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Eleganta's avatar

I lived in Brisbane for a few months in 1994. My Aussie boyfriend and I drove up the coast to the Daintree River to see the jungle crocs and a little way into the outback to see the Aborigine art on the mouths of caves (by then protected, as the white men's cattle had been rubbing off the thousands-years-old drawings). We saw a small abandoned mining and smelting camp, blistering hot even in the midst of winter, and the sad graveyard where the men who'd died in the camp were buried, with old bedframes over their graves to try to keep the dingoes from digging up their bodies. We saw the miles and miles and miles of spectacular, empty white-sand beaches under nodding palm trees, with their exquisite turquoise waves.

It is an utterly beautiful and fascinating land. I never wanted to leave.

But I will tell you, I found the Australian men to be misogynist Neanderthals. Maybe further south, closer to Sydney and Melbourne, they're more normal. But where I was, they were stuck in the worst of the 1950s. It was appalling. They called us misogynist insults to our faces and told us we were evil, cackling wildly. They made American men look like feminist angels. And the smart, strong, no-nonsense Australian women I met just had to put up with it.

Now whenever I hear these stories about Sall and the lesbians of Tasmania and the other women of that beautiful land, I wonder about my women friends long ago in Brisbane. I hope they're fighting back.

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