In Memory of Suzanne Bellamy, 22 September 1948–20 June 2022. Words by Susan Hawthorne, July 2022

I first heard Suzanne Bellamy speaking on The Coming Out Show around 1979. It was a program run by feminists for feminists and was aired every Saturday on ABC Radio National for many years. Suzanne did two programmes about Virginia Woolf and they were full of insightful and exciting ideas. I then met her in 1981 at the Women, Patriarchy and the Future Forum held in Melbourne. We instantly hit it off because we were both nuts about archaeology, art, writing and the work of Mary Daly. Over the years we met at conferences (Third Women and Labour Conference, Adelaide 1982) where she spoke about Form — ‘We Are the Thing Itself'. It was a meditation on artistic practice and

looking for new language to discuss the work of women in non-verbal creative areas — not only sculpture but all the non-verbal forms, all form (and of course by extension a new way of using words themselves).

Over the following years we met at various times and we always had so much to talk about. When Renate Klein and I started Spinifex Press, it wasn’t long before we approached her for an artwork to be used on a book cover. The book was my first novel, The Falling Woman and along with the launch, which we combined with our first birthday party and exhibition at the George Mora Gallery in Melbourne, a number of photos of her cover were on display. The photos were taken by Lariane Fonseca. 

The photos on the back are other views of the beautiful porcelain which we called ‘Flying and Falling’ or ‘Effie’ for short.

In 2004, a new edition of The Falling Woman was published (left), also photographed by Lariane Fonseca. It is the same sublime porcelain sculpture and it thrills me each time I look at her.

In addition to her art, Suzanne contributed to a number of Spinifex books including Australia for Women: Travel and Culture which was published to coincide with the 6th International Feminist Book Fair held in Melbourne in 1994. She also participated in an interview again on The Coming Out Show just ahead of the Feminist Book Fair where some sneaky attempts to undermine the fair were about to be tried. The programme was ostensibly to discuss the ten-year anniversary of the Fourth Women and Labour Conference in Brisbane in 1984 at which I had given a paper that Jackie Huggins did not like, but which the traditional Aboriginal women did. Suzanne, as the initiator of the Women and Labour Conferences, the first held at Macquarie University in Sydney in 1978, was well placed to talk at length about the idea behind the conference. Jackie, who had come prepared to criticise what occurred in Brisbane and what was about to occur at the Feminist Book Fair, did not succeed.

Suzanne also has an essay in Radically Speaking: Feminism Reclaimed edited by Diane Bell and Renate Klein (1996). She writes:

Within a couple of years [of the invention of the Women’s Liberation Movement] a coherent philosophical position emerged which sought no alliances with male ideologies or existing parties, no grafts with Marxism or socialism or liberalism, no goals of success within the dominant culture – an independent core philosophy giving primacy to women’s experience, participations and visions. It was always a minority position, an irritant for many, a source point of great originality in ideas and methods. This movement came to be called radical feminism and it became for me an expanding universe (p. 127).

In 2001, Suzanne contributed to A Girl’s Best Friend: The Meaning of Dogs in Women’s Lives,  as well as for Cat Tales: The Meaning of Cats in Women’s Lives (2003), in which she wrote about her relationships with Thelma, the dog, and Cinnamon the cat, both beings who showed Suzanne different ways of living in the world, their love and loyalty and ability to sniff out trouble, in the case of dogs, and their complexity and performances in the case of cats.

In 2008, Suzanne and I had the chance to work together. Lella Carriddi was getting writers and artists to create joint projects on the subject of Drought. I couldn’t think of anyone better than Suzanne to work with. I had a series of poems called ‘Unsettling the Land’ that included poems about birdlife, drought, flood, and water. Suzanne created a huge canvas which included images of porcelains, prints and across it – like a giant snake – my poem. The final poem, ‘Earth’s pod, 2008’ I wrote in response to one of her works of art. Suzanne’s canvas was hung at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival and we participated on a panel about the project.

In the meantime, I asked book designer Deb Snibson to create a chapbook Unsettling the Land using my poems and Suzanne’s art. The final product is a beautiful version of the collaboration between all three of us.

Suzanne also created beautiful paintings, many about Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein. One of her paintings ‘Birth of the New Universe’, a 198 cm canvas, was used on the cover of My Sister Chaos by Lara Fergus (2010), an extraordinary debut novel about lesbian refugees from an unnamed war-torn country, a cartographer and an artist, who are both dealing with the trauma of violence and loss.

When Spinifex reissued Finola Moorhead’s 1987 novel, Remember the Tarantella in 2011, Suzanne was the obvious artist to ask for the cover art. The beautiful porcelain ‘Starship’ (1989) shows a boat carrying women on a journey through space time, just as Moorhead does in her novel from 4553 BC to the present in boats, planes and taxis.

In 2012, the year before I went to Rome on a Literature Residency, I was staying with Suzanne in her home studio. At this time, Suzanne was working on creating boxes and on the wall hung one of these. I looked at the box and thought it could be translated. As a student of Sanskrit, I am fascinated by the possibilities of translation with commentary attached. I translated the ‘Text Box 1’ (2011) into a poem, ‘Ooss: dog three bones has’. The poem became an important element of my poetry collection, Lupa and Lamb and the box is depicted on the back cover.

I had been writing my novel, Dark Matters since 2003. It is a novel about the ways in which violence against lesbians is ignored and erased. In it, Kate is arrested by an unknown group of men, imprisoned and tortured. When her niece Desi inherits Kate’s papers, she discovers more than she ever imagined. How can you show such a story through an image? Suzanne’s etched and embossed monoprint, ‘Road Map’ (2004), provides just the right answer. A series of mazes with roadblocks depicts the situation that too many lesbians still find themselves in.

In the late 1990s, Spinifex co-organised a conference on lesbian community. In Adelaide at the World’s Women’s Congress in 1996 and at the lesbian community conference, Suzanne presented her performance work The Lost Culture of Women’s Liberation 1969-74, The PreDynastic Phase. There is a 30-minute video of a later presentation at The National Library of Australia in Canberra which you can watch at the above link. I highly recommend it as it gives an idea of Suzanne’s satirical and humorous side, something that is impossible to capture in words on a page.

In addition to cover images, and essays, Suzanne also launched several Spinifex books, beginning with Sheila Jeffreys’ The Lesbian Heresy in Canberra (1993) where Suzanne came dressed as Erasmus and proclaimed a number of decrees about the book. Suzanne was a great performer and had a love of pageantry. I have often been inspired by Suzanne’s idiosyncratic take on the world and she makes appearances in my work, including in a poem about pageants in The Sacking of the Muses (2019).

Suzanne also launched my poetry collection, The Butterfly Effect (2005) and my novel Dark Matters in 2017. You can read her launch speech for Dark Matters here. My life would be far less rich if I had not known Suzanne Bellamy. If we had not worked together, riffed on one another’s work and enjoyed long conversations in person, on the phone or by responding to one another creatively over more than forty years.

Suzanne Bellamy was a giant intellect and artist and like so many women before her has been rarely noticed by the mainstream. But feminist and lesbian households across Australia and overseas have treasured examples of her work. It pains me to say this, but it is time that her work, her scholarship and her extraordinary art be recognised as amongst the most original in Australia.

All images are © Suzanne Bellamy and cannot be used without written permission.