Keeping secrets
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 22: MoneySexPower
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by David Linton
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David Linton's biography and other articles by this writer
The uniquely Australian colloquialism ‘secret women's business' has taken on the character of an incantation, often unrelated to Aboriginal women's secrets. Newspaper headlines declare: ‘And it's not secret women's business as the quest begins to crown a new king, swimming' or ‘Winning trust is the real secret to women's business ...'
The sheer silliness of many of the appropriations diminishes and mocks the original reference, and all that it stands for, in terms of the demands for recognition of respect and trivialises the issue. Yet, to an outsider like me, the uses of the phrase would be as puzzling as the occasional ‘fair dinkum' overheard on the street.
I acquired an interest in the Hindmarsh Island Bridge affair belatedly and from afar after reading George Williams' Griffith REVIEW 19: Re-imagining Australia essay. As my research concerns the social construction of the menstrual period and its media representations, my curiosity was piqued. The richness of the story begs questions that go beyond the particular: whether knowledge of menstruation is a cultural secret or a matter of personal privacy; the difference between ‘secret women's business' and ‘a woman's secret business' and how changes in the general media environment affect contemporary views of secrecy, menses and respect for cultural diversity.
The Hindmarsh Island issue has been thoroughly thrashed in the Australian media, academic settings, political enclaves, courts and everyday conversation. Several books have been published, reviewed and gone out of print. Careers in various fields (particularly journalism and politics) have risen or fallen according to the ebb and flow of the saga's meandering course. Even the lower Murray has changed profoundly as its water has dried up. Perhaps its unique Australian aspects made it too exotic for American consumption, yet the elements concerning race relations, gender, and respect for minority and indigenous cultures might well have proven instructive elsewhere.
ONE OF THE MOST INTRIGUING ELEMENTS in the story is the secrecy, the idea that ethnic/cultural groups within a society are entitled to assert a right to confidentiality about a traditional practice, and thereby influence general social policy such as zoning or construction. The concept was built into law by the 1988 Aboriginal Heritage Act, which outlawed dissemination of ‘unauthorised' information about Aboriginal traditions.
To the best of my knowledge, this view of ‘privileged information' has no similar expression in American law or custom. It is truly a ‘foreign' idea. The closest practice might be the way priests, journalists, spouses, doctors, lawyers and therapists are exempt from testifying against a congregant, source, wife/husband or client/patient in legal proceedings. But these cases only apply to unique personal matters, national security, professional privilege and patent protection, not to entire bodies of lore or ritual.
In the case of journalists, ethical questions of privilege mostly pertain to protecting one's source from exposure rather than the piece of knowledge gained in the course of an investigation. In this regard, the secrets usually kept by journalists (how they gained the secret they're publishing) are different from those of priest, therapist, doctor, attorney or mate in that the content of the exchange is protected while the identity of the confidant is known.
Perhaps it might be useful here to draw a distinction between ‘secret women's business' in the plural and ‘a woman's secret business'. A comparison might be helpful. In the United States, one of the most controversial Supreme Court decisions in the last fifty years, Roe v Wade, turned on the question of personal privacy - a woman's right to keep to herself not just an exchange of information with her doctor about whether she is pregnant, but her right to act upon that information with a course of physical ‘treatment' that suits her own needs. Although the case is often described as having established a woman's right to an abortion, actually it established the primacy of a woman's right to privacy about having an abortion over the right of the government's access to the information and then the formulation of law about what it knows.
The secrecy issue in Hindmarsh also seems ‘foreign' within the larger media context that is emerging across the planet. In an age of photocopying, the internet, blogging, instant news and YouTube, the preservation of the kind of secrecy at issue in Hindmarsh is almost quaint. In fact, I imagine that would Marshall McLuhan be asked his views of the story, he might point out that it is the last dramatic gasp of a vanishing media ecology, a pre-writing, oral culture, a media environment in which communities could be sustained in relative isolation from each other and maintain their own codes, beliefs and identities with confidence that ‘outsiders' would not know their meanings.
Writing about the difficulty of keeping anything private in the age of the perpetually open microphone, Gary Younge lamented in The Nation in August 2008: ‘There is, in short, no such thing as a discreet conversation anymore. The personal, the private, the privileged and the confidential no longer really exist. The stories you may choose not to share are not yours to keep; the conversations you hope will go no further can just keep travelling.' While Younge was writing about the political climate, he might as well have been describing the media circumstances that led to the explosion of passions and conflict at the heart of Hindmarsh. To put it another way, as Garret Keizer pointed out in Harper's Magazine in August, we live in a Candid Camera world in which our only choice is to smile sheepishly even when we've been ‘tricked, ridiculed' by the ever-present intrusive camera.