Recording: Remembering the Sixties

VERITY FIRTH:  Hello, everyone who is joining us today.  I'll just wait for about 30 seconds as people enter the virtual room and then we'll begin.

 

I reckon it's time to begin.  Other people can join us later.  So hello, everybody.  Thank you for joining us at today's event.  Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that wherever we are in Australia, we're on the land of the First Nations peoples and remind ourselves that that land was never ceded. I personally am on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, so that's the land on which this university is built.  So I want to pay particular respect and acknowledgment to Elders past and present of the Gadigal people. 

 

My name is Verity Firth.   I'm the Executive Director of Social Justice here at UTS, where I lead up our Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion.  It's my huge pleasure to be joined today by Meredith Burgmann and Nadia Wheatley, who I will introduce properly in just a minute.  Before we begin, we're just going to have a couple of pieces of housekeeping.  The first thing is that today's event is live captioned.  To view the captions, you click on the CC, Closed Caption, button at the bottom of your screen in the Zoom control panel.  We're also going to post a separate link in the chat now which means that the captions open up in a separate internet window if you would prefer to do it that way. 

 

If you have any questions during today's event, you will in fact be given an opportunity to ask them, or should I say 'type' them and then I'll ask them for you, and you can do that by typing them in the Q&A box, which is also found in your Zoom control panel.  You can go in there and you can also upvote and like other people's questions.  So do do that because what I tend to do, particularly if there are a lot of questions, is the ones that get the most upvotes I actually tend to ask.  But please make sure that you keep your questions relevant to the topic that we're discussing here today.

 

So, what do you think or know about the Sixties? When you think about the Sixties, what are the images that come to your mind? Protests? Free love? The Beatles? Duffel coats?  Flower Power? To our younger audiences joining us today, do you ever think about the Sixties? How much do you know about the 1960s? The social and political rights that many of us take for granted today were won during this decade, driven by mass social movements whose power was enough to influence mainstream politics and drive legislative and other reforms.  These mass movements swept up people from across traditional political spectrums in their efforts to tackle the Vietnam War, Aboriginal land rights, women's liberation, gay liberation, apartheid and workers' rights. It really was a period of radical change in Australia and now, 60 years on, we are, of course, in another period of upheaval, with many of these focuses continuing.  We have Black Lives Matter, indigenous deaths in custody, domestic and sexual abuse of women, land rights, refugee rights and Australia's participation in overseas wars.  These are all still at the forefront of our national collective.  So what lessons can we take from those that bravely fought for change in the Sixties and what are they up to today?

 

So it's my huge pleasure to now welcome you, and welcome two of these 1960s Radicals into the conversation ‑ Meredith Burgmann and Nadia Wheatley, who are the authors of 'Radicals: Remembering The Sixties'.  We're posting a link in the chat right now where you can get a copy of their book.  I really recommend it.  It is fascinating.  We will be talking about it a lot today but it's a great read, so please click on the link if you're interested. 

 

Dr Meredith Burgmann was an industrial relations academic at Macquarie University for 20 years and later was a Labor parliamentarian and President of the New South Wales Legislative Council.  She was the first woman President of UASA, which later became NTEU.  On her retirement, she was elected President of the Australia Council for International Development and she has written or co‑written books on misogyny, the Green Bans and ASIO.  Full disclosure ‑ she's also my aunty.  So welcome, Meredith. 

 

Nadia Wheatley is a full‑time writer whose work ranges from the classic picture book 'My Place' to the biography 'The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift'.  Nadia's memoir, 'Her Mother's Daughter', won the Nib Award in 2019.  Welcome, Nadia.  It's a pleasure to have you with us today.  So, to begin, I'm going to ask Meredith to open our discussion with a bit of an overview of the Sixties.  Over to you, Meredith. 

 

DR MEREDITH BURGMANN:  Well, thank you, Verity, and you did a very good job of giving a taste of the 1960s and you really have to think about the Sixties and especially those of us who were young at that time as coming out of the unbelievably boring 1950s where we had had not only the same government for 20 years; we'd had the same Prime Minister for 20 years. 

 

One of the important mottos or slogans of the 1960s was "The personal is the political" and it's not a surprise that so many of those important struggles of the 1960s were personal liberation struggles.  The personal really was the political for a lot of us.  The linchpin really is the Vietnam War.  Another idiosyncratic thing we've done in this book on the Sixties is to define the Sixties as from 1965 to 1975 because that's actually what most people think about when they think of the Sixties.  So we start in 1965, which is when we're just beginning to come out of the Robert Menzies era, and it starts really with the Aboriginal Freedom Ride, which one of our participants, Gary Williams, was actually on the 1965 Freedom Ride where the bus went round the New South Wales western country towns to actually integrate swimming pools, hotels, picture theatres. 

 

1966 was the LBJ visit where the first big Vietnam demos happened, as people throw themselves in front of the LBJ motorcade, and Robert Askin famously says "Run over the bastards".  From then on, Vietnam really is the background to all the other demonstrations that happen.  We have the draft resisters.  In 1966, the draft is introduced and 20‑year‑olds are sent off to fight in a foreign war.  Towards the end of the Sixties, you get the beginnings of second‑wave feminism and the beginnings of women's liberation, which for a lot of us was very important.  At the beginning of the 1970s you get gay liberation and camping and those LGBTIQ organisations.  In 1971, you get the visit of the racially selected all‑white Springboks team and the huge demonstrations that happened all around Australia against the Springboks.  In 1971, you also have ‑ and might I say this week is the 50th anniversary ‑ of the first Green Ban at Kelly's Bush and then you get those Green Bans all through Sydney that saved so much of the Sydney streetscape.  You get the second‑ or third‑wave activism over Aboriginal rights.  You get those young, angry, particularly in New South Wales, Aboriginal activists who set up the Redfern ‑ the Aboriginal Legal Service, the Medical Service, and start campaigning for land rights and, of course, by 1972 you get the Tent Embassy in front of Parliament.  You get a huge push for prison reform, as you get more and more vicious batterings and bashings going on in the prisons by the prison warders too. 

 

And we finish in 1975 with The Dismissal because that is ‑ well, apart from being a very depressing thing to happen, we do top and tail with the Sixties with those issues.  And although many of these iconic campaigns in Australia were essentially Australian, we knew we were part of the international struggle.  The Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia was all about the de‑Stalinisation which was going on inside the Communist Party in Australia; the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy; the hippies at Haight‑Ashbury in San Francisco; the Black Panthers, the trial of the Chicago Seven ‑ now a lot more people know about it since it became an Oscar‑winning film.  We avidly consumed the radical literature which was beginning to filter slowly into Australia, often not even by email.  Often it was sea mail and you had to wait some months before you discovered what it was that you were being outraged about.  But we were an important part of the international revolt of the Sixties and that's one of the things we were trying to capture in this book. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Thanks for that, Meredith.  Now, that's a great overview, so now everyone knows the span of the book.  Nadia, the book is a collection of stories, isn't it really, featuring people from across the political spectrum.  So what unites all of them as Radicals? Can you tell us more about these characters?

 

NADIA WHEATLEY:  So it's a series of stories but it's also a series of conversations, so conversations that Meredith and I had with 18 comrades from the era, but those conversations actually open up between themselves.  Quite a few of them knew each other.  And what we are finding with the book ‑ and this is fascinating, and today is a great example ‑ is that the book is opening conversations in turn with people from that era who email us and remind us about things we'd forgotten, about minutiae of demonstrations and who held that, the right‑wing journalist who held the handbags while the women went upstairs to demonstrate.  But we also have conversations with a younger generation who want to talk about the lessons for now. So it's a book about the radical process and it's a book about family and growing up.  It's not an amble down memory lane, what I did in my first moratorium, how I got arrested.  It's a story about people who came from conservative backgrounds, Menzies voting backgrounds, Democratic Labor Party backgrounds, and who in response either to the Zeitgeist, to the spirit of the time, or in response to a particular issue, changed and rebelled against the political and social and religious values of their family, church, class and school.  These radical turnarounds in the book were often accompanied by what we call aha moments.  They're revolutions or epiphanies.  So it's a series of these moments, moments that changed people's lives. 

 

In choosing our subjects, we wanted a variety of people who had a directly political activist way and also people whose activism was in the arts or indeed their radicalism was expressed through those Sixties things called transcendental meditation and the particular types of drugs that were around in the Sixties which are rather different from today's drugs.  I should also say this is not a history of oral history transcripts on the page.  It's actually stories about these people, and Meredith's story and my own story interweave through them. 

 

So I'll just introduce you to some of our exciting characters.  Some of the names will be familiar but you will know these people as adults and as world‑changing adults.  We'll tell you in the book about them as young people.  So Jozefa Sobski, who went on to be Deputy Director‑General of New South Wales Education, her parents came here as Polish displaced persons in 1949.  Her father was a virulently anti‑Communist man and her mother was devoutly Catholic, and Jozefa herself was so devoutly Catholic that when she was a teenager, her priest described her as too serious a Catholic. So Jozefa's opening up was through education appropriately, and one particular trigger for her feminism was the book 'The Female Eunuch' by Germaine Greer.  So often we have for people a particular book or a particular mentor.

 

Another person is Geoffrey Robertson, who was always a grown‑up. He was always I think at least 40, but he was also once a suburban high school boy whose lifelong opposition to censorship began when on the train he saw private school boys who had an unbowderalised version of Shakespeare's play 'The Tempest'.  First Nations activist Bronwyn Penrith came to realise that you didn't have to be afraid of police when she left her small home in the Snowy Mountains and came to Sydney and took part in street marches.  David Marr, who came from a conservative North Shore family, was a self‑confessed late bloomer, but he was outraged in 1975 when the Governor‑General was dismissed. Feminist artist Vivienne Binns describes herself as a little suburban girl but she discovered the weight of truth when she found herself painting this enormous metre‑high psychedelic vagina with teeth that went on to shock the art world. Actor John Derum was a Catholic, Melbourne background, but one of the triggers for him was the hanging of Ronald Ryan.  And perhaps I'll also just mention journalist Peter Manning, who came to university and began ‑ re‑founded the DLP Club.  So he was so far to the right that he wrote articles on his class supporting the Vietnam War, but through discussions with a radical priest and with Sydney University's leading Trotskyist, Communist and anarchist ‑ i.e., three people, not a cumulative political person ‑ Peter completely changed his views and came to realise in his words that it was better to be read than dead.  Another one is Margaret Reynolds, who was shocked into an awareness of Aboriginal social justice issues when she saw an Aboriginal man being kicked out of a pub in Townsville. 

 

So it's a series of personal encounters that led people to change, to become radicalised, and then in the way of the Sixties ‑ and Meredith has run through some of the key issues of that time ‑ someone would be radicalised about one issue and then quickly they would become involved in other radical campaigns and other radical issues. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  I think that's really interesting, those personal triggers and those aha moments or epiphanies that you talk about.  So I'm going to ask each of you now ‑ I'll start with you, Meredith ‑ what were the personal triggers for you? What turned you into a Radical?

 

DR MEREDITH BURGMANN:  Well, I've always said that my radicalisation really was absolutely Vietnam.  Whenever the Vietnamese delegations came to the New South Wales Parliament, I always explained to them that I wouldn't even be there if it wasn't for the war in Vietnam.  I was going to be a famous Australian novelist and, of course, wasn't game to be doing the things that I ended up doing.  So my aha moment was Vietnam and I really assumed it would be for all the other characters in the book.  You know, there's 20 characters that we look at.  And, surprisingly, it wasn't.  There were all these other things going on in the Sixties that radicalised people but for me it really was Vietnam.  I came from a loving but, on the surface, Menzies‑supporting family in Beecroft and Cheltenham, and in those days, those two suburbs were absolutely homogeneous.  I had never even spoken to a Catholic until I got to university.  I'd been to an Anglican all‑girls school on the North Shore.  I arrive at university with conservative political views but there I met my big sister's friends who were in the Student Christian Movement or the Newman society, which was the Catholic equivalent, and I remember coming home and saying to my mother, "Oh, there are all these Catholics at university" and she said, "Yes, dear, there is a lot in the world".  But I was that shocked to be talking to Catholics.  They were anti‑Vietnam and I was very taken by their arguments and I started to worry about whether or not I should be part of a society that was sending young men overseas to kill other people in my name and it was that whole thing about: is this a correct and proper war? So it was quite an intellectual change that was happening but it was all absolutely magnified by the fact you would come home every night and there on the boxy little TV set in the corner of your room you would see dead people.  It was the first time ever that they actually showed bodies on television.  It was never done during the other wars and it was pretty confronting for a nice little Anglican girl from Beecroft. 

 

So then I started realising that the Government was lying to me too because you won't remember this, but there was the famous Gulf of Tonkin incident and it came out more and more that the Americans had lied and then the Australian Government had lied, and that sort of stuff really upset me and I started to think to myself: well, is the Government lying to me about other things? Maybe they are lying about what's happening in Aboriginal reserves and maybe they are lying about their support for apartheid and things like that. 

 

But my actual conversion, I have realised, was actually very sudden.  All these things were worrying me and I remember waking up one morning and thinking, "Oh, I know.  I'm a socialist".  I remember travelling into university and seeing Geoff Robertson, who was a good friend, in the corridor at the McCallum Building and saying to him, "Geoff, Geoff, I think I'm a socialist" and he said, "Don't be silly, Meredith.  We're all socialists."  So that was I suppose my aha moment and from then on, Vietnam took over our lives.  It actually took over our lives.  I don't think I did any academic work.  By 1968 I think nothing was happening, except our continual going to demonstrations, being arrested, sitting in law courts waiting for your case or your friend's cases ‑ because you had to be witnesses in their cases.  I have spent probably hundreds of days sitting in those law courts.  So for me, it very much was Vietnam. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  That's really interesting.  And, Nadia, was yours Vietnam as well or did you have another triggering incident or other triggering incidences?

 

NADIA WHEATLEY:  It was Vietnam but I sort of really need to sketch in my family background as well because, as we've said, this is a book about growing up and the radicalisation happening in response or in reaction to families.  So unlike Meredith, I was really the archetype of the ‑ or fitted the media stereotype of the angry young rebel whose anger about Vietnam conscription, later apartheid, was really an expression of a great personal anger inside. 

 

The biggest change ‑ this is not a trigger for radicalisation ‑ but, of course, the great change in my life, the big event of my life, which has not been eclipsed in the 60‑plus years that have followed, was the fact that when I was nine, my mother died and I was put into a foster family.  And as happens to kids in foster families often, I was silenced and I was disempowered.  And in the way of the 1950s in particular I think, there was no expression for grief.  There was no such thing as counselling or discussion for a child, and so by 1968, which was 10 years later, I had a decade's worth of passive/aggressive anger and grief and guilt inside me.  My one escape through all of that era was books.  I lived entirely in the world of the imagination, in books that I read and in bits of books that I tried to write. 

 

So in 1968, my world was ‑ by which time I was doing third year English Honours, as Meredith was as well ‑ but my world was simply the domain between Beowulf and the Waste Land.  I had no knowledge of what was going on in the outside world.  I never watched television.  I never read the newspaper.  Nevertheless ‑ and Meredith and I had met when we were both at Women's College.  We were both misfits in the college system.  And, nevertheless, despite my ignorance of world events, when Meredith came to lunch on Wednesday, the 19th of June 1968 ‑ and I can check that from my diary and from newspaper records of what happened that day ‑ and said she was going on a demonstration downtown and did anyone want to come, I said, "I'll come."  Probably if she would have suggested going to the pub or the movies, I also would have said I would come, but I went.  And we went to what was billed as a vigil outside the Minister for Labour and National Services office, so it was an anti‑conscription vigil.  It wasn't even an anti‑Vietnam vigil.  And people were taking a petition upstairs to the Minister's office.  Very quickly, 92 of us joined the petitioners.  So in working hours, office hours, we went up in the lift and we sat in the foyer, in the carpeted foyer, of the Minister's office.  After a time, a snowy‑haired police officer arrived and read us a thing called the Crimes Act, in which he said we would be libel to two years gaol if we didn't leave the building.  And for me, after years of being bullied and bossed around in my foster family, it was just the final straw.  I was sitting peaceably on a carpeted floor in office hours and I could go to gaol for two years for this.  And so I didn't leave.  I did at that time believe I could be arrested but, of course, what happened that day was we simply sang a new song to me, "We shall not be moved"  .  We were dragged out, thrown out of the building, and in some pictures soon, you will see Meredith and me being thrown out of various buildings, and as I landed on my bottom in Martin Place, I felt happy.  I felt this sense ‑ not just happy that clearly I wasn't arrested and wasn't going to gaol for two years.  It felt empowered, I would later say.  And so for me, over a very, very rapid radicalisation process of quickly reading Karl Marx, of quickly reading Gettleman on Vietnam, of having discussions in the pub and at the student union, I changed my ‑ I didn't already have a political belief but I developed a political belief, which I still have, and I felt empowered by actions such as running around the streets at night, sticking posters on lamp posts, writing up graffiti and also the act of protest.  By being in a demonstration, by being arm in arm with comrades, I felt a physical contact, particularly with young male persons, that was not sexual and that was comradeship.  So for me, it was finding a community and it was finding a family and it was having fun. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  That's really interesting.  I'm going to explore that "empowered by the act of protest" a bit later.  But before I do that, because I'm going to ask you a few more questions, I do understand you have some photographs to share with us, which we're excited to see.  So we will now share them and you and Meredith can talk us through these photos.

 

NADIA WHEATLEY:  There you can see us on our headbands wearing the badges of the National Liberation Front.  So that was the most radical badges that you could wear.  It showed support for what was seen as the "enemy", the Viet Cong.  And on the cover of the book, the flags that you will see the demonstrators carrying are NLF flags.  Next one. 

 

DR MEREDITH BURGMANN:  Now, this is Nadia and me being removed from various places and the thing that we have to always tell people is we were both living in Women's College and one of the rules at Women's College was that you couldn't leave the college wearing trousers.  You had to be wearing a dress or a skirt.  And what I always think is very interesting is that we stuck to those rules.  While we were out there being arrested for, you know, crimes against the Australian criminal law, we still stuck to the Women's College rule of having to wear a dress.  And that meant that whenever we were arrested or dragged out of a building, the only thing that worried us was whether our knickers were showing.  And you can see that on some occasions this worked and on some occasions it didn't.

 

NADIA WHEATLEY:  Another knicker‑showing episode. I put this slogan, this news cutting, in because of the headline which says "Police arrest 6 inner‑city riot".  In fact, there were only six people in the demonstration, so it was pretty easy to have a riot in those days! But the point was that for your younger participants today, just remember that we didn't have social media, so the only way we could make news was by going out and getting arrested, serially being arrested, as Meredith has explained, and capturing the news headlines.  We will get the next picture and we will see what the city riot was.  So here we are, rioting away.  Meredith being arrested and me and another young woman called Maree being arrested outside a picture theatre in George Street that was showing the pro‑war movie 'The Green Berets'.

 

Here we have a couple of great orators.  We have Albert Langer, who ran the Melbourne Monash Maoist Labor Club, and we have the great Aboriginal activist Gary Foley.  The young woman speaking at the microphone is Helen Voysey, who was one of the organisers and founders of the High School Students Against the War In Vietnam, and in that image, she is speaking to the first moratorium crowd of 20,000, so she's still at school.  Meredith will tell you the other picture. 

 

DR MEREDITH BURGMANN:  Well, also, just before we leave Helen Voysey, you also have Mike Jones, who was the leader of Students For a Democratic Society at Sydney University, and, of course, right behind her is Ken McLeod, who ran I think it was the alliance of all the groups trying to put on the moratoriums.  And also there you have Tony Blackshield, a law professor from New South Wales Uni.  But the second picture is one of my favourites.  It's of Margret Roadknight, who we interview in the book.  She was almost 7 foot tall.  She actually was.  And she used to have this wonderful afro that made her even taller.  And at the beginning of the Vietnam War period, she describes herself as probably the only right wing folk singer in Australia, but by the end of it all, she gets totally caught up with it all and, of course, ends up being the iconic figure on the back of the truck playing and singing her protest songs to the moratorium crowd.  And on the left there you will see Jim Cairns, later Deputy Prime Minister of Australia. 

 

NADIA WHEATLEY:  This photo shows Brian Laver, who was the anarchist leader up at Queensland University, and he's there with his wife and young daughter.  His wife is pregnant with their second child in that picture, and the policeman is actually carrying the piece of paper, the placard, that Brian had been holding.  Now, in Queensland they had to fight for the right to go onto the street and demonstrate before they could even fight against the Vietnam War.  So for the simple act of walking with his very respectable wife and daughter in a demonstration and holding a piece of paper, Brian is being arrested in this photo.

 

DR MEREDITH BURGMANN:  These are just other Vietnam images.  Peter Duncan there in the first picture, he's the one with the umbrella.   Shortly after this photo was taken, he was the youngest Attorney‑General in South Australia and actually, as a private member, introduced the first decriminalisation of homosexuality legislation in the whole of Australia.  In fact, Michael Kirby first saw him as the grandfather of homosexual rights.  Peter explained to me that why they dressed like that for the demonstration was because the demonstrators were always being attacked for being long‑haired university students and they decided to up the ante a bit. 

And the second picture is a High School Students Against the War demonstration.  Helen Voysey is in there. This is an interesting one because most of the people that we looked at we assumed would be radicalised at university.  But once again this wasn't the case.  It was very interesting.  None of the First Nations ‑ the three people we interviewed ‑ Margret Roadknight, John Derum ‑ in fact, lots of people we interviewed become radicalised but not at university.  Peter Batchelor was an interesting one of those cases because he went to red Monash but found the oratory of Albert Langer and Jim Bacon, people like that, not terribly persuasive, but in his holiday job, he worked in a mattress factory and he'd become so involved in the industrial ferment at that time that he ends up working at the mattress factory for the next couple of years and eventually ending up being involved with the trade union movement and ending up ‑ well, eventually he was the Minister for Transport in a Labor government for many years.  So he was totally radicalised just by the industrial ferment of the time.  He's the one with the beard and the duffel coat in the middle. 

 

NADIA WHEATLEY:  A bit of recreation.  We've got Albert Langer leading a very quiet life at a picnic and Robbie Swan, who got arrested for growing 600 marijuana plants, so he represents our transcendental meditation and drug aspect in the book. 

 

DR MEREDITH BURGMANN:  In fact, the photograph I would have loved to put in was a naked picture of him doing 'om's but it wasn't a good enough photo. Robbie later created the Sex Party with Fiona Patten, now called the Reason Party, and, of course, Fiona is a Victorian member of Parliament, and I was very relieved ‑ because he's sort of quite well‑known as being the person who defends adult, non‑violent erotica, when we interviewed him, I thought, oh, dear, we're going to have to talk a lot about sex, but when I said to him, "What radicalised you in the Sixties?", he was very clear that it was drugs.  So it was quite interesting to have someone coming from that perspective, when the rest of us weren't terribly interested in drugs at all actually. 

 

NADIA WHEATLEY:  This was a classic photo.  It was a set‑up photo really by the group of young Redfern Aboriginal activists, guaranteed to drive ASIO and Special Branch wild.  So we see Gary Foley, Billy Craigie, Gary Williams, Paul Coe very much in a set‑up to mimic what the Black Panthers were doing in New York and it had its effect. 

 

DR MEREDITH BURGMANN:  And in the back there, on either side of Denis Walker, who was Kath Walker's son ‑ unfortunately, most of the people here have died ‑ there's is Huey P Newton at the back, who was the leader of the Black Panthers in America, and of course Shay Nevara (?). 

 

NADIA WHEATLEY:  So Peter Manning, who, as I mentioned, re‑founded the DLP Club at university but became an anti‑Vietnam activist and, in fact, of all of us, Peter in a way suffered more directly because by the time of the moratorium, he was working in a proper job as a journalist.  He spoke at the moratorium and when he went to work the next day, he got the sack. For a man who married young, with a young family, it was a very difficult situation for him for a long time.  So he suffered in a way that those of us who were just students didn't.

 

DR MEREDITH BURGMANN:  And the other picture is of Geoffrey Robertson when he was President of the SRC at Sydney University.  He decided to take the university to court over a guy who'd been expelled, called Max Humphries, and of course was successful and I just think that's a lovely picture of ‑ and Geoff loves it too, of course, because he looks young and handsome in it. 

 

And this is Gary Williams, one of our wonderful participants, very important in the setting up of the legal centre and the medical centre in Redfern.  He and Charlie Perkins began university on the same day, at Sydney University, in 1963.  I think that's a lovely photo.  It's John Derum sitting down cross‑legged.  He starts in theatre in Melbourne in the mid‑1960s and, interestingly, ends up at Emerald Hill Theatre, which is really where all the interesting, exciting radical staff was happening, and apart from the Ronald Ryan hanging, which he talks about, his radicalisation really happens through the English anti‑war plays of Spike Milligan and John Arnhem and people like that, rather than the American experience. 

 

NADIA WHEATLEY:  And Bronwyn Penrith, who got involved with street theatre, which was another form of getting your message out that we did in the pre‑social media days, and here she is representing white power.  So she has got a blonde wig on and she said that she had flour on her face and it was a particular protest about one of the early outrageous mining company attacks on Aboriginal land.  So the umbrella that she's carrying has got the name of the mining companies and so on, and this particular street theatre performance was invited to be on the equivalent of The 7.30 Report, the evening news magazine report on the ABC.  So they managed to get their message out to mainstream Australia through this street theatre performance. 

 

Here we have a bit of colour.  We have the painting by Vivienne Binns that I mentioned, the vagina surrounded by teeth, and also a light show poster for Ellis D Fogg, who did the smoke and shadows light shows that were at all the concerts that were fundraisers for all the left wing causes.

 

DR MEREDITH BURGMANN:  And Margaret Reynolds bravely taking part in an abortion rights protest in Queensland in the early 1970s. 

 

NADIA WHEATLEY:  And Jozefa Sobski, who is part of a protest.  In those days, we even had to protest about the right of women to drink in public bars, so a group of feminists went across the harbour to Manly one day and took on the guys at the pub, and there she is standing up to someone with extreme body issues. 

 

DR MEREDITH BURGMANN:  These are both photographs from the Springboks tour.  The one of Gary Foley really did flash all around the world, that photograph.  That's him in the parking lot outside where the Springboks were staying in Bondi Junction, which just happened to be about 100 yards from where a house full of Aboriginal activists lived.  So it was very useful.  And that's me being arrested at Manuka Oval in Canberra for once again a Springboks match.  And I only found out when we were doing this book that what I was arrested for was something that Gary Foley and Gary Williams had actually done, which was cutting the wire.  I couldn't work out why I was arrested because I was actually just standing there with my arm through my mother's, because my mother had been totally radicalised by this stage too. 

 

NADIA WHEATLEY:  And this is just us keeping up the struggle on Invasion Day 2020, which we just put there to remind you that we're still doing it.  And, finally, the book cover again.  So the book cover encapsulates the sense of confrontation.  So it was a photo taken from Old Parliament House looking out on a demonstration against Spiro Agnew, who was the Vice‑President of America, and, as I've mentioned, it's got the NLF flags there. 

 

DR MEREDITH BURGMANN:  And I was arrested at the Spiro Agnew demonstration too, charged with fighting in the grounds of the War Memorial. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  How many times all up were you arrested?

 

DR MEREDITH BURGMANN:  I once worked out that I had been found guilty 10 times and I think I had been found not guilty 11 times.  So that would make    21.  But especially during the Springboks, it was hard to even walk out the front door of where I lived without being arrested.  Sometimes I was guilty but not always. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  So what I found really interesting about those photos is ‑ because my next question was going to be around the role of universities in radicalisation and the role of university students in the radical movements but what you pointed out while you were taking us through those slides is it wasn't always university that actually made people radical and, in fact, sometimes they came along ‑ either went to uni and weren't affected at all and went and found their radicalism elsewhere or, of course, didn't go to university in the first place.  I suppose my question is fundamentally, what was special about this era?  You know what I mean? Clearly universities did have a role and clearly in both of your stories, just even the sheer role of education helped you see the world in a different way, but it wasn't just that.  So was it the intermingling between university students and other social movements? What do you think was the role of the university in all of this?

 

DR MEREDITH BURGMANN:  I might just pop in here to say quickly one of the reasons why universities were so important in the Vietnam War was, of course, the conscription of 20‑year‑olds, which meant that your friends and your boyfriends were being conscripted and sent off to war.  So that was hugely important.  But another thing that I have often thought about ‑ because we keep getting asked why aren't students today so radical.  I still think they are radical and doing terrific stuff, but the things that have changed is the bringing in continuous assessment.  In our day, you just had one exam at the end of a year that you had to pass.  And for a lot of my subjects, I didn't even have ‑ you had to hand essays in but you didn't actually have to pass them.  You just had to hand them in, and then at the end of the year, you had to pass an exam.  Continuous assessment has absolutely destroyed university students' chances to be involved in any meaningful way in class.  In our day, we had something called the Teachers' College Scholarship, which gave you not only free university but then gave you a stipend to live on while you went through university, with the result that most students didn't have evening jobs.  Yes, they'd go off at Christmas and get jobs then, but the way university students today have to go off and have other jobs in order to put themselves through uni, that just didn't happen.  So university students had a lot of spare time. 

 

NADIA WHEATLEY:  I would just like briefly to pull the lens out around the world, instead of just focussing in on Australia, and, of course, what we had the sense of being, particularly in 1968, was part of an international movement and so you would see university students at the Sorbonne, you would see university students at Berkeley California, university students in Japan, and so you were simultaneously part of this international student revolt. 

 

Another issue that I think that was important, and I can't give you economic comparisons, but it seemed possible to rent a really run‑down share house more cheaply than it is today.  So a lot more students were living very close to campus,  whereas today they tend to be living at home with their parents and on a far‑flung commute.  So you could get together, drink at the pub til 11 o'clock, and then run around the streets of Glebe all night, writing up graffiti and sticking 'Don't register for national service' posters on to lamp posts.  There was more geographic cohesion as well. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  That wonderful photo you showed of Charlie Perkins and his friend on the 1963 ‑ that's an interesting point.  So Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.  So we've got a question from an audience member, Emily Dawson, who asks: were these movements associated with advocating for the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students at the time?

 

DR MEREDITH BURGMANN:  Look, there was a group called Abschol, which was about scholarships for Aboriginal students, but the group of young activists ‑ Aboriginal ‑ you know, Gary Williams, Gary Foley, Paul Coe, Billy Craigie, that lot, they weren't students.  They were about land rights.  Whenever we talked about rights, it was about land rights and also anti‑police activity against Aboriginal Australians.  So I think we mainly met them through our political activity, although the interesting thing is that Gary Williams, when I asked him about whether he had gone on Vietnam demos, he just said no, that he saw Vietnam as a white fella's war, which was really interesting.  But then he says however ‑ he got totally involved with the anti‑apartheid struggle and the Springboks because he saw that as being about racism, so there was a lot of intermingling of the issues. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Nadia, do you have anything to add to that?

 

NADIA WHEATLEY:  No.  I would just actually like to just go at a slight tangent and say something I was remembering this morning about Charles Perkins because the current struggle about the Biloela family, about those young girls, has reminded me of Nancy Prasad, and if you don't know who Nancy Prasad is, you could Google her.  Her surname is 'Prasad'.  And she was a young Fijian Indian girl who was being deported.  Of course, in those days, we had a White Australia Policy.  So look up the role that Charles Perkins played fighting against her deportation.  And I think it's really significant that Aboriginal activists like Charles Perkins and like the two Garys and Paul Coe were interested beyond purely Aboriginal issues, that they were fighting for social justice issues beyond just the Aboriginal land rights issue. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  So Aleesha Ford ‑ this another question from one of our audience members ‑ she says it's an interesting point about those who suffered for or perhaps were more established in their careers and adult lives and possibly had more to lose through their involvement in radical activism, so she's pointing out that point you made about Peter Manning, Nadia.  She says: notwithstanding the need for bravery or the absence of fear in social movements, what lessons can we take forward for impactful activism now in ways that will make a difference but perhaps without resulting in us getting arrested?

 

DR MEREDITH BURGMANN:  Well, as Nadia says, the reasons why we had to get arrested in some way was that it was the only way you got any coverage at all.  These days you have social media.  You have huge platforms where you can get your message out and your story out and you just have to video doing something and stick it on YouTube and there people can see it.  In our day, unless the mainstream media covered what you were doing, nobody knew that you were anti‑Vietnam or something.  So being arrested really was a way of drawing attention to your issue. 

 

NADIA WHEATLEY:  Maybe I'm just a grumpy old woman but I've been feeling lately that the ease of just going on to hashtag this or Twitter that or Instagram has the danger of enabling people to feel good too easily, as if they're taking a radical act in three seconds, just by clicking on something.  And the turning up, going in the march, making those physical human connections is what's really important.  I think that's what we have seen in the Me‑Too movement, particularly in the Black Lives Matter movement, and in the international protests over climate change.  I still think maybe you don't have to get arrested but turning up and going in the marches, putting in the time is still really the bottom line of importance. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  I went in the School Strike For the Climate march.  It was actually the last year's one I think.  Anyway, it was the one that was absolutely enormous down at Domain and I remember thinking that although I was still pretty cynical that the Government would actually react to it, I personally felt so much better and so energised from standing amongst a whole lot of people who felt the same way as I did.  There's something about the moral‑boosting impact of being around a whole lot of people who feel the same way about a certain cause. 

 

DR MEREDITH BURGMANN:  But also seeing how young they were and how funny their posters were.  I just loved that.  I felt the same way.  I came home thinking the world was in good hands. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  It gives you hope.  So Barry Niverson‑Smith has asked a question.  He has got the most votes at the moment.  His question is: workers' rights to strike seem to have taken a dive in recent years.  Can you comment on the changes in society that have led to this?

 

DR MEREDITH BURGMANN:  Well, you know, a preponderance of conservative governments has meant that even when Labor governments get in, they don't really get enough time to properly protect workers' rights.  And I agree, the Green Bans of the '70s would not have been able to happen under present industrial relations legislation because of secondary boycott legislation and no right to strike, all those things, and it's to do with the lowering of union density, the fact that fewer and fewer workers are actually in unions, and that means that the right to protect the right to strike even is damaged.  I think the actual answer to all that, of course, is another three or four Zooms. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  That's right.  We might do another one on that.  So do you think ‑ we're almost at time, so I'll start to wrap it up, but do you think ‑ and I know this is a question you've been asked before, that you run the risk of taking a glorified or rose‑tinted view of the Sixties? So there was lots, of course, that was wrong with the Sixties.  It was a really shamefully racist era for Australia.  The Stolen Generation was happening throughout the Sixties.  The ongoing removal of First Nations children.  So is this a glorified view? What do you think?

 

NADIA WHEATLEY:  I think a hopeful view.  I think it maybe is a very positive view but we just wanted to give people hope and to see that you can make change, that you can go out to change the world and you can do it. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Meredith?

 

DR MEREDITH BURGMANN:  Yes, certainly ‑ there were things about the Sixties that were terrible.  I mean, we had a shocking, shocking government that was doing the most dreadful things and the most paternalistic and colonial.  I mean, Menzies really did belong in the '40s rather than the '50s.  He was so old‑fashioned.  And issues like censorship.  We weren't allowed to read DH Lawrence!  So it was ‑ but the fact that it was so terrible is why the Radicals happened.  We were still executing fellow Australians in 1967 and, I mean, they're horrifying thoughts.  But whether we're rose coloured about the radical movement that arises out of that bad political background ‑ of course, it's rose coloured.  You know, we were young.  Everything was better when we were young.  But it certainly changed a lot of things. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  And last question because I really like this question from a woman, Jen Laidlaw, and I just wanted to add my own personal story, which is I also grew up with radical parents and we, therefore, as kids ‑ so I was born in 1973 and grew up in the late '70s and '80s and the music we listened to in our household was always Pete Segar and all of that.  So I still know off by heart, all of those songs of the '60s and '70s.  And Jen Laidlaw asks the question: how important was music to the cause? Nadia, would you like to have a go at that one first?

 

NADIA WHEATLEY:  Well, we have mentioned Margret Roadknight, who was one of the folk singers of the era, but very significant also was things happening in the world of rock'n'roll with people like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin.  So again it was part of the radical change, the radical ferment.  We have mentioned Ellis D Fogg, so having concerts and fundraisers that were bands and performances and dancers was a really significant part of it.  So it was just the exhilaration of that era and, of course, it was a time epitomised in that moment when Bob Dylan changes from having an acoustic guitar to having an electric guitar when you felt suddenly things taking off in the music world as well as in the political and the social world. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Was music important for you, Meredith?

 

DR MEREDITH BURGMANN:  I've never quite been into music in the same way as everyone else but I love the very aggressively anti‑war stuff coming out of America, particularly Phil Oakes and his terrific "Love me I'm a liberal", those sorts of very political songs.  But even the Beatles were producing soft‑core anti‑war pro‑Radical songs.  I mean, 'Revolution', 'All you need is love', 'Back to the USSR', so many of those songs really had ‑ fairly soft but terrifically radicalising messages. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  That is true, isn't it.  Alright.  Well, that's all we have time for today.  Thank you, Nadia and Meredith for joining us.  That was just wonderful.  I hope everyone online enjoyed it as much as I did.  And last‑minute plug for the book, 'Radicals'.  The link is still in the chat.  You know what it's about now.  It is all these beautiful interwoven stories talking about the 1960s and their role in it.  Any closing remarks from either of you?

 

NADIA WHEATLEY:  Just keep up the struggle. 

 

DR MEREDITH BURGMANN:  Yes, and we have total faith in the young of today.  I think they're doing a terrific job in difficult circumstances. 

 

VERITY FIRTH:  Yes.  Well, thank you, again.  Thanks for joining us and thank you to everyone online.  And, remember, this session was recorded so we will be sending you a link to the recording if you want to watch it again or if you want share it with anyone.  So thanks very much.