Dr. Claire French was born in 1924, Claire Anna Maria Margaretha Wieser, “in the backwoods of Bavaria” as she has described, where “pagan beliefs and superstitions were rife” and “so was Communism amongst the factory workers who lived in her neighbourhood.” She described her mother as “a staunch Lutheran”, her father as “a freethinking artist from the Tyrolean mountains”, and her paternal grandmothers and aunts as “bigotted Catholics”. She has said that she received some of all these ideologies right from her earliest childhood, and that “to this were added the experience of fascist and national socialist authoritarianism during her school years.” In early years she was educated by nuns in Italy. For high school her education was in Germany, where the teachers were partly nazi and partly anti-nazi. She has described her education as “pluralistic in the extreme”.
During the war she was conscripted to the German paramilitary organisation for women working for Tyrolean mountain farmers and later in the military hospital. That year of paramilitary service was conditional for enrolment of women at any German University: educated women were seen as dangerous … the authorities wanted “incubators”, as Claire named it. After the war she studied modern languages and politics at the University of Austria, and in 1945 she was conscipted as interpreter to the military government first by the American and then the French Army Forces. She has said: “In 1951 she finally had enough of Europe and embarked for Australia, where she worked as a housemaid, grape picker, and interpreter and finally as a secretary at Melbourne University. There she started her studies from scratch again as a part time student, graduating in 1956. In that year (an Olympic year she noted), she married Jack French, with whom she had a daughter and two sons. Continue reading “Loss of Good Friend and Elder Claire French by Glenys Livingstone”
My ancestors built great circles of stones that represented their perception of real time and space, and enabled them to tell time: the 
Amongst Celtic peoples, the capacity to speak poetically was a divine attribute, regarded as a transformative power of the Deity, who was named by those peoples as the Great Goddess Brigid: She was a poet, a Matron of Poetry (along with her capacities of smithcraft and healing). And at Delphi in Greece, the oracular priestesses delivered their prophecies in poetic form: Phemonoe invented the poetic meter, the hexameter. And from Sumeria, humans have the first Western written records of literature, which is poetry written by the High Priestess of Inanna, Enheduanna in approximately 2300 B.C.E.. Poetry has been recognised as a powerful modality: Barbara Mor and Monica Sjoo described “poetic thinking” as an wholistic mode, wherein “paradox and ambiguity … can be felt and synthesized. The most ancient becomes the most modern; for in the holographic universe, each ‘subjective’ part contains the ‘objective’ whole, and chronological time is just one aspect of a simultaneous universe” (
The term ‘PaGaian’, which became the title of my work, was conceived in at least two places on the planet and in the opposite hemispheres within a year of each other, without either inventor being aware of the other’s new expression. It was some time before they found each other … one party in Australia, myself having published a book with 
Despite the chocolate bunnies, eggs and toy chickens in the shops along with the coaxing to buy and celebrate Easter at this time in Australia, it is not Spring: Earth here does not seem to co-operate with the Consumer Faith, built as it is around the Northern Hemisphere and dominant Christian calendar. In the Southern Hemisphere it is Autumn, the dark part of the day is lengthening.
Feminism and Religion 