AustLit

The idea of Hecate originated through Ferrier and the editorial team’s desire to establish an international interdisciplinary journal that would develop, strengthen and pave the way for Australian women’s writing on female liberation. All issues state “Hecate prints material relating to women, particularly contributions which employ feminist, Marxist, anti-racist or other radical approaches. We also print creative work and graphics.”

Hecate was informed by Ferrier's time in Sydney in the early 1970s where she was involved with Refractory Girl, a socialist-feminist journal produced by Sydney University (USYD). Refractory Girl published Australian writing on the women’s liberation movement, the anti-war movement, anti-militarism, post-colonial, anti-racism, gay liberation, and lesbianism. Ferrier was heavily involved in several political and social campaigns: she took part in protests, typed up leaflets, and attend seminars and rallies. Refractory Girl was associated with Mejane, a socialist-feminist newspaper that printed journalist style pieces. From the late 1960s, socio-political activism branched into self-publishing. Ferrier recognised the potential to synergise her activist beliefs with academic context, and so sought to refine her skills in independent-publishing. Here she gravitated towards people on her wavelength; she connected with feminist writers, historians, and activists such as Anne Summers, Kate Jennings, and Susan Sheridan.

In 1972 Ferrier left Sydney for a position at UQ. Her employment with the university allowed her to associate with like-minded women who would come together to be a part of political organising. That same year, Merle Thornton, a fellow Humanities teacher at UQ, pioneered the first Women’s Studies course, and a group of feminist academics came together in support of the course. Ferrier was determined to see it flourish and become established as a serious academic field of study.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Australian socio-cultural sphere was changing; there was a distinct increase of women’s departments, and women’s advisors in state or federal governments and within big unions. Ferrier was influenced by these large-scale women groups, who were developing platforms that inscribed women’s liberation ideologies. Ferrier was a significant member of a network of Australian women who were interested in pioneering published works that focused on feminist theories and perspectives. As Ferrier explains, this time of her life was about “getting ideas about the ways in which we can develop this new sort of field of women’s studies and make it more visible and more intellectually acceptable.”

Ferrier asked Refractory Girl if they would consider allowing the team in Brisbane to realise one issue a year. However, the Brisbane issue contained more wild and evocative cartoons than those in vogue in Sydney, and the joint production of Refractory Girl did not continue beyond one issue. This was Ferrier's way of using the academic environment to allow for more subversive images, words, and ideas to filter into a wider community.

In 1975, realising they would have more freedom of expression with their own publication, Ferrier and a few others decided to create a journal that would enter Australian writing on issues of female liberation and women’s studies into an international academic sphere. Ferrier always wanted Hecate to go beyond Australian issues, and to explore concepts and theories that were international, interconnective, and reflected the social/political/cultural movements of the women’s liberationists of the late 1960s.

Ferrier envisaged Hecate as a more academic-looking journal than what was being published in Australia at the time. She explains that the reason why this was so important was “because only comparatively few of the articles, say in earlier issues of Refractory Girl, actually had notes and bibliographies.” For Ferrier, having an academically-accredited outlet on women’s liberation was a tremendous step forward for women’s publishing in Australia. Hecate was to be recognised as having academic substance and theoretical sophistication on a par with that of emerging US journals, such as Signs and Feminist Studies, whose editors she had met on visits to the US.

There were many bodies who supported Hecate’s finances during the early years of publication. The first issue, published in 1975, was financed by the Postgraduate Association, Refractory Girl Collective, the Communist Party Printery (who printed the first issue), and the Women’s Rights Committee. By the second issue, even more institutions were involved; 1975 was International Women’s Year and Hecate received funding from the Australian Advisory Council and the Literature Board of the Australia Council. From then on, Hecate continued to receive financial support from the Literature Board. A few years later, Hecate obtained funding from Arts Queensland. This funding allowed Hecate to imrpove its quality of typesetting, printing, and images to create a published product that was beautiful, bold, and powerful.  Ferrier notes that Hecate has “never had paid editorial staff”— they could never be afforded, and that was the norm in those days for many of the publications that fell into the category of “little magazines.” Although Hecate had a strong financial support network, it was not a commercially-run publication. Over time, most feminist journals have been taken over and marketed by commercial publishers. Feminist Studies is one of the few in the US that remain independent. Likewise, Hecate remains independently published and continues to stand autonomously within the highly-commercial industry.

Hecate was “carving out a space for work that back then was not getting published by mainstream history, English or philosophy journals.” Such publications were on the rise in the States and the United Kingdom and gaining ground in the Australian literary and academic environment. As Hecate grew, it always maintained its core values—those of the late-1960s socio-political movements that had so influenced Ferrier and her chosen peers as academics, writers, researchers and as women.  Hecate provided academic women with a platform for different research, to create ideas that were making a difference outside of the university, whether it was in school syllabuses or in wider state or federal parliamentary political debates and legislation.

As a Brisbane publication, Hecate also challenged the publishing dominance of Sydney and Melbourne.  Ferrier saw Hecate as contesting the “fairly extreme marginalisation of women and feminist ideas and the whole general situation of women in Australian institutions.” Hecate was leading a change in the way Australia and the world engaged with women’s liberation; in its early years, it was one of the few women’s journals on a par with Feminist Studies in the U.S.

Epitomising the nature of second-wave feminists, Hecate ignored voices of criticism, resistance, and rejection along the way. She says that “we were on many missions” and that any resistance met was “water off ducks' backs because we knew we were right and we knew history would be on our side.” The whole experience

was exciting and really good fun and you could see the change happening…There was an enormous struggle to get a twentieth-century women’s writers course in 1975 but the thing was, that in those days, although the whole place was very conservative, the university was a haven of tolerance and civilisation. People had been conscientised by the civil rights struggles and marches ten years before, in which the university had been quite prominent. Quite a lot of the academics, especially in humanities, but not only there, thought it was part of the university’s business to be doing those sorts of things. That really isn’t the case now.

From its humble beginnings in 1975, producing Hecate was always a thrilling and enjoyable journey, one that Ferrier believes could not be replicated today. In the early 1990s there was a congenial atmosphere of curiosity about and engagement with new ideas and forms of activism, developed at UQ in the 1960s.