It's a bitterly cold Sunday evening. The foyer of the Capitol Theatre swarms with women. We all clutch at our tickets, printed with 'From Freidan to Feministas', with gloved hands. In the toilets, we jiggle up and down, waiting patiently for all the other feminists to finish peeing.
Once in the theatre, awe-struck under Walter Burley Griffin's honeycomb ceiling, my friend, my mother and I sit and suck toffees, waiting for the panel to start.
I look at all the other women filing in, taking their seats. Everyone seems to be wearing dark colours, the aisles awash with charcoal grey and navy blue, various shades of black, with here and there a dash of red lipstick.
The panel goes for an hour and a half. Monica Dux speaks first, about how feminism is in trouble, about her view of what she calls the great feminist denial.
Then Catharine Lumby gets up and disagrees, sort of, with everyone and everything, only tries to make it look like she's not. Intimates that we, the audience, are all white middle-class women, and that the media is obsessed with the death of feminism, and that we should all get over ourselves. Can I have another toffee? I ask my friend. Not yet, she says. You just had one, if you have another one now it'll give you a stomach-ache.
Emily Maguire's next: pretty and bouncy and supposedly representing the face of young feminists everywhere. I think of the Sylvia Plath poem about mushrooms, and I can't quite make the two feelings fit together, this upbeatness on stage and the quiet march of the fungi.
Emily Maguire says that young feminists are everywhere. My g-string's giving me a wedgie, and I shift uncomfortably. Can I have another toffee, now? I ask my friend.
In the applause at the end of Emily Maguire's talk I scrabble to get the toffee's wrapper off so no one will hear the noise.
Susan Maushart leans against the podium and says that when she was in Sunday school in the States one of the nuns told her that all men were brothers, and that she'd put up her hand and asked if that meant that all women were sisters.
The nun had thought about it and had said that yes, she guessed that was what it meant, and Susan Maushart says that she was very excited by this and that she