RADICALS — REMEMBERING THE SIXTIES

Meredith Burgmann – former president of the NSW Upper House – and writer Nadia Wheatley, who have put together Radicals – Remembering The Sixties, spoke for The Sydney Institute about the book and how it happened on Wednesday 28 April 2021. The book is a look back in time from a unique perspective. The voices in the book are largely those Australian radicals who began in conservative status quo homes. Each had a “aha” moment and went on the man the barricades and protest in the turbulent and radicalised years between 1965 and 1975. The paper which follows is taken from their presentation.

RADICALS — REMEMBERING THE SIXTIES

MEREDITH BURGMANN &  NADIA WHEATLEY

One of the best-known slogans of the Sixties is the claim that “The personal is politica”’. Although no one is sure who first said this, nevertheless it expresses the spirit of the time.

Of course, in any era, people bring their personal history to their political life, but in RADICALS — Remembering the Sixties (recently published by NewSouth) we relate the personal stories of 20 people from our generation who rejected the political views and values of their family, school, church and class. These radical about-turns were often accompanied by epiphanies, awakenings, revelations and other such “aha” moments.

One such story is that of Margret RoadKnight. Margret is the amazingly tall folksinger with the powerful voice who sang protest songs from the back of a truck during the Vietnam moratorium era. One would imagine that folksingers of the period were all left wingers to start with. Not so.

Margret, who came from a devoutly Catholic background in suburban Melbourne, wryly describes herself at the start of her career as being Australia’s only right wing folksinger. So what changed her? What was her “aha” moment? Yes, she mentions her wonderful friend and mentor, fellow folksinger Jeannie Lewis, but it was one particular song which really resonated. Margret had been singing it for some time before it really hit home. It was Malvina Reynolds’ plaintive lament “What have they done to the Rain?”

Margaret explained to us in chilling detail how she eventually came to realise that this song referred to nuclear fallout and was tied up with protest about the atom bomb. This, for Margret was the revelation that led to her to anti-war action and a lifetime of radicalism.

In Radicals, we include three First Nations stories — those of Gary Foley and Gary Williams from the Gumbayngirr nation, and Bronwyn Penrith whose family are traditional owners of the south coast land around Wallaga Lake. Of course, growing up with systemic racism, most Aboriginal young people don’t need something to make them politically aware. Nevertheless, as Gary Foley tells his story, two moments stand out.

Gary had a very positive time in Primary School in Tenterfield, but by his High School years he was living in Nambucca and attending Macksville High. By 1965, he was in fifth form, with one year to go.  He was an eager and popular student, good at schoolwork and sport. So, he was astonished when the principal called him into his office at the end of the year and said “Don’t come back next year, Foley.” Naturally, Gary asked, “Why not?” The Principal replied: “We – don’t – want – your – kind – here!”’

As Gary described this, he said: “When the headmaster did that, he did severe damage to my self-esteem, my self-confidence and, worst of all, he destroyed my belief in education.”

Gary left school, and came to Sydney to take up an apprenticeship as a draughtsman. It wasn’t long before he had a brutal second political awakening.

Backing up his account with specific details, Gary told us how, early one evening, he happened to be walking in Railway Square when he saw a young woman he knew from the dances that were held at the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs. Although it was mostly Indigenous youngsters who went to these dances, this girl was non-Indigenous. Spotting Gary talking to her, two detectives from the notorious 21 Division arrested him for “behaving offensively”, took him to Regent Street Police Station, and beat him up. The police followed the beating with a warning: “Tomorrow morning, you plead guilty to this in court or you’ll get some more of this.”

Gary Foley did what the coppers told him to do. For what would be the last time.

How he felt after this experience of unprovoked police violence has a great deal in common with the kind of outrage that many people of our generation describe after their first encounter with police. But what is extraordinary about Gary Foley’s account is that, despite the racism he had suffered in Nambucca, the bashing took him by surprise.

“It was a big shock for me” he said. “But also it made me fucking angry because I didn’t do what they were bashing me for.”

One evening soon afterwards, Gary met a young Wiradjuri man by the name of Paul Coe. From Cowra originally, Coe was enrolled as a law student at the University of New South Wales. “Listen,” Paul Coe said, “we’re thinking of setting up a group to try and do something about the coppers.”

Still reeling from the bashing, Gary didn’t need to be asked twice if he was interested in joining the “crew” that within a few months founded the Aboriginal Legal Service.

***

Apart from any personal issues that might have spurred our radicalisation, for all of us in this book the catalyst was the shared experience of growing up in the political circumstances of Australia in the 1950s. Certainly, the ferment of the Sixties was an international phenomenon, and for young radicals from Berlin to Berkeley it represented some sort of reaction to a Cold War childhood. But in this country, there was something in particular to drive us wild.

Elected in 1949 to head the first Coalition government of the Liberal and Country parties, Prime Minister Robert Gordon Menzies cast a long shadow over the childhood and adolescence of our post-war generation. For a twenty-year-old Australian today, who has lived through seven prime ministers, it would be impossible to imagine how stultifying it was to grow up under a single one – and a patriarchal, conservative one at that. It is easy to point to the Menzies government’s support for policies such as White Australia and Assimilation, not to mention the military commitment in Vietnam. But just as bad was the cultural repression. Growing up behind the white picket fence of Menzies’ Australia was deadly boring. Often unable even to say what was wrong, we knew we had to make our escape, using whatever resources we had.

So, to return to ourselves, and to the exhilarating year of 1968…To outsiders, witnessing our increasingly frequent arrests, we probably seemed surprising radicals. Both of us were from middle-class and politically conservative families. Both of us had been educated at single-sex private schools. Both of us were raised in the dreary puritanism of Sydney Anglicanism. But – as we relate in our own accounts in this book – there was a great difference, too, in our respective backstories.

MEREDITH: My “aha” moment was purely and simply the war in Vietnam. I came from a loving but, on the surface, Menzies-voting family in Beecroft, which at that time was an absolutely homogeneous suburb in northern Sydney – in fact I didn’t meet a Catholic until I arrived at University. My world was Ming’s world.

But at University in 1966, I met a bunch of young Catholic radicals in the Newman Society who were all anti-Vietnam. So, I started to worry. Here was my government, sending young Australians overseas to kill others in my name. I needed to know more. The more I learnt about Vietnam, the more horrified I became and the more I started worrying about other things that the government was doing in my name. The Coalition’s  support for the Apartheid Government in South Africa and it’s brutal policy for Indigenous Australians were the two that most upset me. So my ‘aha’ moment was brought about by my understanding of what was happening in Vietnam but it was also a very abrupt moment.

I remember waking up one morning and deciding I was a Socialist. I travelled into Uni and saw Geoff Robertson in the SRC corridor and said “Geoff Geoff. I think I’m a Socialist” and he replied in a suitably patronising tone, “Don’t be silly Meredith, we’re ALL Socialists.”

NADIA: Unlike Meredith, I fitted the media archetype of the confused young rebel venting personal anger as well as anger about political causes. As a result of the death of my mother when I was nine, I ended up in a foster family, where I was thoroughly miserable. Silenced and disempowered, by 1968 I had a decade of stored-up anger and grief inside me, ready to burst out.

In another way too, Meredith and I came to radicalism from different ends of a spectrum. At university, Meredith was studying Government — largely taught by young left-wing academics, with a lot of curriculum content about the Vietnam War. In contrast, my intellectual world was restricted to the territory between the ancient epic poem Beowulf and TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.I never read a newspaper, never watched television. As far as I knew anything about Vietnam, I thought it was an island.

Nevertheless, on Wednesday 19 June 1968, I joined Meredith on what was her first demonstration downtown — and my own first political awakening. Intended as a vigil outside the office of the Minister of Labour and National Service in Martin Place, it turned into one of Australia’s first “sit-ins”, with ninety-two of us sitting on the floor inside the foyer of the Minister’s office.

We had been sitting and singing for an hour or so when the police arrived.  A silver-haired policeman introduced himself before telling us that he was going to read the Crimes Act. “After that,” he said, “I will ask everyone to leave the building. Anyone who remains will be liable to two years gaol.

When he said that, I truly believed that, if I remained there, I could be put in prison for two years. Yet it seemed so disproportionate — to be sent to gaol for two years for sitting in a public office during office hours — that I was willing to risk arrest. For me, this was the moment when I crossed the political Rubicon.

As two policemen grabbed my arms and began to haul, I became aware of a logistical problem. Because of a Women’s College prohibition against wearing trousers on campus, I was in a dress – which rode up my thighs as I was dragged. Yet being – literally – in the hands of the law, I could not pull my dress back down to a reasonable level of decency.

As I landed on my bottom in Martin Place, some of the other demonstrators cheered. It was only at that point that I realised I was not under arrest; and nor was anyone else. Struggling to my feet, I felt as if an enormous burden had been lifted from me. This was not as simple as relief at the fact that I wasn’t about to go to gaol for two years. It was an unaccustomed feeling, which I can only describe as happiness.

For me the personal liberation that resulted from taking political action was profound. Suddenly, I had a voice. I had a community. I had a family. And for the first time in many years— I had fun.

***

Our book is subtitled ‘Remembering the Sixties’. But exactly when did the Sixties happen? A mood and a movement, more than a specific slice of time, in Radicals we define the decade as spanning the years between 1965 and 1975.

The start of our Sixties is marked by a change that occurred in the anti-Vietnam movement after the introduction of conscription in November 1964 – a change that over the next few years brought both a broadening of support and an intensification of activism.

1965 saw the Freedom Ride for Aboriginal civil rights, and in 1967 a whopping 90 per cent of Australians voted YES in the referendum that was widely seen at the time as some sort of guarantee of social justice for Aboriginal people —a promise still not delivered. In January 1966, Menzies finally retired, but the Coalition landslide in the federal election later that year was a terrible blow both to the Labor Party and to opponents of the Vietnam War. It did, however, result in Gough Whitlam being elected to the leadership of the ALP. Meanwhile, the anti-war movement received a boost to its profile in response to police bashings of protestors during visits by American President Lyndon B Johnson (October 1966) and South Vietnam’s Prime Minister Air Vice-Marshall Ky (January 1967).

By 1968, the explosion of what seemed to be revolution in Paris and Prague was mirrored on the streets of Australian cities, even if we didn’t have any cobblestones to throw at the constabulary.

With the first Moratorium (1970), this decade reached midpoint, before moving into the anti-apartheid campaign of 1971 and the Aboriginal Embassy (founded under a beach umbrella outside Parliament House on 26 January 1972), and on to the optimism of the November 1972 It’s Time election. True to his promise, Gough and his government ended conscription, brought the troops home from Vietnam and replaced the White Australia Policy with something new, called “multiculturalism”. All of this was a victory for radicalism.

Our Sixties concludes with the Dismissal of the Labor government in 1975, and the return of a Liberal/Country Party Coalition — a moment vividly recalled by one of our participants, David Marr, who was working as a journalist at the Bulletin on 11 November 1975, when the editor’s secretary came and told him that the governor general had just sacked the prime minister. “Oh, no,” David replied, “it doesn’t work like that”. His discovery that in fact it did work like that was what he calls “the most educative moment” of his political life.

For David Marr, this was the radical revelation — the moment when (in his words) he “discovered that Australian Tories are willing to bet the house on power. And that, at their worst, they are not constrained by law. And that they are willing to do almost anything for power, and to prevent change”.

This is a powerful memory of a historic moment in Australian history, but everyone in our book has an individual “aha-moment” that is just as significant in their development.

John Derum is a successful stage and TV actor who was a 17-year old boy looking for work in Melbourne’s theatre land in the mid sixties. He fortuitously landed up at the Emerald Hill Theatre where drama icons George Whaley and Wal Cherry were instrumental in bringing British anti-war plays such as “Private Yuk Objects” and “Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance” to Australia. Other plays by John Arden and Spike Milligan were also staged. For John, his radicalisation is a cultural rather than an intensely political process. He learns his lines, reads other plays by the same authors, has conversations with the older actors and begins to think.

However, his real moment of epiphany comes in 1967 when he finds himself outside Pentridge Prison at 8 o’clock in the morning on 3 February when the Australian state staged its last official killing. The hanging of Ronald Ryan was a huge jolt to John’s previous conservative Catholic belief system. He describes the flock of pigeons rising in alarm at the sound of the gallows and ends his story with the plaintive observation. ‘They just weren’t listening to us’.

Brian Laver comes from the famous Laver tennis family. He is the cousin of Rod Laver, who in the 1960s was the world’s number 1 professional. But Brian himself was also an A grade player, and indeed at Queensland University he was a ‘Blue’ in tennis as well as being the university’s best-known student leader.

Born in 1944, Brian grew up in far north Queensland in the township of Rockhampton, amidst the evidence of the American troops who had been based in the town during the war. Thanks to the tales told by his dad’s fishing mates, Brian also grew up with the sense that the enemy might well have invaded northern Australia. This led to a very early awareness of fascism.

Brian’s moment of radical revelation was particularly acute and has lasted for the rest of his life. He was twelve years old, in first year at a private boys’ school in Rockhampton when a teacher showed the students documentary film footage about concentration camps. As well as images of Nazi camps in the Third Reich, these films included footage of dissidents held in prisons in Communist countries. Brian describes himself as becoming “fiercely anti-totalitarian” on the spot.

A few months later, the school held its annual Public Oratory competition. Brian’s classmates gave talks about sports and hobbies, but Brian gave a speech on the topic of “Anti-totalitarianism”. He won the competition.

Later, at the University of Queensland, he would particularly be known for his oratory — often delivered under a barrage of missiles thrown by right wing students.

                                                          ***

For our generation, radicalism meant openness and freedom. It meant the particular kind of grassroots organisation and New Left ideology that arose in opposition to the hierarchical structures and dogmatism of the Old Left. And it meant fun, not fundamentalism.

RADICALS, Remembering the Sixties does not set out to give a comprehensive history of the era. Rather, it is a bunch of people talking to the two of us and – through us – to each other, and to the reader. This conversation is a collective reminiscence composed of individual awakenings that turned twenty people into radicals.

How we went about the book

We began by researching the backgrounds of a variety of people from our generation, looking for those who had experienced some sort of radical turnaround in response either to a particular Sixties issue, or to the Zeitgeist.

Obviously, comrades who came from left-wing family backgrounds didn’t fit the bill. We wanted people whose parents had supported the policies of Menzies or the DLP. With one exception, there are no “red diaper babies” in the book. We also wanted a balance between people who made a predominantly political response to the times, and those who expressed their radicalism through art and culture, or escaped via archetypal Sixties routes such as drugs, Transcendental meditation, and happenings.

Our characters span the political spectrum – Anarchism, Trotskyism, Maoism, Pragmatism, as well as Labor Party members, DLP supporters, the non-aligned, and those who just wanted to keep their noses clean. While some, such as Geoffrey Robertson, Jozefa Sobski and Peter Duncan, were old friends, neither of us had previously met Brian Laver, Vivienne Binns, Ellis D Fogg, Albert Langer or Margret RoadKnight.

Once we’d chosen the people, we interviewed them together, but we wrote up their stories individually. This book isn’t just a collection of interview transcripts. In keeping with the notion that the personal is political, our own stories interweave with the stories of the book’s participants.

When we began writing RADICALS, we had no idea how the pieces would come together. That time we call the Sixties was made up of so many varied experiences. As it turned out, however, the twenty people we chose to include had more in common than might be apparent at first sight.

Overall, the twin issues of conscription and Vietnam created an atmosphere of demonstrations and chaos, but that alone wasn’t what gripped our generation. Australia was on fire with radical causes, and there were also some very particular local triggers.

For instance, in South Australia, the problem of the conservative gerrymander loomed large for Peter Duncan. On many campuses, student rights were at least as important as Vietnam. And in Brisbane, the students had to win the right to march on the street, before they could protest about the war.

Opposition to capital punishment, racism and apartheid … Support for land rights, drug law reform, women’s rights, gay rights, censorship … There were so many issues that brought our participants out into the street.

Although the Australian Left was influenced by international ideologies, it was, on the whole, devoid of the violent aspects of the American and European movements. No Weather Underground, no Angry Brigade, no Baader-Meinhof Gang for us down under. Perhaps this can partly be explained by the fact there is almost no culture of political violence in modern Australia (as distinct from the violent massacres of colonial Australia). Also, we had a class-based party that was committed to bringing the troops home. American youth had no democratic road to peace – both parties were intent on pursuing the war.

So what was the effect of being part of the radical Sixties?

All of the participants in this book believe that their experience in that period changed them forever. Some were scarred by the struggle, but all have continued to work for a better world, whether at a macro or micro level. For example:

Geoffrey Robertson in London — fighting for human rights.

Bronwyn Penrith in Redfern — Chair of Mudgingal Women’s Centre

Gary Williams, in Nambucca — helping reclaim the Gumbainggir      language for the next generation

Robbie Swan — fighting censorship

Peter Manning — campaigning for justice for the people of Palestine

Jozefa Sobski and Margaret Reynolds — a lifelong commitment to women’s equality

Peter Batchelor — serving for twenty years as a member of the Victorian parliament

John Derum — serving the local community on the Blue Mountains city council

Helen Voysey — conserving the heritage shacks at Era Beach

Vivienne Binns and Margret RoadKnight — continuing to inspire audiences through their chosen art practice

For all of us, the Sixties were about idealism, aspiration and determination. The settled verities of the fifties were being challenged in the streets and the lecture theatres. We were determined to change the world — and we did.