Embroidery, Protest and Identity at the Pine Gap Women's Peace Camp

Since the late nineteenth century, women have occasionally used needlework to make feminist political statements, disrupting the presumed relationship between textiles, virtue, domesticity and femininity. Handmade banners featuring peace and women’s symbols were central to the performance of protest at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. Founded in 1981 in Berkshire (England), the camp was a statement against Cold War militarisation, masculinised violence and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In November 1983, inspired by and in solidarity with Greenham Common, around 800 women from across Australia staged a two-week protest in the desert. They camped outside the U.S military installation at Pine Gap near Alice Springs in Central Australia. At Pine Gap, women coming to protest had to explicitly negotiate the legacies of colonialism and the British empire. The months leading up to the camp involved tense, difficult conversations between Aboriginal and white women, between east-coast and central Australian Aboriginal women, and between feminist, anti-nuclear, land rights and peace groups. At the camp itself, however, women came together and momentarily produced a collective identity in which they protested ‘as women’ against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. This paper analyses the form, iconography, use and memory of handmade (and implicitly anti-capitalist) banners at the Pine Gap Women’s Peace Camp. I argue that the design of banners and the process of making and using them in the performance of protest was central to the fleeting creation of ‘women’ as a shared ideational category, in defiance of conflicting interests, identities and agendas.