Introduction

This research is generated on Whadjuk country, the unceded lands of Noongar people on what is commonly known as the city of Perth in the south-west corner of Western Australia. This acknowledgement of country positions this chapter in a particular political time and context. This recent practice of acknowledging the Indigenous land on which we live and work acts as a symbolic reminder of the violent colonial history of Australia. It registers the ongoing colonising relations as both historic and insistently present today. It is now common to see such phrases on email signatures, before public talks and ceremonies, at openings of meetings and festivals, and Australia Post now has a formal place for Indigenous country on postal addresses.

This chapter is predicated on the continuing valency of political and theoretical contexts, both historical and in the present. As a White Anglo-Australian researcher, I think through some of the entanglements between feminist ideas and practice as they take place on a colonised land, paying attention to the language and politics circulating in the 1980s and their relation to contemporary feminist discourses through which we now speak and write. It is a complicated and often subjective set of engagements that might be characterised as fractious, confusing, awkward and awe-inspiring: both conservative and radical. In the 1980s Donna Haraway suggested that we are always in the process of constructing ‘situated knowledge’, rather than revealing truths, and can only ever attain a partial perspective (1988). Striving for objectivity, Haraway argued, is misguided, because we are all the products of our social experiences and inevitably work from these premises, which form our epistemological foundations. This argument might also be applied to the legacies of feminist theory and philosophy through which we work, and which complicate the way we can remember and narrate feminism and its histories.

More specifically, this chapter focuses on a women-only protest camp held at Pine Gap/Quiurnpa in central Australia in 1983 and reads it as an encounter of feminism on Aboriginal land. Since that event, the chant ‘Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land’ is often heard at protests of all kind; however, feminist engagement with what was then known as Aboriginal ‘land rights’ is rarely remembered or included in feminist histories.