Australian Women's Book Review Volume 14.1 - School of English ...

used for this, as it was for the 'conventional' wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. Australian foreign policy
has had these alliances and these bases for decades but they are currently being dramatically upscaled.
The last (and only) time nuclear weapons were used it was supposedly to stop fascism. But the current
surveillance, secret policing, and government prioritising of burgeoning military might, bear increasing
resemblances to the early days of fascism in the 1930s. Is 'Terror' in Australian uniforms not terror at
all? Does counter-terrorism (to which this year's Budget in May re-directed massive funds that could
have been spent on welfare and education) actually produce anything other than an escalation of what it
supposedly sets out to combat? The turn in most of the West over the past few years, and greatly
accelerated since last year, to conservative governments, surveillance and militarism, has been
compared to the 1950s; more recently however the similarities beginning to be drawn are with the
1930s and the rise of fascism.
Arundhati Roy in a recent article in the New Statesman has named the situation in Gujarat in India
specifically as `incipient, creeping fascism' particularly in relation to the persecution of India's
Muslims. But she seems to underestimate the degree to which this might also be identified throughout
the West. She suggests that George Bush and the Coalition Against Terror created `a congenial
international atmosphere' for its rise, although for 'years it has been brewing in our public and private
lives.' But she seems to be blind to the way in which it could also be seen to be being prepared for in
the West: one minor concession after another made to economic rationalism, gradually adding up to a
whole shift of direction, a whole new worldview. John Howard's role in this in Australia is discussed by
Nathan Hollier in the politicsandculture journal that you can also find on this website.
This issue of the Australian Women's Book Review contains an interview with Kate Jennings who has in
some ways followed in the tracks of Christina Stead who left Australia in the late 1920s for Europe and
America, marrying an American banker, Bill Blake, writing about the world of high finance in House
of all Nations (1938), and living in New York for long periods. Her posthumously published novel, I'm
Dying Laughing was about attacks on the American left, especially cultural workers, during the
McCarthyite days. Along with many other Australian women intellectuals, Stead has been important in
offering incisive critiques of capitalism and imperialism, and their concomitant ethnocentrism and
sexism. Australian women were among the first to get the vote and the socialist-oriented Women's
Liberation Movement of the 1960s made huge gains in terms of services for women and other
progressive social policies, and women's visibility in public life. Particularly offensive to many
feminists has been the suggestion that the war in Afghanistan was made in women's name to liberate
them from oppression. Violence is also being enacted against minority women here (most visibly in the
detention centres that have been described as 'concentration camps') in the name of 'Australian' women.
Virginia Woolf says in Three Guineas (1938): 'as a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no
country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.' Women in Australia could combat the
destructive potential of globalising and increasingly militaristic capital by thinking about this view too.
Review articles are anonymously refereed.
Contributors are paid $60 per review, $90 per review article.
This is the fourth issue of AWBR since it became an internet magazine. AWBR is published twice
yearly in May and November (and appears at the same time as the two issues of Hecate per year). It is
Australia's only women's review of books (on or off the net). We publish reviews by Australian women
of both Australian and, occasionally, other texts, and welcome new reviewers.
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