Staring into space is another big bonus of a seaside holiday. Every sort of person plonks down on the sand and simply looks straight ahead for hours on end. Does the sound of the sea remind us of our time in the womb? Something certainly makes us cluster by the coast in luxury resorts, seaside flats and caravan parks. We all want accomodation close enough to the beach that we can fall asleep with the sound of the surf in our ears. If Mum or Dad forgets to book the spot in time, and the family is forced to take the place one street back, nothing can make up for that loss of the comforting sound of the waves crashing. Over and over again. Forever.

For the past few years my partner and I have been lucky enough to have one week with the kids and then one without. This configuration is ideal. The first week is "action stations". Bodysurfing. Board riding. Shell collecting. Walks to the shop for ice-blocks. Digging holes in the sand. (Remembering when you were so small you could dig a hole deep enough to get into and almost disappear.) You spend all your time rubbing factor 30 onto limbs, pulling hats back onto heads and watching to make sure small bodies are still between the flags and, ideally, still afloat. It is busy, but it only engages, half your brain. This is perfect for making the transition from the list-filled world of work to the mental release of genuine relaxation. By the time the kids go, you're ready to enter deep space.

For me, this next phase of the holiday is exemplified by reading for no good purpose. A crime novel or two slips by. A writer like the American James Lee Burke is an ideal vehicle for an escape into reverie, with his violent, but oddly moral tales from southern Louisiana about the Alcoholic Anonymous-attending detective Dave Robicheaux.

This summer, Burke's 1998 thriller Sunset Limited (Orion) delivered enough tough Yankee prose and taut plot, with just a whiff of social consciousness, to cleanse my mind of all the work-oriented skimming that makes up so much of my reading in the non-holiday year.

An autobiography makes a great follow-up. I revisited Anne Summer's Ducks on the Pond, published last year by Viking. This story of an Aussie suburban childhood and the subsequent emergence of an activist, journalist and intellectual, requires more brain muscles to read than a crime thriller but it provokes a lot of pausing and staring oat to sea as you wonder how you'd construct a coherent version of your own muddled life. Who would crack a mention? Who is still too painful or tricky to talk about? What's been really important?

This pausingand pondering is the greatest reward of the seaside holiday. It is the antithesis of normal life, for most of us. This is not a whinge about the pace and pressure of life. Like most of the readers of this newspaper, I fall into the lucky slice of our increasingly divided and unequal society. Good health, a decent education and my city location mean I'm quite capable of competing in, and generally enjoying, the deregulated professional jungle I inhabit. But once my holiday rocket re-enters the Earth's atmosphere, I can kiss "pausing and pondering" goodbye for another year.

William James reckoned a great many people "think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices". This is not what I'm talking about. I'm after what a mate of mine calls "spiritual filling". It can be stimilated by the right location, reading or company. A good seaside holiday works every time. It offers the chance for a thoughtful assessment of the year's experiences and, most nourishing of all, a chance to just stare at the sea and drift into reverie.

A standing-room-only crowd of 400 squeezed into the Brunswick Town Hall last week to hear the new Victorian attorney-general, Rob Hulls, and a panel of human rights advocates, including the Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner Susan Halliday, discuss same-sex relationships. The event was part of the Midsumma Festival, Melbourne's equivalent of Sydney Mardi Gras that is launched tonight at the Opera House.

The Victorian Attorney-General didn't disappoint an audience keen to hear commitments to law reform.

"I can't believe that in this day and age people still face discrimination on the basis of their sexuality," Hulls said. "I intend to propose a number of changes to the law."

He specified three areas for action. The first was amendments to the Equal Opportunity Act. "There are some changes that can be made quickly," he said "such as replacing the offensive definition 'lawful sexual activity' as a ground of discrimination with 'sexual orientation'."

He then turned to the definition of "de facto" under State legislation and his intention "to address discrimination faced by gay and lesbian couples".

Like the NSW Carr Labor Government, which passed amendments to that State's De Facto Relationships Act in June 1999, the initial emphasis in Victoria was on property rights. "Same sex couples should have the same property and inheritance rights as heterosexuals in de facto relationships," Hulls said, eliciting a delighted response from the Brunswick crowd.

But more controversial legal minefields lie ahead. Affirming his keenness to implement the recommendations of an earlier Victorian Equal Opportunity Commission report on same-sex relationships, Hulls told the Midsumma mob that he would follow that report's advice and I refer some of the more contentious issues such as access to IVF to the new Law Reform Commission for community consultation."

This consultation will be lively. Under Victorian legislation donor insemination services are available only to married or heterosexual de facto couples. This restriction does not exist in NSW, where the full range of fertility services are promoted by private clinics in the gay and lesbian press.

It is an issue the Victorian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby, which has been pushing for amendments to 34 discriminatory pieces of State legislation, is eager to take up. The lobby's co-convenor, Megan Jermer, applauded the Attorney-General's "extremely significant" commitments to "end the discrimination that people face", but confirmed that access to fertility services is a hot community issue.

Just an hour or so before the Attorney-General began talking, an announcement took place in another corner of Midsumma Melbourne.

At the Equal Opportunity Commission, Chief Commissioner Neil Comrie from Victoria Police was appointing the State's first gay and lesbian liaison officer. Senior Constable Melinda Edwards, 31, a slender lesbian with a big smile and 12 years' experience in the force, will act as a contact point for lesbians and gay men, educating police, and developing Crime prevention initiatives.

It's a four-month pilot project confined to inner-city Melbourne. But the scheme has potential for growth. The state co-ordinator of the scheme in the NSW Polic Service, Sue Thompson, says there are 140 gay and lesbian liaison officers in NSW, an increase of 136 since the first four were appointed in 1990.

Police from Western Australia, Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria, the Australian Federal Police and the United Kingdom have completed the five-day training course in Sydney.

In the 1999 Sydney Mardi Gras, 17 uniformed police marched up Oxford Street to the rapturous applause of the huge crowd. It was a public relations coup that appeared to reflect some genuine cultural change.

Media coverage of law reform tends to focus on the rights gained. Less attention is paid to the new obligations being created, such as the statutory-based property claims a same-sex partner may have if a relationship breaks down.

NSW Attorney-General Jeff Shaw has provided $24,000 for community education about the 1999 legal changes. No doubt the Sydney gay and lesbian community will approach this task with its characteristic flair and I'm sure a booklet will be published. It's a document every same-sex couple cuddling at home on the couch should read.

Tassie is a top spot for a drive, but when you're moving that fast, it feels like you're watching the flickering images on a pack of those little cards we flipped through as kids to discover the principles of animation.

In anticipation of the talks, my annual scramble has begun to collect the latest data on how women are doing in the equality stakes. I want to know how many women are in the rooms where big decisions are made - the boardrooms of our major corporates, the corridors of power where our elected representatives lurk and make deals, the golf courses where senior managers improve their handicap, and the court rooms where some of the best drag costumes in town still find an appreciative audience.

As always, I'm startled by the slow pace of progress. What would the Suffragettes have to say if they knew that nearly 100 years after the vote was first won for non-Aboriginal women, less than 30 per cent of Federal MPs wear frocks in public places? And that's the good news. Boardrooms and court houses will be struggling to match those percentages for some time.

Each year, the executive head-hunting firm Korn/Ferry International sends out questionnaires to the largest Australian companies. According to its 1999 survey, while in the US 72 per cent of companies have at least one wornan on the board, in Australia the figure is 42 per cent (up from 34 per cent in 1997 and 28 per cent in 1996). Last year, only 8.3 per cent of directors were women in the Korn/Ferry survey compared to 7.0 per cent in 1997. Companies reported that women make up 10.3 per cent of non-executive board members (9.7 per cent in 1997), and a depressing 1.3 per cent of executive board members. This figure has not changed since 1997.

A slightly better picture emerges from the Affirmative Action Agency. It receives reports on all organisations with 100 employees or more. Last year, 10.7 per cent of board seats in Australia's top 300 companies were filled by women. That is 251 out of 2,345 board seats. The rate of change in these figures makes a garden snail look pacy. Yet spookily, on the international scene we're doing well on corporate representation for women. Only the US has better percentages.

As you may be beginning to appreciate, the challenge when you accept the invitation to speak on International Women's Day is how to give an optimistic and energising performance that is still evidence based.

Peek into the court rooms of the nation and the heads under the wigs of barristers are more likely to smell of Brylcream than hair spray.

In Sydney, 244 (or 13.4 per cent) of the 1,825 barristers at the Sydney Bar are women. Nine of the 246 silks in NSW are women. In Melbourne, 220 out of 979 barristers are women, and 10 of the 161 silks. Cross the road from the courts to the corporate management watering holes and the Affirmative Action Agency's report on the 300 biggest organisations tell us that the percentage of female managers has risen from 17.2 per cent in 1990 to 27.3 per cent in 1998.

What does this all add up to? Well, I reckon, with the vote, education, the right to work, control of our fertility and a smattering of child care, we should be doing a hell of a lot better than this. Equity would do. I want to live long enough to see roughly 50-50 ratios in the figures we've been talking about. I'm not prepared to wait the 177 years that the Affirmative Action Agency has estimated it will take at this rate to achieve equity in management ranks for women.

What will be the driving force for the next explosive push? That is precisely what I'm pondering right now as I plan for the Canberra talks.

More than 640 women attended at the invitation of a committee representing 11 women's organisations and Chiwute was there to report on the progress of training programs run by the Dodoma Inter Africa Committee in Tanzania to prevent female genital mutilation.

The details of what actually happens to the girls is too gruesome to go into. But the effects are well documented, ranging from pain, bleeding and infections to childbirth complications and infant and maternal death. Sexual dysfunction and psychological trauma have also been reported. The practice is basced on deeply held cultural beliefs and is not restricted to particular classes. Indeed, in some regions of Tanzania the majority of women are cut in this way, such as in the Arusha and Dodoma regions where 81 percent and 68 per cent of women have been circumcised.

So what is the good news? Well, since 1994, Jennifer Chiwute and her Tanzanian colleagues have run community training workshops in 99 villages and a reduction in cutting has been reported. In one village 30 girls were circumcised in 1994, 15 in 1995 and 6 in 1996. No girls from this village have been circumcised since.

Traditionally, circumcision cleanses young women and prepares them for marriage. It is often associated with a period of training when girls learn about aspects of adult life, such as menstruation sexual intercourse, pregnancy and the care of a husband. The actual process and consequences of female circumcision are very secret and Chiwute says that this is one of the biggest challenges. "We have to open the secret so everyone knows what is done and people can make an informed decision," she says.

The key to their success in reducing the incidence of this practice appears to be a genuine respect for local autonomy. All the ifluential people in each village, men and women, are involvod in the initial training and then decide who will be nominated to become a community-based educator. "We tell the local community leaders that we are not the governrnent and we are not the police," says Chiwute. "We say that you are the local custodians of your beliefs and we know you can make the changes if you think it is right."

Traditionally, teaching is done through songs and dances, parables and quizzes. So these techniques are used to promote "progressive" traditional practices to mark the rites of passage. Chiwute showed me photographs of herself dancing with village women in the dust with big audiences of men and boys. Originally a local, she now has an MA in labour and developmer studies from a university in the Netherlands. But her capacity to dance is as critical to the success of her work as her educational qualifications. "By dancing and singing together we show our respect for the local culture, but we also want to overcome the ignorance that causes suffering for women and girls," Chiwute says.

Additional funding has made it possible to educate community and religious leaders, policymakers and journalists in other parts of Tanzania about the tragic consequences of female genital mutilation. And the training of artists has led to the development of educational materials for people who can't read. "This is not a women's issue," says Chiwute. "It affects the whole society. We all need to be aware of it."

After lobbing from the Dodoma Inter Africa Committee and many other non-government agencies, Tanzania passed a law in 1998 prohibiting female genital mutilation and other sexual assaults on women. But for Jennifer Chiwute, the real hope for change lies with the village-based educators who are locally chosen and trained.

"The practice is supported by influential people in the country. We must get their consent for our work or we will never succeed," she says. "The support we have received from Australians has helped to make our work possible but there is much more to do."

For more information, contact the International Women's Development Agency. The email address is iwda@iwda.org.au