The invisible women of Prehistory
Venexia Editrice, Le Civette – I Saggi 2019
We asked Judy Foster, co-author with Marlene Derlet about the book Invisible Women of Prehistory – which is receiving great attention and was awarded last November in Rome by Country of Women with the “EDITORIAL AWARD for works of particular collective interest” – to tell us something more about his life and education.
In recent months, Australia has been at the center of the world's attention, with fire and then water crossing a continent at the antipodes of Europe, but now populated more by Europeans than Natives.
It was precisely the encounter with Aboriginal culture that triggered in her the desire to recross the history of humanity in a completely unsettling way: from the other side of the planet and from the point of view of a woman!
We thank Giusi Di Crescenzo for the care and translation.
Judy Foster paints for us a picture of life in which nature, life with animals, land and water are the formative elements of her childhood and adolescence.
A childhood immersed in wild nature.
In a secluded house in the middle of a sheep property with the Murray River running through it, not far from Melbourne.
What memories do you have of your childhood?
From my childhood I especially like to remember the games with my sisters, in the water and in the mud collecting mussels to make bait and fishing small cod or sea bream with a simple line for the happiness of our mother, who would have cooked them for dinner in the evening .
And then the ponies that I had learned to ride along the river or in the bush that grew on the high banks. Sometimes on our long walks we would encounter my father on his little motorbike following a group of sheep as they were being driven to the farmyard where they would be sheared and then the wool would be packed into bales ready to be sent to Melbourne to be sold .
But also the thrills of a nature to be respected like when in the hot summers we met snakes slithering silently along our paths and we stopped motionless as they passed!
One night my mother found a snake in the kitchen and immediately went to get the rifle and fired a shot which hit the snake but also the wall, so my father had to plug the hole!
Even his first years of study have the flavor of an education far from the conditioning and rules of "regular" institutions.
He was called Long Distance Home Schooling or “a school at home” in which the directives arrived from a correspondence institute:
Blackfriars Correspondence School, Sydney.
The lessons arrived by post every week and my mother had to find time, among the thousand things she had to do, to guide me and my sisters in studying the various subjects we had to study.
When I was sent - at the end of my fifth year - to secondary school at the Genazzano Convent in Melbourne, the first times were very hard.
I was homesick. But eventually I settled in among 28 other girls my age. When I was 11 I returned home and mine bush.
I obtained my first teaching qualification at the Australian Catholic University and then attended the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology Art School for four years, studying fashion and advertising design.
To gain some experience in the world of work I taught at Monash University's Caulfield Campus.
Marriage in 1965?
I got married and had three daughters: Sarah who is a ceramist, Carolyn who is a web designer/writer and Edwina who is a documentary producer.
And now I have six grandchildren.
It is therefore only after a good stretch spent according to the common canons of the chronology of female life - higher education, marriage, family and children - that Judy Foster begins a new path of study and research, which will lead her directly to this book.
Which seems to arise from questions that many women - especially in the second half of the last century up until today - have asked themselves.
Those questions that Marlene Derlet – co-author of the book The Invisible Women of Prehistory – also asked herself as a girl, as Judy Foster tells us in the acknowledgment pages of the book.
“Why do states have to fight each other? Why are heroines almost absent in history books? Why are women given lower status? And above all, where do these attitudes come from?
Has there ever existed a society without conflicts where women and the feminine were celebrated and valued?”
Marlene Derlet had found the answers in her research on issues related to indigenous Australians and indigenous women in particular: Aboriginal people lived in communities that coexisted peacefully with other groups and in which there was a clear separation between men and women, but where separation did not it meant inequality and devaluation, but each sex was appreciated in its own right.
And was it for this reason that the teacher Marlene Derlet was happy to contribute to the writing of this book when it was proposed to her by her student Judy Foster?
In 1989 I decided to attend Monash University to find out why there were so few women teachers in universities and why what women had done throughout history was so little the focus of scholarship.
It bothered me that there were so few women represented in history books and especially in archeology books and so I decided to focus on this aspect.
I attended, part time, a course in Visual Arts and Women's Studies (women's studies) and completed the courses in 1993.
Meanwhile, a course on Australian Indigenous Studies had been founded, led by Marlene Derlet and since I was interested in the topic I began to frequent her group at the Center for Indigenous Studies in Monash.
So was the approach and study of Aboriginal history and traditions an important element in inspiring your work and indicating a path of research?
Yes. Throughout the year we had very interesting chats with Marlene, which continued even after we both left Monash University. Thus the idea of writing down what I had learned was born and I began to compile an essay that progressively grew. Not only about women in history but also about women before history.
And so it was born Invisible Women of Prehistory?
A first draft was ready in 2002, and in 2003 I sent it to Susan Hawthorne of Spinifex Press, a women's publishing house founded in 1991.
Marlene had written part of the first two chapters and I had done the rest. In this manuscript we had written the first three or four chapters together.
Susan read them and was very encouraging and sent us many suggestions.
Marlene worked on her two chapters – although her contribution to the writing of the book, as I write in the acknowledgment pages at the back of the book, went well beyond the written contributions on linguistic origins, indigenous oral literature and mythology. Her work was instrumental to our numerous discussions, her criticisms and her patient editing.
Meanwhile, after that first draft, I began serious research on women in prehistory rather than in history, and there was very little information.
Was it during this research that you discovered Marja Gimbutas?
I discovered all her work and it was then that research on women in prehistory became broader and more serious.
It took 10 months of very difficult editing work during which I also completed all the drawings and captions. And finally the book was ready in 2013.
And little by little also the Goddess and the civilization of the Goddess?
Since I began this research I have produced many essays on various aspects of the Goddess as she appears in different cultures and societies around the world. I discovered her presence everywhere, an explicit or implicit presence, portrayed in small sculptures or other utensils used by women.
She is One, she is Everything, She is Everywhere.
