Joe Demanuele

Some women get wolf-whistles when they go for a walk. Maryann Curmi gets insults, threats and men making gestures as if they were shooting at her. I meet her for a coffee at a bar in Nadur village square some distance away from her hairdressing salon. There are surreptitious looks from the other customers as we talk in the bar, where everybody knows what she stands for.

"Let me show you where I go for a walk every day," she says, as she gets up to pay for the coffees. We set off from her house which overlooks the magnificent valley that is a stone's throw away from Nadur church. We are soon on a path amongst the fields. Plums, pomegranates and peaches line the way. But not for long. In bright orange paint someone has written, in bad Maltese, 'Ibza ghal rasek ja Bewwiela'. ('Mind where you go and what you do, you crazy woman'). More insults in the same bright orange are painted along the way that leads to Dahlet Qorrot - a beach lined with 'boat houses'. We stop to look up at a bird of prey that is circling overhead while the men near the boat houses look at us and my camera.

Maryann has had her hairdressing salon for over 30 years and her customers know that she never holds back from speaking her mind. However, her customers are mostly women so she has never had a wide audience of men with whom to share her views. All that changed when she tried Facebook three years ago. "Unlike the people in Nadur, I saw people speaking openly against the Nationalist government of the time. So when the Labour Party was elected, I saw no reason why I could not talk about the things that I did not like. The same happened when it came to hunting."

However, Maryann was not prepared for the reaction she got. Some men do not expect a woman to talk about an activity which they see as the sole domain of men: hunting. And this is even more the case with Maryann, because there were men in her family who hunted. "I'm worried when some men claim that hunting is their whole life. Can a person really love only one thing in his life?"

When the 'Yes' vote won in the hunting referendum, someone placed dozens of lemons in front of her salon. They also threw eggs. This did not frighten her and, being a positive woman, she joined Birdlife and started accompanying CABS to learn more about the environment. She made this public and it seemed to enrage some of her critics. "If you are doing nothing illegal, why are you afraid of cameras and binoculars?" she asks the hunters who attack her.

I ask her if she minds having anonymous people writing comments about her around Nadur. "They don't hurt me by doing it but I'd like to say to them that if they have an issue with anything, they should not go around dirtying our beautiful village. And they lined the route I take every day with insults because they know that my daily walk enjoying nature is what helps me keep me sane. I feel partly responsible for that graffiti." Maryann may put on a brave face, but I notice tears in her eyes when she says this.

I ask her about the future and she tells me that she is setting up a new environmental organisation. "It will deal with Gozo and one of the things I want is dialogue with hunters." She is tight-lipped about the name but, seeing the determination of this woman, I know that I will be following what she does.