PEACEWORK: I am a woman for peace
Special Project at Sydney Trades Hall for International Women’s Day, 2025.
Co-curated by The Cross Art Projects & Sydney Trades Hall
Artists: Alison Alder, Fitri D.K., Guerrilla Girls, Fiona MacDonald and Wendy Murray
Archive: Sydney Trades Hall Collection ‑ Australian Peace Movement, Future Feminist Archive, Union of Australian Women. Artists from the archive: Deborah Kelly, Marie McMahon, Toni Robertson, Ralf Sawyer and Lorraine Schneider. Dove of Peace by Picasso, 1949.
Conversation: Dr Catriona Moore, art historian, with Neale Towart, Trades Hall Librarian and historian and artists Alison Alder and Fiona MacDonald.
At Sydney Trades Hall, Wednesday 26 March at 1pm.
Courtesy of the artist and The National Portrait Gallery (ACT).
PEACEWORK: ‘I am a woman for peace’
The exhibition Peacework: I am a woman for peace pulls the red thread of intersectional, inter-generational organising to pattern the charged public space of Sydney Trades Hall atrium with lessons for our politically polarised times. Peaceworks conjures two sets of work side-by-side for us to consider: campaign materials made through the Cold War by members of the Union of Australian Women and site-specific works by contemporary feminist artists.
The Trades Hall archive is best known for conserving the giant “banners of pride” carried as markers of labour unity and respectability at May Day parades, and now a favourite of History Week and Open Sydney tours. This exhibition draws attention to one of Trades Hall’s lesser-known collections: that of the Union of Australian Women (UAW). In mid-1950 in the dark chill of the Cold War the newly formed Union of Australian Women linked global peace with everyday tussles against racial, religious and gender chauvinism. The cry was “peace, bread and freedom”.
The UAW collection is vastly different to the handsomely embroidered and painted allegories on union banners. The women painted their own posters, sewed peace flags and bannerettes, aprons and kerchiefs from the blue and yellow cotton used for school uniforms. A common motif was embroidered and appliqued versions of Picasso’s iconic 1949 Dove of Peace made for the World Peace Conference in Paris. The dove’s flight was quickly grounded when the optimism of post-Second World War reconstruction faded, but the dove’s formal simplicity had a powerful aesthetic impact.
The UAW was one of a galaxy of associations that emerged from the great struggle for women’s suffrage, addressing the gendered shortcomings of both major political parties and the union movement. [1] Members were drawn from unions (teachers, retail and clerical workers), women’s auxiliaries (miners, wharfies and seafarers, and building workers used to hard times during disputes and lock-outs), along with home-makers from all walks of life. UAW campaign issues are familiar today: affordable housing, cheaper prices, childcare, access to education, equal wages, civil rights, and international peace and justice. Pearl Gibbs was a stalwart of both the Aboriginal Australian Fellowship and the UAW. “I am not a citizen of Australia, although I had two sons in the war,” she explained when she joined the UAW and helped to guide their campaigns for equal rights for Aboriginal people. [2]
The UAW occupied a room in Trades Hall and worked alongside smaller unions and organisations like Amnesty International, the Bicycle Institute, and a group of conceptual artists (Ian Burn, Ian Milliss with Ruth Waller and others) who turned their skills to creative alliances at Union Media Services. Like the UMS artists, those now exhibiting in Peacework view Trades Hall and its collections as a living left archive; a creative workplace for extending studio and gallery practices. We ask: Can archives of feminists, peaceniks and anti-nuke pacifists agitating creatively ‘from below’ help us reimagine our fractured and war-torn present? How have activists in past times faced up to contempt for international rule of law and human rights by rogue nations? How have activists dealt with repressive legislation? Peaceworks delves deep to counter current warmongering and nuclear posturing, such as AUKUS and Dutton’s propositions for a nuclear future.
An enlarged photograph of a UAW peace demonstration taken in 1965 outside Sydney Town Hall centres the exhibition. Women march behind a family wagon – a sparkling clean Ford Falcon – that bears another photo on its roof: a notorious image from the war in Vietnam, showing two children with Napalm-inflicted burns. This well-known photo from a time when Napalm was cynically called “Golden Rain”, echoes others made familiar through years of Hiroshima Day marches for peace and nuclear disarmament. In this context, it connects past and present, local and global struggles. UAW members were mistresses of organising: pairs of women (often pushing prams), went door to door and shop to shop on Peace Walks, talking with other women about shared concerns and collecting signatures to “ban the bomb”.
Cold War peace campaigns courted media charges of disloyalty to the nation (ASIO spies saw the UAW as a “monstrous regiment of women”). Indeed, their pram-pushing peace walks, ‘kitchen cabinet’ aprons and appliqued peace scarves in local shopping centres were a creative response to the 1958 arrest of four UAW members for carrying ‘Nuclear tests menace children’ signs (attached to ‘menacing’ wooden poles) in downtown Perth.
The boldness of these whistleblowing actions is extraordinary as The United Kingdom conducted 12 major nuclear weapons tests in Australia between 1952 and 1957 under cover of intense secrecy. This operational nous remains relevant today echoed for instance in the ‘watermelon’ motif used today in pro-Palestine anti-war walks and vigils.
The site-specific works by contemporary artists are as portable and non-conforming as the UAW materials and are attentive to feminism’s generational legacies. Alison Alder and Fiona MacDonald portray individual personalities, lives and times to work against the grain of selective public records. For Peacework, both artists draw from larger site-specific works. Alison Alder introduces her portraits as friends and family, as the artist says, for “Everybody’s lives are built by so many influences, and for me, it is writers, artists and activists who have influenced how I think about the world.”
Alder’s prints are from two large installations in Canberra: the portraits of Emma Miller, Louisa Lawson and Pearl Gibbs are from Alder’s twelve-portrait commission for Federal Parliament House, I AM A NEW WOMAN, while her six brilliantly coloured portraits, Some women you may not know (2022-23), help form a billboard of 112 panels currently displayed outside the National Portrait Gallery. From I AM A NEW WOMAN she selected ‘women for peace’, including Bertha McNamara, the ‘mother of the labour movement’ whose 1931 memorial portrait by Lyndon Dadswell is in Trades Hall lobby, and writer Louisa Lawson, publisher of the The Dawn, our first feminist paper and the Aboriginal rights activist Pearl Gibbs. From Some women you may not know there are portraits of the pioneering communist writer K.S. Pritchard, Jessie Street advocate for the Working Women’s Charter, activist Muriel Heagney, feminist artist Mandy Martin (1952-2021) and the fearless writer Kate Jennings (1948-2021).
Fiona MacDonald introduces us to another group of friends in The Dawn Club (2020) a triumph of tea towels suspended across the atrium. These portraits began with research at the Henry Lawson Centre in Gulgong (NSW), a hagiographic archive dedicated to the life and work of Australian nationalist writer Henry Lawson. Here MacDonald came across pamphlets on the emancipation of women, which prompted her to explore the strong women in Henry’s life – all now archival fringe-dwellers, including Lawson’s mother Louisa. MacDonald pegs her counter-portraits on washing lines strung between the interior walls, each subject asserting her own, separate existence from our national bard. “I am not Henry Lawson’s mother”, says Louisa.
The exhibition includes solidarity artworks from the UAW collection: iconic posters, including Marie McMahon’s Pay the Rent (1984 and many editions), Toni Robertson’s Women’s Liberation (1976 and 1978 version), Ralf Sawyer’s Ban the Neutron Bomb (1979) a startling fluro painting, and Lorraine Schneider’s anthem War is not healthy for children and other living things (1967). We see common threads across the decades. Deborah Kelly’s work (from the Future Feminist Archive, 2019) re-prints images of UAW-style women marching for equal pay and equal rights towards the outer galaxy of space, calling ‘Are we there yet?’ A commemorative Kenyan Khanga (Kanga or Leso) cloth made for the Third World Conference on the status of women (Nairobi, 1985) reminds us, ‘No, not yet!’ The textile is centred with an abstracted map of the world and the 1975-1985 UN Decade for Women logo, which integrates the peace dove and woman symbol, and is bordered with a colourful, massed movement of women. Like the UAW aprons and scarves, and MacDonald’s tea towels, the Khanga is made for home, yard and streetwear: the couture of both grass-roots organising and international advocacy.
These archival researches are complemented by the marching anthem prints by Indonesian activist artist Fitri DK, recent ‘public service announcements’ by the US artist collective Guerrilla Girls, and a set of Wendy Murray’s eye-grabbing posters, ready-made for street paste-ups. All artists work the seams of female experience to forge broader political alliances. Feminism re-imagines aesthetic and political avant-gardism in ways that resonate: questioning artistic practice through interdisciplinary inventions, exploring non-traditional art materials, processes and forms of exhibition, and seeking other social spaces beyond the artworld. These experiments continue to energise today’s perceptual, social and artistic horizons. In Australia, as elsewhere where nations are struggling with the slow march backwards to Cold War rhetoric and censorship, the historical importance of decolonial feminism remains one of the larger elephants in the contemporary art and agit-prop room.
Text – Jo Holder and Catriona Moore
Notes
[1] The UAW evolved from the Housewives Association Progressive, which was dissolved fearing proscription by the pending Communist Party Dissolution Act of 1950. The Act became a referendum that was narrowly defeated the following year. The UAW NSW archive was donated by Audrey McDonald.
[2] Barbara Curthoys and Audrey McDonald, More than a hat and glove brigade. The Story of the UAW, Chapter 10, ‘Peace Issues’. Catriona’s mother Deirdre Moore kept a scrapbook of her experiences as a UAW delegate to the 1953 International Women’s Congress for Peace in Copenhagen and spoke many times about the inspiring figures in the global feminist peace she met there.
Wendy Murray, Who has the power?, 2024. Printed at Troppo Workshop, Melbourne. Set of 3 silk-screen prints, each 43 x 28 cm. Edition of 20.
Wendy Murray, Who’s Got the Power?, 2023, screenprinted at Troppo Studio, Melbourne.
Wendy Murray, Who’s Got the Power?, 2023, screenprinted at Troppo Studio, Melbourne.
Union of Australian Women, Installation: Sign for Peace apron. Cotton and applique, 47 x 52 cm
Union of Australian Women, ‘Equality Development Peace/International Women’s Year 1975’, Silk-screen poster, approx 84 x 57 cm.
United Nations, Decade for Women Conference, July 1985, Nairobi Kenya. Kente cloth, printed in Kenya, 104 x 164 cm. Designer unknown.
Fiona MacDonald, The Dawn Club, 2021. Photo: installation at Henry Lawson Centre Gulgong, NSW. Installation at Trades Hall atrium: 8 paper stencil screen printed linen tea towels, each 70 x 50 cm.
Union of Australian Women in the May Day parade protest the war in Vietnam, Sydney Town Hall, George Street, 1965. Photo: Ern McQuillan. Courtesy National Library of Australia.
Union of Australian Women, Hiroshima Day, 6 August 1964. Photo courtesy Trades Hall Collection