The Women Of Courage
The Age
Friday October 28, 1994
ALL that many people remember of Boadicea is the rather fearsome design of her chariot and the efforts of 20th century cartoonists.
Nobody who ever lived can be dismissed in a single sentence or summed up in a drawing - least of all Queen Boadicea.
The Roman legions in Gaul, and Julius Caesar in ancient Britain, were resisted fiercely by women as well as men. In the first century AD, when Suetonius Paulinus attacked the Druid stronghold on the Isle of Man, his troops were terrified more at the sight of women running about with flaming torches, tossing their dishevelled hair, howling and uttering curses, than by the weapons of the other defenders.
In Eastern Britain, Boadicea, on the death of her husband, Prasutagus, assumed leadership of the Iceni. The tribune Catus confiscated the possessions left to her and her two daughters. When Boadicea threatened military resistance, Catus had her publicly whipped and her daughters brutalised by his soldiers. Boadicea, by the power of vengeful oratory, mobilised an army which carried everything before it, finally capturing London. It took a disciplined Roman force of 10,000, under Suetonius, to dislodge her. In the face of the wholesale slaughter of men and women indiscriminately, Boadicea took her own life.
A more recent heroine is Mary Wade, in whose memory there is a scholarship in Australian history at Wollongong University. Sentenced to death at the Old Bailey, at age 10, for robbing an eight-year-old girl of some clothing, she spent three months in the squalor that was Newgate, before being transported for life to Australia. She gave birth to two children on Norfolk Island in her mid-teens, a third in Sydney later.
Eventually, she married an emancipee carpenter, with whom she farmed successfully, and raised 21 children. In late middle age, she and her husband, having lost their farm and all their possessions in a bushfire, cleared more land in a new area. She died at age 81, highly esteemed, well known and respectably connected.
Aung San Suu Kyi, 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner and democratically elected head of government in Burma, under house arrest for five years, continues to reject the ruling military junta's offer to allow her to leave the country quietly. She was reported recently as having had talks with two of its leaders, whom she had said repeatedly she was willing to meet.
Jan Ruff-O'Herne, from Indonesia, one of thousands of young women forcibly removed from their homes during World War II and confined in Japanese military brothels, carried the story of shame to Japan, its Government and people, demanding apology and reparations. Of the unspeakable horror of her war experiences, she says: ``The one thing they couldn't take from me was my love for God and my faith in Him."
We salute all these women for their courage. We salute also the multitude of others less well known, or never even heard of, who daily confront the best and worst life can bring them.
© 1994 The Age