Many literature teachers will have played the game, with students, of ‘pick the sex of the writer’ from a selection of excerpts, and all will know how ultimately futile this turns out to be, since language and tone can be so readily appropriated to a variety of ends: there are plenty of Margaret Thatchers in the literary world and even the nineteenth century could produce a John Stuart Mill. Thus, any claim of uniqueness needs to be approached with caution. Again, the gender-specific collection demonstrates through its variety as well as its repetitions that its border country is common property, but that it has its sacred places as well. For a female reader at least, the uniqueness of such a collection comes from surprised recognition that we all do indeed inhabit the same place, even if not the same time.

Hampton and Llewellyn maintain in their Introduction that-the arbitrariness of sex is mitigated by the shared experience of gender: that the social implications of being female can be discerned in every aspect of women’s poetry, not only in its themes and subjects, but also in its revolutionary technical strategies which liberate women writers from the so-called ‘universal’ constraints of literary orthodoxy. As long as the universal is defined as male, women will be forced into an oppositional stance. The danger of this position is obvious, but gender-specific collections of writing such as this one does make possible a contrasting ‘centring’ of female experience which demands assessment on its own terms.

With eighty-nine contributors, some principle of organisation is crucial, and this collection is strictly chronological; the poet’s birth date dictates the running order. Thus, we are also provided with a history of cultural politics, and the common concerns of nineteenth century writers with present-day ones is a salutary reminder that the psychological space we inhabit has not much changed. The older voices are radical ones, or rather their radicalness is defined by the subject of their poetry represented here, namely the experience of being female in a male-dominated world. Poets like Mary Gilmore, Ethel Anderson, Anna Wickham, and Dorothea Mackellar express strong feelings in strong poetry, forthright, passionate, unillusioned. As a corrective to the sentiment of ‘My Country’ stands another Mackellar poem ‘Arms and the Woman’, a grim little debate about aggression ending with the line ‘God be thanked, I carry a knife.’ Eve Langley’s ‘Native Born’ is an equally savage contrast between female passivity and male brutality, with the female being equated with the archetypally Australian.

Woman-as-Victim turns up in many guises; sometimes she is Aboriginal as well, or a homesick migrant, or mad. But lest she should be thought of as stereotypically the subject of feminist writing, there is also a very large category which could be called Poem-as-Defiance, repaying old scores with the sharp weapon of words. Thus, Mary Durack’s heart-breaking old Aboriginal woman longing for the return of her drowned country in the Ord River district is matched by Kath Walker’s iconoclastic ‘Ballad of the Totems’ where a shrewd modem Aboriginal woman finally puts an end to male domestic oppression which has masked itself as totemic and sacred. There’s a lot of fun to be had out of the witty put-down, too. Edith Speers in an ironically titled poem called ‘Why I Like Men’ gives them their due: ‘… they’re almost as good as a trip overseas when life gets dull’.

Grabbing the microphone, as it were, for the female characters incarcerated in male myths turns up some surprises. Kate Llewellyn in ‘Eve’ shows her ‘bored witless with Adam’, Sylvia Kantaris’s Mary in ‘Annunciation’ makes it clear they’ve concentrated on the wrong miracle. Fay Zwicky gives us ‘Mrs Noah Speaks’, Jill Hellyer, ‘Jonah’s Wife’. Best of all is Jennifer Strauss’s ‘Guenevere Dying’, the voiceless sexual criminal of Arthurian myth given words at last and on her deathbed ‘confesses’ not her own crimes but those of all women used by men for their own ends.

That fickle dame, the Muse, comes in for a lot of criticism, too, Sylvia Kantaris even creates a tenth muse, a chauvinist male quite without subtlety or tact. One of the joys of reading through this collection is its pervasive comedy, its splendid sense of irony.

However, there is a generation gap, too. A number of the older generation of poets take up politics with passion, in particular the masculine threat of nuclear destruction, Judith Wright quite specifically in ‘Eve to Her Daughters’ seeing humanity’s only hope for a future threatened by chemical and nuclear destruction as necessarily female; Barbara Giles with two short poems, one expressing the triumph of age, the other the (nuclear) threat of being young; Sylvia Kantaris leaving a poignant post-nuclear note to the ‘Dear Inheritor’. The younger poets distinguish themselves in their experimentation, in their refreshing tendency to shoot straight from the hip, but they practice sexual politics only. What is worrying about this is its apparent reflection of their generation’s movement away from the public arena of political action into a more introspective mode of protest. As a survivor of the sixties, I find this disturbing. I need some reassuring that a change in sexual consciousness is going to feed into permanent social and political change, as well as a cultural endorsement of this.

Such an anthology as this, however, can’t really be read pessimistically. Its quality, range, variety, skill and wit constitute a loud rejoinder to those seventeen per centers who have been practicing a sexual apartheid and getting away with it for so long.