Vale Judy Foster
Susan Hawthorne writes…
I first met Judy Foster in 2003 when I received an interesting manuscript about prehistory and women, an area I have long been interested in. The book was fascinating and complicated. Over years, we shared books, we had long conversations and often I thought that Judy would give up. But she persisted, and in 2013 we finished up with a fantastic book Invisible Women of Prehistory: Three million Years of Peace, Six Thousand Years of War.
Judy grew up on an isolated farm on the Murray River in the 1940s, always interested in art and design, she went to RMIT Art School and studied fashion, design and advertising. Later she taught in schools and became a qualified Primary Art Teacher. By the 1980s she was writing books for primary school art teachers.
In the 1990s, she completed a Visual Arts Major, as well as courses in Koorie Studies and Women’s Studies at Monash University. After coming across The Language of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas in 1993, she began researching visual symbolism in prehistory. It took her to many parts of Australia as well as Ireland and Britain where she visited places such as New Grange, Averbury and Stonehenge. With Marlene Derlet, a linguist and her former tutor in Koorie Studies, they began writing Invisible Women of Prehistory. An outstanding feature of the book is the hand-drawn illustrations by Judy. Another is the timeline charts that summarise the dates and places covered in the book. In 2018, Judy’s book was translated into Italian and published as Le Donne Invisibli della Preistoria by Venexia in Rome.
Judy’s work has also been published internationally in anthologies and online. She leaves many readers from across the world expressing their sorrow at her death, as well as three daughters, Sarah, Carolyn and Edwina. And all of us at Spinifex are saddened by the loss of a remarkable woman.
Photo of Judy Foster
with Marlene Derlet
Invisible Women of Prehistory is a revolutionary book that challenges our preconceptions about the past.
We often think of history as a linear development in which we are steadily moving out of a violent and patriarchal past to a more equitable and peaceful future. While we have no shortage of wars – and the incidence of violence against women is alarmingly high – we are told that humans have never lived in such peaceful times. We continually hear that our predecessors were violent but also that patriarchy is inevitable and universal. But what if none of this were true? What if we were descended from peaceful societies in which women were respected and equal to men? Would this inspire us to seek new ways of organizing our lives and of interpreting the present?
Based on many years of research into ancient history and prehistory, Judy Foster and linguist Marlene Derlet take on the world. They argue that three million years of peace, a period when women’s status in society was much higher than it is now, preceded the last six thousand years of war during which men have come to hold power over women.
They challenge the academic resistance to these ideas and re-examine both the archaeological work of Marjia Gimbutas and recent research into the prehistories of Africa, East and South Asia, the Americas, Australia, South-East Asia and Oceania.
2013 | ISBN 9781876756918 | Paperback | 240 x 170 mm | 404 pp | LOW STOCK - ALSO AVAILABLE AS EBOOKS