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Friday, 7 September 2007

SPECIAL REPORT...

History rerun - Sydney's Radical Past Revisited

Deja-vu in Town Hall Square

April 2003, Sydney

The dark, slicked-back hair of his late-1960s persona is now grey and a little wilder, his paunch a bit more substantial and his clothing the contemporary grunge it was in 1969. It is a somewhat aged version of that earlier Gould, but it is still recognisably Bob.

On the other side of the crowd, near the Town Hall steps, a middle-aged man sells newspapers. Under a head of greying hair is a face with an air of seriousness reminiscent of its 1960s self. This is John Percy, surviving member of the Percy brothers, one-time Trotskyite, socialist youth movement leader and one-time University of Sydney student. The newspaper John sells is called Green Left, a title suggestive of how the youth politics of 35 years ago has changed.

It is no coincidence that Gould and Percy are at this demonstration. Such events have long been their political stock in trade. But what is different this time is their position on the periphery of the demonstration - Gould sitting, observing; Percy selling his newspaper. It signifies their stepping away from the core, their handing on of the torch of leftist politics in Sydney to the younger cohort at the centre of the day's noisy, emotion-charged demonstration. It is the intergenerational handover of the Sydney Left.

The journey south

I first come across Bob Gould and John Percy in 1967. Travelling from Brisbane to Sydney after doing time at Brisbane State High School and a couple of years working at uninteresting jobs, my plan was to spend a year in the big city before being conscripted into the army - these were the years of compulsory military service for the war in Vietnam.

In Sydney, I encountered an old school friend and it was through him that I met Gould and the Percy brothers - the leaders of Sydney's radical Left. If characters become icons signifying the spirit of a particular time, Gould and the Percy's symbolise the exuberance of the late1960s in its politicised form - the so-called New Left. Though they do not figure prominently in historical studies of the city, they surely deserve a place in the matrix of characters that have shaped the metropolis' social movements.

I discovered photography at high school. Thirty-five years ago I photographed demonstrations against the war in Vietnam and episodes in the life of the city's radical youth movement. Now, here I was again photographing a demonstration.

Parallels with a radical past

The parallels between the current era - early 2003 - and the late-1960s ran deeper that warm Autumn Wednesday in downtown Sydney.

First, the newspaper Percy was selling, Green Left, was the direct descendent of a political paper called Direct Action that was published in the late-1960s. That paper was the product of the leftist youth group, Resistance, that was set up to radicalise, with an infusion of Trotskyist political thinking, the youth who opposed the war in Vietnam. At its peak, it sold around 6000 to 7000 copies each edition, according to Bob Gould (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Greenleft_discussion/message/1764). Just as that earlier newspaper capitalised on the concerns of the youth of the time, so Green Left used a fusion of anti-globalisation, environmental politics and opposition to the war in Iraq to capture the imagination of the dissafected among contemporary youth.

Resistance - here, in 2003, stenciled white on red on the headbands worn by the noisier core of demonstrators was that same name... a movement reborn, recycled for new times and new wars... Sydney's leftist history moving in a loop. The age of the crowd told the same story. The April 2 and April 9 demonstrations had been billed as 'student' events, with the predominant age group from late high school to young adult, the same demographic that participated in the anti-war/ counterculture movement of the 1960s and that made up the membership of Resistance - young people on the cusp of adulthood.

Face on a shirt

There was another familiar face at that April 9 demonstration in Town Hall Square, another link to our political past. It was a face emblazoned on T-shirts worn by some in the crowd... that of Cuban revolutionary, Che Guevara. It was the very same image that Resistance had printed on T-shirts 35 years ago, an image taken in 1960 by Cuban photographer, Alberto Korda (see sidebar this page).

I had come to the demonstration to photograph it, not to revisit icons from the past. But the past was very much present that day - John Percy, the recycled Resistance, the face on the shirts... all again manifest in the city like some fantastic revival, some commemoration... a revisitation.

The form the demonstration took - direct action on the city's streets, angry young voices raised in opposition to a war and antagonism towards the police - was something else suggestive of past times. The only thing missing was conscription for military service and the burning of draft cards.

Despite the presence of images and actions reminiscent of times now distant, there was something fundamentally different about the afternoon's demonstration. Missing was the exuberance and sense of freedom and possibility - that's the best way I can describe it - that characterised similar events of 35 years ago. Instead, there was an anger... a deep anger perhaps less-prominent or even absent among demonstrators against the war in Vietnam.

>>> next: The countercultural context