COMPILED BY KEITH JACKSON
AMIRAH Inglis (1926-2015), an Australian writer and feminist with a close association with Papua New Guinea, has died in Melbourne.
Inglis migrated to Melbourne in 1929 with her Polish-Jewish parents. She graduated from Melbourne University with a BA Hons in history, later studying at Canberra University College.
She followed her parents into the Communist Party at the age of 18 and worked on the communist weekly, The Guardian.
At 21 she married the communist intellectual Ian Turner and became a devoted and active member of the party during the most turbulent period of its history - the Menzies era, the Petrov Affair and increasing anti-communist sentiment. The marriage ended in 1962.
The family moved to Canberra in 1959 where Amirah taught music at Lyneham High School, was on the programming committee for Canberra's ABC concerts and was involved in the Canberra branch of the Communist Party.
In 1967 Amirah and her second husband historian Ken Inglis went to Papua New Guinea when he was appointed inaugural vice-chancellor of the University of Papua New Guinea. There she lectured in history at the Administrative College and mentored women university students.
Her book, Not a White Woman Safe, published in 1974, has been described as a thoroughly researched work that brought into focus the White Women’s Protection Ordinance of 1926 introduced by the Australian colonial administration in Port Moresby.
Passed into law on the watch of then Administrator of Papua, Sir Hubert Murray, this discriminatory piece of legislation was put into effect with penalties that were deemed draconian, even by the standards of that time.
This book clearly depicts Port Moresby of that era; an ultra-repressive “white man’s town” where the social castes were distinctively defined.
It explores the underlying myths surrounding the white man’s perception of the Papuans’ sexual mores leading towards resentment and paranoia that gave rise to the “Black Peril”: the unnatural fear of sexual attacks on white women and girls by black men, even when there was not a single recorded case of rape.
Her 1983 book Amirah: an un-Australian childhood explored the issue of migrant identity in Australia and described the frustrations and challenges of growing up in a country with different cultural, political, religious and philosophical traditions.
Inglis's second autobiographical work, The hammer & sickle and the washing up: memories of an Australian woman communist, described her struggle to balance her political commitments in a man's world with those of being a wife, mother and homemaker.
Inglis's other books reflect a desire to understand the complexities of her world within the framework of the humanitarian, internationalist, European-based communist ideology of her migrant parents and the completely new world of Papua New Guinea where she lived and worked between 1967-1974.
Sources: Nickson Piakal (‘White prestige in a colonial port town’, Hope Trek), Ros Russell (The Australian Women’s Register), Sarah Dowse (National Library of Australia). End photo by Ken Inglis: Bill Gammage, Amirah Inglis, Hank Nelson, Canberra, 1966
