1985 Notes. Days of sophistication, sub defuse and continual cultural Explosions. New kinds of catharsis and nemesis. Extensive journeys. The drug culture intensifies. Important Women’s Protest movement. Young family days. World Oil Crisis 1973.

The Bretton-Woods Agreement from 1971 was important. It was when the US Greenback became more significant for world currency and trade than gold equivalents with complex results. One aspect of the present global financial crisis begins from there. It helped the US at first and then it started to undermine its powerful Imperialist position much later. Ralph Nadar wearing worn puritan shoes appears on the scene and shows how the corporate world can be held legally and ethically to account.Culturally on TV and in film The satirical Yippies sent up the absurdities of the system. with humorus aplomb.Monty Python and its neo-Dada comedy burst onto the scene and changed our imaginative lives.I can still feel that stimulus there in my Chinese illustrations for my m.s ‘The Ninth Immortal.’

There was a revival and extension of new feminist ideas. Building from older ideas from Betty Friedan and Simmone de Bourvoir and the anthropology of Margaret Mead. Many were reading fiction of Doris Lessing etc. There appeared the new, major, qualitative critiques of the path- breaker Kate Millet. The more philosophical Shulamith Firestone (great name). Gloria Steinem, Julie Ellis, Germaine Greer, Anne Summers, Ann Curthoys and many others. It was a time when radicals had large posters of Angela Davis on their walls. Everyone knew of the Karen Silkwood controversy. When women were arrested at protests at nuclear communication sites in Australia, they would all give their name to the police as ‘Karen Silkwood’.

The early Feminists in Sydney were creating new songs to express their concerns about the pill such as the following sung to an old bouncing Irish tune.

Don’t you know the date today?
Don’t you know the date today?
If you want to get in the family way
Listen to father Riley!