As you probably all know, Freda had a pretty good classical education. She may have decried Ruyton as essentially a finishing school for girls but the education she received there alongside the intellectual immersion that was an integral part of her family background, and then diving into philosophy and literature at Melbourne University, meant that she was, by any measure, highly educated and she was one of the most learned women I had ever met.

And she never stopped. There is this fallacy that as you get older you close off, you stop learning. If there was ever a corrective to that fallacy, it was Freda. (That couldn’t be said for some of her opinions. As you are all probably aware, she had very strong opinions about a range of things and very often, they NEVER changed).

Freda engaged in many activities, committees, cultural and academic institutions. Freda was a dynamo, so it isn’t surprising that there were so many of them.

There was the Tertiary Screen Studies Association of Victoria, back in the late 70s, of which Freda was a prime mover, and which promoted the study of cinema and media in schools. No-one would consider this radical now but then, it was revolutionary. This was quickly followed, with Freda again as one of the prime movers, by ASSA, the Australian Screen Studies Association of Australia which organised several international conferences and was a crucible for the debate and discussion of emerging theories informing the analysis of cinema, feminist theory, structuralism and post structuralism, and the profound influence of psychoanalytic theory on cinema generally but more specifically on women’s cinema.

This was a period of intense debate but the influence of feminist theory and the project to bring to the fore women artists across the spectrum of the arts, including cinema, was very much central to Freda’s preoccupations and interests at the time. It led her to a pivotal role in the Lip Collective which published a series of journals in the late 70s and early 80s with articles and reviews and debates about women artists contemporary and forebears, about feminism and art, about all the arts. Freda brought to this collective her elegant and incisive writing, her editorial skills without which I’m sure the journals would have been practically unreadable, her intellectual rigour, her breadth of knowledge and research, and her hospitality.

I have vivid memories of sitting in Freda’s living room in that marvellous mid-century house in Kew. There was Freda, smoking of course, making sure we were all fed and watered, bringing order to the chaos of proofs, layouts, artwork, design ideas - the place was awash with paper. In those days cut and paste meant literally cutting and pasting bits of paper. She brought focus and clarity to the endless and often vociferous debate.  

Freda worked tirelessly for and was seriously devoted to, the Melbourne Film Festival shorts sub-committee. The Festival had an internationally accredited competitive shorts program so this was a very serious undertaking. Freda worked alongside a devoted committee to watch and select what must have been thousands of short films from around the globe, in so many different languages, reflecting so many different cultures, some were surreal and really out there in formal terms, others more conventional but dealing with social and cultural issues reflecting turbulent times. She loved it and made many lifelong friends, sitting in the dark for hours doing what she loved best, watching films and talking about films. As someone observed at one of her major birthday parties, ‘no film was ever left unseen.’

Her involvement with MIFF and her later support for the Jewish Film Festival reflected her insatiable curiosity for art and the cinema from all parts of the world. She had a particular love of film festivals, many of which she described as community film festivals (of which JIFF was one). They not only provided a window into the filmmaking culture of countries and cultures, but they also acted as a focal point for migrant communities and their descendants in Australia.

This passion for examining ‘the other’, for engaging with people and cultures that touched on but were not her own, can be seen in her extensive and ground-breaking research on Japanese cinema. Her writings on Occupation Cinema (post-war Japanese cinema) were based on original research and are widely recognised and cited to this day. She wrote monographs and extended essays on Japanese directors and films from the silent era through to contemporary cinema, but most notably on Mizoguchi and Naruse, with a particular emphasis on the representation of women and their role in Japanese society.

Her interest extended to all aspects of Japanese culture, but she was not a fan of Japanese food. I gathered that when in Japan, she didn’t find it particularly appetising, so I had terrible trouble convincing her to come with me to a favourite Japanese restaurant of mine. Finally, she agreed but only because it was convenient – handily close to the Kino cinema – and grudgingly declared it wasn’t bad, better in fact than in Japan. Small victories.

Her interest in Japan led on to further research on the cinemas of North Asia –the three Chinas (now two): the People’s Republic, Hong Kong and Taiwan, and South Korea. I always suspected that one of her motivations was not only a love of the cinemas emerging from these countries, but also a riposte to the terrible isolationism and racism of pre- and post-war Australia (she grew up under the White Australia Policy), and her curiosity about how things were changing in Australia’s relationship to Asia. She herself was one of the few people at university who actively supported students coming to study in Australia from Asia under the Columbo study plan.

It didn’t rest there. Her field of vision expanded and expanded.

She began to teach Holocaust cinema and an example of her contrarian stance was the very positive review she wrote of Benigni’s Life is Beautiful which, though it won an Oscar, was pretty much savaged by most other the critics.

During her involvement with Lip, she became very interested in photography but she didn’t write extensively about it till later. She was particularly interested in contemporary Australian photography, particularly emerging women artists, racing off to exhibitions, be it at the major galleries or tiny specialist spaces.

When the writing slowed down (she blamed not being able to smoke cigarettes anymore), she became an organiser with the University of the Third Age, arranging a series of lectures by her friends and acquaintances on a huge range of topics. And she continued a hectic life of cinema going. Every Wednesday night she was off to the Cinematheque, or she’d book and see around 60 films each year at the Melbourne Film Festival, JIFF, and let’s not forget all the other community festivals. Then there was the gallery viewing. Only 2 weeks ago she headed off with friends to the exhibition of Lee Miller’s photography at Heide Museum. And there was the concert going including ANAM and Anna’s flute recitals but it has to be added, trenchantly criticising the acoustics at the Abbotsford Convent where ANAM is currently housed.

I should add that she managed the huge number of films at festivals by coming prepared. When I came in almost late for the beginning of a film we were seeing together one year, she asked if I’d managed to have lunch. No, I replied, but not to worry. Out came her carry bag which like the magic pudding contained endless quantities of sandwiches and fruit.

Freda’s intellectual output was vast. Apart from her writing on Japanese and Asian cinemas, she wrote co-edited and contributed several chapters in Don’t Shoot Darling on women and Australian cinema, and many chapters too numerous to mention for books of essays on Australian cinema and culture.

She would probably feel somewhat awkward about what I’m about to say, and certainly dislike the word, but Freda was a mentor to so many young women. She encouraged, challenged, and acted as a friend and support to filmmakers, academics, artists, film enthusiasts. She was a mentor, in the truest possible sense.

I’ll conclude with a couple of personal observations. As we are all very much aware, Freda was a smoker. She stopped smoking and complained several times to me, and I presume to others, that stopping impeded her writing. I think there’s a psychological term for this – patterning? – but what I remember most was chatting one day to her about the importance of serious conversation, and she observed that the best conversations were always out the back with the smokers. I am and always have been a non-smoker.

Over many years, a group of friends: Barb and Jeanette, Ann and Joy, Freda and I, would make a point of going out to dinner to celebrate each other’s birthdays. Happily, these birthdays were more or less evenly spread throughout the year, the last one, for Jeanette, just a few weeks ago. There was always good food, many films to discuss, outrageous gossip, exasperation at the incompetence and/or appalling behaviour of university administrators (and some colleagues), and of course outrage at the latest political shenanigans…these are and were wonderful affairs, but we had to increasingly try to find restaurants where there wasn’t too much noise because several of us were and are becoming increasingly deaf.

There were always six of us at these dinners. And now, there are five.

Annette Blonski