Still defending the '50s
By Joy McEntee
In Swansea, a small east-coast town near Hobart, the '60s and '70s might never have happened. For the past two years, Denise Power has been fighting the local Glamorgan Returned Services League Club over admission to the members' bar.
After a legal battle and a boycott of their business by local RSLers, Power and her fiance Derek Wills were eventually forced to move to Hobart.
To those who ask why a woman would want to be in an RSL bar, Power replies that it is the de facto decision-making forum in the town.
In early January there was a breakthrough in the case when the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission mediated a truce: the RSL was to allow women into the bar, Power was to be allowed to apply for associate membership and the club was to redraft its discriminatory constitution.
But on January 31, four women, including Power and myself, were asked to leave the bar even though we had been properly invited by an associate member. Our group had been in the room for less than a minute and was sober and well dressed: no thongs, singlets or large expanses of naked flesh, not even any feminist slogans, placards or abuse of other patrons.
In response to polite questions as to why we couldn't stay, we were told we would be removed by the police if necessary. "That's been arranged", the local RSL president said.
After a peaceful drink and several offers by other associate members to sign us in, the local policeman arrived and the old constitution was produced to justify the eviction: no sign of the new one ordered by the Human Rights Commission.
To those who would support the right of clubs to select their participants on the grounds of common interest, it might be of interest that Denise Power is a war historian and that the women ejected from the RSL club that night included an army reservist and two children of returned servicemen.
The power to order the group out of the bar is based on a liquor licensing provision in the club's constitution, which is intended to cover the violent and the intoxicated.
Nonetheless, the group left with the policeman, who appeared embarrassed about the whole affair. Who can blame him? I'd be embarrassed too. In this part of Australia, in 1992, women are still being removed from places they won the right to enter in the 1970s. I wonder where Swansea's war widows go to drown their sorrows.