THE FEELING OF INFINITY
by Elizabeth Reid

It is a great honour for me to be here today to present the Fourth Kenneth Myer Lecture and I would like to thank the Friends of the National Library for extending me this invitation in this year of celebration for the Library. It is a special honour both because of those who preceded me and because of the tradition of social commentary which has been taken up in these lectures. 

The title of this talk is taken from last year's lecture¹. It comes from a discussion of the role of the imagination in education in Mary Warnock's book, Imagination². Dr. McCaughey quoted: 

The belief that there is more in our experience of the world than can possibly meet the unreflecting eye, that our experience is significant for us, and worth the attempt to understand it ... this kind of belief may be referred to as the feeling of infinity. 

The quote continued: 

It is a sense ... that there is always more to experience, and more in what we experience than we can predict. Without some such sense, ... human life becomes perhaps not actually futile or pointless, but experienced as if it were.

Without some such sense, one might add, human life is stultified, lived as if human agency is without purpose, with change most likely experienced as imposed. 

The sense that there is always more to experience and more in what we experience than we can foresee leads to an openness to oneself, to one's life and to the world around one. it leads to a sense of wonder, a sense of the unboundedness of the life that there is to live, and it creates the possibility of empathy and compassion. 

The belief that there is more in our experience than can possibly meet the unreflecting eye and that it is worth the attempt to understand it has informed my work, particularly that on the quality of women's lives, on the HIV epidemic and on human development. The processes of introspection and reflection inherent in this belief and thus in the feeling of infinity must, I believe, inform social action. It is what gives it a groundedness in reality whilst at the same time creating the possibility of change.  

Mary Warnock argues that instilling this belief, and so creating the possibility of experiencing this feeling of infinity, is the main purpose of education. On reading this claim in Dr. McCaughey' Lecture, I looked back over my own education. Whilst the formal education systems that I experienced certainly played a part, in particular, my grounding in philosophy, there were two other critical influences in my early life. 

The first was my local library. During my high school days, my local library was a part of the extended library system from which this great library was born twenty five years ago. it was housed nearby in more humble surroundings and the Molonglo River had not yet covered our hockey fields ad the lucerne paddocks. But here it was that I found that diversity, those dissenting voices, that cultural heterogeneity that Dr. Coombs³ and Dr. McCaughey have argued are so essential to the well-being of a society. It opened an undreamed-of world to me of complexity and difference in human nature and in the human condition that led to a greater knowledge of self. 

Here it was that I read my way through the English Novel. Using one of the library's reference volumes as a guide, I started, as it did, with Mandeville's Fable of the Bees and read on. I can still feel the sheer joy I felt then in front of an unknown but anticipated author's work, knowing that I was about to start with his or her first book and read my way through to the last. Each book in this body of literature, and in the others that I was subsequently to read, contributed to this emotional sense of the infinitude or the inexhaustibleness of experience. The mediator was the imagination, what Mary Warnock calls "the owner in the human mind which is at work in our every day perceptions of the world, and is also at work in our thoughts about what is absent ... emotions as much as from the reason, from the heart as much as from the head."⁴ 

My parents were the other critical influence in the way this belief in the richness of experience has been expressed in my life. They taught me that the process of reflecting on experience, as does the capacity for prophetic vision, brings with it a responsibility to act. Throughout my high school day and later, whilst I read my way through the moral and spiritual conditions of other times and other people, our family conversations abounded in the tensions and anguish of our own lives: whether it was the responsibility of government to financially support Catholic parish schools, the split in the construction industry union, whether there was any place or role for women within the Labour Party, whether individual conscience or movement allegiance should determine one's actions, what was our responsibility, as a family and as a country, in the face of world hunger and poverty and so on. 

Then I way my parents leave the house and go out, separately or together, to try to bring about the world in which they wished us to live. I listened to reports of inspiring or boring speeches, of tumultuous or productive meetings, of victories and of defeats. I stood outside polling booths. I hovered around the edges of animated meetings and agitated telephone conversations. Not only did my parents reflect upon and attempt to understand what was in need of changing or crating in our lives, but they also reflected upon what was wrong or in need of changing in the ways they tried to bring about the changes they wanted. Reflection and action were essentially interwoven. 

In these ways, I was introduced to what I would like to call utopian thinking, its value and its imperative to action⁵. What I mean by the phrase "utopian thinking" is not a vision of some future society dislocated from and unconnected with the present. Nor is it, like most utopian communities which have been set up in history, the delineation of an alternative utopia occupying the spaces, the cracks and crevices, allowed to it by the status quo. Rather it is a critical utopia calling into question the assumptions, norms and values of everyday life and expressing the desire for a better way of living now, through an understanding of a different kind of society in which that way of life would be possible. All utopian thinking presupposes a belief in some degree of human influence over social and political organisation. My parents showed me that such a belief was well founded; and, as Luce Irigaray was later to argue⁶, that the value of utopian thinking can be to change the present, rather than to programme the future. 

Their experiences in social transformation, as recounted around the dinner table, also made me aware that the process of achieving the desired changes may be frustrating, anarchic, venal, exhilarating, funny, anomalous, turbulent, empowering or disempowering, but it was always complex. In retrospect, the determinants were usually intricate and entangled so that it was often impossible to single out a unique intervention, or to identify particular agents or bearers of change, or even to claim uniformity of values or motives amongst those who worked actively for the achieved change. 

I was, thus, quite well formed for the life I was to lead when I set out on its journey. I should not be surprising that, in looking back over this journey so far, the questions which arise, and upon which I wish to reflect a little tonight, are those touching upon how shared visions of a better life are actualized. How do our essentially individual reflections on the nature of our livers and experiences cohere into a force capable of transforming our societies? 

What is this force for change which is such an essential precondition to social transformation and how does it come about? Listen to how it is expressed in a recent poem entitled Up Sister by a young, black American women, Ruth Forman⁷:

Jus get your beautiful black behind
Up off that cold Armstrong tile 

Don't give up
don't give up jus cuz you don't see no where to go
We have faith in you 

You are brilliant and bold
like nobody I have ever seen before
How the hell you think you got this far anyway? 

Can't do it no more huh
too tired...to achin
to arch to the ceilin one more time
Jus to find you back on the floor tomorrow 

Girl don't you know that floor got
the change that fell out my pocket
when I was huggin my knees by the corner last night?
And Bessie's birth control
and Billie's Marlboros
and Muscarat and matches and mace
and everything else you could find
in a woman's pockets that fall out
when she collapses with a hundred pound sigh 

But you know how we leave that floor?
Some hand reaches in that darkness and pulls you up by the waist
Even when you don't want to go
cause it has faith in you
See you got to get up cuz you're US
and when you fall WE get bruised 

Sometimes you can't do it by yourself
but you got a hand reachin out right now
Don't you know
you got a hundred hands
from every single Black woman who claims that floor 

Yes you'll find yourself here again
But for now
jus worry bout gettin your beautiful black behind up
off that cold Armstrong tile

And don't worry about that lipstick sittin by your corner
I'll get it next time I'm here.

The force for change becomes not only the "arch to the ceiling: of each black woman and of all black women, but also the "hands that reaches in that darkness and pulls you up by the waist", the "hundred hands/from every single Black woman". The collective will is not only the will to do, which may be individual, but also the solidarity, the togetherness, the reaching out to the others for "you got to get up cuz you're Us/and when you fall We get bruised". 

In reading this poem, I was struck by how this imagery could apply to other groups, other women, HIV-infected gay men, other movements and groups with a strong sense of group identity and purpose. Those of whom it holds true ar, in some sense, off-centre. This imagery does not seem to fit those who exercise power, who gain from the status quo. Our images of them are more individualistic. The do not need, or would spurn, a hand that reaches out to pull them up. 

However, when I try to pin down who they are that gain from the status quo, to name them or to give them faces, thy always seem to be someone or somewhere else. The centre, the place from which power is exercised, is an often hidden place. Yet we know that those who inhabit this place, or these places, wield a real and undeniable power. They are often unnameable, identified by their absence from the imagery of solidarity, from the voices of dissent, from the barricades. Those who have a will to change are those who can imagine and want a better world already embodies that vision. 

I was also struck in the poem by how the feeling of togetherness had been crated not through opposition, through the creation of the other, but in the solidarity of a common purpose. It set me wondering whether a collective force for change or a collective identity can only be formed in opposition, in conditions of oppression or estrangement, or whether it can be forged out of collective action, and of a common purpose or shared response. 

How then is the collective will to transform stimulated? Let us look at some examples drawn from the worlds in which I have worked. 

In A Quiet Revolution⁸, an important study of women's education in rural Bangladesh, Marty Chen describes the efforts of the Bangladesh Rural Achievement Committee (BRAC) to increase the rate of female literacy in certain rural areas. the project began from a conviction that literacy is important in improving the quality of these secluded women's lives. It was seen as closely linked with other values such as economic and personal autonomy and self-respect. This conviction did not derive from the local traditions of the villages, where women had in fact little autonomy and no experience of education. It derived from the experiences and reflections of the development workers themselves, who were mostly national but from many different socio-economic backgrounds. 

It was, however, a conviction with a long history in Bengali society. Perhaps the first feminist utopia of this century, one that predated by a decade the much better known feminist utopian novel Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, was published by a Bengali social reformer in 1905. This provocative story of purdah reversal, Sultana's Dream⁹, along with the many other essays and articles written by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain Greatly influenced upper-class attitudes, and later middle class attitudes, to women's right to education and employment. Seventy-five years later, the value of education, self esteem and economic autonomy for women was widely acknowledged in Bangladesh but not by these rural communities. 

In the first phase of the BRAC programme, the development workers went directly to the rural villages with their ideas of literacy and its importance, offering adult literacy materials borrowed from another national programme, and trying to motivate the women of the communities they entered to take them on. They found that general talk of the value of literacy and of self-respect did not interest the women. Women found the borrowed literacy materials boring and irrelevant to their lives. They did not see how literacy would help them. Even the accompanying vocational training was resisted since it focussed on skills for which there was little demand in that area. No will for change arose. No will among the village women to reflect upon the convictions of the workers. 

Failure made BRAC rethink their approach. They never abandoned their basic conviction that literacy was important for these women. This concoction, based on wide experience and on their vision of what these women's lives might be, still seemed sound. On the other hand, they recognized that far more attention to the lives and thoughts of the women involved would be necessary if they were going to come up with an understanding of what literacy might do and be for them. To do this, the women had to come to believe that their daily experiences were significant and worth the attempt, by themselves and others, to understand them. 

BRAC created cooperative groups where the village women and the development workers could explore together the women's experiences and sense of life. This led both the women and the development workers to a much more complex understanding of the situation, as they grasped the network of relationships within which the women had to function and the specific dimensions of their poverty and cultural constraints. At the same time, the women grasped the alternative possibilities for their lives and began to define for themselves a set of aspirations and strategies for change. The development workers, the outsiders, were the facilitators of these changes, crating a place for reflection, for questioning, for dreaming, a space within the system to challenge it. 

The result, which continues, has been a slow and complex evolution in the role of women in the villages. In one fishing village, the women decided to each save a handful of rice from their weekly ration, to pool and sell it. Within a few years, they had saved $2,000 and were able to lend it to the men of the village to buy better equipment. Other women's groups have invested in new power pumps for the village or seed for the fields. These women, as well as the development workers, are now experiencing what has here been call the feeling of infinity, a sense of the unboundedness of life. 

Let us look now at an example closer to home: how there came to be a collective will among the women of Australia to take control of their lives, to demand the services they needed, to express their priorities electorally as well as through collective action and to insist on respect and the right to independence. 

It is hard now to recall or to imagine the culture within which women in post-war Australia wrote their lives onto the palms of their hands. It was not that women then did not know what they would like to change about their lives. They did. They were not isolated form the world and the repetitive and time-consuming nature of so many of their tasks - making beds, washing up - left them a great deal of time for reflection. They understood the nature of their lives and its determinants. They just did not collectively believe that they could change them. 

The emergence of the women's liberation movement in Australia in the late 60s followed, in 1972, by the election f the Whitlam Government was to change this, radically and seemingly irreversibly. 

The women's liberation movement concerned itself with the restructuring of Australian society and of personal relationships. It saw itself as a revolutionary movement and its concerns for reforms were articulated within that ideology. Its demands included the redistribution of access t wage employment and to services, not to wage-earners nor to households, the traditional concern of the trade union movement, but to individuals; the dismantling of the dichotomy between the personal and the political; and an end to the violence towards women which so tragically characterized and continues to characterize our society. 

When the Labour Government was elected, it did not have a programme for women in its platform. Thus, in the first thirteen months following my appointment as Whitlams's adviser on women, I travelled around Australia talking to women about their lives and the changes they wanted in them. the women who spoke out came from all backgrounds: migrant, Aboriginal, rural, elderly, suburban, working, single, wealthy, married, poor. We talked wherever women were: in clothing and footwear factories, cleaning hospitals, in housing estates, on farms, in schools, at women's meetings, in goals, in universities. I was deluged with letters from women. In a short while I was receiving more letters than anyone in government other than the Prime Minister. 

On the basis of these women's reflections and demands, we formulated a set of principles to guide the Whitlam Government's programme for women. Its aim was to give all women the opportunity freely to choose, and to live, the kind of life that best suited them. For this choice to be truly free, women had to be conscious of how society's expectations had shaped, if not determined, their choices to date. To achieve this, the nature and extent of sexism in our society first had to be understood, the changed. 

In the intervening years since then, the women's liberation movement matured, bore fruit and died. The Whitlam government, Its commitment and vision are ling past. What does lives on is the child of that movement and those times, what might be called a movement of women, the creation of collective will for change among the women of Australia¹⁰. 

This movement of women is characterized by a widespread refusal among women to accept denigrating attitudes or behaviour, a belief that their lives can be changed, much greater knowledge of how to bring about those changes, and a range of support systems, personal, economic and social, which offer help to women in that process of change. This movement of women has not led to a revitalization of traditional women's organisations nor to the establishment of a nationally unified women's liberation movement; rather it has led to a fragmentation and diversification of efforts. It has evolved and moved out from its centre. Its natural structures now are networks. The movement of women has strengthened each women individually and given her the knowledge that elsewhere, in her family, in her office, in her factory or laboratory, there is a background of support. Women now support women. 

It is because this collective will of women to better their lives exists that governments subsequent to the Whitlam government have been unable to completely dismantle the reforms for women that started in that era. The movement of women can, and does form time to time, mobilize itself around issues, although activism is not it's main raison d'etre. The refusal to tolerate any longer a gender discriminatory legal system is a recent example of such mobilization. The outcome of the last Federal election is because of it. The plethora of women in the Arts, in journalism, in our parliaments is part of it. The ABC's Playschool has been transformed by it. The women appointed to Boards and Councils and recruited into the public sector contribute importantly to it. 

Because there is now a movement of women in Australia, there are certain things that women need no longer tolerate. There have been changes that women will not allow to slip backwards and women's expectations of themselves and of others ar maturing. Women now have hope and the collective determination and knowledge to do something about it. This movement of women is low key. I is not a highly visible phenomenon. Few, other than women, often remark it. But is there, and it is the yeast of our society. It makes me proud to be an Australian. 

Like in the villages of Bangladesh, changes in Australian society have been slow and complex, in some areas more so than in others. They have been marked by gradual shifts in what people think to be thinkable and achievable within their concrete and particular reality. This slowness and complexity of change is sadly highlighted, for example, by the extent of violence to children by both men and women of which we are becoming increasingly aware. An analysis of its causes will, I believe, highlight how few changes have occurred in the way our culture constructs masculinity, how the concept of masculinity had structured the concept of family in social policy and shaped relation within families. It will also highlight the gap that exist between the social transfers that vulnerable households receive and what they need to survive and the coping strategies women adopt to lessen that gap. In 1988, social security transfers accounted for only eight per cent of GDP, compared to the OECD average of 15.9 per cent, making Australia's spending in this women's collective will for change, changes in societal values, beliefs and dreams occur over the long term, incrementally and slowly, for a common purpose must be constructed between men and women and among people with differing and conflicting visions of what a better world might be. 

Can we answer the question: what in particular brought this movement of women about? Not, I think, the limited gains achieved through the struggle for any one particular reform. Indeed, in a frustrating way, small and essential gains in child care, in the abolition of university fees, in abortion law reform, in equal opportunity laws an so on have provided sites for backlash, backsliding and challenge. A great deal of time has been spent over the ensuing decades trying to protect them, which may have dissipated the energy and commitment required for more radical social transformation. 

What was important, I think, was the importance placed by both the women's movement and the Whitlam Government on creating the possibility that gender be differently constructed, on challenging, albeit tentatively, the hierarchical structures of power and on seeking for ways to achieve the required changes in the way men and women interact in all spheres, public and private, of women's lives. 

Perhaps, however, the tradition of differentiation between reform and revolution is ill-conceived and it was the whole extensive tapestry of changes, its richness of colour and pattern, and no particular parts of its that made the difference. Just as patterns of oppression hang together as whole structures, so too must the responses.  

As the forces shaping contemporary society become more complex, we seem to be faced with two seemingly opposing truths. Firstly, we are faced with the increasing difficulty of presenting adequate maps of the present which would enable us to identify agents and motivators of social transformation, to identify critical points of interventions and to create images of a connected bus transformed world. The constituencies of oppression and of common purpose are increasingly diversified and seem less capable of affirming a clear and shared set of values. Secondly, whatever we do, in the words of an important Australian cultural critic, Meaghan Morris, "society as (we) know it will likely collapse, or transformed unimaginably, during (our) lifetime"¹¹. 

In the worlds where I listen, question and reflect now, both these truths would seem to hold. 

It is difficult not to have an apocalyptic view of the imminent future when one works in communities where perhaps twenty per cent of the adult population are infected with the HIV Virus. Or thirty per cent. Or fifty per cent. Where already small businesses are folding because so many personnel are sick or dead. Where agricultural production has started to shift towards less labour intensive crops or mining production levels are threatened. Where perhaps eighty per cent of the country's trained airline pilots are infected and similar per cent of the air crews. Where senior bureaucrats are being buried almost on a weekly basis and drivers and secretaries each day. Where there are increasing numbers of young children and the elderly left without care, love and financial support. Where women continue to live the paralysis of powerlessness but now the price is the daily fear of their own infection and that of their children. And, perhaps worse still, one sees the condition for rapid spread in many other communities throughout the world. 

The complexity and the global interlinkedness of the determinants of daily life not only make social analysis and social transformation problematic but contribute to and are affected by the spread of the virus. The factors which predispose individuals and populations to infection include the lifestyles of the rich and the poor, sexual norms and social values, the structure of the labour force and the legal, ethical and human rights environment. Poverty, wealth, power, disempowerment, subordination, indebtedness, to mention just a few, and the HIV epidemic are essentially interlinked conditions. A country's development choices and imposed structural adjustments, along with its cultural, religious and social mores, will influence the speed and pattern of spread. In turn, where the virus spreads will determine how the epidemic will affect national development, weaken the national capacity to respond and worsen the conditions which facilitate the spread of infection. 

It is this epidemic then capable of, and in the process of, undermining forty years of development efforts? Or is it, perhaps, forcing us to question the very basis of the dominant and accepted approach to development? It is it making stark what Michael Watts has called the Eurocentric vision that has occupied the mental space in which people dream about development?¹². Or, to put it in the words of an Australian women's group, ArramAieda¹³, in a song entitled Tell Me Now: 

It is it only a white man's dreaming
That you're listening to?
It is it only a white man's dreaming
Getting through to you? 

Those arguing that development is the invasion or imposition of a Eurocentric vision would claim that development has rarely broken free from linear notions of growth, form the view that economic growth constitutes the heart of social development and from a close affinity with teleological views of history, science and progress in the west. Development, on this view, partakes of modernity's universalism. It is devoid of heterogeneity, without ambivalence, without other voices. 

To begin to answer these questions, let us look more closely at the phenomenon of this epidemic. We now can identify the characteristics of communities and nations vulnerable to rapid diffusion of the virus; those so identified are often those that would rank high on an index of development. The identifying characteristics of such places include¹⁴: 

• economically vital areas, cross-roads and market towns, for example, and areas with mobile populations, inflows or outflows, short or long term movements, socially or economically motivated;

• communities and cultures which do not value women, the indicators of which would include the extent of violence, illicit abortions and maternal mortality, and which tolerate or encourage certain patterns of sexual behaviour, particularly in men;

• socio-economically stratified communities, whether by wealth, power or autonomy;

• communities lacking basic social services, in particular health care;

• communities without strong traditions of respect and concern for others: and

• communities with little capacity for reflection and change. 

Sadly, communities, even nations, fulfilling many or all of these conditions are everywhere in the world. In the light of this, can the prophetic vision of the despair, destitution and social and economic disintegration which this epidemic carries within itself be called into question? 

It can, and it is, by a striking feature of this epidemic: that wherever the virus spreads, communities respond, supporting, caring for and ministering to those affected and seeking to prevent further infection and reinfection. The epidemic creates its own agents and motivators of change and the collective will to act arises quickly within affected communities. We have seen this within our own country, in gay communities, among sex workers, in Aboriginal communities, among drug users and ex-users, but it is a global phenomenon. These two characteristics of the epidemic constitute the basis of the hope and the belief that the epidemic and its potential ravages can be overcome. 

Let me tell you just two to the many stories I have heard in other places so that you can better imagine the various settings of this response; but remember also that all places have their stories. 

In a village in rural Uganda, a woman's husband fell sick. he was young, active, not of the age where sickness and death traditionally visited. But the villagers had heard of this new sickness and were fearful. They did not go near her house. She struggled alone to care for him, to work in her fields, to care for her children, to gather the firewood and water, to prepare the meals. He died. 

As time passed, the sickness began to visit other households and she noticed that they too were left alone. She knew what it was like. She started gathering some extra firewood or water and leaving it outside their houses. Then she started visiting the families, sitting and talking to the other women, helping out. The other villagers watched. Their fear lessened. They started talking about these new things, how this sickness comes, what they could do about it. They started visiting the households where it was. News spread and, when they went to the market or elsewhere, people from other villages started asking them about their fears. Then they hear about an organisation in Kampala which came to villages and helped them understand all these things. They asked them to come and help them. 

Some years before this, in Kampala, Noerine Kaleeba had had a call from London, from the British Council. her husband, Chris was sick and close to death, would she like to come and see him for he did not have much longer to live. She flew to England and went straight to the hospital. Chris, the told her, had AIDS. She was to learn what this meant, not only from the caring hospital staff but also from his buddy and the local network of support that had already mobilised to help him. The nursed him back to health and Noerine and Chris returned to Kampala. There they discovered a number of others also so diagnosed and they started coming together to provide similar support to each other. 

After Chris' death, Noerine started TASO, The AIDS Support Organization, so that support in living positively with infection and illness could be provided to the ever increasing numbers of people in need of it. TASO provided a haven for those in need of someone to ease their pain, to talk to about their fears for themselves and their families, in need of shelter, of companionship. Gradually these people gained the confidence to speak out about being infected and so began to lessen the fear and denial in the community outside their haven. People began to know about TASO's work and to support it. Other centres were established and the programme broadened to include assistance to communities to begin discussing how they might protect themselves form further infection and provide care and support for those already infected. And so it was that the widow/s village heard about TASO and invited them to come and help their village. 

Through the initiatives of countless such individuals and groups, a language of optimism is being developed: an affirmation of the possibililty of behaviour change, of the centrality of car, respect and compassion and of the interrelatedness of these two. This language is developing within affected communities as they learn to live with the presence of the virus. As yet it is only expressed in their stories and used in their own search for understanding. It is little reflected in public policy nor has it displaced the discourse of interventions, of telling them what to do and what to use. This language rejects the dichotomy between prevention and care, knowing that at the basis of each is respect for self and others, that knowing someone infected or caring for the children or a wife left unsupported after a death brings, as its unsolicited gift, changes in attitude and behaviour. It is a language of process, of the creation of a collective will to act, rather than of intervention, of capabilities rather than of constraints, of people as responsible actors rather that of people an manipulable objects. It is, surprisingly perhaps, a language of celebration. 

What can these stories of the epidemic teach us about development practice, that is, about social change? 

Because this epidemic is s complex and entirely new phenomenon for which there are no accepted paradigms and approaches, people and their responses are necessarily being placed at the centre of the analysis. We identify points and types of interventions by watching and learning from what people are actually doing. This enables responses to the epidemic to reflect and build upon the complex nature of people's lives and responsibilities and to address their needs in cohesive manner. It recognizes, and accepts, that little is simple in the face of this epidemic but that, nevertheless, simple gestures can turn its tide. 

It shows that group identity may arise outside of conditions of oppression. Collective action can empower communities, bring with it self esteem and a sense of identity, a will for father change. 

Recognizing that people and their communities are at the centre of the response to the epidemic leads to the strengthening of their capacity to respond in an effective and sustainable manner. It stimulates interactive processes within couples, families, groups, communities or nations which build consensus on the need to respond, which lead to changes in norms and values, especially relating to sexuality and gender, and which ensure a sense of ownership of, and empowerment through, the response. 

It identifies the role of the outsider in such communities as that of the facilitator of a process of introspection and reflection, of a process of making the invisible present, of creating the possibility of an ethic of compassion and concern, and of ensuring community access to the required goods and services. 

It teaches us that the energy, vision and commitment of these individuals and communities can be transformed into an active force for change, a force which can transcend the particular and permeate nations. But for this to be sustained, new patterns of relationships must be entered into between men and women, between those directly affected by the epidemic and those not yet so affected and between communities and governments and a new global contract among nations will be required. 

Do these insights point the way to a radically new approach to development? Is it not inherent in the two earlier examples?

These are the questions that I struggle with in my work. I know at least one thing that is wrong with the assertion that we are faced with the increasing difficulty of presenting adequate maps of the present which would enable us to identify ages of change and points of intervention. It is the pronouns "we" and "us", the location of agency. There is no centre to the web of responses. Wherever the virus spreads, people respond, as they do in some way or other to all that happens in their lives. It is the sharing and the learning from these responses that become critical and this is a network or clustering activity.

I watch gender relations being unpicked and reconstructed as women negotiate their lives with their husbands and other sexual partners. I watch the concept of "expertise" being rewritten as we learn from Noerine and the village widow, as they become the experts. I watch the claim that the discursive field of development is cartography of power and knowledge¹⁵ being reinterpreted as a landscape of empowrment through responding as the way people actually shape their lives is placed at the centre of the analysis. I see this as I watch the women of Australia knitting and quiling while the talk in our public spaces is about problems, the problem of our stock-piled wool. I listen to the talk of the African Crisis and yet I know that, for example, in the villages of Zaire where I spent many years, the coping strategies witll be flourinshing as people find ways of continuing theidr daily lives. I also know that, at the same time, the transport and communicatin systems athat should link them to the centres of economic and political activity, to the outside world, to the so-called center, no longer function.

Can people create their own images for the mental space in which the dreams about develoment occur? This is what is happening with the HIV epidemic and soon, in many communities, as it affects every facet of human life, it will be indistinguishable from life.

Will these changes occur in time to save us from the ravages of this epidemic? I do not know. But I do know that working within the epidemic gives me a renewed sense of the goodness of human nature, as well as of the pain of the human condition. It challenges me to rethink the role of the outsider, of the nautre and the catlysts of social change, and confirms once again that theire is always more to experience and more in what we experincence athan we can predict. Along with its distress and grief comes a feeling of infinity.

ENDNOTES

1. Dr. Davis McCaughey, " 'Repining Restlessness': Diversity and Dissent", Kenneth Myer Lecture III, Friends of the National Library of Australia, Canberra, December 1992, p.6.

2. Mary Warnock, Imagination, Faber and Faber, London, 1976, p.196

3. Dr. H.C. Coombs, "Aborigines Made Visible: From 'Humbug' To Politics", Friends of the National Library of Australia, Canberra, October 1991

4. Op cit. p.196.

5. My thinking on these issues benefitted greatly from reading Ruth Levitas, "The Future of Thinking about the Future:, in Jon Bird et al., Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, Routledge, London, 1993, pp. 257-266.

6. Discussed in Margaret Whit ford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, Routledge, London, 1991, p.14.

7. Ruth Forman, We Are The Young Magicians, Barnard New Women Poets Series, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, pp. 82-83.

8. Martha Chen, A Quiet Revolution: Women in Transition in Rural Bangladesh, Schenkman, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1986.

9. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Sultana's Dream and Sections from The Secluded Ones, The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, New York, 1988.

10. This is elaborated on in Elizabeth Reid, "The Child of our Movement: A Movement of Women", in Jocelynne A. Scutt, Different Lives, Penguin, Australia, 1987, pp. 10-20.

11. Meaghan Morris, "Future Fear", in Jon Bird et al. (eds.), Mapping The Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, Routledge, London, 1993, pp. 30-46.

12. Michael J. Watts, "Development I: power, knowledge, discursive practice", Progress in Human Geography 17,2 (1993) pp. 257-272.

13. ArramAieda, More Ways Than one, Natural Symphonies NS 731 Compact Disc, Australia, 1992.

14. Elizabeth Reid, "Approaching the HIV Epidemic", HIV and Development Programme, United Nations Development Programme, New York, 1993.

15. Watts, op cit., p.265.

 Biographical Note

Elizabeth Reid is a Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Resident Representative in Papua New Guinea. Before joining UNDP, she worked closely with community groups working within the HIV epidemic in Australia and was responsible for the formulation of Australia's first National HIV/AIDS Strategy. She has extensive experience in development theory and practice, including programme design and evaluation in Africa, Asia, the Pacific, the Middle East, and Latin America and the Caribbean.