Women of a Certain Age

by Jodie Moffat

  Will this raised consciousness and action create any long-term justice and economic and political change for First Peoples of Australia? We shall see. I remember during the 1980s, when I was a member of the National Aboriginal Education Committee that advised Senator Susan Ryan, we had called for a makarrata, or treaty. Now, more than thirty years later, we are still calling for a treaty to negotiate our rights as First Peoples. It takes the concerted efforts of many across time to achieve the final outcomes of equality, fairness and justice for all. And I am one of the many.

  On reflecting about my life’s journey, I have come to believe that for Australians to truly move forward in social justice, reconciliation and recognition we need a Truth Commission to be established that lays bare the raw truth about Australia’s past treatment of its First Peoples – one that can establish both mechanisms and a change of attitude to redress the devastating effects of displacement and exclusion of First Peoples. Only then will we all benefit as twenty-first century Australians, and only then will the First Peoples experience basic human rights taken for granted by so many others. One of my last wishes for my five children and five grandsons is that they will live in a future Australia where they can enjoy the benefits of being an Australian, free from racism, harassment and brutality, and truly experience what other Australians call, ‘A Fair Go’.

  My mixed heritage identity has made me both a survivor and a thriver. I have loved passionately, lived purposefully and have strived to be respectful and generous towards all peoples. I have valued and cherished my friends and families who have valued me, choosing to retreat to my safe spaces when I have faced too much negativity from those around me. As I have grown older and expanded my interests, knowledge and skills, I have achieved many successes through my fabric artworks featuring traditional symbols, the publication of children books and illustrations, academic pursuits and recently the development of an Australian cuisine through bush tucker and native-plant remedies. I am personally driven by my families’ values and our sustaining ideals of land, culture, identity and respect for our language, our knowledge and our ngarrangu nilangany, our Aboriginal knowledge and worldview. This knowledge, its concepts and people’s relationships between themselves, animals, plants and environments form the ngarrangu nilangany, creating what the anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose has called a ‘sacred geography’ within a ‘nourishing terrain’. My life experiences have shown me that it is vital that Australia’s First Peoples’ voices are heard – to educate Australians about living sustainably within threatened environments, and also to ensure justice and fairness is achieved in Australian society in all its diversity.

  Notes

  1 D.B. Rose, ‘Sacred geography’, Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal views of landscape and wilderness. Canberra: Australian Heritage Commission, 1996.

  Seeking singular single older women — Susan Laura Sullivan

  I am still sometimes asked if I’m married. It’s a question asked and answered with some trepidation. As I age, it’s taken for granted that I am or have been, and queries abate. Questions about my supposed husband or partner occur on occasion. Setting people right about not having a partner can be uncomfortable. The stigma of being female, older and unmarried colours the interchange, even if I’m not so worried about the situation. There’s no easy fix to breaking the conventions of polite conversation.

  I live in Japan. When I arrived in the early 90s, I thought I’d returned to 1950s Australia. My opinion of that era was informed by my mother’s words and my perception of the time. Taxi drivers often asked my age and my marital status. Japanese is a hierarchical language and certain phrases are used with particular ages and social positions. The answers to these questions could be used to determine the level of politeness needed to address me.

  ‘Twenty-three,’ I’d tell them. ‘Not married.’

  ‘Mada wakai,’ was the response. ‘You’re still young.’

  By the age of twenty-five, though, my youth was null and void. I can’t recall the reaction taxi drivers had to my nuptial status; they probably changed the subject. A lot is different now, but in the 90s in Japan, the concept of ‘Christmas Cake’ was something women under thirty were well aware of. Christmas Eve is an important day for singles taking a potential loved one on a date. Christmas Cake – a fruit, cream and sponge concoction – is part of the equation. The cake stales quickly and can’t be sold for optimum value beyond December twenty-five. Women not married by twenty-five were deemed day-old Christmas Cake, ‘left on the shelf’. A Japanese businessman I taught in the 90s said he paid his female staff less because he expected them to resign once they reached their mid-twenties.

  Australia’s public service had similar official policies until 1966.1 In the 1950s, my mother joined the Kalamunda telephone exchange at age fifteen. By twenty-one, she was a supervisor in Geraldton. After thirteen years of service, she left her job as required by the policies of the time when she married. A woman’s choices were limited by her married state, and the married state was the standard at the time. If women had to resign after they wed, and were expected to stay home and raise kids, then this was their public face – not public at all.

  The Christmas Cake notion is no longer as prevalent in Japan, though many pregnant women still leave work due to company and cultural pressure. The average age for marriage among the population now is approximately thirty for women, and thirty-one for men.2 One in seven Japanese women are still single by the time they are fifty, not including those divorced and widowed.3 De facto relationships, in the Australian sense, aren’t common. Being independent can be explored, but often at the expense of relationships or kids.

  Among the Japanese and Western women I know here, some have deliberately chosen careers over having children. Others chose not to have relationships and, in a conservative society like Japan, that generally entails no kids. It’s commonly accepted that relationships lead to marriage, and children follow. Child rearing is mostly undertaken by women.

  Single women who are seeking relationships are often expected to put in so much time at work, in part due to perceived lack of family commitments, that their chances of meeting someone narrow significantly. Women go against the grain by choosing a career, and for many women it also means remaining single.

  Wherever I have lived, positive role models for those of us not married have been hard to come by, particularly as I’ve aged. If you fall outside of the coupled norms, it’s best to keep your own counsel to maintain confidence. Betsy Israel’s work, Bachelor Girl: The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century, outlines US government and media attitudes of the late 1800s, critical of women who didn’t end up in heteronormative relationships, including choosing to be single. The media maintained this attitude throughout the next century, using scare tactics such as painting a lonely and bitter old age for the single woman.4

  As I was growing up, I thought there were only two relationship statuses: married and not married. My great-aunt Mag moved in with my grandparents and uncle in their Perth home after the last of her goldfields siblings had passed away. Never married, she was the stereotypical doting spinster aunt in my mother’s childhood and my own. Despite this, I viewed Mag’s dependence as weak. Her brother-in-law, my grandfather, seemed to regard her with annoyance.

  I felt pity for her, in the way a ten-year-old trying to be whatever normal is. I knew little of Mag’s achievements, which included teaching, helping migrants on the goldfields with English, supporting the ALP, and looking after my mother’s extended and immediate family. My grandmother, on the other hand, never worked outside the home, first having to look after her sick mother, and then taking care of her own children once she married. But that was a sign of the times. Mum always felt if more options had been available for women in terms of schooling, working, and raising families, Nan would have taken them.

  I was told the reason for Mag remaining single was that she fell for a Protestant boy. Religious intolerance within our
Catholic family prevented her from marrying him. I understood this to mean that not being with someone – either through tragedy or preference – meant you were lacking something. I never entertained an alternative view. Mag, however, may have thought there were advantages to being independent at a time when being married meant losing your job and bearing children. The fact that dying in childbirth was not uncommon might have been deterrent enough.

  Mag was born near the turn of the century. Betsy Israel writes that in the US from 1870 to 1914, the marriage rate among women with an education drastically decreased as life paths beyond being a wife and mother opened up.5 Some of these opportunities no doubt existed in Australia, even though Constance Stone, the first female doctor registered in this country, was barred as a woman from learning medicine at the University of Melbourne, and had to gain her qualifications in North America in the 1880s.6

  I have had advantages in terms of career and women’s rights that my female ancestors did not. I can work and enter serious relationships, but in my thirties it seemed unlikely I was going to. I hadn’t had much luck with meeting someone to that point and, as such, I actively sought older single role models. There had to be more to life without a partner than loneliness and dependence, or being defined by my relation to another. Mag was a possible role model, but I’d only met her as an elderly woman, and my impressions were shaped by the stories of my grandmother and mother.

  Finding successful older female singles wasn’t easy. The internet wasn’t as streamlined as it is now. Relevant search terms led me to online dating sites, the opposite of what I needed. Many friends spoke of keeping someone in reserve to marry – by mutual agreement – if they hadn’t found a partner by thirty. They were joking, but the pressure to not be alone was real.

  Australia, New Zealand, the US and Japan are relatively accepting places for a single woman to live. I’ve resided in them all. But the pressure to marry is fairly universal, and the pressure to be with someone is also perhaps biological. There is nothing wrong with being single, but social conditioning is a tough thing to recognise and face, both internally and externally.

  An adult Korean student of mine in New Zealand spoke of her family, and how they made her feel she had failed by being single. I told her, more bravely than I felt, that we needed to be our own role models if we couldn’t find them in the public domain or in the words of strangers, acquaintances or relatives. Korean children look forward to gifts of money every New Year. An unmarried woman is considered a child and my student still received cash from her relations on January first. She could have exploited the situation, but mostly felt embarrassed. She wrote to me when she returned home to say she’d found someone, and I was happy for her.

  Omani attitudes were not that far removed from Korean. I went to the Sultanate in my late thirties, the age my mother had her fourth and last child. When taxi drivers asked if I was married, I’d say I was, and they immediately showed me photos of their family. I wore my grandmother’s wedding ring. If I said I was single, suddenly I was fair game. Being without a male companion in a society steeped in machismo, I attracted attention. My behaviour was outside the norm. As such, I was a viable target. Harassment was justifiable even if it was considered haram, not in keeping with Islamic tenets.

  When I visited the UAE, a Filipina taxi driver with a degree in business drove me to the airport. She had been hired to drive female customers. She had adult children back home and said there was still time for me to have kids, but I should hurry, given my age. She was a lovely woman and meant well, but I understood that my life choices so far were lacking in her eyes, as well as in the eyes of many other taxi drivers, those bellwethers of a nation.

  An Iraqi professor I worked with invited me to her home. Houses in Oman were cheap in terms of my Western concepts and salary. It was a massive place on the beachfront, built to include a few families, the floors made of tile and marble. Sand from the seashore and surrounding desert crept into and over all surfaces. As a divorced woman in Oman, the professor had limited social outlets, and her own role models would have been scarce.

  Being married was like turning the pages of the same book, she told me – no longer interesting. She had initiated the separation. At work, I heard constant judgement against her from the male professors who were fluent in English. They sat, scratched and bickered like old chooks. The female professors were just as critical, but there were fewer of them.

  Oman opened up in the 1970s. At the time it had only three primary schools, so catching up in terms of education was crucial to the development of the nation. Some of my students’ mothers couldn’t read. Many women signed their names with an X. I worked with a smattering of Omani instructors, but the majority were from the surrounding countries. Not all were male, but most were.

  I taught English to another female professor. She was from Syria. Druze, the other instructors whispered with the kind of aversion the Catholics of my great-aunt’s youth held for Protestants. Her husband was studying in Spain.

  In a society with very few safety nets for women on their own, these two Iraqi and Syrian professors were basically single mothers, though one had a Filipina live-in maid. The male professors came to Oman with their families, or alone. Some had a family in either place. Marriage and career with support, or without the day-to-day responsibilities of childcare, was an option for the men. Not so for these two women whose situations were mostly viewed as unsound, even while the establishment employed them for their needed skills in mathematics and science.

  I admired them. Their English was better than that of many of my international students in New Zealand or Australia, yet their chances of gaining visas to better their lives elsewhere were restricted. In a place where the opportunities to meet someone were slim, and the pressure to be with someone was strong, I can imagine they’d fought to own their identities much longer and harder than I had. To even walk on the beach with someone of the opposite sex who was not family resulted in a chorus of speculation. When some interest was shown between one of these professors and another teacher, the consensus was that she should be with someone, but it was still ridiculous that she was seeking someone to be with, especially at her age – and the actions of both instructors were haram anyway. Things just weren’t done that way.

  Before I went to Oman, I learnt the expression Masha’Allah: it is God’s will. It was a good response to people asking why I wasn’t with someone. Or so I thought. Students, teachers and the man or woman on the street all asked why I wasn’t married and didn’t have kids. Kids often seemed more important than being wed. God’s will didn’t cut it. There was still time. I should. I could. People prayed my health and well-being would grant me progeny.

  Paradoxically, while I tried to find ways to be successfully single, a few relationships crept up on me. I hadn’t gone looking for them. This was the first decade of the millennium and I lost a number of years due to them. In fact, I’d gone to New Zealand to start afresh from a failed relationship. From 2012 onwards, I re-emerged unattached and slowly regained the self-knowledge and confidence I find I lose when I am with someone. I grew more content with being alone.

  Unlike my mother and many women before her, I freely gave up a lucrative job and the chance of tenure during those unfocused years. I also lost a contract. The appeal of being with someone trumped common sense and making my own way. At one stage, I was in the dangerous position of not having a guaranteed income when I moved to the US for a man. The choice to do so was my own.

  My partner was generous, though elements of the relationship were manipulative. Business ventures we’d discussed before I went over didn’t eventuate, and my visa didn’t allow me to work. If the relationship had been stable, employment opportunities might have arisen once visa issues were sorted. But it never was, and they never were.

  It was disconcerting to lose that control over my life. I was in my early forties and I’d rarely relied on anyone else for my day-to-day survival. Capital entails independence
. My American partner was well-off and had retired early, in part because of his own efforts, but mostly due to the achievements of his ex-wife. I extracted myself from a vulnerable situation, and returned to Japan.

  He visited me, and we shared expenses as we travelled. I was relieved to contribute financially again, even if it wasn’t on an equal footing. I’d never make nor save what he and his ex-wife had. Long-distance relationships rarely last the distance though, and we were no exception.

  I still live in Japan, and work alongside three other single women, and two married men. One woman is in her late thirties, and the others are in their forties. I’m fast approaching fifty. One professor gained her PhD in the States. The pay-off for doing what she loves was to look after her mother – much as my grandmother did – on her return to Japan. She doesn’t seem to resent this. Her brothers are married with kids.

  There are many things I might not have seen if I were permanently with someone: the Southern Alps, Okinawan seas, camels sauntering along desert roads. By the same token, there are places I haven’t visited, and times I didn’t go out, due to lack of companionship. A significant other doesn’t guarantee company, though. My American ex liked to sleep late and wasn’t keen on hiking, or meandering from one place to the next. Setting my timetable to another’s meant seeing a fraction of what I wanted, or striking out as if I were single and reconciling myself to crossing paths with him a few hours a day. Maybe that is what relationships are, but it wasn’t enough for me.