Newtown, 1989
Nineteen eighty-nine. Living in a dilapidated two-bedroom terrace in Newtown not far from the old brickworks. Fleas in the carpets, redbacks in the outside dunny, windows only partly in their frames, the sashes wrecked. I shared the place with a printmaker artist; I remember being struck by her strong hands, brown and muscular, and her joyous approach to living.
This was the year I began fulltime employment. As a volunteer, I had undertaken research for a national environmental group, and now was working as one of their campaigners. An actual job, paying a fortnightly income. Modest as the wages were, after two years of frugality, including sharing rooms so we could make the rent, this was luxury. I had money to spend.
What things were bought with this newfound affluence? Hippy consumerism, of the kind involving essential oils, incense sticks, and art works at local galleries.
Then there were clothes. More precisely, I bought two dresses. Both can be said, with decades of hindsight, to have been ghastly. Drop waist and pleats in one; the other more casual, gathered at the hip, but with yards of fabric in it nonetheless. A lot of colour on a lot of cotton. They had intensely busy designs; one was plastered with blocky geometric patterns in many hues of ochre, mauve, brick red and more. The other was finer, swirling forest green, dark purple and blue.
I wore them at home. Sitting once or twice in the dilapidated back garden, seeing the sunshine on my feet. Cooking vegetarian curry in the kitchen that had no hot water tap.
But, once, I did not wear them at home. On a warm morning, I put on the purple, blue and green dress, stepped out into the street, and strode toward the train station. There, I commuted into the heart of Sydney’s business district, walked down Liverpool Street, and sat at my desk and did my job all day. In a dress.
We may have been greenies, and one or two of us were known to arrive at work in bare feet. But overwhelmingly we were young professional people in casual clothes, driven by a strong sense of mission, but not, to my knowledge, a desire to subvert the dominant gender paradigm. Still, no-one said anything, as I tapped away on the computer, or got a cup of instant coffee in the windowless back room in which we held staff meetings. No-one said “what are you doing, you idiot!” but also, sadly, not “what a lovely outfit!”
It wasn’t as though I was confidently stylish. These colleagues were friends, but i was still anxious that day. It might have been logical to be nervous that I might be subject to gender-phobic violence; to have agonised over transgressing against my assigned sex role. But really, I just was not sure it looked that good. My body was skinny and straight, lacking utterly the curves anticipated by the dressmaker. I was not hirsute, except on my legs, and felt that the thick hair contradicted the feminine beauty of flowing fabric. These were the things I fretted over; while structural gender questions apparently passed me by.
A friend visited for dinner; a warm night, the cockroaches and fleas temporarily fumigated into submission. Me sitting in my dress, she in hers. Talking about our short lives, hers the more interesting by far: someone who had been to South America rather than just reading about it. In moments like that, there were other questions that came to mind - of much the kind that might be expected of a person on a date (even though we were not, technically, on a date). I loved wearing these clothes, but my mind did wonder: did the dress drain romantic possibility from the evening, or was there never any in the first place? I do not know.
