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By Dr Julie Macken, Sydney Peace Foundation Board Member

I had the joy of interviewing Arundhati Roy for the AFR in 2005, about a year after she won the Booker Prize for her book, The God of Small Things. We spoke about many things but what I remember most clearly was her answer to a question I asked. She was under unbelievable attack at the time, from a number of powerful actors and I asked how she managed it, how did she continue in the face of these attacks?

Her answer was simple and has never left me. “When the current is pushing against me, I drive my spear down deep and hang on, so I am not swept away. When the flood subsidies I am still there.”

Every day it feels like the flood of horror and cruelty and greed is flowing against me – against all of us. Every day brings a new low, a new form of barbarism in Lebanon, in Gaza, Iran, in the reduction of dead toddlers to statistics. Our communities, environment, humanity is being demolished by the genocidal rage of the Israeli government and the chaotic greed and violence of the Trump regime. Both the US and Israel – with its newly announced death penalty for Palestinians – have forgone any claim to democratic practice as they slide under the waves of a rising fascism.

This powerful tide of horror destabilises us as we try to find existing points of reference, as we drive our spear deep and hang on waiting for its pull to lessen. But while we wait we need to ask ourselves what is to be done? Not as a curious question but as a way of beginning to understand just how high the stakes are. Asking that question and searching for answers is a part of what we can hang on to, and staying in contact with the stakes, with reality, is the only way out of this malignant labyrinth.

There is a growing discussion about ‘fascism amnesia’ that demands our attention if we are serious about finding a way of this malaise. Jill Salberg[1] suggests, ‘the forgetting of history can be understood as part of the phenomenon of transgenerational transmission of trauma, where the unfinished work or wounds of one generation get passed down to the next.’ She argues, ‘that to break or interrupt this transmission, a bearing witness needs to happen. An example is offered of the Abuelas of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, whose ongoing mourning and the persistence of memory offers successive generations an entry into the process of “continuing mentalizing.” Such witnessing needs to be in the service of defying and refusing fascistic amnesia.’

Witnessing and giving language to the abuse of refugees held in Australia’s brutal immigration regime by those detained and those caring for them was a central theme of my book. Remembering and using honest language is vital right now. As Aarathi Krishnan describes in her powerful article, The whole civilisation will die tonight, ‘The most dangerous political moment is not the atrocity itself. It is the period before it, when the language that makes the atrocity thinkable becomes the language everyone uses, when each escalation is absorbed and normalized and the boundary of the acceptable moves outward by degrees small enough to seem manageable in the moment.’

We need to remember. We need to take language seriously. For all these reasons I want to start telling my own stories of moments of change, of joy and of being part of political actions that changed the nation. Because they do change the nation. We have been a better nation than the one we are right now and I am tired of waiting for any political leader or party to guide us into something better than this.

My hope is that others will remember and write about their moments of action and joy and seeing the possibility for all of us.

It was Anzac Day 1983, I was a young Women’s Libber and someone just beginning to realise that a lot of the crap I had always thought was personal, was actually political and not an accident. But I was still pretty naïve at the time. Some mates of mine had told me about a protest women were making to remember all the women raped and killed in war. I thought that was probably a good idea because god knows there were a lot.

I found myself dressed in black on a cool autumn morning walking silently down George Street behind a banner that said, “We Mourn all Women Raped in all Wars”. I didn’t know it at the time but Meredith Burgmann was also marching and she wrote about her experience in Crikey and takes up the story here.

The women’s movement in Australia had been increasingly concentrating on the issue of violence and many were reading the material of American radical feminist Mary Daly. This fed into the heightened anti-war sentiments of the Vietnam era and general anti “One Day of the Year” feelings about Anzac Day as a day which glorified war and machismo.

The Sydney Women Against Rape in War Collective was formed around the leadership of Quaker academic Sabine Willis and sociologist Rosemary Pringle at Macquarie University. We were influenced by the protests that had taken place in the ACT in 1981 and were determined to demonstrate against the 1983 Anzac march in Sydney. Our application for permission to march was refused and we took action in the courts. This received great publicity and even though we lost the case, the publicity continued.

We decided to march anyway, but to do so before the official march took place rather than directly confront it. This was in contrast to our Melbourne sisters who were much more confrontationist; they thought we were wimps (and perhaps we were).

We marched silently down to George Street where we were confronted by a phalanx of police and eight paddy wagons. We then sat down in the middle of George Street. Some women refused to move when ordered and all 161 were arrested, silently and, we hoped, with dignity.

What I remember about that day was the outrageous fun that was had as Darlinghurst Police cells were crammed full of women all dressed in black and up for passing the time as entertainingly as possible.

I remember the numerous renditions of the Prisoner theme song, He use to bring me roses, I remember endless rounds of ACDC’s Jail Break, especially the line, “and he got out, with a bullet in back…..jail break.” I also remember getting stumped by the lateral thinking games that were started by the philosophers from Sydney Uni in our midst. This is one of the best kept secrets when it comes to activism, even when it is very scary, it is still so much fun.

But maybe more than anything I remember the soul deep feeling of solidarity. Of knowing it is right to remember the women and children raped and killed in war. It is still right to remember the real victims of war.

This kind of protest would probably get someone torn to pieces in today’s Australia, though I suspect the Diggers would understand better than most. My memory on the day was that it was those standing on the margins that were furious, the Diggers understood I suspect because they understood what the real stakes are in war.

We didn’t change the world that day, but we did create more space to imagine a more complex story about war. Australia desperately needs more room to imagine ourselves differently, our place in the world differently and to remember just what an extraordinary place we could be. This imaging is vital because our policies and cultural practices emanate from who we are. It matters that imagine better versions of who we are to produce better policies, politics and practices.

But for that we need to tell each other stories about what we were like before – pick your date – before 1996, before 1778, before we forgot how important collective action is.

Fascism depends on all of us agreeing to forget.

[1] Salberg, J. (2024). “Don’t You See I’m Burning?”: Fascism Amnesia and the Failure of Witnessing. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 60(3–4), 209–220. https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2025.2540735

By Dr Julie Macken, Sydney Peace Foundation Board Member 

Image credit: Unsplash, Mike Newbry