Next Friday, on March 6 – two days away from the official International Women’s Day, when I sit down to chat with three highly visible and vocal women – the Hon Mary Delahunty; producer and writer Deb Cox and journalist and children’s book author Samantha Turnbull on the theme of ‘make it happen’, I think there will be a question that must be asked. And that is, how on earth did Australia’s Human Rights Commissioner, Gillian Triggs, become the victim of a merciless vendetta by a government apparently hell bent on undermining any progress we’ve made towards a more equal society?

Booker prize winner Richard Flanagan, author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, put it most succinctly in The Guardian online when he wrote that there has always been something deeply disturbing about the Abbott Government’s attitude to women. ‘Even in opposition,’ he writes, ‘such sleaze as the menu for a Mal Brough fundraiser depicting Julia Gillard in the most vile way went beyond the vicious into some psychopathology if not too bizarre to divine, then too awful to contemplate.’

Award winning journalist and writer Mary Delahunty will speak at this year’s International Women’s Day Lunch at the Byron at Byron

Mary Delahunty, a former Gold Walkley award winning ABC journalist, and education and arts minister in Victoria’s last Labor government, has brought her sense of compassion and justice to the book Gravity: Inside the PM’s office during her las year and final days, to create a portrait of a woman doing her best to withstand a siege of political and personal proportions rarely, if ever witnessed. Don’t forget Alan Jones’s low moment when he said on radio that Gillard’s father had “died of shame”, or that a Perth radio shock jock had asked her about her long-term partner Tim’s sexuality. At what point has the Australian media ever subjected a male Prime Minister to that kind of bitter and unscrupulous scrutiny?

Writer and producer Deb Cox from EveryCloud Productions.

Where Delahunty uses prose and journalism, writer and producer Deb Cox from Every Cloud Productions, has turned her writing talent to create fictional television and film content as varied as SeaChange, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, and The Gods of Wheat Street. All of them gritty and real, and featuring women in starring roles as powerful forces – particularly of course the indomitable Miss Fisher originally created by Australian author Kerry Greenwood. “The attraction to the stories was definitely because Phryne Fisher was such an entertaining but wonderfully subversive, feminist character,” says Cox, “and that laced through with Fiona Eagger’s and my history of wanting to tackle social issues with a balance of grit and humour made it something we could proud of which would reflect the moral values we share.”

Author of The Anti-Princess Club Series, Samantha Turnbull.

Which brings me to the youngest of three who have ‘made ‘it’ (whatever it is) happen’ – Samantha Turnbull. Turnbull, and I’ve had the privilege of working with Sam on the Northern Star – is a force to be reckoned with. Funny, astute and also an award-winning journalist, she found her writing voice when she was searching for a book for her daughter Libby that didn’t feature a princess or a fairy. “I wanted to write stories about girls that don’t actually need rescuing,” says Turnbull, “and that’s how The Anti-Princess Club books were born.” The four-book series, published simultaneously this month, features Emily, Bella, Grace and Chloe – a group of ten-year-old girls determined to prove that it’s a girl’s world, full of adventure, sport and derring-do.

President of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Gillian Triggs.

In terms of derring-do, Gillian Triggs, as Tess Lawrence wrote in the Independent Australia Online, has proved a fearless public servant, a formidable human rights advocate and guardian of those denied a voice and consigned to the marginalia of justice — especially children.

Lawrence goes on to say: ‘In particular, both her public statements and a recently tabled report The Forgotten Children: National Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention (2014) damning Australia’s degraded legal and moral conduct on the plight of those children in offshore detention centres, has incurred the wrath of the Coalition Governent intent on daily painting a whitewash over the black history of our bulk violations of human rights and industrial strength abuse of children, including violence and sexual abuse.’

I hope that Gillian Triggs knows how much she is admired by so many of us – male and female – for her just advocacy of the powerless. Seeing her sad and somewhat haunted expression of late, I hope that Flanagan is right when he says that one day in the future another Prime Minister (perhaps, who knows, another woman brave enough to face the battle against mysogyny) will apologise for our treatment of asylum seekers, and of women and children, and I hope perhaps in the nearer future, that just maybe an apology to Triggs will happen. Perhaps, after the Byron Bay International Women’s Day lunch, taking place once more at the Byron at Byron resort, we can find a way to help make that happen.

Proceeds of the lunch will go to the S.H.I.F.T Project which is aimed at shifting lives, by firstly providing a 12-week transitional program of stable supported housing for women at risk. A few local volunteers and one very generous philanthropic donor have enabled S.H.I.F.T. to open its doors in Byron Bay.

‘Make it happen’ and make a difference by joining the lunch on March 6 at the Byron at Byron.  Cost $65. Tix www.byronunited.org.au <https://www.byronunited.org.au>  or call 0401 592 114.

https://www.internationalwomensday.com/theme.asp#.VO-r1ShpA98

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Walt Corporate Disney eating her alive

‘I liked princesses and I turned out fine’

Says the beige, robot mother pulled into line”

When local author and journalist Samantha Turnbull decided to enter her first poetry slam competition, she confesses she felt a little nervous.  “I’d never really been a huge poetry fan, I’d always thought it was a little pretentious,” she says, “but when Bruce, my husband, and I had went to New York, we’d visited the Bowery Poetry Club, and I’d really loved it.”

Shortly after Turnbull saw an advertisement in the Northern Rivers Writers Centre newsletter for entries into a heat of the New South Wales Poetry slam taking place at the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival earlier this year and decided that she’d give it a go.  After all, she reasoned, she had a message – one she already knew had a market.  On maternity leave from the ABC for two years she’d written a series of four books – The Anti-Princess Club series, with the first one due out in March 2015.

It was time to take her Anti-Princess crusade to the stage.

“Why are we, the most educated women ever taught,
Not encouraging our daughters to become astronauts?
To find their own auroras, calderas, constellations,
Not be ruled by marketers’ gender limitation
Not be primped for boys’ lustful salivation
Not be pimped into childhood sexualisation”

A poetry slam, for those that may not have been to one, is a competitive event in which poets perform their work and are judged by members of the audience. Everyone who signs up has the opportunity to read in the first round and the lineup for subsequent rounds is determined by the judges’ scores. Of the scores the poet receives from the five judges, the high and low scores are dropped and the middle three are added together, giving the poet a total score of 0-30.  Slam is designed for the audience to react to all aspects of the show, including the poet’s performance, the judges’ scores, and the host’s banter. Audiences can boo or cheer at the conclusion of a poem, or even during a poem. The best slam poets are good at theatrical performance  and pure poetic writing.

Samantha Turnbull – photograph by Karly Nimmo

Turnbull and her husbane Bruce Mackenzie, an experienced performance poet, both entered.  “I honestly didn’t think I had much chance,” says Turnbull.  “I just went into it because I was interested in the way people can use poetry slams to get across a message – I was incredibly surprised when I won.”  Did she celebrate?  “Not exactly,” she says.  “I seem to recall Bruce went out to celebrate for me – or perhaps it was to drown his sorrws – and I went home to mind the kids.” The win took her straight to the New South Wales finals.  “I got a good score,” she says, “and I was in contention most of the way through – right up until the end when the last two performers came first and second.”  Not that she minded.  “It was a great experience – and it’s certainly made me determined to keep on doing it.”

The budding performance poet whose day job is cross-media reporter for the local ABC, is originally from the Northern Rivers.  Turnbull, 34, was born in Lismore, her family are from the region, and these days she lives in Suffolk Park with Mackenzie and their two children, four-year-old Libby, who despite her Mum’s best efforts still seems to enjoy a Princess moment or two in the dressing-up department, and one-year-old Jonah.  It was Libby’s birth that set in motion the on-going Anti Princess project.

“I just couldn’t believe what I was given when she was born,” she says.  “There were tiaras and oceans of pink, and princesses everywhere.  That’s when I began to think about how we give our girls these messages and more recently, how, in the last ten years Walt Disney has really hi-jacked princesses and turned them into these princess stererotypes.  It’s almost like a religion – they even have princesses on huggies now.”

“Because that’s what this is,
This Disney Princess virus
A line of gateway drugs
To the twerking Miley Cyrus”

In between everything else Turnbull is also working on her next set of books – this time aimed at the seven to ten market.  And it would seem that a way with words runs in the family.  Her daughter’s idea of a compliment? “Mum, I would really miss you if you got locked up in a cage and fed to vultures.”

https://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6KiENJll68

samanthaturnbull

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