Author: Hilary Burden

This long weekend, we are invited to wake up and think about the women in our lives, focus on women’s achievements, and reflect on what still needs to change. On a personal level, this International Women’s Day I will have baked something purple-y to eat, called my girl buddies; painted the town purple (#paintitpurple is one of the official hashtags).

When it comes to the representation of women in politics, Australia has an impressive lineup of firsts, with female premiers, governors, a governor general, prime minister, attorney general, and now, in Queensland, a majority of women ministers with eight women (including premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and her deputy) and six men. The gender balance was so apparent and unusual it made the portrait on the steps of Government House mesmerizing.

Yet, more than a century of International Women’s Days and activism have not changed the fact that women are still under-represented in parliament. Compared with other national parliaments, Australia’s ranking for women in national government continues to decline, hovering around the critical mass of 30%, which is the figure regarded by the UN as the minimum level necessary for women to influence decision-making in parliament.

In 2013, Australia came a lowly 44th in the top 50 ranked countries for women in national parliaments. And, despite Tony Abbott’s claim that he was “disappointed” with the number of women in his own Cabinet, he picked just one among 18 men. As Minister for Women, this was somewhat of an own goal; as PM, it showed his leadership in this area to be hollow.

People who have studied these statistics cite structural, social and cultural factors and the nature of politics and the parliamentary environment in Australia. In her maiden speech in 1919, Nancy Astor, Britain’s first female MP said, “I do not want you to look on your lady Member as a fanatic or lunatic. I am simply trying to speak for hundreds of women and children throughout the country who cannot speak for themselves.”

There would be no need for an International Women’s Day if our system of government, increasingly disparaged today, was given a makeover from one that is not just harder for most women – and so hard for some it is plain they choose not to participate – to a system made easy for everyone.

I am ambivalent towards organized days. Often they are not what they seem. How can we properly celebrate Australia Day on the same day that it was claimed for Britain? Or, march on Anzac Day, with its focus on sending young people to war rather than building an ideal of peace?

So, on International Women’s Day, while being grateful for some change the women’s movement has seen in recent times, we must also reflect how women are not represented and how they are paid less.

I’ve done my fair share of banging on about women’s rights, as deputy editor of British Cosmopolitan and editor of Australian New Woman in the 90s. I now understand how sometimes it doesn’t help reacting to life events from a gendered perspective. Attacking men can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, causing more division while holding back women from finding their own way. In gender wars, often we are defined by our response to men, and what they will allow, or not allow, us to do, rather than by finding our own true voice.

This International Women’s Day, Malcolm Turnbull is on the radar as Prime Minister. I once sailed in a boat with him on Sydney Harbor and recall him being far from comfortable with me at the helm. Although I could sail he kept trying to take the wheel. Since then, his light has risen and fallen and is rising again. As an intelligent man hopefully he has learned his lessons in leadership.

Turnbull wore his internal struggle with leadership on his sleeve in an interview with Annabel Crabbe last year on ABC’s Kitchen Cabinet. After crediting his wife, Lucy, a former Lord Mayor of Sydney, for helping him survive the enormous blow of losing the liberal opposition leadership, he said: “Here’s the thing: if you are completely and utterly lacking in any sense of self awareness, and you’re absolutely oblivious to what anyone else thinks, you’re perfectly suited to be a political leader. If, on the other hand, you are dripping with empathy and you take seriously what the other people say then you run the risk of being very badly hurt. So how do you match, how you can be an effective political leader and be a human being?”

Showing acute self-awareness, Turnbull went on to say that he knew himself to be a far bigger person with his wife rather than without her. His challenge, if he becomes PM, is to hold on to this belief. He may then not only be a great prime minister but a great man too.

This year, for International Women’s Day, perhaps our politicians might take lessons from the Guides (although still a female-only club). As part of Guide Law they undertake to:

• Respect myself and others
• Be considerate, honest and trustworthy
• Be friendly to others
• Make choices for a better world
• Use my time and abilities wisely
• Be thoughtful and optimistic
• Live with courage and strength

Why should the values of leadership be any more complicated than this?

In the celebration of winning leadership, perhaps it is also key not to overdo it. On losing power, former PM Julia Gillard spoke of the need to believe in a purpose “larger than yourself and your immediate political interests”. More recently, Socceroos manager Ange Postecoglou said a similar thing when Australia won the Asian Cup: “We spoke at the start of the camp about the need for personal ambition to be set aside for the good of the team objective. This,” he said, “is where the Aussie spirit kicks in.”

When this happens, when this Aussie spirit kicks in, we may well have real leaders and real equality – and that will be the day to celebrate.

First published in Tasweekend, March 7, 2015

     Ever since I bought a $2 packet of seeds from an elderly couple at the Longford Flower Show a decade ago I’ve been fascinated by seeds.

     They were old-fashioned sweat pea seeds, numbering only about a dozen, and came wrapped, like mixed lollies, in a plain brown paper bag. They proved to be sweets for the garden. I’ve been collecting their descendent seeds and passing them on for years now, always remembering how that Longford couple had told me of the beauty of their fragrance.

     Over the years I’ve passed them on to people who come to visit and sold them as Nuns’ House seeds in brown paper bags at Lilydale market. People have reminded me, years on, how the dual-purple flowers had bloomed and how dreamy they smelt. They have brought me simple joys and I’m forever grateful for having found them.

     It’s that time of year again, when I’m sorting out the seeds. I could give some to you now if you were to drop in. That’s the beauty of seeds. I don’t mean the kind you buy in colourful glossy packets from the garden centre – athough they are useful too. The kind of seeds I mean are local, saved, that you have been witness to and seen through a life cycle. They seem to connect you to a way of living where you are, that I know to be precious. I think, as precious as families. Seeds have roots too.

     More often than not, people who save seeds from their gardens will tell you how best to grow them. My sweet pea seeds, for example, get saved in a bag in a cool place, then, just tossed into the garden on St Patrick’s Day, against a wall, fence or gate, where they might ramble and get a sprinkle of water every now and then, when the days are warmer. And, sure enough, by the first day of spring, my sweet peas will be up, all tangling tendrils and bursting into flower and heady fragrance.

     I love the way seeds are packaged up in nature, and how every flower has different packaging. The sweet pea flower dries and hardens to a crescent-like pod, packed just so with seeds. Then, when ready to burst, they spring out so fast they’ll have you chasing them all over the kitchen floor. I also love the cup-like seed pods of Love in a Mist that, if shaken, sound like mini maracas. Double joy: you can also use the seeds (nigella) in cooking. The pods of a particular white wisteria are a new fascination, like flat broad bean pods, or dangly earrings.

     Sunflowers left to dry and go to seed teach melancholy in the garden and when you’ve had enough just throw them to the chooks or save them for next year’s planting. Angelica blooms, too, make pretty dried arrangements, as do artichokes left on the plant you couldn’t be bothered to cut earlier in the season. And, when the border of wild Watsonia leaves finally withers and dries, I cut some right back to the ground, while others I leave only because the frost looks so pretty clinging to vertical dried stems. Poppy fields with dead heads are such things in the Tasmanian landscape: so much so you’ll often see people stopping to photograph them from the roadside.

     Karen Hall and Peter Cooper’s Wychwood garden in Mole Creek introduced many garden lovers to the beauty of saving plants well after their prime. I always looked forward to their autumn garden – their beds of seed heads were an inspiration not to tug things out of the ground before you have also appreciated them as they fade. Those curved rainbow-borders of bronze and biscuit, of gold, dusky pink, and mauve … In their book, Wychwood, Karen explains how easy it is to collect your own seeds, alongside the joys: “The rewards for taking the time to venture into the garden with a handful of paper bags and a pen are great,” she writes. “Watching seeds germinate, develop into seedlings and then mature into a plant is one of the most wondrous journeys a gardener can take.”

     Seeds come in packets but it’s only when you grow your own seeds you realize their true nature. So I was riveted when English physicist Professor Brian Cox introduced viewers to the Doomsday seed vault on Human Universe, his fascinating program currently showing on ABC TV. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is seed heaven on an incredible scale. At last count, the total number of seeds buried underground in frozen caves, 1300 kms from the North Pole, was over 20 million. There are 32 varieties of potatoes from Ireland’s national gene banks and 20,000 new samples from the U.S. Agricultural Research Service. Other seed samples came from Canada and Switzerland, as well as international seed researchers from Colombia, Mexico and Syria.

    The Svalbard Global Seed Vault’s mission is to provide a safety net against an inevitable loss of diversity in traditional gene banks. US Conservationist and vault visionary Cary Fowler told Professor Brian Cox while some people thought the seed bank was depressing because its existence accepts that the world might be doomed, he said he thought it spoke of hope. Hope that, given the destructiveness of humanity, we might at least have been clever enough to save enough seeds to keep future generations alive. Which is the ultimate cleverness of seeds: that in their seeming deadness they hold the potential for life. Just make a point of popping a handful in a paper bag over the next few weeks: see for yourself.

First published in Tasweekend, Saturday Mercury, 21 February 2015

It’s a game I play every year. How long does it take to put a stain on New Year? Just as increasingly fancy fireworks go off around the world at midnight, so too does the year spoil and muck up. A global climax of celebratory hope reverberates, and, next morning, perfect Public Holiday stillness as the hangover fug clears and we make the first nervous steps into 2015, wearing our New Year resolutions like see-through dressing gowns.

Then, the milk spills, a family argument, the inevitable first tears or sharp word, a flat tyre… life swings back to normal settings. In my house it’s usually by around day six, if not before.

But it was almost exactly a week after fireworks lit up the City of Light that the first world news headlines horrified all over again. Twelve people assassinated at work in Paris, 11 injured. Philippe Val, the former editor and publisher of the satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo, said he’d lost all his friends. Good people, he said, who loved to make people happy, to make them laugh, to give them generous ideas, who stood for liberty.

They were editors, cartoonists, journalists, all meeting about ideas in the middle of the day, driven to make a difference by provoking a reaction; working to the death shadowed by bodyguards and a police presence at the front door. All shot dead, and in the centre of working Paris.

Already the last days of last year were revisited with the vision of yet more innocent people being slaughtered going about their daily lives. Echoes of Martin Place café-goers, of Boston runners, of a solider in Woolwich… Somehow the French national motto of liberté, égalité, fraternité, seemed to wrap around the whole world as solidarity made headlines. Yes, solidarity and fraternity, a common stance across nations. Normally you only see this kind of crowd at a football match, not for an intellectual ideal spoken in French. But, in a new 21^st Century, it was quickly hash-tagged into a three-word catchphrase: “Je suis Charlie”.

“We cannot let silence set in, we need help,” said Philippe Val. “We all need to band together against this horror. Terror must not prevent joy, must not prevent our ability to live… We cannot allow this, this is an act of war.”

It might be the other side of the world in another language. But imagine if this was your workplace, if a friend had been shot for having an opinion, or drawing a cartoon. How outraged would you be? We need big ideas against idealism gone wild.

In Tasmania we are, in the great scheme of things, a small place but we are peaceful and our religions do not make wars or buy rifles. Country churches – challenged by dwindling congregations and ever increasing costs of maintenance – are one of the last vestiges of pure community. Many of us choose not to worship a god, but worship, instead, the right for people to pray to theirs, alongside others, in peace; to park in a paddock, come together, rest our woes.

We are all wondering what can we do after the Charlie Hebdo killings. Who will provide the answers? Can our churches answer the challenge of what Tony Abbott calls “a death cult”? Will our philosophers and thinkers help answer the questions people are asking: what is going on in this world?

I wish for our island smallness to be a centre of big ideas; for us to make politics about the bigger things, not the pettiest. Advance ways to peace, not bigotry. To talk more about ethics not markets. How can the market economy fix people gunned down at their desks, executed by a Kalashnikov rifle?

Why not ask the bigger questions of others from this place? You could say we have relatively little to lose. Will all churches convene? How will Islam rescue its youth? What is missing in these young men’s lives? Who will stop the killings? When will attacks on journalists end?

In Tasmania, all our islands are inherently beautiful, and we have space and inspiration to be at peace. We can be agile, heck, we all bump into each other in Myers. So why not make politics about our community. Celebrate the way we live together, talk about what makes it work, address what doesn’t. Resolve to come together every year, improve on last year, find ways to keep learning, updating, reviewing, finding better paths to happiness, health and peace.

A week on from the trillions spent on a global fireworks party, we saw new fireworks: candles lit freely in Lyon, Brussels, Copenhagan, Marseilles, in Geneva, and Trafalgar Square. A sign made in lights: “NOT AFRAID”. So much more powerful than any pyrotechnic show.

A recent cover of Charlie Hebdo featured a magazine cartoonist, with a pencil tucked behind one ear, pashing a Muslim man. The headline reads: L’Amour: Plus Fort Que La Haine. Love: stronger than hate.

Let’s not sweat the small stuff. Let’s find ways to make peace across parties while still being free to say what we think. In a small place we waste energy and time having the same arguments, filling in forms before using our hearts, applying our minds. We are stronger with a common stance.

Can events like this inspire us to re-frame our own politics? Take account of a world made smaller by big issues and put peace front of mind? We are more peaceful here than in much of the rest of the world. Why can’t this be our selling point, too?

First published in Tasweekend, Saturday Mercury, 17th January, 2015

Just be lizard-lazy in January. The month lets you: go with it. With Christmas frenzy put away, these are the days to slop into holidays, live more at the beach, plan only picnics, sprawl in the shade of a tree on cool grass, whip clouds into shapes with just your imagination. Slow down.

            Tune in to what David Malouf calls “the insect-simmer of grass”.

January is when a sense of Australia comes into its own. We play. Relax. Read books. Go to festivals. Find our nature by lingering. Being ourselves. It’s a month we dream of all year. We close our eyes and see striped-towels on white sand; cool beads of sea clinging to warmed-up skin; ice cream rivers dripping down chins; toes unfurling into thongs… It’s okay to be messy, eat with your fingers.

Bodies arc into the crests of waves, get cupped into hammocks. Here in Tasmania, twilight lasts so long it almost butts up to next morning’s dawn. Resting makes sense of the day when it lasts this long.

Now’s not the time to think too hard or else the innocence of a new year will be lost. This month is a route to reliving childhoods when life seemed simpler, less full of rules or plans. When the hay’s away, take off. Get to the shack, go camping, make the most of the only month of the year that’s school-free; the month when life can teach us. Be a lizard. Joyous January.

Published in Country Style, January 2015