Category Archives: Women who’ve carried the day

Life in 100 words

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The magazine, Marie Claire, recently featured a series to mark the centenary of International Women’s Day. It asked “10 women, 10 years apart, to offer their life story in 100 words.”

Here’s what the 70-year-old former prima ballerina, Marilyn Jones, said:

Born to house painter, housewife. Liked dolls. Frightened of spiders; still am. Started dancing at six to lengthen Achilles. London at 16. Nine months with Royal Ballet. Homesick. Principal with Borovansky Ballet. Was 21. Had doubts. Had boyfriend, almost engaged. Maybe life was in Newcastle. Went to Paris instead. Danced with Nureyev. Promoted to étoile: star. Married. Danced with Australian Ballet. Had Stanton. Motherhood and performing tiring. Had Damien. Both went into ballet. Proud. Marriage collapsed. Retirement performance got standing ovation. Thought, people do like me. Would like to have remained married; at least we’re still friends. Independence is important.

And here’s the 20-year-old Najeeba Wazefadost, former refugee:

Born Afghanistan. Persecuted by Taliban. Came to Australia by smuggler boat. Sent to Curtin detention centre. Saw security guards; thought they were like Taliban with better guns. Finally sent to Tasmania. Realised what smile was. Got citizenship at 18. Mother and father in tears. Finally, we belonged somewhere. Dad said now that Australia has given us identity, must give back and make it proud. Childhood was bombs, guns, persecution. Australia is about education, freedom, raising my voice. Have just finished medical science degree. Definitely want to get married and have kids some day. Proud they will have better childhood than me.

And here’s mine:

Happy brilliant child. First in everything. A leader. Painful adolescence. Started hiding strengths. Serious affliction at 20. Healing still. Went through motions with men in 20s. Almost married a man didn’t love at 28. Started own business at 32. One employee became lover. To Cambridge with him. Snowbound swans, Jesus Green, train to Liverpool Street. Back in Australia, moved to Melbourne, studied philosophy. Two great discoveries of life: another realm within this, and meaning of Sunday school text: “God is love.” Planning 50th birthday. Many beloved friends to share it with. Have learnt what Oscar said: “All criticism is autobiography.”

*****

What would yours be? Watch what happens in your mind when you start to contemplate it. Then go back a few hours later and watch it again. See anything different?

*****

Image: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Pablo Picasso

A compassionate man: Australia Day 2011

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Like bowling clubs, trams in Sydney used to have the best real estate.  One of the trams that ran until 1960 terminated at The Gap, the dramatic sandstone cliff on the ocean side of Sydney Harbour, next to Watson’s Bay.

The Gap has been a tourist attraction since European settlement, and for most of that period too, a notorious suicide spot.  The first reported suicide was in 1863.  Anne Harrison, the wife of the licensee of the Gap Hotel that stood on the site in the 1860s was suffering after the accidental death of her young nephew who slipped and fell over the cliff while visiting.  One night, after she and her husband had moved to the other side of the city, Mrs Harrison took a cab to The Gap in the middle of the night and leapt to her death.

In recent times, up to 50 people a year have taken their own lives at The Gap.  For years, there have been discussions and disagreements among local residents about the wisdom of fencing the cliff and installing lights and other deterrents.

One local, however, has been quietly getting on with saving people’s lives. For more than 40 years Mr Donald Ritchie has coaxed people away from the cliffside with an invitation to “come back to my house for a cup of tea.”  Keeping watch from the second storey bedroom of his nearby house, Mr Ritchie has officially saved the lives of 160 people.  Unofficially, he says, the figure is closer to 400.

Some, at his urging, have quietly gathered their shoes and wallets, neatly laid out on the rocks, and followed him home.  Others, tragically, struggled as he grabbed at their clothes before they slipped over the edge. (1)

Mr Ritchie, 84, has today been recognised in the annual Australia Day awards for his words and actions in times of trouble.

Mr Ritchie said on ABC radio this morning, “I can’t live here and not do something.”  He concluded,

All I do is give them the opportunity to change their mind.

*****

Among the awards given out today there are two others that thrill me.  Jessica Watson, the 16-year-old young woman who sailed around the world solo in 2010, whom I wrote about when her achievements were being trivialised and her integrity impugned, has been awarded the honour, Young Australian of the Year.

And Sally Sara, the ABC’s foreign correspondent stationed in Kabul, has been awarded an AM.  I’ve written about Sally’s compassion and intelligence in her reporting on the story of the little girl, Benazir and her family in the Pakistan floods, and the acid attacks on women in Bangladesh .  She’s the finest correspondent in the land.

Happy Australia Day!

*****

Notes

1. “Three of the best”, Sydney Morning Herald by Amy Corderoy, January 26, 2011

2. Information on Anne Harrison from “The Gap” by Robin Derricourt, The Dictionary of Sydney

Helena Rubinstein Down Under

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It really takes something to get to Australia.  For the British and their convict cargo it took many months by sea.  For the Italians and Greeks, and the “10-pound Poms,” fleeing post-war Europe, the best they could hope for was six weeks of calm weather and congenial shipmates.

Even today with air travel it’s not easy.  There’s a long 13-14 hour leg to Singapore and then a 9-hour encore before one is finally flying over the big arid continent at the bottom of the world.

It’s intriguing then that so many writers, artists and other well-known figures have visited Australia, including such names as Mark Twain, Anthony Trollope and D H Lawrence.

When Lawrence arrived in the 1920s he set up camp with Frieda in a cottage named, in classic Australian style, Wyewurk, on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean in the seaside hamlet of Thirroul, south of Sydney.  The novel he wrote during his stay called Kangaroo (what else?) about an Australian fascist movement of the 1920s is notable for one unforgettable image.  The two protagonists, a thinly-disguised version of Lawrence and Frieda,  go out into the bush and gather armfuls of mimosa (or wattle), and getting back into the trap, find the golden blossoms lighting up their faces and the gathering dusk.

But more about Lawrence, perhaps, anon.

The visitor I want to write about today — in this, the first of a series on the Antipodean adventures of the Rich and Famous – is not a writer, nor an artist, nor even a famous person when she arrived.  For it was in Australia, more to the point, in the tiny sheep-farming town of Coleraine (population 900), that Helena Rubinstein began her rise to fame and glory as the grande dame of a cosmetics empire and one of the wealthiest women in the world.

*****

One can only imagine what Chaja Rubinstein, born in Krakow, Poland in 1870, the eldest of eight daughters, thought when she arrived in Coleraine, the two-horse town in the middle of the Australian bush in which her uncle owned a store, in high summer, sometime around 1894.

Many years later when she arrived in New York, she would exclaim:

It was a cold day … All the American women had purple noses and grey lips, and their faces were chalk white from terrible powder.  I recognised that the US could be my life’s work. (1)

Whatever it was that went through her mind that day on viewing the sun-withered complexions of the Australian women, it’s clear what went through their minds.  With her parasol, her striking clothes, her hauteur, above all, her milky-white complexion, they must have thought as one: how does she do it?  And Helena was quick to oblige them.  She’d travelled from Poland with 10 pots of face cream and soon she was sending back home for fresh supplies.  She also started to put it about that the cream was specially blended by a Hungarian chemist called Lykusky, the first of the quasi-medical touches with which she invested her products, and which she later used to create

one of the great growth industries of the twentieth century.

Legend has it she also started making her own cream using the plentiful supplies of sheep lanolin and disguising the pungent odour with lavender and pine bark.

By around the turn of the century, she was working in various jobs: as governess to a large family, and then as a waitress in Melbourne at the Café Doré and the Winter Garden tea room.  It was at the tea room one day in 1902 that she discussed her vision of opening a beauty salon with a group of people including a printer, an artist and J T Thompson, an admirer, and manager of a tea company.

Thompson provided £100, the printer and artist together produced a label for her cream, and Helena opened her salon, the first beauty salon in the world by many accounts.  The cream, newly dubbed Crème Valaze, including “rare herbs from the Carpathian mountains,” cost 10 pence to make and sold for 6 shillings.  Within 2 years, she had made £12,000 and moved to the more up-market 243 Collins Street.  Dame Nellie Melba reportedly sang Aida in the salon while

tiny Helena – 4 foot 10 ins tall – stood on a chair to examine the diva’s complexion.

In 1905 she went to Europe to study skin treatment, and by November had moved into the Valaze Institute at 274 Collins Street.  The large “operating theatre” treated

flushed skin and blotches, double chins, warts and superfluous hair.

Her sisters, Manka and Stella, came from Poland, and soon she was opening a salon in Sydney and in New Zealand.

In 1908 she left Australia for London with £100,000 to invest.

Within a year she opened Helena Rubinstein’s Salon de Beauté Valaze; within another year, she claimed, a thousand society ladies were paying her a special subscription of £200 a year for weekly beauty treatments.

Her sisters, Manka and Ceska, joined her, and before long, she opened a salon in Paris and had another sister, Pauline, manage it.

In 1914, she arrived to the purple noses and grey lips of America, and opened her New York salon in 1916.  The rest is history.  The famous rivalry with Elizabeth Arden, an eccentric accumulation of art works, huge generosity and frugality in equal measure, and a lucite bed with built-in fluorescent lights from which she conducted business till her death at the age of 94 in 1965.  On her death her business was estimated at more than $60 million.

It was an empire “built on cold cream and dreams,” and it was born in a tiny sheep-farming town in Australia.

*****

Notes

1. “Cosmetics: The Beauty Merchant,” Time Magazine, April 9, 1965

2. All other quotations are from the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Images: Helena Rubinstein by William Dobell, 1957 (bottom)

Writing vs Blogging

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It’s just struck me.  Two years of blogging now, and this morning I finally got why it is that blogging still mystifies and wrongfoots me.

Because I still think of it as writing.

Sure, I make a few concessions to the medium – short paragraphs, fewer qualifications, a single line here and there – but, essentially, it’s still writing.  Writing transferred to a screen, and squished and trimmed to fit between virtual covers.

Not writing, blogging

What I’ve missed is that blogging is not writing.  Blogging is marketing.  Even when the blogger is not selling something.

Blogging is marketing on a few grounds.  One of them is the unmediated relationship between blogger and potential readers.  The “unmediated” is crucial because it means the authority and trust which precedes and underwrites the relationship between, say, book and reader, has to be negotiated neverendingly and “on the fly”, as it were.

It’s also why it’s always potential readers.

In fact, it’s far more accurate to say that blogs don’t have readers so much as consumers.  Yet here’s me still thinking unconsciously I’m dealing with readers.  No wonder I’ve resisted the word blogosphere.

I still think of writing and readers because that’s how I think of myself.  I consider myself a reader first, and a writer, second.  And I consider myself a writer even I’m not writing, or haven’t written anything for months, much like the character in a novel by Vita Sackville-West, unpromisingly titled All Passion Spent, who considers herself an artist even though she’s never painted anything in her life.

Can you imagine a blogger calling himself a blogger if he didn’t blog?

“The rules”

I do so many things that ignore all the blogging “rules” I should call this a non-blog, and I would if iconoclast were not the second most popular persona in the blogosphere (the most popular being guru, of course).

I regularly express doubt, use big words and — fatal sin — indulge my love of satire and irony.

So I don’t stand a chance in the market.  Luckily, however, I get enough from this writing to satisfy me.  And I’d much rather contend with the “anxiety of influence” good old Harold Bloom attributed to aspiring writers, than the “anxiety of consumers” true bloggers bear.

To have written

Below are some of the posts I’ve most enjoyed writing in the last year, with some commentary on each.

But first a word about this matter of enjoyment in writing, or better still, plain fun.  What makes it fun to write?  What makes it fun to have written?  The answer is something Andreas Kluth was debating, as productively as ever, on his blog the other day.

What makes it fun to have written is that the words written were those one intended to write, and only those one intended to write.

W G Sebald, a writer’s writer, puts the matter beautifully:

That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created.  It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread. (1)

The five posts below were among those I most enjoyed writing because I didn’t get hold of the wrong thread.

The post on blogging (yep, can’t leave subject alone)

In December, stupefied after a few too many wines at Christmas and 10 minutes too long on Copyblogger, I said my piece in a post titled 9 ways to become a popular blogger (Or, how to suck your readers’ brains out).

It’s tickled me ever since that Copyblogger displays a prominent link to my satirical post under the post in question; like a fly in the ointment, a worm in the dream.

I tossed this off in a couple of minutes, and it was fun.  If I were going to write it today, I’d add:

10. Advise readers not to take any advice (be sure to include this in every “how-to” post you write).

11. Only write about the topic “how to become a popular blogger.”

Click here to read 9 ways to become a popular blogger (or, How to suck your readers’ brains out).

The post on a “story that has everything”

The aforementioned Andreas Kluth commenting on this post got it in one.

The story of Etheldreda, a Saxon princess, who established a monastery on the Isle of Ely in England in 672, has everything that makes a good story:

- Danes, Angles, Saxons etc
- sex (including the lack of it)
- Plague
- tawdriness
- legacy

It’s also a story that’s been close to my heart for years, and I was pleased to be able to do it some justice.

Click here to read Last redoubt of a Saxon princess.

The post about transformation, no less

In September I wrote about the difference between change and transformation.  It’s been one of my most popular posts, and I assume it’s not just because the title has one of these simplified oppositions that work well in the blogosphere.

I felt inspired and moved writing this post, and I am still moved reading it today.

Click here to read Change vs Transformation.

The post that broke my heart

For years I’d cherished the excerpts from the notebooks Gustave Flaubert wrote while sailing down the Nile in 1849.  Then, earlier this year, I read that Florence Nightingale had been on the same boat for part of the trip.

I was amazed, and thought it time to share some of my cherished excerpts.  Unfortunately, the post sank without trace (though it was saluted at by Thomas as it slid under). This broke my heart, and had me pondering afresh my taste for earthiness and vulgarity.

It also had me pondering if that photo really did suggest arseholes.

Click here to read Adventures on the Nile with Gustave and Florence.

The post about knitting (of course!)

If you’re still reading, no fear.  This last one is a list.  What is it about us and lists? And what is it about me and knitting socks?  This post explains it. A little. And I managed to squeeze in Hercule Poirot, a personal hero.

Click here to read On not fondling one’s moustaches.

*****

So, that’s it for this year’s roundup.

Here’s to more fun writing, and remember, dear readers, may your socks always be handknitted!

Notes

1. W G Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

Images: W G Sebald (top); Ely Cathedral (middle); Flaubert in fez (bottom)


The shock of the feminine pronoun

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Every time a radio or TV announcer talks about the new Prime Minister they use the pronoun “she”, and I get a little shock.  Can it be? “Prime Minister” and “she” in the same statement?  Always the most powerful and telling unit of speech, the pronoun’s in neon at the moment.

When I think of what it means for Australia to have its first female Prime Minister I’m very moved.  Like the election of Obama in the US, it’s what it now makes available in the world that’s the thing. According to Mary-Anne Toy in today’s Age,

the Melbourne headquarters of Emily’s List, the group that Gillard, Joan Kirner and others founded to get Labor women elected, has almost sold out of its ‘Future PM’ t-shirts for girls.

For the first time, 22 million men and women, boys and girls, will see a woman wielding ultimate authority.

*****

Image: Emily’s List

Julia carries the day

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What an amazing day it’s been. I’ve resented every minute away from the internet, TV, radio. Yet only 24 hours ago, as someone said somewhere, this was no more than …

Chris Uhlmann’s wet dream.

Australia has its first female Prime Minister, sworn in by its first female Governor-General.

Headline of the day?

Gillard grabs her moment in history

This is what’s really inspired.  How she seized the day.  She didn’t squib it or get cold feet or play “nice”.  She just reached out with both hands and took power.   In doing so she demonstrated what power is: taking the thing desired and accepting the consequences, whatever they may be. It’s what Peter Costello couldn’t do.

Most searing moment of the day?  When Kevin Rudd talked about the Stolen Generations and how they’d come in “that door” on that day in 2008 — here he broke down for several minutes — and

… they were frightened.

Ahhhh. His greatest achievement, and the one for which every Australian will remember him with gratitude: the apology to the Stolen Generations.

Well-played, Mr Rudd!  Well-played, Ms Gillard!

*****

First female Prime Minister in land feminism forgot

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A few minutes ago, Australia got its first female Prime Minister.  Never did I think I’d live to see this day in the land that feminism forget, the land where women earn 83% of what men earn …

Overnight, a surprise challenge was brought on to oust Kevin Rudd, the man elected by Australian voters to lead Australia only two and a half years ago.  And this morning, in a Caucus meeting, his Deputy, Julia Gillard was installed as Prime Minister.

This is stunning. It’s a total surprise to this Rudd voter at least.  There is no precedent for ousting a first-term Prime Minister.  And that a woman should become Prime Minister, a woman who’s never been married and has no children, who was once taunted by the Cro-Magnon, Bill Heffernan, for being “barren”, is gobsmacking.

What a red letter day it’s going to be watching our first female Prime Minister being sworn in by Quentin Bryce, our first female Governor-General.

After this, truly anything is possible …

*****

Image: Julia Gillard, photograph by Glen McCurtayne for The Sydney Morning Herald (top); Quentin Bryce and grandchildren, photograph by Paul Harris for The Brisbane Times (bottom)

Breaking the sound barriers

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Sometimes you’ve just got to be amazed at what people are capable of.  Take my friend, Julie, for instance.  Julie has just headed off on a two-month speaking tour of the US and the UK to publicise the book she has written, Breaking the Sound Barriers, and its subject matter: how children who are deaf and hard of hearing can have lives of great success and fulfilment.

As of last week she had two speaking engagements confirmed: one in Pittsburgh and one in Culver City.  The fact that a two-month tour is still to be filled with engagements, and she’s already in the midst of it, doesn’t put her off for a minute.  It’s all part of the joy of the challenge.

I know Julie will be successful, simply because of who she is being and what she is committed to which is:

to write words that change lives.

Julie’s book, Breaking the Sound Barriers, features the experiences of nine children who are deaf or hard of hearing and what they and their parents have learned about self-esteem, fulfilment and possibility.

As one of her readers said:

This is something I would have really wanted to read when I was younger.  It would have helped me deal with my deafness – I remember searching online for “inspirational deaf people,” and being very disappointed that they were all old.  It took me until I was 21 years old to get to the point where I was completely confident about being deaf, so this book would have been very welcome when I was younger, dealing with the difficulties, and feeling alone.

Julie is a successful journalist and author.  She has worked with Deaf Children Australia for several years, and has interviewed hundreds of families of deaf and hard of hearing children.  Julie will be speaking next Tuesday evening – May 18, 2010 – at Culver City.  Details are as follows:

A Night of Remarkable Women
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
6pm to 8pm
No Limits, 9801 Washington Blvd, 2nd floor
Culver City, CA

So if you’re in the US or UK, go and support Julie and help her change the world for deaf and hard of hearing children.

To purchase Breaking the Sound Barriers: 9 deaf success stories (ISBN 978-0-9805953-0-7) go to Amazon or the Breaking the Sound Barriers website.

For more information or to request an interview, contact Julie on: julie at breakingthesoundbarriers dot com

*****

What a winner! Jessica update

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Jessica Watson has responded, via her blog, to the bickering amongst the sailing fraternity and the media about her solo circumnavigation.  What a winner she is.  And here I was wondering about her spirits!

This from her blog …

Been having a giggle

I don’t normally bother addressing critics because someone’s always going to be saying something, no matter what I say or do … But I thought I’d have my 2 bobs worth on these claims that I haven’t officially sailed around the world.

Call me immature but I’ve actually been having a bit of a giggle over the whole thing. If I haven’t been sailing around the world, then it beats me what I’ve been doing out here all this time! Yes it’s a shame that my voyage won’t be recognised by a few organisations because I’m under 18, but it really doesn’t worry me.

Like climate change scepticism

I mean there’s millions, properly [sic] billions of people who still don’t believe in global warming, so I’m more than happy to settle for a few people going against the tide and declaring that mine hasn’t been an official circumnavigation.

“Couldn’t be in better spirits”

I’m having the time of my life slowly cruising up the coast, not pushing Ella’s Pink Lady too hard, and looking forward to arriving on the 15th. I’m enjoying all the highs of solo sailing and in just a few days, I’ve got seeing friends and family to look forward to … I think I can safely say that I’m now seriously excited about getting home! It’s probably a good thing that I’m by myself because if there was anyone else here I’d be driving them mad with all my hyperactive energy!

To read Jessica’s blog, click here.

*****

Image: by Steve Holland for The Sydney Morning Herald

“Little girl” sails around the world, solo, unassisted

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Jessica Watson, a young Australian sailor of 16, is about to complete her solo circumnavigation of the world.  After 200 days at sea, and a torrid last two weeks spent righting her boat after being knocked over and over again in the Southern Ocean, she’s rounded Tasmania and is headed back to where she started, Sydney.

Guess what the Australian media is consumed with?  Whether or not she will actually qualify to take the record of youngest person to complete the circumnavigation.  A huge fight has broken out following the comments of a Mr Rob Kothe, the editor of Sail-world.com, that her journey will not qualify as a record under the rules of the World Speed Sailing Racing Council (WSSRC).  Mr Kothe has been telling all and sundry that she won’t break the record of the young Australian man, Jesse Martin set in 1999, but of course, she is a very brave and plucky “little girl.”

This is the same “little girl” who endured such media criticism before she even set out on her journey when she broke her mast in an encounter with a container ship on a trial run.  The same “little girl” who, with cries of “what are her parents thinking of?”, “she’s too young”, “she’s not up it, look what happened to her mast” ringing in her ears, set out nevertheless and is about to succeed.

The same “little girl” who will always have to tack against the best efforts of our society to minimise and trivialise her achievements, as well as her personhood.  All because she is female.

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