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JM: Kate Jennings grew up on a farm in outback Australia in the fifties. It was a toughening childhood, and as it turned out, she has needed all her native resilience to pursue her life's course.
A passionate feminist, she was well known in Australia in the 1960s for a remarkable and confrontational speech which, basically, launched the Australian women's movement. She also edited a book of poems by Australian women, Mother, I'm Rooted, which was a best-seller ? over 10,000 copies, and she published her own volume of tough-type poetry, Come To Me My Melancholy Baby.
Then she moved to New York, and married Bob, an art director, a much older man.
Kate visited Australia for the Sydney Writers Festival to launch her second novel Moral Hazard. Written in spare beautiful prose, it is loosely autobiographical, and based on two major events in her life in the 1990s ? her husband's diagnosis with Alzheimer's disease and, as a consequence, her taking a job as a speechwriter on Wall Street....
JM: In this interview, Kate, we'll try to get a sense of a life journey, so I want a snapshot of the Kate of the late 60s, might have been the early 70s, on the front lawn of the University of Sydney, it's a moratorium against the Vietnam War and you gave a very provocative speech about women, can you take us there with a picture?
KJ: I think you'd call that speech `in your face.' They were wild, rackety outrageous days and we were not getting the attention of the men at that point. We were a very small group that started meeting and that was the speech I gave. I'm not sure that we can actually say it out loud on radio. It was that outrageous.
JM: But what was the core content, the cry from the heart?
KJ: The cry from the heart was that we were all Vietnam activists and the men were all gung-ho about fighting that cause, and nobody cared about women, and at that stage women could not have legal abortions.
JM: And when you look back are you amazed at the courage you had, that was a new voice then, the voice of women saying: `Look...