Jo , 34, artist and musician.

Just recently I have been thinking about pivotal events in my childhood which would have situated a sense that there were many perspectives and languages for understanding, interpreting and speaking about the world. And I think that one of the events which I draw on was that I went to a primary school with a 'speech and hearing unit', so in the class room, we were taught Australian sign language as well as spoken and written English language. As a result, from a very young age I learned on quite a potent level, that there was more than one way to experience the world and to articulate it. And I learned about prejudice, about how people are included and excluded based on perceived ability and disability.

My parents are from India so from a very young age I had a sense of experiences of racism. I can remember coming home from high school being really surprised that some of the girls at my school who were Italian Australian, were being racist towards some of the (first generation migrant) Vietnamese Australian students. At that stage, I don't think I had fully cognicised how complex racism is. On a simplistic level I had thought that if you experience things like racism directly or in your family herstory, it would invite you not to treat people the same way. I started to realise that something else much more complex was at work and I started to grapple with this philosophically.

When I hit uni I got involved in punk/DIY/indie music and the links between feminism, punk and DIY communities, and activism all synthesized. I was working in student media, coordinating the Student Radio programming at Adelaide University, with a friend. And at that stage I was majoring in Women's Studies at university and really diving into feminist ideas, not just in the readings but also in action, meeting incredible, inspiring women in my tutorials, who were introducing me to possibilities in my own life, womyn who set up rape crisis centres and women's studies departments, who did all this amazing radical queer and lesbian activism in their daily lives.

So in my role as 'Student Radio Director', and particularly in terms of the radio programming we coordinated, I decided that my feminism had to be very active and present. I guess it was utopian in a way, but I totally believed in the potential of it. I believed that change was completely possible and exciting, fundamentally I still do. So anyways I started basic stuff - I wanted to address the imbalance and lack of technical confidence of women presenters on student radio, so focussed on training up womyn in womyn only training sessions, we encouraged a quota system to inspire more female driven and local music content across all shows, we purchased a stack of punkrock/diy vinyl and cds made by womyn to address the then heavy weighting towards male made music in our music library... so we did a lot of 'affirmative action' influenced ideas to shake up the culture of student radio and introduce new possibilities and permutations and address previous regressive imbalances.

At that stage it was really different music context, if you wanted punk, DIY or genuinely independent music, not what 'indie' and a lot of punk is called today, it was through mail order or a few dedicated but obscure music shops. A guy I knew was running Spiral Objective, a seminal punk mail order catalogue in Australia. I bought all the feminist/punk/DIY music I could find from him, so then there was no excuse for not playing female content. Our music programming was so discordant and different from the dominant classical music culture on the radio station we worked at, that we were called "sonic vandals".

I think the notion of self-directed education and taking initiative around learning was influenced by being part of the DIY communities, in order to participate in a committed way to them there's a sense of trust and deep belief in alternative possibilities, in stepping away from institutional or corporate
run systems, so to an extent strategies for self directed education become a part of that stepping away....

Also the context for DIY communities was very different in the early 90s. At that stage zines were relatively new in Australia, but spreading, urban and international communication patterns were different then being largely before the net and mobile phones, big outdoor festivals were only starting
to take form in Australia for young people under 18 to attend, so I would say it was trickier to find out about other alternative communities in Australia and around the world, you had to take more self directed initiative to spot and link up with similar minded people and make new possibilities for communities.

…The US bands SpitBoy had a massive influence on me at the time. To hear an all female punk band expressing rage and fury against oppressive gender and power systems, in such an uncompromising and direct way was so inspiring. I was listening to lots of bands with womyn in them; The Gits, Fur, Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Doughnuts, Sleater Kinney.....bands who were making space for an emotion range in womyn which patriachal culture often trivialises, condemns or stigmatises, and here were these womyn occupying that space, carving it out for themselves, screaming their guts out, being fucking loud! That's the great thing about electric guitars and punk rock, grrls get to be fucking loud on their terms, when so much of a girl's upbringing is about presenting well and being polite and talking mildly and considerately and being compliant and blah blah blah…

…I was part of a crew of womyn who started up Girls with Power Tools (GWPT), a feminist driven music collective which put on regular gigs and made fanzines in Adelaide in response to the longstanding situation of almost exclusively male music communities. Now I am part of a similar collective in Sydney called 'Scooter'.

…I think that you need women only spaces in a patriarchal society so that women can focus on skill sharing amongst womyn, and have a whole lot of important experiences and conversations which uniquely come out of a women only space. My life is not entirely separatist but I use separatist strategies to create the sort communities which I want to be part of, that are genuinely inclusive and empowering for womyn.

…Its such a complex process, how you learn from events, or a series of 'smaller' events that crosshatch a significant influence over time rather than 'pivotal' ones, and how to speak about these links and non links without simplifying them is a dilemma. But I know I went through a massive philosophical shift when I lived and studied in India. My feminist strategies had been primarily influenced by Australian and US based feminism, with definite leanings towards post-colonial critiques of both. I had been involved in these communities which had evolved out of a certain level of privilege, where basic sustenance issues had already been addressed. And then when I went to India I was faced with the very real fact that the kind of activism I did in Australia was largely redundant there. The activist and feminist ground I stood on shifted dramatically (but in a good way!).

… When I went to India and went to a National Women Studies Conference, there was a man from Pakistan giving a lecture and it really shifted my understanding of feminist strategies being locally driven. I recognised that in Australia I would have had total resistance to a man speaking at a Women's studies Conference but I had been living in India long enough to understand and be a little more flexible to this notion, I knew that activism was based on local context and local strategies, which in India is sometimes going to involve women who are in coalitions with men in a struggle for change in basic living conditions. I learned so much about a workable activist strategy, based on local needs and practicalities and not a universalising (usually white) perspective.

… When I came back to Australia from India, I was so affected by the experience, I found it very difficult to return to the formal learning of university... I dropped out and never finished my degree. Sometimes I have regrets as it would have been good to have closure on the degree and I could do postgraduate research etc. But at that time I felt that after all my experiences in India, my learning there did not need to be measured by the formal process of a resultant degree. There are so many people in the world who never go through those systems.