well, I remember when, I guess in the late 60s, early 70s, I remember seeing her talk. I imagine it was probably at a meeting about abortion. So, you know, she was a figure around the campus, but I couldn’t remember meeting her. And I was going through her papers, and I found that she was actually a member of a committee I chaired.
It was a prize for the Premier’s Non-Fiction Literary Awards. But at that stage, I was having to pick up Vin Buckley to drive him to these meetings. And I think that was, my preoccupation was, you know, finding, picking up Vin, finding somewhere to park the car. I had three small children at the time, you know, and I didn’t remember meeting her.
Sally Warhaft:
Oh, I just love that. I just. Imagine writing a biography, writing the whole biography of someone and not realising you’d actually sat in a really tense room with them numerous times. Because literary award judging is always tense. Everybody’s always upset with the result. Or, you know, they don’t get their first pick or… I think that’s so wonderful.
Was it really different to write about a woman that was alive, you know? And there was a crossover of, you know, you met her. Compared to the work of writing the biography of Deakin?
Judith Brett:
Yes. It was much different because, I’m ten years younger than Bea, but the university I went to was in transition in the late 1960s. I still had a sense of what it had been like in the early 60s. And there was still some of it. I mean, it was still, there was lunchtime lectures. There was a lot. There was a lively intellectual life on campus. There was campus celebrities in the way they’d been in her day. So I was a, I guess, I’d observed some of that.
So that was really different. And I was able to, I mean. It was interesting because I got Frank Bongiorno to read the manuscript for me. And one of the things he said, which was really helpful, was that I was assuming too much knowledge of the social context, and I had to put more in about the things that were going on in that period in the late 60s and 70s. Because, you know, they were things that I sort of knew well and I couldn’t… and I had to imagine like, a 35 year old reading it and not knowing it. So that was very helpful. So it was really different.
Whereas with Deakin I was starting from scratch. I mean, I didn’t know the name of any of the premiers in Victoria in the 19th century. And I in fact, the only 19th century names that I knew were Ned Kelly and Alfred Deakin. 19th century Victorian names of public figures, you know, which I think… And I was aware that that would be the same for my readership. So I had to work much harder at both finding out, you know, what the context was, but also trying to bring that context to life, because I knew that. Whereas here I felt there was more, there were some readers anyway, there’d be more chords that I could be striking, you know? So it was different.
Sally Warhaft:
Did it make you think about your own sort of growing up and going to university at the time that you did, very different to now? And the, you know, your own sort of interactions with the women’s movement?
Judith Brett:
Yes. Well, look the one thing, one of the things that really made me mourn, I think, is how rich the curriculum was for the honours art students. I mean, I was an honours art student. And Bea starts off as an honours art student, but she sort of mucks around too much. But, you know, the the richness of the literature that they read and the way that stood her in good stead. So there was that.
I mean, I was a fairly, anxious, cautious, risk averse young woman. So I wasn’t busily… I mean, I was on the edges of things. That’s my memory of myself. I wasn’t throwing myself into into things. But I thought about it, but it’s certainly the… when there was a vibrant campus life and where you’re making friendships for life and where you’re reading books, which you will think about for the rest of your life. That made me think about that.
And I, you know, despair in many ways of what seems to have happened to university life now, particularly in the humanities and social sciences.
Sally Warhaft:
You actually write in the book that she got a second class honours degree, as did Germaine Greer.
Judith Brett:
Yeah.
Sally Warhaft:
And that…
Judith Brett:
A 2A.
Sally Warhaft:
A 2A, which actually had consequences.
Judith Brett:
Oh yes.
Sally Warhaft:
Quite serious consequences for her working life. But when you read it, that this would easily be a PhD now. I was very struck with that.
Judith Brett:
Oh yes, well that we her…
Sally Warhaft:
Or that was her Master’s, was it?
Judith Brett:
Yes. The Master’s she wrote was on Henry Handel Richardson and it’s a really substantial piece of work. She was a very good reader and she’d read very widely. She got an H2A for her undergraduate degree, as Germaine did, and Germaine resuscitated, revived her academic prospects by going to Sydney and doing a Master’s, and getting a First and then being able to go to Cambridge. And so Bea hoped that she could do something similar.
But the marking. It’s hard to know because Melbourne University doesn’t keep examiners reports in its archives. So I couldn’t find them. And I talked to a couple of people who were in the English department at the time, but it was too far away, and they were too far gone to be able to remember what was what was going on.
But, at the time that this was, in the mid 60s, there were a lot of jobs. There was a lot of jobs tutoring. Monash had opened. La Trobe was about to open. And if they had have given her a good mark for it, they would have had to give her a job. And my reading, I mean, I think there were two reasons that they did the thesis in.
One was, it was a it was a more historically scholarship-based piece of work, which would have been fine at the University of Sydney but didn’t fit the more sort of leave aside, you know, preoccupations. But secondly, I don’t think they would have wanted to give her a job. You know, they wouldn’t have wanted this sort of sexually active, aggressive woman in amongst all these timid men in the English department at the time. Is my sense. I mean. I might be…you know, but…
Because people were getting jobs with honours degrees, you know, I mean. It seemed to me it was worth an explanation. And the whole thing about whether you were… people would talk about whether people had an H2A mind rather than an H1 mind. You know, in those days. Those of you who are my age remember this. I mean, I was determined to get a First because I knew that if you didn’t get a First, you know, you had an H2A mind. And worse, that you could have an H2B mind.
Sally Warhaft:
You write, that the biographer sees the self-doubt in the person that you’re writing about. It makes her. This is a quote for this, for viewers. “It makes her tender with admiration for the bravery of this frail, super smart woman.” I really liked that sentence. “Makes her tender with admiration.” What are the things you most admire about her?
Judith Brett:
Well, look, I admire her intellect. I admire her capacity for incredibly hard work. I admire the way she just keeps on going, her determination. And the way she keeps on going, you know? And people who met her in her prime said that she had a sort of charisma, you know?
And I should add one of the reasons for admiring her is because of the papers that I had access to. Like I was, when I said before about the two sides of her, the outer side. I mean, that’s in the public record. And there you see this really formidable, confident woman. But, Iola Matthews and I went down to her house. She didn’t leave a literary executor in her will. And we retrieved a certain amount of papers, like correspondence and diaries for about two decades. And that revealed, that’s where I got the sense of her self-doubt and her, the sort of inner pain that she lived with. Because, I mean, a biographer is pretty, it’s very, you’re very dependent on your sources.
I mean, I couldn’t have made that up. I couldn’t have found that out just from the public record. I mean, and so in that sense, there’s a similarity with Deakin. Because Deakin also left a large archive of private personal writings, which were a revelation to his family when they found them, because they just saw the confident, handsome, successful politician, you know. And so it was because of that, I guess, that I could see how much pain she lived with. Both physical pain and psychological pain.
That made me admire her achievements. You know. It wasn’t like somebody, like Robert Menzies didn’t have, there was not much sense of inner pain with him. When I wrote about him. I mean… and there wasn’t. And when I wrote on him, I was working always with the public man, and trying to read the distinctiveness about and the personal, the way that his life left traces on the public man. But there wasn’t a sense of another inner conversation that he was having with himself.
Sally Warhaft:
Now, originally we had planned to do some Q&A this evening, but that’s going to be a private Q&A with Judy now, as you line up to, when you get your book autographed. Because the time has just run away so quickly.
And, Judith wants to say a few words too. But, just before she does, I just, I want to congratulate you on what you’ve done here. There’s no one like you, Judy. There is nobody like you.
And this is another incredible contribution that you’ve made to Australian history and cultural life and literary life. You just, you do it all and you do it, I don’t know, in a way nobody else does. And some of those qualities you spoke about, admiring in Beatrice Faust. I know, I and I’m sure many people here, admire in you.
So, it’s a lovely joining to see you looking at a woman like this. So I want to say, before Judy says a few words to say, you know, to say that, you know, the book is launched. It’s it’s! And congratulations! Congratulations.
Judith Brett:
Well, I just wanted to say a few. Thank you. So I want to thank you, Sally, for doing this. Because Sally and I, we’ve got to know each other from La Trobe and become good friends. And I felt because, you know, the book is a, you know, I feel nervous about aspects of it, but I knew I could completely trust you. So thank you very much for that.
And I wanted to thank everybody for coming. And I wanted to thank all the people that I talked to about Bea. Some of whom will be here. And I particularly want to thank Katie Richmond, Gary Jane and Thomas Mautner, who’s in Canberra, who lent me material that was really helpful.
I want to thank Text. I want to thank Michael Heyward for agreeing to publish the book, Mandy Brett for editing it with, such diligence. Chong for another one of his amazing covers. And Emily Booth for helping with the publicity.
And then I want to thank, obviously, the Victorian Women’s Trust. Ally for managing the the invitations, which, you know, was not not an easy task. But particularly Mary. Mary’s been, as she said, I mean, has been a champion, is supportive for this, from the beginning. And later this year, she’s retiring after 28 years. What a formidable woman. And let’s all give Mary a huge clap.
And I can just say one last thing, which is that I’m not like Bea in that I haven’t actually suffered a lot.
Sally Warhaft:
I know.
Judith Brett:
I’ve had a very fortunate….
Sally Warhaft:
No, I, I’ve noted that in the, in the. No, no, there’s plenty you don’t have in common. But you find the meeting points and it shows.
Judith Brett:
Yeah.
Alanna Johnson:
Well thank you. Please remain there while we do further thanks to you.
So, Alana Johnson, the Chair of the Women’s Trust, delighted to be here and wonderful to be part of this celebration of Judy’s book. Judy, Sally has already said all the things that we know and think about you. And, all I want to add is that people should know that this was largely a labour of love.
Judith Brett:
Well, most book writing is.
Alana Johnson:
Which makes it all the more extraordinary, I think. And hearing you talk tonight, I’m so looking forward to getting to know Beatrice Faust through you. So thank you. And Sally. Well, lovely conversation. So thank you. I mean, we all learned so much from it.
Sally Warhaft:
Absolute pleasure.
Alana Johnson:
And I’m so much looking forward to now reading it. So thank you. This is what a book launch should be like. Makes us go away thinking “oh I’m really looking forward to reading that”. So thank you.
And Sally White, thank you for sharing the stories, the memories. And not only to you, but to those wonderful women, Roslyn Smallwood, Jocelyn Mitchell, Iola Matthews and Lesley Vick. Who, without their conspiring together and talking to Mary, this may not have happened. So thank you.
Also, of course to have a book like this that’s now going to be on our shelves and in the public, on the public record forever. We have to thank the some 50 private donors who have enabled the research. And also tonight, tonight’s launch. So, let’s put our hands together for them. Those donors are so critical to women’s history being recorded. So very important.
And, of course, to the wonderful women at the Victorian Women’s Trust. Ally, who’s also already been mentioned. But Rachael and the rest of our staff and the volunteers. And Stu Mannion, who is on tech. And Bree Dunbar there with her camera doing the thing. It’s always part of a Women’s Trust Event. And thank you very much for making it so professional. And, we’re all looking forward to seeing the interview online in a couple of weeks time.
So, as Judith has already alluded to, I wanted to say something about Mary Crooks tonight, but she didn’t want me to. She said, ‘I don’t want to detract from tonight’s event’. Which is so typical of Mary. But this may well be the last Victorian Women’s Trust event that Mary will be at before she leaves.
So I ignored what she said.
If you would like to know more about Mary and what she’s achieved over her 28 years at the Women’s Trust, then go on to our website and have a look at the blog that’s been written there. It’s the start of a public record about Mary Crooks. I’m sure that’s going to grow in the future. So as we honour Beatrice and all those fabulous, fierce feminists in the 1960s and 70s, I would also like us to honour Mary as a fabulous, fierce feminist of a later era. So let’s have a clap for Mary Crooks.
And what an auspicious day today to be having this event in the lead up, only a couple of days away, from our 2025 election. I’m wondering what Beatrice would think of where things have come for women now. We have come some way, and there are now more pathways for women into politics. And women find themselves being able to go into the party system or fabulously become part of the community independents movement.
I think women are at the cusp of remaking Parliament. There’s enough women there now that I think we can all be hopeful that our Parliament is going to look very different in the future. And that we all need to get behind those women and support them to make that happen.
Thank you all for coming. It’s been a lovely evening and without you, things like this aren’t possible. So thank you very much.
Sally Warhaft:
And, there will be book signings.
Alan Johnson:
That’s right! Book signings down the back.
Sally Warhaft:
Book signings right away. Thank you Readings.
Alan Johnson:
Yes. I’ll do the Christine Gordon little bit and say what they do is sell books. So please go down the back.
Sally Warhaft:
Have a lovely night, everybody.
This event was proudly presented by the Victorian Women’s Trust, as part of Trust Women: Feminist Book Club, a free literary series. All welcome. The launch of Fearless Beatrice Faust was made possible thanks to the generous support of private donors.
