Thank you for the warm welcome I received from the lesbians who attended the Seahorse Project conference in Sydney on 23-24 August 2025. What a wonderful surprise and an honour to find myself, on the Sunday, after the keynote speaker, Susan Hawthorne, had told you her story, to hear some of you share your stories over lunch. It was an even better surprise to discover so many of you are proud lesbians.

I very much regret not being able to converse with you in your own language because I have not continued to develop my Mandarin language skills, from when I used to teach English to (mainlyPRC) university students. However, I do hope that any of you who come to this website can find ideas that inspire and support you while you are living in Australia.

It is my dream that some of you might come together through CoAL to carry on the important work of breaking down barriers created by our differences (culture, language, age, ability, etc) while you live here in Australia. Lesbians and other women are experiencing difficult times in this country, too. Legal changes make it a crime for lesbians to gather in our own spaces, play sport together, support each other and maintain our culture, or even survive the mass ‘censorship’ here that stops us from saying that a woman is defined by her biology (not some imagined gender identity) .

CoAL encourages any lesbian to make a contribution to CoAL and to this website by joining and becoming a member. Email us at admin@coal.org.au for a  membership application form.

I especially hope some of you can add more Asian lesbian herstory to our lesbian timeline (see https://coal.org.au/lesbian-herstory/). So far, it uses English language sources that are also Eurocentric and the page could be very much enhanced with the addition of lesbian knowledge from other languages and cultures such as yours.

Any other contributions you can make to enrich this website and make it more meaningful to all lesbians would be very much appreciated. I will shortly add content to our website drawing from seminars by WDI  such as Ann and Alice on ‘Political lesbianism in China‘ and ‘China Lesbian feminists interview with Sheila Jeffreys’. But we neeed more like this (English translations of Seahorse Project podcasts perhaps?)

Contact us at admin@coal.org.au.

in sisterhood and solidarity

Viviane Morrigan

member of CoAL National Committee

Image: Ellen Shumsky Christopher (2016), ‘All Women Are Lesbians’