Interview with Hellen Cooke

My hope is that an international criminal court will soon prosecute companies and nations that supply the materiel of torture and dispossession, as well as the militaries and nations/companies who use them. 

My father was in the Second World War leaving my mother, for the duration, with three children - one just a newborn baby.

I had an uncle who entered the war very early although he didn't like war. He said to my father 'I will go in so that you don't have to go'. This gives me the sense of why some, at least, of the men went to war. They wanted to win the peace and have a peaceful life.

My first awareness of sexism came when I was four and my brother was born. People congratulated my father on having an heir at last and I wondered 'If this was the heir, then who was I?' It must have made an impression on me because I recall when I was old enough to go to the youth group at my Methodist church we studied the purpose of man. It was to serve God, but the purpose of woman was to serve man. I stood up, said 'No' and walked out, never to go back.

Post-war times included new neighbours and school friends  who were refugees from places such as Estonia and Italy, and Jewish people from all over Europe. I understood only a little of the references to war and dispossession, yet I knew these people were endlessly saddened.

When I went to New Guinea I became aware of racism for the first time. I was living in it! The second time I was in New Guinea (eight years later at Independence and after I was married) I was glad to find out things had altered a great deal. Everybody had begun to mix and to have many more relationships.

Then my husband was killed and we came back to Canberra. I was busy being a mother and bringing up my children when my neighbour took me to hear Bill and Helen Caldicott talking about nuclear issues and showing a film called If You Love This Planet.

Rob and I had been very interested in the environment. He was an amateur ornithologist and was always finding dead birds, insects, or snakes he didn't know and taking them to the museum to be identified. We often had our freezer full of dead creatures, rather than food.

After seeing that film I 'got off the fence', as Helen Caldicott suggested. The result was that I promptly got, well, fired really, from the Physiotherapists Association I had just rejoined. I had suddenly become this activist and the Association thought my passion for the environment was not relevant to what physiotherapists did.

At that time I had also become converted to homeopathy after another neighbour, Anna, took me to a homeopathic seminar. I only attended because of my friendship but it explained a lot of puzzling things I had seen in patients I treated. To me the links between planetary health, social health, peace and therapy seemed clear.

I tried to become involved in the peace movement, the Canberra Program for Peace. I went along to a meeting knowing absolutely nothing about what they were doing. They were in the throes of planning the next big peace march, but as they were speaking in acronyms (everyone in Canberra does) I did not know what they were talking about.

I think the only thing that kept me going was the equality (the gender equality, the sexual equality) shown in those meetings. I was amazed and delighted. Women were speaking out - they were not being put down by men!  I had never seen this in action before. I was so delighted I was willing to sit through some very tedious meetings, where they may as well have been speaking in Chinese, for all I understood. I was a bit of a puzzle to these people. I was still very much grieved at the loss of my husband and I didn't want to explain myself to anybody so I would just creep into these meetings and sit down. For a long while they thought I was a spy.

Once I started reading through the literature and I realised all the leaders in the world were planning to kill me and my children, I found myself going into a rapid depression. I then fully understood what Helen Caldicott had been talking about with psychic numbing - it was just too hard. I would have turned away at this point, had it not been for the homeopathy. The theory of homeopathy is that when you are planning, or agreeable, to killing some other person - to wantonly destroying life - you are at your sickest, even if you look hale and hearty.

I found evil very difficult to cope with (perhaps because of my early reaction against sexist religion) but I could cope with sickness. I could see that maybe people would get well, maybe they would die, but the fact that they were sick and not evil made a great difference to my ability to cope with being a peace activist. I then began to make friends with an amazing group of people, who were doing extraordinary things. They led me to doing things I had never thought of doing. They invited me to help with the peace paper. I said 'yes' and after one issue I was editor.

I did that for several years and I learned things like how to plan actions, how to liaise with the police, how to use marshals. I didn't realize how special this conflict resolution training was, in fact I didn't even realize it was training. This was just the way everybody acted, and this was what I copied over the years of the peace marches.

After the United Nations International Year of Peace all sorts of grants were taken away. People wandered away and took up other issues and tasks. It was as if they said 'We have done that, now we will do this'. I was still an acolyte, or student, of being an activist and I was puzzled. I ended up being in the hot seat where, I felt, I had no right to be. And I still had trouble with acronyms.

Looking back at the Canberra Program for Peace I realize what wonderful people they were - extraordinary people.

There was a small amount of money available from the Government for the International Year of Peace and the Non- Government Organisations came together to decide how to use it. At these meetings I found out that people who come together for peace are not necessarily peaceful. In fact, some young men wanted to take the word peace out of the International Year for Peace. We weathered a few meetings by sticking to the agenda and these young men got bored with us and left.

But then the head of the Returned Soldiers' League came in. He, again, seemed hell-bent on removing the word peace. A friend of mine, an ex-headmistress, had enough of this - she spoke up and said 'Will you be quiet?'  He was.

Stella Cornelius - a member of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) - came in. She was an absolutely unflappable woman. The RSL man said she must not criticise the men involved in the war games we were having at that time. He called these men 'the brave boys who would fight the wars'.

She just said, 'Yes, I really want to help the brave boys. I don't believe their lives should be risked wantonly, so I propose that before we have war games we should have peace games - serious peace games'. She won me over. I still correspond with her. So, Helen Caldicott and Stella Cornelius became two heroines of mine.

In those days I was actually helping to lead the peace movement, but in my own mind I was just pursuing it - except occasionally I would have very clear ideas. One time was when I went along for the first time to lobby a parliamentarian. I told the others I was just coming to observe and I wouldn't say anything. But the politician singled me out after the introductions. He said, 'Oh, your name is spelt with an e is it? You were born on the wrong side of the blanket' (a bastard).

That set me up! I sat up very straight after that.

He started talking about about how they were not interested in the peace movement any more. How, as far as they were concerned, if we were in the middle of the road, they would run us over.  I found myself on my feet. I said, 'We are the people who elected you. How dare you denigrate our efforts'. I raved on for quite some time - to the astonishment of my friends who I had told that I couldn't even say a word.

The Senator was conciliatory. He was humble. He bowed low every time he spoke to us. He was sweet and kind and was never rude again. But he lost any respect I might have had for him. I never, after that, felt humble before a politician. I thought that if this is any example of them, I needn't worry about how I express myself. It was a lesson on how to become an activist on sheer indignation.

I have met Prime Ministers and all sorts of people, but they are very constrained. It seems as a lobbyist that if you are not rich and if you don't wine and dine them, you don't matter. They can be rude - extremely rude. I had one who just spread his legs in front of me. I was the only woman there and without actually unzipping his fly, he exposed his crotch and just sat there.

One part of my brain said that as he was looking at me, it was up to me to ignore this male power show and concentrate on getting across the issue we were there for - land rights. On the other hand, as a mother, I wanted to reach over and thump him on the knee and say, 'Would you stop that?'  When we talked to our associates from the other delegations we found that several of the women had experiences of being put down in one way or another. It was clearly the intention of some politicians to belittle the women.

Lobbying is an interesting experience. With the enormous money the paid lobbyists have and the enormous respect given to them by the politicians and influential bureaucrats, it seems almost useless to do it, but I think it is worthwhile. It is not rewarding but it has to be done.

There were great peace marches in Canberra. We dealt with any disturbances ourselves because, as they were peace marches, they had to be peaceful. The march might be against the law, but it was always peaceful. This seems to have been forgotten in later years, when we had people who would nip off and do actions by themselves to grab media attention, but that would negate the message the main body of the protest wanted to communicate. This was very much in evidence when the unionists crashed through the doors of Parliament House during the 1989 protest. I was there that day, listening to all the talking and part of the enormous number of people who had come to protest.

All of a sudden these people burst through the door of Parliament House. The police were brutal in repressing them. They felt they had the right to go in and grab people and mistreat them - and they did. After this I was sick. I had a strange illness for two years. I thought I was alone in my suffering, but after talking about it with other people who had been in the protest I realised that everyone had illness. It seemed to me that it was some type of psychic malaise from the time of the protest when we had all felt quite disempowered.

We felt we had made good protests but against the world arms trade we knew we had managed to do nothing - so we punished ourselves for it. Anyway, I found myself a good homeopathist and came out of that and I was part of the 1991 protest. This was even bigger, in the main peaceful, wonderfully diverse and varied.

Around about the mid-eighties I became involved with WILPF. Again, I volunteered to help with the newsletter and found myself quite rapidly becoming editor. I did that until the International Congress in Sydney.

One of the things about being involved in the international movement, particularly the women's peace movement, is that there is the opportunity to travel to different places and have different experiences. In Sydney there were many more aboriginal, Maori and Islander people. They took over workshops and led them off in completely different directions, so I got a completely different view of what peace is about. From then I found myself working more and more for WILPF. The objectives were so broad, it didn't really matter what took my interest, and I could work for that and be active in that. I was not constrained.

For the 1991 protests people had come together from all over Australia and from all walks of life. I persuaded WILPF to act outside the AIDEX protest itself because there were enough people there. I thought we should be in the Civic Centre, where we would catch the eye of people who were just passing through. We took bamboo poles and slung them across our shoulders like Chinese coolie women. There were four different placards in large letters on each pole. The letters had been coloured in by some of our children. They were simple phrases that would stay in people's minds such as:

ARMS MAKES US POORER NOT SAFER

We intended that people would have to come to some conclusions as they puzzled out the meaning. We stood in the Civic Centre during the main peak hours, enduring the down drafts from the high buildings. In the main we had a very good response. It was hard work and sometimes we suffered abuse, but we were winning people over - at least to thinking about it.

We particularly got a wonderful response from busloads of children who were going to and from school. They would peer out, read the slogans, open the windows and cheer and thumbs-up to us. It was very heartening to have this response from primary and secondary age children.

After AIDEX 1991, as after AIDEX 1989, people in Canberra seemed to be in a state of shock. Even people who had not been involved in the protest at all. Almost everybody who lived in Canberra knew somebody, or was related to somebody who had been in the protest, it was so widespread and well attended. I think this was so throughout much of Australia, certainly in the capital cities.

We were in a peace network at that stage and we decided we should try to do a type of reconciliation action. We would ask people to come and tell their stories and we would just listen and record them. This would involve us in a lot of planning, but we had a precedent, before the International Year of Peace, when people like Dorothy Green (the great peace activist and poet) had been involved in touring around Australia, listening to people's stories about peace.

We got a really good idea of what the protest had been about for people across Australia when Nancy Shelley, who was the main protagonist here, went across Australia to Sydney, Adelaide and Newcastle. Here, we tucked ourselves under the Ecumenical Council in the ACT, which made us quite respectable. In fact, it made us quite invulnerable when we decided we would seek every possible experience. We were able to front up to Sir William Keyes, the head of the Australian Defence Forces, and the Chief of Police (he forbade any police to talk to us but he talked to us himself. A couple of police did talk to us, though).

We spoke to the arms traders, when we could, and we spoke to politicians, unionists, and of course, to the activists who were there. We also spoke to people who had been employed on the arms trade stalls - soldiers and people who had a job for the first time - who were quite traumatised (not by the terrible weapons being sold, but by the protesters). Nancy Shelley did the write-up from all the transcripts of interviews. I did the research to place the events in context, I designed the cover and named the book Piecing It Together.

I have re-discovered the mid-1800's Australia Felix and the international hopes for ending war, social injustice and inequities, and I have formed an e-mail group of WILPF to restore to mind the history that was covered up by the ruins of noble war.

Lately I have been participating in non-violent direct action, non-violence training, legal information and then the action against Australian Defence Industries (ADI) at Benalla. ADI makes 'Product and Components' which are mainly sold to the government, i.e. we, the people. Somehow, someway, a proportion of this product became available for the use of the Israeli Army in their dispossessing work in Palestine, and the Indonesian Army also find Australian made 'Product and Components' useful for oppressing and raping the land and peoples of Aceh, West Papua and the islands between.

Just this morning Radio National had a news brief that the UN Human Rights Commission had served notice on Caterpillar (the USA  firm that makes and supplies bulldozers to Israel to raze olive groves, houses and the occasional peace activist),  that it may be party to an international crime.

It will be a great day when the weapon makers, including the product and component makers, are called to account.

My hope is that an international criminal court will soon prosecute companies and nations that supply the materiel of torture and dispossession, as well as the militaries and nations/companies who use them.

In the tradition of Joyce Steven's BECAUSE ...

Hellen Cooke, for Women's International League for Peace & Freedom, in response to UN High Commissioner Mary Robinson’s

I CALL YOU TO CONSCIENCE.