Fwd (GLW): Connie Frazer: Poet, feminist, revolutionary

["Alan Bradley" <abradley1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From Green Left Weekly, May 15, 2002.

Connie Frazer: Poet, feminist, revolutionary
BY MELANIE SJOBERG
& JOHN MCGILL

Connie Frazer died, aged 76, on May 6 after a struggle with breast cancer.
She was a poet, a feminist and a member of the Democratic Socialist Party.

Connie's presence will be missed from the Adelaide political scene as one of
the more well known and outspoken radical political activists who marched,
spruiked, leafleted and directly achieved social change. It was rare for her
to miss a rally, campaign action or meeting.

Connie's first experience of political activity was participation in the
first of the big Moratorium marches against the Vietnam War, in May 1970. In
an oral history of her life, recorded by Marg McHugh in 1993, Connie talked
about the daily life of a working-class housewife and mother confronted by
the new reality of a war:

"I really was caught up in being a housewife then. I was aware of the war in
Vietnam going on, because by then we had TV [but] I didn't really take much
notice, hardly knew where Vietnam was...

"One day I was crossing King William Street to Rundle Street thinking about
what I'd got to buy when a news placard leapt out and pulled me up. All it
had written on it was `Conscription!' I felt, `I've spent 16 years trying to
teach my son that war's a bad thing, and now they're talking about taking
him away and putting him in the army.' It just sort of rose up inside me. I
thought, `No way, no. I'm not going to let them take him'.

< The remainder of the article can be found at
http://www.greenleft.org.au/current/492p7.htm >


New Comrade

Astonishing! I am become
a communist, a leftie, a red
-ragger, revolutionary

surely not! Che, that handsome
hero on the wall is one of
those - not me?
Yet I want a socialism

that's fun
a green one
with no national flag. No more

false grim images
of worshipped dead
visionaries.

For I've seen
pictures of Karl Marx live
with a twinkle in his eye.

Trotsky on film feeding pet
rabbits. And what was, I wonder
the name
of Vlad Lenin's little cat?

BY CONNIE FRAZER


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