Sites of feminist activism: Remembering Pine Gap

Abstract

In 2009, the Jessie Street National Women’s Library curated an exhibition in Sydney, Remembering Pine Gap, using their extensive collection of materials relating to the Pine Gap women’s peace camp held in central Australia in 1983. Arguably, one of the most iconic events of the Australian women’s peace movement held at the height of Cold War politics, the event accrues significance through being the subject of an exhibition. As well, the exhibition is one of the few that takes a feminist event as its sole focus, and so reminds us of the material connection between the politics and aesthetics of feminist space and time. This article investigates what this might mean as a form for remembering feminist activism, and as an activist form. Remembering Pine Gap is therefore critically situated in relation to other feminist and social protest exhibitions, and is then addressed as an activist form through its feminist aesthetics. In doing so, the paper seeks to extend the ways in which activist spaces and forms can be remembered as physical and material sites as well as intellectual cultural heritage.