Sunkamap: Australian women in solidarity with the women of Bougainville
"Picture one side of a fence; a daunting row of Victoria's men in blue, the newly built Australian Defence Industries munitions factory off in the distance... on the other side of the fence, close to two hundred women and children from all over the country were gathering around a symbolic vegetable garden."
It’s Easter weekend 1995 and a large crowd of women and children are assembled outside a weapons factory in Benalla, Victoria. The women, in line with their policy of total honesty, have told police of their plan to stage a non-violent demonstration, including their intention to break the law by climbing the fence into the factory to sit on the lawn. A number of women scale the fence and are immediately asked to leave the private property. All but seventeen depart and these seventeen are arrested, a first for many of them, and charged with wilful trespass.[1] Their efforts are to raise awareness of a war occurring on a small island off the north coast of Australia and of the people who live there who are suffering as a result, not only of the conflict, but because of a military blockade that has cut them off from the outside world.[2]
The Bougainville conflict began when tensions surrounding the Australian owned Panguna copper mine, the largest open cut mine in the world, boiled over. In the 1960s Australia and the Papua New Guinean (PNG) government, disregarding the complex connection of Bougainvillean people to their land and ignoring their matrilineal culture whereby women are the custodians, [3] signed a lease with Conzinc Riotinto of Australia. In 1988, angry at the lack of financial recompense and the escalating environmental damage, a group of men, who were to become the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) attacked the mine to disrupt operations. By 1989 the mine had closed but the island had descended into civil war. The PNG Defence Force (PNGDF) set up a blockade around the BRA controlled area, prohibiting supplies of clothing, building material, food and most devasting, medical supplies. Over the following nine years somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 people died.[4]
Sunkamap, sunrise in Tok Pisin, was a quarterly newsletter published and distributed by the Fitzroy-based group Australian Humanitarian Aid for Bougainville (AHAB). The May 1995 issue reports the group’s demonstration at the ADI factory in Benalla the month prior. The idea for the protest came about at a workshop attended by AHAB called ‘Sexism in the Peace Movement’ where the nature and effect of sexism on activism was discussed. Afterwards, the idea to hold a women only action was formulated.[5]
Women hold an important place in Bougainvillean society, not only because the woman’s line determines kinship and land rights, but they are also responsible for keeping the family wealth, recording family history, arranging marriages, and negotiating land usage. Naturally, Bougainvillean women played an integral part in negotiating peace and promoting sustainable solutions to the conflict,[6] but they were also heavily affected. By the time of the protest the blockade around Bougainville Island had gone on for six years. Around 5000 people, including children, died from preventable illness like malaria or infection because they could not access medicine. Many women died in childbirth due to the lack of medical supplies. Thus the women of AHAB protested in solidarity with the women of Bougainville. The protesters were conscious of their place in a lineage of women-led anti-war protests, describing theirs as ‘the first Australian women’s peace camp since the 1980s’, harking back to Pine Gap in 1983, and Cockburn Sound in 1984.[7] The location of the protest – the new munitions factory – was to draw the attention of the public to ‘the myriad ways’ Australia was involved in the conflict, including, AHAB allege supplying weapons and training through the Defence Cooperation Program.[8] The women’s scaling of the factory perimeter fence carrying medicine symbolised breaking the blockade.
This archived issue of Sunkamap is addressed to the Campaign for International Cooperation and Disarmament (CICD) headquarters at Trades Hall in Carlton. The authors of Sunkamap claim that the protest was widely covered in the media, but it is difficult to locate any evidence of it besides a small article in The Age, 17th April 1995.[9] CICD were no doubt one of those groups Antoinette Burton identifies ‘who believe that their histories have not been written because they have not been considered legitimate subjects of history—and hence of archivization per se.’[10] This is evidenced in CICD’s large contribution of documents to the University of Melbourne Archives, which thankfully included this newsletter. Histories of dissent, especially feminist dissent, Bartlet would agree are ‘too easily relinquished’ when 'how dissent is incorporated into social memory...has resounding implications for future wars and discourses of nation.'[11] That the official story, which speaks only of Australia’s role in the peacekeeping process, is somewhat contradicted by this small account of one protest, says something for the role of archives, even if they are fraught with complications.
Marilyn Lake has described how there is ‘an understanding of Australian history as bounded by “Britishness”, isolated from the countries and cultures of its own region…’[12] Yet in 1995 there were 200 women and children gathering in solidarity with their pacific neighbours in their fight for peace. Australia, ‘girt by sea,’ is also surrounded by many island nations with whom we have a long, sometimes tumultuous, history.
A hand drawn map featured in the May 1995 edition of Sunkamap showing Bougainville Island's location in relation to Papua New Guinea, Australia and the Solomon Islands.
[1] Victoria Gurvich, “Police Arrest 17 at Benalla Protest,” The Age, April 17, 1995.
[2] “Sunkamap” (Australian Humanitarian Aid for Bougainville (AHAB), May 1995), Congress/Campaign for International Co-operation and Disarmament CICD, Unit 50, 2012.0286, University of Melbourne Archives.
[3] Sister Lorraine Garasu, “The Role of Women in Promoting Peace and Reconciliation,” Peace Women - Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, January 1, 2002, https://www.peacewomen.org/node/89897.
[4] John Braithwaite et al., “Historical Background to the Conflict,” in Reconciliation and Architectures of Commitment: Sequencing Peace in Bougainville (ANU Press, 2010), 9–22, https://www-jstor-org.ezp.lib.unimelb.edu.au/stable/j.ctt24h90c.3. and K. Lasslett, “State Crime by Proxy: Australia and the Bougainville Conflict,” British Journal of Criminology 52, no. 4 (July 1, 2012): 705–23, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azs012.
[5] Mary Heath, “Peace, Protests and Police,” Alternative Law Journal 20, no. 6 (December 1995): 291–99.
[6] Garasu, “Peace Women.”
[7] Heath, “Peace, Protests and Police.”
[8] “Sunkamap.” For a discussion of the Defence Cooperation Program and its potential for ‘embarassing Australia’ due to unintended human right violations see Allan Shepard, “Australia’s Defence Cooperation Program” (Parliamentary Research Service, November 25, 1993), https://www.aph.gov.au/binaries/library/pubs/rp/1993/93rp04.pdf.
[9] Gurvich, “Police Arrest 17 at Benalla Protest.”
[10] Antoinette Burton, “Archive Fever, Archive Stories,” in Archives Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 2.
[11] Bartlett, “Remembering Feminist Dissent amid Memorialising War.” 8.
[12] Marilyn Lake, “Colonial Australia and the Asia-Pacific Region,” in The Cambridge History of Australia, ed. Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 535–59, https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781107445758.025.