We must value the hopes, cares and lives of women

When I started to write The Bass Rock I had a new baby, so I was writing in the small moments in between that life – I’d started jotting down little fragments of things and there were three voices I kept coming back to, which felt distinct and somehow connected.

Evie Wyld’s award-winning novel, The Bass Rock.Credit:

There was a woman in the 1950s, struggling within a suffocating marriage. Then there was a woman now, struggling without any of the things accepted as evidence of a successful life and then there was a young girl in the 18th century accused of witchcraft.

There were common threads – control by men, violence large and small and especially the framing of female anger as hysteria, which seemed to connect them. But I wasn’t sure they were one story, let alone a novel.

It was when I saw Sherele Moody’s Google map of Australian femicide and child death online, in which since 2015 she’s been marking the deaths of women and children through violence and neglect, that something clicked.

A continent covered in markers, in which she has tracked the gender of the victim and the perpetrator. It seemed to me to echo those maps in films about serial killers, when suddenly disparate crimes become the work of one killer. And I asked myself the question – what if every woman ever killed by a man was put on a map like this?

As soon as I had thought it, I imagined a voice saying, “not all men, though!” I had a feeling that I was making a fuss. That I was exaggerating. That it would make men feel uncomfortable. That it would make women uncomfortable, after all don’t we have good, decent sons and husbands and brothers? How reductive, how negative, what a harpy.

The March 4 Justice rallies last month decried the tolerance of violence and sexual assault of women. Credit: Justin McManus.

That was when I knew it was a novel I wanted to write. It made sense for me of so many things that I’d never allowed myself to look fully in the eye, because the conditions which have allowed men to hurt women, again and again, are the conditions we have all grown up with.

Suddenly a man telling a woman to “cheer up love” or making a joke about her being on her period used the same tone of voice a witchfinder used. I could hear that weary resignation, that faux concern with which a husband had his wife institutionalised – for responding to the confines of her position – in all of the men who have ever talked over me as if I wasn’t there.

All of the voices internal and external telling us that we are too loud, too quiet, too sexy, not sexy enough, too big, too serious, not cheerful, too much a body forcing men to look at us with that mixture of desire and hatred.

The million ways in which girls are taught that their needs, their rights and their safety are less important than the comfort of a man. That their bodies are not their bodies but a kind of resource that must be removed from circulation. That rape and murder are the natural and logical consequence of this resource left improperly tended.

That the responsibility and solution for men hurting women, men hurting children, men hurting men does not somehow lie with men. That it’s women who must change how they dress, how they talk, where they walk and when.

The same casual assumption that we will make the sandwiches and bear the children and buy the birthday presents.

How different the world must feel to those of us who have walked home with their keys poking out from their fists and those that haven’t.

How innocent it must seem to those that do not have to make the avoidance of death part of their to-do list.

This felt like a story that these three women were part of, that I was part of, that countless, unvoiced women were part of.

The novel came out of an attempt to reclaim these women’s hopes and cares and lives as being fundamentally of value. Of mattering more than the comfort of men.

What I wanted to do was to suggest that somehow, within this narrative, there is hope. That somewhere in this shared experience between women there is solidarity and there is strength, there is laughter and there is sisterhood and life.

There is the potential for men and women to survive the damage that men do to us and each other, and themselves.

Evie Wyld is the 2021 winner of The Stella Prize for her novel The Bass Rock (Penguin Random House). This speech was delivered in response to the theme ‘If They Could Talk: On Voice and Voicelessness’ at an online broadcast Thursday night for The Stella Prize, a prestigious $50,000 award that celebrates Australian women’s writing.

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