Gillian Morrison

PhD candidate Swinburne University of Technology - Game Based Learning

[Gillian Morrison @MsQuiddity]

@SenatorWong We’re in great hands! Thank you for all of your hard work. I breathe a sigh of relief every time I see you in the media:))

[Gillian Morrison @MsQuiddity]

Please support Assange and democracy https://t.co/GYdkAn5fug

[MFWitches @MFWitches]

(CW: Sexual Assault)

If you think all this sexual assault noise everywhere doesn’t impact women, listen the fuck up.

I live in a small town, and often grab a coffee near my work. I’ve gradually come to know an elderly woman who’s sometimes at the cafe, too, while I wait for my takeaway. We chat a few times a week, and sometimes I sit with her for a bit.

On Friday she was there again, so I sat down in the sun.

She seemed a bit distant, and sad, and I asked if she was okay.

She said she felt down due to all the media noise about alleged sexual assaults inside Parliament House. She’d seen some of the reporting in the papers, and it stressed her out.

I was thinking: maybe she’s just of a generation which doesn’t like talking of such private things. That makes sense. But suddenly (out of the blue) she was crying, telling me about her own rapes.

The first, she said, was as a 15-year-old who went to a large urban park with a new boyfriend, and while walking down a quiet tree-lined lane he pushed her into the bushes and raped her.

The second was as a 19-year-old who went with a platonic male friend to a party in an apartment, and was gang-raped in a bedroom by 5 other men. She thinks the friend “sold” her for the night to his mates.

In both instances, she said, she never told anyone as she willingly went to where it happened and had been taught (as have all older women) that going somewhere freely with a man means you’re at least partly responsible for what happens when you’re there.

As I listened to her, my relaxed work break was suddenly dark, and awful. Because I’d been sitting in the sun with a beautifully dressed, beautifully spoken older widow, who was suddenly spilling her guts about terrible things which happened to her six decades ago yet which she remembers as if they were yesterday.

Her carefully applied mascara was now running unheeded down her cheeks. I was crying too. Because she said she felt so tortured and helpless hearing about the attacks happening to other women, knowing intimately how this feels. Knowing how it feels to spend the rest of your life being scared of parks, or apartment buildings, or groups of men, or certain smells, sounds or tastes, or of inadvertently being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Again.

Most of all, scared to tell anyone, because you know you’ll be ostracised and doubted and hated and denied even your own story, just for doing what everyone’s taught to do from the time they’re toddlers: tell the truth.

Unless it’s the truth about rape.

Because it isn’t true, is it, that the truth sets us free?

Far too often, for women, the truth just fucks us up.

There’s no real reason for this tale except to say: you can befriend a lovely frail old lady and have no idea what’s under the surface. You don’t know what she’s been through, or what she’s hiding, or her still-raw pain.

This is true for a lot of women of all ages, of course, but somehow it’s more shocking coming from someone who was a young adult at a time we were taught was a more chivalrous, decent, gentle era.

Well, no it fucking wasn’t.

It’s just that all those polite, thoroughly decent old women never told, and virtually nobody would’ve believed them if they did.

They (and nearly all of us as women) carry those scars around so men don’t have to. So men can continue the sweet delusion that everything was better when men were men and women didn’t carry on with this ridiculous #MeToo bullshit. So people (mostly men) can say on the internet that when the women of Australia aren’t safe in our own workplaces, we should just shut the fuck up. Suck it up, princesses.

Well, not on our fucking watch.

Our mothers and grandmothers are watching what we do now, and we won’t fail them as they were so often failed.

Thanks for trusting me with your story, dear D. I hope I was able to comfort you a little.

You’ve motivated me to keep going with this fight, and hopefully I can motivate others to go on, too.

#ToYourBrooms

[Gillian Morrison @MsQuiddity]

@BrittHiggins_ Stay strong. You’re a wonderful woman!

[Gillian Morrison @MsQuiddity]

@melissablake I like your face too!

[Phillip Adams @PhillipAdams_1]

Now our King Prince Charles saluted Kerr’s dismissal of Whitlam. Lest we forget

[Gillian Morrison @MsQuiddity]

@bohemothbibby @Mon4Kooyong Stop being abusive. Just ask your question.

[Gillian Morrison @MsQuiddity]

@DickBranson @cheryl_kernot No she wasn’t, Dick!

[💧simon holmes à court 🦋 @simonahac]

💥 @theage writes: “australians watching the coronation – and millions of other commonwealth citizens – will be asked to cry out and swear allegiance to the king next week”

will you be crying out and swearing allegiance to your king?

https://t.co/FTVNcmwI6p

RT for reach 🙏

[Gillian Morrison @MsQuiddity]

Help Victorians get off gas https://t.co/AbPQATFpNk via @EnviroVic

[L @LisaAnnese]

Wonderful to have the chance to say thank you to @Kate_Jenkins_ at her farewell tonight, for her extraordinary work over the past 7 years, especially Respect@Work. Always so warm & collaborative, it’s been great for @DivCouncilAus to work with you progressing #genderequality.

[Dr Monique Ryan MP @Mon4Kooyong]

Simple wording of the referendum question announced today by @AlboMP

I'll be voting YES to recognize the First Peoples of Australia in our Constitution. Will you join me?

[Sally Rugg @sallyrugg]

**Violently thrown to the ground** by police

[Gillian Morrison @MsQuiddity]

Friday night “fuck off” to all the trolls harrassing women online everywhere https://t.co/5XiKoOdycw

[Gillian Morrison @MsQuiddity]

@RonniSalt I’m a non-gun knowing type and understood. Important to have accuracy for the “in the know” readers so they don’t reject the work as lacking authenticity. The rest of us are coming along for the wonderful ride:))

[Jo Dyer @instanterudite]

Pell: dead. Porter: gone. If Tudge resigns, Louise Milligan can claim a clean sweep. #auspol

[Gillian Morrison @MsQuiddity]

All women and girls should be offered asylum from the Taliban. Some require evacuation more immediately ⁦@AlboMP⁩ @SenatorWong⁩ Knowing you care deeply. https://t.co/2ZJLHeQHcR

[💧simon holmes à court 🦋 @simonahac]

key stats to help you prepare for the onslaught of gaslighting by australia's fossil fuel sector.

• 86% of our coal is exported
• 75% of our gas is exported

the price caps will allow them to continue #WarProfiteering on exports, and still extract healthy profits domestically.

[Kon Karapanagiotidis @Kon__K]

4 women killed by male violence in the last 7 days in Australia

47 women killed in 2022

Thousands more women permanently injured and disabled from abuse.

Tens of thousands of women each year are survivors of male violence.

This is the epidemic #AllMen cannot be silent about

[Gillian Morrison @MsQuiddity]

@BrittHiggins_ With you!!!