Rob Willis: 

Yeah. At those early stages, was there this flair for doing what you do, I'll put it that way, with doing unusual things so that it just stood out? 

Judi Summers: 

It started off with Claire and Lindy doing the surveillance. Yeah. Right? And then taking other nannas out doing surveillance. But then soon after that we, I think it was Clare, decided that we were going to sit outside our local MP Thomas George's office. And the creative part that came into that was Clare, he's got this, he had this life-size photograph of himself in the window like a transfer. Claire started dressing him up. Each week was a different thing. 

And it was like every Thursday morning, there we were, dressing up Thomas, doing our knitting, talking to people. And it just took a hold really quickly. And Thomas used to get really irate. And his PA used to come out and tell us to bugger off. Thomas is doing everything to support this community. Anyway. 

Rob Willis: 

And you would just knit and smile? 

Judi Summers: 

Yeah, just knit and smile. We'd plot, we'd sort of come up with ideas and what we wanted to do and, you know, where we were going to do the next blockade. And then that was sort of the start of things.

Ann-Mari Jordens: 

Did you get your pay? I mean, were you paid directly? 

Judith Stubbs: 

Oh no. I was being paid ten pound a week which was a lot of money in those days. No, five pound a week sorry. Four pound of that was going in board to the Home, that was going, I didn't see any, I don't know how much money I was given to, to spend, but I never got any of that money. Even when I went through Tech college there, the Rotary, the local Rotary club paid for that. But in my finals, I had to pay for that out of my earnings. 

Ann-Mari Jordens: 

So they were double dipping? 

Judith Stubbs: 

Yes, and I've got proof of that. Um, but on my eighteenth birthday I said, I'm out of here. And you were always told that you go, you never come back, you don't come back here. 

Mavis Robertson: 

And it was certainly a Congress very unlike the Congresses of the Australian Council of Trade Unions today, because as far as I recall, the only women who were actually official delegates there came from the New South Wales Teachers Federation. There may have been a few others, but out of a whole Congress, you could hardly see anyone who was female. And we stood on the steps of the Sydney Town Hall, and we had a little chant, which if somebody asked me to say who wrote it, I probably would have said Biff Ward. But anyhow, it said something like this. And it was associated with the fact that Bob Hawke not only had a reputation with women, but he continually called them birds. And it said: ‘We're not birds. Birds live in cages. We've been there for ages on second-class wages.’ We were not considered very popular. And people wanted to say to people like me, the trade unions are the main organizations of the working people, which, of course, they are, but so you shouldn't undermine them. I wasn't trying to undermine them, I was trying to strengthen them. And that dynamic of an argument was not very well understood by most men.

Jenna Love: 

… it's interesting because, I mean, similar to, you know, I was talking about non-monogamy that, like, we know, sex work has been around. People say it's the oldest profession. I don't think that's factually correct, but it's been around a bloody long time. We know that much, and it's kind of existed in every culture and in some aspects of the animal kingdom as well. So, you know, it's another one of those things that's been around forever and, and it is, I mean, media loves it, like it's in, you know, I do musical theatre stuff, and, God, musicals are obsessed with whores, like they're everywhere, and there's so much, you know, there's Pretty Woman there's like … our society's like really, kind of obsessed with the sex industry, but also absolutely terrified of it. And it's this big, dark secret, but also obsessive, and it's exciting, and people want to write about it all the time and stuff. So it's this weird, which is a terrible combo, right, because then you get people writing about it who know nothing about it, and then it just perpetuates all these myths and things. But yeah, and it's, I think, you know, most sex workers I speak to who are not out, feel the same way, which is that, like, I was so proud of the work I was doing, and there was no shame in that, you know, and I wanted to tell people, but I was aware, I was very aware of the shame that does exist in our society, and sort of how they would feel about it...

Madonna Grehan: 

So Harry Bartram introduced you to tattoos. Then you did a bit of sitting.  

Bev Nicholas: 

Yep.  

Madonna Grehan: 

How long did you do the sitting as Cindy Ray for?  

Bev Nicholas: 

Well probably in all it would only been over a course of 18 months. But that was not like a regular thing. And if you'd get tattooed, he'd showed up with the camera. He'd be recording what dates these were done on and all going into ah this book and um …  

Madonna Grehan: 

So he did a kind of tattooing history as you were being tattooed.  

Bev Nicholas: 

Yeah he did.  

Madonna Grehan: 

He photographed your story. Is that how he came to write the book for you?  

Bev Nicholas: 

Yeah he did from that. Yeah.  

Madonna Grehan: 

Okay. Because there's two publications. One is [called …]  

Bev Nicholas: 

Yeah, How To Do Good Tattooing  

Madonna Grehan: 

How to good, do good tattooing. And the other one is …  

Bev Nicholas: 

Ah the ah, The Story of a Tattooed Girl I think, isn't it? Yeah. [That's right.]  

Madonna Grehan: 

The Story of a Tattooed Girl  

Bev Nicholas: 

Yep.  

Madonna Grehan: 

Now they're um, supposedly written by you. [They're authored by you.]  

Bev Nicholas: 

No they're not. They're not written by me. He'd just go along and I'd tell him different stories and he'd put his take to it. And next thing I know that's the book.