Rosemary Williams

I was born in Hobart in 1952 — the only daughter of a local shopkeeper. Despite the 'scoffs and scorns and contumelious taunts' (Shakespeare) about my birthplace, I am proud to be Tasmanian.

In the 1960's, Tasmanian football stars, like Baldock, played with the St Kilda Football Club in the Victorian Football League. So when my family moved to Melbourne in 1966, it was in the normal order of things that we would follow St Kilda. The Grand Final of that year still stands as the most elated day of my life.

I was as happy as a lark. On that day St Kilda won its one and only premiership defeating Collingwood by the narrowest possible margin of one point. If my claim of it as life's most exalted moment seems shabby, it was this football final that changed the course of my existence. For in its dying minutes my father kept repeating: 'St Kilda's lost it now, Rose. We've lost it now'. But, dad was mistaken and I, his child, understood for the first time that authority could be gloriously in error.

This understanding placed me between the devil and the dark blue sea as a Catholic secondary school student. I had toughed it out at St Mary's College, Hobart, but Kilmaire College, Melbourne, was to prove my undoing and I was turfed out of there in 1969. The harshest penalty accompanying my expulsion — so I thought then — was that my photo and name were purposively excluded from the official team photo of the A-Grade netball team. As a team member, I had played in the 1969 Final, defeating Genazzano, a much more prestigious and wealthier school than Kilmaire. We were proud of ourselves...if not for long in
my case.

I fared much better at university where freedom and anonymity did my heart good. I completed degrees in arts, social work, education, educational psychology and theology at the University of Melbourne, Monash University and the Melbourne College of Divinity. I won the Norma Parker Award for Social Work and the Stanton Archer Prize in Biblical Studies. My Masters thesis — a history of St Mary's Hall at the University of Melbourne - was published in History of Education Review. I have published in a broad array of journals and magazines,
including, The Australian Dictionary of Biography, Australian Social Work, Pacifica, Interlogue, Australian Psychological Society News, Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Student Services Association, Journal of the Catholic Education Conference, Parity, City Streets, Messenger and Madonna.

I am a Member of the College of Counselling Psychologists of the Australian Psychological Society and I am employed by the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. My practice of psychological counselling there depends upon me entering into the darkness of those who come before me. Like a tolling bell down through the years, clients have complained about being blamed for their own suffering by friends, family and casual acquaintances. This phenomenon lead me to write my first book, Recasting the Stone : Human Suffering and the Business
of Blame.The book critiques the theology, psychology and economics that bring blame, censure and reproach to human pain.

Homeless women are given a voice in Recasting the Stone for in 1991 I went to live as a volunteer psychologist-in-residence at Regina Coeli, a community of homeless women in North Melbourne. There I write psychological reports, do some counselling, manage the house one night a week and I am (since 1989) the founding and continuing Editor of Taking it Like a Woman — a quarterly newsletter of the women's own writings. In 1999 I won the Elaine Dignan Award — awarded by
the Women and Psychology Group of the Australian Psychological Society. The citation reads in part: '...In Taking it Like a Woman, Rosemary has encouraged the often marginalised women who live in these communities to have a voice...Reading a sample of the newsletters was a truly inspiring experience...Her book...strongly argues against the "blame the victim" mentality of our society today'.

The homeless women, in fact, give me far more than I give them. Their radical openness about life calls me to claim my shadow side — the despised quarter of my being, holding all the attributes I dislike and disown. For example, when our women are depressed, they go to bed. They decline to get up. Over the past months, I have been depressed myself and the women-in-bed have unnerved me. Why?
Because they point to that part of me that wants to go to bed, too, and never get up. That part of me that wants to give up on life and love. I don't want to own these feelings as my own. Yet I am incomplete without them and I relate within the legacy of that loss. Can you see then that this is the gift homeless women bring — they reveal the truth about ourselves to ourselves?