There's music, and there's a woman in a red dress, dancing on the yellow beach this evening. She's joined by a man in a white shirt. They dance to the strands coming from a speaker they've stood upon a stone. I can see them from my veranda, through the paper bark trees.
This week I drove to the city to work and also to attend the March for Justice. These protests happened around the country and the Albany march was attended by plenty of women, men and children.
We were asked to wear black (something I'd neglected to let my mum know, who turned up in full pink regalia). As I neared the railway line on my way to the rally, an old bloke fell in alongside me. 'Well, you're wearing black and holding a sign,' he said. A train chundled by and so we stopped to talk. 'I think I'll follow you.'
'Are you going to the rally as well?' I asked him and he nodded.
As we walked across the green lawn marked with so many pram tracks, he said, 'My wife is speaking today ... and here she is!'
Out of all the English and Indigenous Studies unit's I'm tutoring, this week we were doing the depiction of the 'other' in colonial discourse, plus Enlightenment period thinking, Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication for the Rights of Woman and some work by Mary Robinson, among others. It seemed so fitting. We are still asking for individual freedom, that our senior law makers be impeccable in their behaviour past and present, and that the rights of man continue on to the rights of women.
I guess this is why, when I returned home from a long drive, I was so pleased to see a woman in a red dress dancing on the yellow beach on the edge of the inlet.
