paint the town red: an ode to my coven

I write this before I gather in two groups of women this weekend. First, dinner and drinks with some of my closest female friends. Second, I hope to be a part of the No More rally happening tomorrow across Australia, protesting against the increasing levels of gendered violence in my country.

I have come to the realisation in the last year exactly how much I relish and recharge from my time in the company of women. It's not just the cliches of rosé-drinking (although there is a very heavy overlap in the Venn diagram with my specific friends and their drinking habits), it's not just the camaraderie. Something fundamentally shifts in the way women behave when men aren't around. What they talk about. Guards go down. Voices get louder, unregulated.

It's been hard to organise drinks with my friends. I think this is our third attempt this year just to find one evening where all of us can gather together in one spot. There are only five of us, yet piecing together when we are all free at once takes an incredible amount of forethought. We use Messenger to pepper each other back and forth with the incantation when is everyone free?

It is like watching planets aligning. Or herding cats. Or lightning striking. No wonder it makes me think of the universal power that allegedly happens with aligning planets.

It is like a gathering of a Coven.

---

We make backyard bonfires, but instead of stirring a cauldron we stir swizzle sticks in margaritas, cast curses in curse words,

burn the patriarchy

burn

burn brighter in each others’ presence, the flickering flames dancing in our eyes, reflecting each others’ brilliance,

witness each other shapeshift into our Final Forms, pat each other’s Familiars,

talk of exchanging middle-age medications, trading uppers for downers

---

Rejoining Girl Guides, and becoming a leader, was one of my first realisations of this behaviour. Why women's-only spaces are vital still. (with the acknowledgement that for many on the gender and nonbinary spectrum, women's-only spaces are the ones that feel the safest for them.) I saw in the energetic girls who whirled around me every Monday night the unruly joy of existing without the male gaze. The freedom to, put it bluntly, to act and sing and move like a dickhead. That it was a safe space to do that in.

When have I needed the Sisterhood, the Coven? The starkest example of that was heavily leaning on them in the early days of my separation. It was a deliberate convocation, a permission to be in their presence and rage for a while. The most interesting thing was watching the Coven signal go up at work: there are, sadly, so many smart, high-performing middle-aged women at my work whose husbands also left them for Vague Reasons as well. There was a nod, a knowing in those conversations, as though I was being let into this sage wisdom.

And then this week, I watched Smoke Sauna Sisterhood. Recommended by a dear friend, I wanted to be immediately be transported to their sauna, birch branch in hand after watching it. It captures conversations by women, about women's experiences in Estonia, and the joy and heartache they keep close to themselves. I cannot explain easily how much I have fallen in love with this group of women (although I'm churning through my thoughts for my review deliberately and slowly). It is not a claustrophobic space, but a space of deep connection

I will have to settle for invoking the Coven under the Northern Lights in 2025 instead.

I raise a glass of overpoured rosé to the accidental times when Covens have gathered, such as the beautiful tour group of women in Tuscany, with whom I celebrated my 40th Birthday on the steps of the Piazza Michelangelo in Florence.

To the Python-esque comedy of the court case against the Ladies' Lounge space in Hobart's Museum of Modern Art: I don't raise my glass of rosé, I get the butlers in the exhibit to pour it for me instead. The audacity of "being upset" and bringing a lawsuit of discrimination against the exhibit by a cis white man is a performance piece in itself. Just give us one fucking space you can't have. and I vow to practice the sashaying of the female law team the next time I have to knock up against the patriarchy. The artist behind the Kirsha Kaechele can be the Supreme of my Coven any day by the way.

You bet I have a Spotify playlist to invoke feminine energy and rage. You bet it's called The Coven.

We gather to protect each other. there is a terse, abrupt anger and fierce, unconditional love that exists in these collectives, that does not exist outside of it. I fucking love my Coven. The power of saying to men This Time Is Not For You. I would do anything for the women in my life. And that includes those who identify as being in my Coven.

My coven is kept sharp with smart women,

with hearts of ripe experienced love to share

full of Hurly Burly lives

who make foul fair

Girls' bathrooms should be a designated UNESCO site of cultural significance. But that's an entire post, or poem, for another day.

Poetry excerpts from The Coven, by me, c 2023.