Making Friends With The Neighbours

I’ve been thinking a lot about International Women’s Day over the last week, mostly because I’m not participating in any events or actions or anything at all this year. I always know it is coming up (as I tell people who seem surprised it’s arrived, "it’s the same date every year") so I can only surmise that my apathy is intentional. By now, we know the critiques of IWD that emerge in Australia – that it is commercialised, corporatized, neoliberal, and focused on White women, middle class women, women with the most privilege – so my apathy isn't so hard to understand.  What has been surprising is that along with my apathy has come guilt.  I know that it’s not my personal responsibility to do something every year. Nor is there a need for my thoughts or ideas to be part of every IWD conversation or action. But I still feel guilty that I'm not participating in a formal way.  Recognising that this year I'm not organising or supporting events or actions, I’ve made time...

(Side note: Has it really been a whole year since I last posted?!) I’ve been trying to think about how to write about International Women’s Day (IWD) for 2022.  The theme, Changing Climates: Equality today for a sustainable tomorrow , gives lots of scope to this about how intersectional politics of sex/gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, colonisation, ageism, and ableism, link with ecological issues that I’m interested in, as well as the wars, natural disasters, and the pandemic that are dominating my news feed. As it happens, in my region we’ve been living in catastrophic weather events. I’ve found them deeply distressing and I’ve one of the folk who has been safe and dry, so I can’t imagine what these events have been like for those who will continue to feel the traumatic impacts for many years to come.  For me, IWD is about more than women, because fighting for greater equity for women necessarily includes equity for non-binary and trans people too. Certainly, I’m not here ...

This week was International Women’s Day. Much to the seeming surprise of many people, it happens on 8th March, every year.  There is growing critique about International Women’s Day (IWD) day; what it represents, who it represents, and how we should recognise it. Key critiques are of the corporate back-slapping and self-congratulations that it enables, as businesses and organisations host morning teas at which they point out the ways they’ve been less sexist that year, while serving cupcakes to women and taking photos to share in their promotional material. I absolutely agree with these critiques. The history of IWD is one based in the protest and anger of working women about the conditions of their lives in their workplaces, their communities, and their homes. If you want to research the specific origins of this day, then go ahead, but keep in mind that there were similar movements and protests like this around the world, which are also part of this story.  So what did I do t...

Surfing is one of the great joys of my life.* Being outside, at the beach, riding waves, spending time alone or with friends, encountering all kinds of animals, being away from my computer and phone - it's a feeling of freedom and joy that I find in precious few other activities. The very thought of being in the water and riding waves makes me feel good. But while the joy of surfing is the biggest part of it, darkness, discrimination and exclusion are a large part of going surfing too. These cultural aspects - human wrought - are by far the worst of surfing; worse than the fear of sharks, of wipeouts, of fin cuts. The violence and anger, the sense of entitlement, the commitment to exclusivity that some surfers layer over the pleasures they find in riding waves is the worst of surfing. We've all seen, experienced or practised this to varying degrees, and we've all likely turned our heads at times as well, hoping it will go away, hoping the victim will go away. It's n...

*The title of this essay is inspired by  Kylie Maslen's recent article about women's sport, 'Skin in the Game '. The essay itself is dedicated to my friends in the Institute of Women's Surfing (Europe), with my thanks for sharing your stories and friendship and resources. I. Oh hey, surf media! Surf media is such an interesting world. I used to consume it voraciously, reading everything I could find - every book, magazine, website, and blog. I was trying to understand it, to understand the world it was describing, to see the patterns and themes as well as the points of difference and resistance. I wasn't out to create a typology or anything like that, but to get my head around what it is that we say to ourselves as writers, editors, photographers and readers. I wanted to know who was talking and who might be reading and to know what was missing from these stories; to find the gaps. It didn't take long for me to turn away from mainstream print magazin...

I was surfing recently at a spot that I often avoid as it's mostly populated by aggressive shortboarders. They were sitting so deep and are constantly playing for the inside position, a game that left most of them in the wrong spot to take off and miss the section of wave that crumbled and filled up. On the other side of the section, the waves ran much further and longer and cleaner and formed fast little sections to play in before they closed out. This didn't stop the crew from still sitting deep and hassling each other and then pumping their way along the face, trying to gain speed to get around the close-out section. As a longboarder, and as a someone who can generally (and unnecessarily) lack confidence in their surfing, the inside was not an option for me. Longboards are not welcome, and not making a wave is not an option. Instead, I sat wide, out on the shoulder. I was sitting wide for more reasons than my board and my ability though. I was sitting wide because I...