I have to admit I haven’t been a big IWDer, around it leaps and we diligently report and click ‘like’ and hope that one day, equity will shape all of our daily lives. But, this 8th of March, I’m choosing to be less inert. There are too many stories to ignore; too many futures at stake; too many women whose security hangs by a thread, even in this Australia.

Each year, I write a series of stories for a remarkable charity whose goal is to help set women up with viable small businesses, delivering flexibility, income, empowerment and community trickle-down in ways that are so much more vital and sustaining than an annual report could ever capture. Many of the women I interview are refugees, domestic abuse survivors and single parents. Some are over 60 and faced homelessness before their business idea – a kernel of hope, of risk, of determination, somehow lodged in unsettled earth – took root and gave them an alternative view to carry them into a more secure old age.

Blocked from mainstream employment and armed with the need to make this work work, these women shared their memories with me, and, amid tears, laughter, nerves and something less easy to pin down and more kindred – let’s call it sisterhood – they’ve spoken about what has held them back and what it means to succeed at something beyond their labels of mother, migrant, divorcee, victim, survivor.

Here are some of their words from those 35-plus interviews. Take them together, pull them apart – I hope there’s something in here that might set thoughts in stream, chip away at the barriers and, perhaps, bring us closer. This is not a collection of happy endings – there is still too much to be done for that; this is the stuff of grit and resistance.

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“I have a message for the young girls of today. Stay educated. Have your own bank account, be in charge of your finances, always have a signature on your income, know where your money is going, never only have a joint bank account, always make sure your property is in joint names.”

“My biggest barrier to work was not being legally blind, as you might think, but was isolation. It can be very isolating having a disability. It can be very isolating being a single mother. I don’t drive, I was broke, I have a background of trauma and I live in a rural area – and all of that was isolating.”

“I was a mum to five sons. I didn’t have babysitters, I didn’t have family support, there was no way for me to be able to afford to have a 9-5 job with daycare, after school care, before school care, as well as trying to raise five children.”

“I once walked into a room at a networking event and this guy comes up to me and says ‘What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘Oh, I have a start-up, I’m making an app.’ And, he goes, ‘An app? You? How old are you?’”

“I really didn’t think I would have an issue living and working in Australia but the cultural difference was huge. I didn’t know what the right behaviour was, or what to say, it confused me so much. What worked perfectly back home didn’t work here.”

“I felt that the narrative about my future meant I couldn’t have a successful life, and that as an Aboriginal woman, my future was destined to be a stay-at-home mum, controlled by our government and government payments and to not have my own freedom and follow my dreams.”

“I was once on a list for being at high risk of homelessness and the training has given me hope to achieve my goal to be financially independent, not be a burden, not be one of the statistics. Women need to be honoured and treasured, obviously by their partner and family, but also by society. The growing homelessness among women is just abhorrent.”

“We’d be in a business meeting and I’d get introduced probably eight times out of 10 as, ‘This is Catie, Warren’s wife.’”

“I would do the shopping at the age of seven … We didn’t have money, we didn’t have discipline. I thought I’d never own a home, I’d never achieve anything – I didn’t know what it was like to be good and have good influencers around me.” 

“I didn’t call out for help and I’m not alone.”

“I knew no-one here in Australia. But my biggest barrier to work was the language barrier. I knew some English before I came to Australia, but knowing that I didn’t need to be afraid of it was a challenge.”

“I’ve been a single parent of three boys for a long time and once you’ve taken on a responsibility like that, it’s quite hard to then say, ‘You know what, I’m going back into the work place to work for someone else.’ Being a single parent, you learn so many skills and you are your own boss.”

“Starting a business has given me a sense of purpose and worth that had been eroded … it has given me the power to do things the way I think they should be done.”

“I could have said, ‘I don’t know English, I don’t think I’m going to make it, I don’t know where to start.’ I could have just shut the inspiration off because of fear, but I believed that I could do it. Even though I have faced challenges, I know that I will get there.”

“Talking about this business has opened me up to hearing other women’s stories, and some of them are so much worse than what I went through. As some of them say to me, ‘At least you had your son’s couch to sleep on.’ There are women around Australia sleeping in dumpsters and on park benches.”

“I don’t regret any of the decisions I made – I would happily have my time all over again with my children – but through the whole process I have always felt like Australia wasn’t home. Now, I feel like I have arrived. There’s a sense of rightness, of the circle closing. I can see a future for myself and it’s full of happiness and wonder and excitement.”

“If I met her today, I’d tell the young me: Don’t worry, everything is going to be all right.”

#BackHerBrilliance #IWD2023

We leave base camp and start our trek across this vast country.
We invite you to walk with us in a movement of the Australian people for a better future. – The Uluru Statement from the Heart

There’s a section of our local bush track that takes me past the only handful of homes designated for Arakwal people of the Bundjalung Nation to live on their own, hard fought for, land. The path slinks through shaded grass then into soft sand and birdsong-pierced coastal scrub that finally, but only at the very last moment, opens onto the profound blackness of tea tree lake. It is said to be a traditional birthing place, a pool of maternal creation. There is peace in that spot, an energy that has existed and will continue to exist for aeons beyond you and me.

I’ve been thinking a lot about animism, spurred on by my latest feature for Patagonia’s Roaring Journals about the idea that a better way to live with and on the planet might lie in imparting lifeforce to its volcanoes, rivers, pebbles and snowflakes. To breathe a soul into grasses and shady bowers and petals and bee’s wings. Within that way of seeing, humans are only part of the reverberating whole, equal to but not above any being, rock or vegetable.

In her singular work, Tracks, Robyn Davidson writes about the Pitjantjara people she befriends as she treks across the spinifex-knotted aridity of remote central Australia. Remote to you and me, I should say, as it’s home to those First Nations people and their ancestors and families.

“And as I walked through that country, I was becoming involved with it in a most intense and yet not fully conscious way. The motions and patterns and connections of things became apparent on a gut level. I didn’t just see the animal tracks, I knew them. I didn’t just see the bird, I knew it in relationship to its actions and effects. My environment began to teach me about itself without my full awareness of the process. It became an animate being of which I was part”, she wrote.

“In picking up a rock I could no longer simply say, ‘This is a rock,’ I could now say, ‘This is part of a net,’ or closer, ‘This, which everything acts upon, acts.'”

She explains that in Pitjantjara, there is no word for ‘exist’. “Everything in the universe is a constant interaction with everything else. You cannot say, this is a rock. You can only say, there sits, leans, stands, falls over, lies down, a rock.”

Lose boundaries and fragmentation: join things up to stay alive. The self seemed to be, in that extraordinary place, “a reaction between mind and stimulus”, she wrote.

“The self in a desert becomes more and more like the desert. It has to, to survive.”

There is no individual, but a community of things and beings. To separate indigenous humans from their land is to shred that instinct. Pull a piece of that gum from the whole and the entire system shakes. It’s the same with the Mapuche in Chile or the Western Apache. It’s what Zapatista rebels fight for, it’s what our next generations, our Violet Cocos, are being sent to prison for. It’s a sense of neverendingness, of never-not-vibrating energy, that is woven through the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

Here walks a human, beside the fecund waters of the tea tree lake, past the fallen trees and the scythe tracks of a nearby snake. Here moves a community of humans, trekking across a vast and flawed nation.

Always moving forwards, together. Because, if the self becomes like a desert to survive the desert, does the self become like a prison to survive a prison?

Where I live, in Byron Bay, cleaners charge up to $70 an hour. My cleaner has just raised her rate to $50 an hour and about $60 seems quite normal.

To put this in context, a friend has just been offered a role in comms and research, hourly wage $40. Childcarers, $22 an hour.

I say this not to whinge – although my first instinct is to want to rail against it: look at how little childcarers are paid! And what about nurses! And teachers! – but I’m more chuffed for cleaners than I am slightly broken by how much I pay to dodge scrubbing my children’s grubby dirt ring from the bath.

It feels like a mostly unpleasant job is being recognised for what it is – hard and unsavoury work, very often done by women who are loaded with barriers to other career paths. Being a cleaner comes with a social stigma, and in a country where domestic help is rare beyond home cleaning, they are housemaids we choose not to label that way. Anyway, like waiters, whose wages go up and up, cleaners are almost as rare as hen’s teeth in a post-Covid, economically confused holiday town.

So, I report all this in observation but also in reverence for the verisimilitudes of a planet, a society, a culture in flux. For a Byron that, too, is newly attached to its real estate perversion (hence the cleaners) but also tightly tethered to something far deeper, a power that lives beyond the liminal, winding its way through the flows, currents and patterns, around the ebb and dance of nature’s rhymes.

The Bay I know is not the Bay you know. Nor is it the Bay your parents knew or the Bay your children will know. It’s is, like us, forever in motion, shifting like the sandbars that have come to flavour its current surfing fame – or perhaps that’s the fame that came before its celebrity infamy.

As Steve Shearer writes in his perspicacious review of Tricia Shantz’s Neverland, Byron has been many things since sedimentary layers at Broken Head were formed up to 405 million years ago. Mercurial primary produce prices saw a buttery and abattoir come and go and then come again – and whale hunting had its short, bloody and profitable moment in the Byron sun. Magically and improbably, its sand was heavily mined after it was found to contain minerals that the US needed in its space program. Stardust to stardust.

With each iteration of a place and a region – and a world – in neverending movement, the push and pull of celebration and detraction, of loss and love, of boom and bust, will forever shape our lives.

I read, in Clover Stroud’s brilliant book about motherhood, My Wild and Sleepless Nights, that nothing is set in stone, apart from the love she has for her children, which is carved into rock. I feel the same, and I’d add that respect for one another (be you animal, mineral, vegetable or sprite) has to be up there, close to that granite truth, too.

Cleaners will charge what they can now, which will not be what they are able to charge in the future. What can’t be negotiated and must be fought for, is the life force that exists far beyond us and our whims, far beyond all we see and all we judge. That, simply, is not for sale.