I had to ask for access to a bathroom once a month because I had my period! So eventually instead of access to a bathroom, they got me access to a Toyota so that I could drive away to a toilet. So the entire crew knew exactly when I was cycling every single month. And … they used to piss in the connecting pipes for me to discover when I got back from the drive. And looking back on it now I also realise that the blokes were also pissing on my boots when I was gone – I see now but at the time I was just so confused and baffled by it all. – Female miner, aged 21
A week ago I had the honor of speaking at the launch of Whispers from the Bush, a new book by ANU academic Dr Syke Saunders (from which the quote above is taken). Publisher Federation Press describes the book as follows:
Australian women are enduring a cultural epidemic of workplace sexual harassment in remote and rural workplaces – the experience is rife, rampant and as hard to contain as any infectious disease. Whispers from the Bush – The Workplace Sexual Harassment of Australian Rural Women is the first book to focus upon the nature, pervasiveness and reporting of sexual harassment in rural Australian workplaces. Drawing upon 107 interviews conducted with rurally located employees and employers about their experiences and observations of sexual harassment at work, it shines a light upon a phenomenon largely hidden or minimised by silence, distance and an atmosphere of ‘saturated masculinity’. The book seeks to give voice to the ‘whispers from the bush’ by exploring themes such as:
• the impact of male dominance and mateship on the nature and prevalence of sexual harassment within the rural workplace;
• the complex survival behaviours adopted by many rural women in response to sexual harassment as it occurs – most surprisingly, extending to women blaming women;
• rural employee and employer attitudes towards the disclosure of sexual harassment; and
• the limited reach and effectiveness of laws against sexual harassment in rural Australia.
The Women Lawyers Association of the ACT, together with the Women’s Legal Centre and Legal Aid Commission (ACT) hosted the launch as which I, Syke Saunders and Deputy ACT Discrimination Commissioner, Belinda Barnard, spoke.
Reading Skye’s book was an intensely personal experience. I had to re-visit my experiences and those of other women I knew, which I’m only beginning to process decades later. A literary journal has expressed interest in a contribution based on the whole speech, so I’ll let you know when that is published. For now, here’s an extract from my launch address.
When Skye first asked me to write an endorsement for this, her new book Whispers from the Bush, my first thoughts were: at last.
This book fills a gap. It gives voice to women we rarely hear from.
Beyond the romantic notions held about life in the rural frontier – the ‘bush imaginings’, ‘the imagined embodiment of the iconic rural ideal,’ there are stereotypical patterns of male dominance and ‘rampant maleness’ in the rural heart of blokeland – identified in Whispers from the Bush as ‘the dominant male bush construct’ and the ‘masculine architecture of rural life’. This pattern of dominance contributes to female inferiority and submission, discrimination, marginalization, histories of violence and – as this book attests – sexual harassment as a cultural norm.
The highest rates of violent crime such as sexual assault have consistently been in rural Australia. As Skye writes: “The further from the metropolitan capital the higher the per capita rate becomes for violent crimes, such as assault, domestic assault and sexual assault. Numerous other reports have concluded that the rate of crime and abuse in rural and remote Australia are much higher than any set of data has suggested, primarily because of the growing levels of under-reporting.” Recent studies also reveal a “consistent pattern of higher rates of alcohol consumption and consequent harm within regional and rural Australia than in urban areas.”
95 percent of gendered harm is not reported in the bush.
Reading Skye’s book has forced me to confront aspects of what happened to me growing up in a country town.
I am the daughter of a farming family in rural Victoria…
It is only fully now, decades later, that I look back and see the entrenched sexism that, being young and lacking the language to describe, I didn’t know how to deal with.
The editor in chief’s hand on my leg in his car and comments about my breasts (taking me ‘under his wing’ as a work experience student – how do you make a complaint when the perpertrator is the man in charge?), the sexually loaded jokes about my body, descriptions of sex acts I didn’t understand (especially when a male radio announcer and close friend dropped by – he was gay, but that didn’t matter), the male bonding over assessing the bodies of any woman passing through the building, the porny calendars on the walls of the print room (I was so pleased to see Skye include pornography as an expression of sexual harassment in the workplace).
A male editor used a piece about cancer caused by sun exposure as an excuse to publish an image of a topless woman.
Possibly the worst incident was the metal ruler up my skirt. I was made to feel I’d asked for it and told to stay out of the ‘lay out’ room where the man worked night shift, though I had to walk through that room to get to the ladies’ toilet (After the incident I had to walk around the building and climb rough cement steps to access the toilet). When I read Chapter 5 ‘When the boys come out to play’ I saw myself there – a paragraph on the humiliation of women in the workforce included: “rulers are thrust under skirts”.
…To be both young, unformed in feminist thinking and not knowing I had any rights, made speaking out almost impossible
One of the first pieces I wrote as a cadet journalist was about the opening of a women’s refuge in my town. These experiences were the seedlings of my later feminist activism….
I commend Skye for giving voice to women in rural and regional areas whose lives have been harmed by sexual harassment.
May Whispers from the Bush break the silence of rural women.
May it empower and strengthen them to speak out and no longer put up with mistreatment. May it contribute to solidarity among our sisters in dusty, remote places.
All of us who live or lived in these places – and have parts of our heart remaining there even when we have moved on – owe Syke a debt of gratitude.
