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Friday, 7 September 2007

SPECIAL REPORT...

History rerun - Sydney's Radical Past Revisited

Resistance - the rise to leadership

The youth group Resistance led the early opposition to the war in Vietnam. The Combi belonged to the Third World Bookshop.

They were not discussing adolescent sexual behaviour but the organisation that preceded Resistance - SCREW - the Society for Cultivation of Rebellion Everywhere. Whether the story is true or apocryphal, the organisation changed its name to Resistance in 1967.

Gould and the brothers

The sometimes contradictory blend of politics and counterculture that became Resistance was the product of Bob Gould and the Percy brothers - John and Jim. Neither fit the stereotypical 1960s countercultural image.The three conveyed more the picture of the social revolutionary immersed in the society they are trying to change and working with a youth movement some of whose practices they were not fond of.

All three had been influenced by the writings of Leon Trotsky. Trotskyism did not sit well with the old Left, those with an ideological predisposition towards the Soviet Union. It was Stalin, after all, who was behind Trotsky's murder in the 1930s. John Percy's parting with Trotskiism would not come until the creation of the Democratic Socialist Party in 1972.

Well versed in labour history and a one-time member of a Sydney-based Trotskyite faction, Gould was the politically experienced guiding force, the intellectual of the movement who would call upon an encyclopedic knowledge of the Australian and international Left to win his point. He was of Irish extraction and a supporter of Irish republicianism. In the early days of Resistance and the Third World Bookshop Bob Gould was married to a school teacher and lived in the distinctly middle class suburb of Woolahra.

John Percy's political experience was gained in Sydney University's Labor Club, for which he served as secretary in 1966. Perhaps it was no coincidence that the Club would become a leading force of opposition to the war in Vietnam. John, slight of build and with dark beard framing a round face, was the more serious of the two brothers. Behind the plastic-frame of his glasses was an acute political mind. John's brother, Jim Percy, had a jovial overlay to his serious political side. A man of large of build with a substantial red beard, he passed away in the mid-1990s.

The anti-war movement came into existence when Gould and the Percys got together. Hall Greenland, then a participant and in later years a Leichhardt councilor, wrote of its origin: " ...the anti-war movement began as a one-man band. The first organising meetings were held in Bob Gould's lounge room in the eastern suburb of Woolahra, the leaflets were run off on a Roneo machine in the kitchen and we stuffed the envelopes for the mail-out in his dining room. And while we worked at undermining US imperialism, in those moments when Gould was not lecturing us about the finer points of Marxist theology (Bob was a rumbustious Australian-Irish Catholic of orthodox Trotskyist bent) we listened for the first time to Bob Dylan".

Saturday nights were party nights at Resistance. From left: Keith James dances with Barbara Enge; Centre front: Lin Stanton and Christine. Centre back: Tara Whalesby and John Dease. Standing in door: the author (L), cup of rough red in hand, and film afficionado, Rod Webb (R).

Goulburn Street, Saturday nights... Ivan Rapak stands with back to camera on the right of the image. Wearing glasses to Ivan's left is Staphan Couani. On Stephan's left is Earle Lomas, who later went to the US and became a singer-songwriter before returning to Australia. The flagons contain cheap, rough red, the preferred social lubricant at Resistance.

Youth culture and politics - an unhappy blend

The small group is sitting around the kitchen table. Suddenly, John Percy storms in and announces in a very authorative way that the "fun crowd" is finished. Serious politics is to take its place. Those who do not agree can move on.

There was no chance to discuss John' s proclaimation. It went down like the proverbial lead balloon. The group, which included some who would certainly have regarded themselves as politicos, were stunned and subdued. John knew how to spoil a convivial evening meal.

The scene took place one Saturday evening in the kitchen of 35 Goulburn Street, the Sydney premises occupied by Resistance, and it epitomised the difference in thinking between the Marxist politicos and the less politically committed of the movement. It seemed that countercultural ways were to lose out to the heavy weight of Marxist doctrine.

John knew his proclamation risked alienating many of those who hung around the Resistance premises. Countercultural attitudes permeated the organisation but his statement gave no recognition to the fact that having fun was part of the wider culture of the anti-war movement, that it was a part of the growing up process that most of those involved were passing through, and that there was more to participation in radical politics than the constancy of serious work for the cause.

John's was a hard-nosed attitude given the cultural politics of the time. That he was aware of the importance of this was alluded to in his later description of the movement (www.dsp.org.au/dsp/hist 1.htm#Intro): "The radicalisation among young people that occurred in the 1960s was a deep-going rebellion on cultural, social and political issues. It was an international phenomenon and any new development in that rebellion spread around the world rapidly. It broke through the last vestiges of the stifling, conservative, Cold War atmosphere of the 1950s.

"The radicalisation expressed itself in rebellion against parental authority, any authority. It was a reaction against capitalist commercialisation, exploitation and debasement of every human value... It was a rebellion that took many wild forms, took many dead ends such as drugs and dropping out. It was a cultural rebellion on music, on dress, on style".

Percy's kitchen outburst grew out of frustration with counterculture ambiguity towards conventional politics. For most of the counterculture, including that on the Resistance periphery, politics was more a background noise to their opposition to the war in Vietnam and to their attitudes to conventional society in general.

The Marxists vision of a new society was certainly more restrictive than the expansive but vague allusions of the counterculture. Grounded in theory that failed to take account of the differences of the Australian working class to that of other countries, the prospect was of a grey society rooted in images of the past, yet one internationalist and humane in outlook and without the shortcomings of capitalism.

The vision might have been appealing in terms of social equity, but, in form, it was of little appeal to the free, individualistic and liberal attitude of a youth culture that was more in tune with the spirit of the times. Social change through violent revolution, seen as inevitable in Marxist theory, was eschewed by the counterculture majority. Their attitude was summed up in John Lennon's famous song of the time, Revolution: "You say you want a revolution, well, you know, we all want to save the world... when you talk about destruction don't you know that you can count me out".

The serious politicos saw Lennon's song as a political sell out, however it summed up the desire for social change brought about by peaceful means and was more representative of the attitude of the youth culture in general.

For sure, the leftists were right that the youth culture had no articulated vision of a socially just society - no grand narrative which gave meaning and context to their everyday actions. And they were right in their assertion that the youth culture, the counterculture or whatever term was used to describe it, was hedonistic and focused on the now with its music, earthy chic, pot and acid. The Resistance leadership attempted to reconcile counterculture and leftist politics but there remained an undercurrent of tension between the two.

Resistance was an underlay of Marxist class analysis capped by a superstructure of youth culture. It was a hybrid intellectual creation that sought to incorporate Western liberalism and Marxist class struggle. It was unstable because, ideologically, those influences were contradictory. The tension that resulted was discussed at the movement's core, but not overtly. They could not afford to divorce themselves from youth because it was from them that their recruits came. The counterculture and opposition to the war in Vietnam were seen as the first steps on the road to radicalisation.

An attractive politics

Sydney, 1968.

It is a large, dark, cavernous room in what must have been an old industrial building where the eastern side of Sydney's central business district blends into Surry Hills. The place is crowded. People sit on the floor, others stand in groups around the walls. Music is blaring loudly and on the wall moving, amorphous shapes are being projected. This is the doing of a man with a projector and a set of oil-filled slides that set up moving patterns when the heat of the projector bulb activated them - an effect reminiscent of those coloured, oil-filled lamps of the period in which heat-activated blobs move through an oily liquid.

Not all that far away in Darlinghurst, just a hundred metres off Oxford Street, a shop sells paraphenalia imported from San Francisco's Haight Ashbury's youth culture. The posters blend psychedelic art with the floral exuberance of Art Norveau and there is a bewildering array of other subcutural artefacts that carry meaning and more than a hint of something exciting happening in that distant city.

This is how Haight Ashbury youth culture and its 1967 Summer of Love manfested in Sydney. Hippy had been born and had come to these distant shores where it attracted the attention of the innovative crowd on the social edge. But there was a war going on, a war starting to lose favour among a public that initially supported it. That loss of confidence fed into the mix that was the forming counterculture. And, at some time in those years, that counterculture discovered Resistance.

Vietnam Moratorium 1971... the man with the curly hair is Rudi. Behind him is Resistance habitue, Belinda Kennedy, daughter of the late associate editor and columnist for The Autralian newspaper, 'Buzz' Kennedy.

Resistance can be thought of as a donut. The hole in the middle was the politicised core. The doughy matter surrounding it was a numerically larger and ideologically looser periphery made up of people attracted to the organisation by its anti-war and cultural activities. There was a churning of individuals on the periphery as people came, stayed awhile, then left. They would attend events and help out but, with few exceptions, would not commit in any serious, political sense.

To make the place and its politics attractive, those in control organised a weekend package, though they would not have thought of it in such terms. There were the demonstrations, of course, but the weekend activities at the Goulburn Street premises were an ongoing program - Saturday night performances by acoustic folk musicians or parties, and Sunday night film screenings or other activities. It was at these events that most of those on the organisation's periphery were most in evidence. For some, their association with Resistance was a social, and sometimes fleeting, affair.

Dissent can appear adventurous. Perhaps the allure of the place had much to do with its role as a visible symbol of resistance to the war in Vietnam and as a cultural beacon representing the values of difference. Except for the few who had already been introduced to the politics of the Australian Left by their parents, it is doubtful whether many would have become involved had it not been for the youth culture packaging surrounding Resistance and the Third World Bookshop. For most, a political message stated in the staid terms of Marxism would have been too dull. The spirit of the time was exuberant and Marxism appeared as anything but.

The structure of Resistance did not present any particularly attractive, democratic alternative to the social mainstream. There might have been tokens of democratic particiption here and there, but the reality was that major decisions were taken or heavily influenced by the Gould-Percy troika. In a 1990 talk on the history of the Democratic Socialist Party (www.dsp.org.au/dsp/hist1.htm#Intro), John Percy, then national secretary, summed up the decision-making structure of Resistance: "The initial leadership of Resistance was an unelected clique of three - Gould and the Percy brothers".

Domain days

He is only of modest stature but standing atop a short stepladder he is lifted above the crowd. His voice is anything but modest and his quick responses to the shouted comments from his audience reveal an entertaining wit edged with a biting sarcasm.

The crowd gathered around the speaker form a dense knot amid the green lawn of Sydney's Domain. The quietness of the Sunday afternoon is punctuated by outbursts of hearty laughter as the speaker lampoons politicians, prominent clergy and deserving others. This middle-aged, red-haired and vociferous man is the so-called 'Webster the fascist'. How he came by this name had something to do with his life in England, however he appears more an entertainer than an extreme right winger.

Webster was a regular speaker on Sunday afternoons at Sydney's Domain, that patch of parkland that separates the central business district from the downhill run into Wooloomooloo. The Domain is the local equivalent of London's Hyde Park's Speakers Corner, a place where anyone is free to practice their oratory skills on whatever subject excites them. The Domain on Sunday afternoons was an institution in Sydney and, in the late-60s, was well attended.

When the weather was fine up to several hundred people would stop to listen, jeer and be entertained. Another regular was a middle-aged evangelist, a man whose face went bright red as, Bible tucked under his arm, he ranted at the crowd, pausing every so often for a break of religious music performed by his younger female companion, a Pacific Islander.

On the edge of this scene, on the grassy patch against the wall of a government building at the entrance to the Domain, a team would spread a selection of literature, printed T-shirts and message badges to sell to the public and engage them in conversation about the war in Vietnam. This was Resistance.

One of the publications sold was a propagandist little edition under the title of Australian Atrocities in the War in Vietnam. While some were interested enough to purchase a copy, the book elicited a contentious reaction from others.

Resistance habitues such as Roger Garlic, with his Afro hairstyle, Kevin Childs, Bluey Fisher and Megan James were regulars at the bookstand. The Sunday afternoon was another of Resistance's ways of gaining visibility and getting its message out. Certainly, sales were made to the passing public but who knows how effective it was in promoting the political message?

It was a pleasant way to spend Sunday afternoon for the book stand crew, an afternoon outside, sheltering from the sun in the heat of summer or enjoying the sun's warmth of a winter's afternoon. Later, the books, T-shirts and other paraphernalia would be packed into cartons, loaded into the Combi and the crew would return to the Third World Bookshop in Goulburn Street. In the evening there would be films organised by Rod Webb, who made a living in publishing, or some other event.

Looking back on those Sunday afternoons in the Domain produces a strange feeling of satisfaction, even happiness, as if listening to those speakers and watching the crowd as it cheered and jeered was an important part of growing up.

Raiders in the night - the paste-ups

It's the end of another day at the office. The commuters trudge towards train station and bus stop past grey city walls so anonymous they are not even noticed. Not so the next morning when those same commuters make the journey in the opposite direction. During the night those boring, grey walls have been transformed with colourful posters calling on passers-by to mobilise against the war in Vietnam.

The mavens responsible for planning the war spoke of winning the 'hearts and minds' of the Vietnamese they sometimes protected, sometimes bombed. In Sydney, the anti-war movement had its own hearts and minds campaign and the walls of the city carried its proclamations.

In those days, it was the poster that took message to the masses. As well as appeals to join this or that mobilisation against the war or a coming Moratorium march, there was cultural propaganda such as posters of Che Guevara or another similarly unkempt face, a poster which carried the message: "Wanted for sedition - Jesus Christ".

Responsibility for making the walls speak lay with Resistance's nocturnal paste-up crew, a shadowy team or variable composition. Their day started with the coming of night; that provided the concealment they needed for their nefarious work.

Into the night - the propaganda raid

It is early evening at the Goulburn Street premises and preparations are underway. Buckets are filled with water, flour and sugar added and stirred until a gooey, glutinous paste of just the right consistency to attach paper to wall is ready. Nothing will happen for awhile now.

Around nine or ten the noctural crew reassembles. They load the buckets, a couple wide brushes and a wad of posters into the bookshop's old, green and cream VW Combi. A crew of three or four climb in, already having discussed with Bob Gould or perhaps a Percy brother the target area for the evening. Into the concealment of darkness they drive in search of virgin, anonomous walls.

Moving into their target area, the driver searches for suitable surfaces. Spotting some, he parks the Combi inconspicuously, looks around to make sure there is no one about, then gives the waiting crew the go-ahead. The side door opens with that rumbling, scraping sound characteristic of Combis and a team of two - or perhaps two teams - rush out and go to work to remedy the blank anonymity with a hurried application of bold, colourful posters. Wall space becomes propaganda space.

Sometimes, the city itself would be the target. Other nights, the Combi might turn west down Goulburn Street towards the waiting walls of Glebe and Newtown. On other occasions the combi would venture far into the western suburbs to paste the city's working class areas. Sometimes, a left turn into George Street would head the van across the bridge and into the lower North Shore. While those middle class people slept securely, the walls outsie their homes were transformed. It was ironic that it was often the children of those same suburbs that made up the nocturnal crews.

Those posters would have been printed the previous weekend on the silk screen apparatus out back of the Third World Bookshop. Bluey Fisher or one of the Childs brothers would have patiently moved squeegee across silk, depositing paint onto waiting paper. That done, the poster would have been placed on the wire drying rack.

Posters were an important and successful mobilising medium for the anti-war movement. Cheap and easy to produce, they combined rudimentary graphic design with politics to shout their message at passers-by.

The art of the political poster flourished in the late-1960s. Artistically, the posters were nothing to boast of. Basic, utilitarian and commonly of a single colour, they were designed for fast reproduction by silk screen press. Many a Sydney wall was made the more interesting by their presence and they fulfilled their purpose of swelling numbers at demonstrations and bringing people into the Third World Bookshop. The poster helped to create a presence for both Resistance and the book shop.

Postage please

It is around 10 in the evening and the paste-up crew are deep in one of the financially comfortable suburbs that make up the lower North Shore. They have had an uneventful night pasting walls in the neighbourhood and now it is time to make a purchase of stamps so the next edition of the Resistance newsletter can be mailed out.

The suburban post office is closed at this time of night but, fortunately, it has a coin-in-the-slot stamp dispenser in a little alcove off the street.

The driver, a man a little older than the avarage Resistance activist, parks and exits the Combi. Looking around, he is happy to find that there is nobody about. He looks like any other respectable citizen in need of a stamp at this time of night as he walks up to the vending machine and feeds the coin slot. A line of stamps begins to ooze from the machine.

He is buying a lot of stamps, so the purchase takes a little time but eventually it is done. He rips the last from the vending machine and turns back to the Combi. As he pulls away the satisfied customer must have thought how the stamps in his pocket weighed a lot less than the washers he had purchased them with.

Not the average school days

"We attract the brighter, more intelligent kids, don't we?". The statement comes from Bob Gould and he is talking about students attracted to a new organisation, High School Students Against the War in Vietnam. He stands behind the counter of number 37, the adjoining premises the bookshop has expanded into. Gould is carrying on a conversation with a couple activists and they look over towards a group of three or four, one of whom is Peter Voysey, a student who will later go into leftist politics in the UK.

The high school organisation is still small but it is growing despite the fact that the authorities and many parents do not see the politicisation of their children as a valid part of school life.

High School Students Against the War in Vietnam was set up by the Resistance leadership. Recruiting a small team of young activists, some of whom became regulars at Goulburn Street, the organisation soon expanded.

The brighter kids that Gould referred to were exemplified by Peter and Helen Voysey, Barbara Enge, Debby Payne, Mandy Nicholson from Chatswood Girl's High and her friends Margy and Perry, senior students at respectable North Shore high schools. These were people not inspired by political careers, Marxism or world revolution. While they were sincere in opposing the war, for most it was the ambiance of Resistance that attracted them.

John Percy claims that the organisation had contacts in 100 high schools in Sydney. Whatever its reach, it soon raised the ire of talkback radio hosts. In one instance a Resistance member, not a high school student, was detailed by Gould to call a talkback host to deny allegations that the organisation was controlled by leftist politicos. Although the students themselves appear to have had some control, that charge must have been difficult to deny. To have an inexperienced person confront an experienced talkback host was maybe not such a good move.

On another occasion, presumably with the intention of stimulating participation, members of the group paid unannounced visits to addresses on their mailing list, a move they should have known would lead to trouble with parents.

High School Students Against the War in Vietnam - Centre: Debbie Payne with Stefan Couani (behind)

Minor opposition becomes mass

The Vietnam Action Campaign and Resistance crystalised opposition to the war in its early years but a new organisation established in 1970, the Vietnam Moratorium Campaign (VMC), was to turn what had been the province of smaller political entities into mass opposition to the war. Jim Percy was elected to the secretariat.

The moratorium marches organised by VMC were the biggest ever seen in the country. They consolidated a growing, broad-based opposition that spanned political allegiance and age, religion and social class. Opposition to the war had penetrated the suburbs and had become respectable. Even the Australian Labor Party was playing a more prominent role, especially through leading leftist intellectual, Jim Cairns, who later became treasurer in the Whitlam government and became entangled with the attractive Juni Morosi in a much-too-public affair. An author and social thinker, Cairns later became a favourite of the alternative movement and was to be seen at markets selling his book.

The moratorium marches were huge, almost festive occasions when the people took over the streets. By this time, public opinion was in favour of ending the war. The movement had come far from the days when demonstrations consisted of fewer than 100 enthusiasts. In May 1970, more than 100,000 people marched against the war. In 1972, the Australian government announced that it would bring the troops home. History had been made and public pressure paid no little part in it.

The not-so-secret society

It is a Sunday morning in May 1969 and I walk along Goulburn Street towards the Third World Bookshop. Suddenly, a figure appears in an upstairs window of 20a, the larger premises across the street into which the bookshop has moved. The figure beckons me over and I climb the steps to find a group of familiar but serious-looking faces.

I have no idea a meeting was to take place and I have no idea why I was called over to the formation of a new organisation, the International Marxist League (IML), membership by invitation only. It seems no way to run a closed organisation to ask someone who is, because of his photography, sometimes thought to gather intelligence for the police or other, more clandestine organisations.

The idea, I soon discover, is to establish a path from Resistance into a serious Marxist political committment. Within this structure, Resistance is to constitute the mass movement, a magnet for those opposed to the war. From there, those showing promise will be inducted into this higher-level organisation.

Conspiritorial and semi-clandestine, it was an idea stillborn.The IML will self-destructed within a very short time.

John Percy summed up the brief life of the IML: " ...about 30 of the key activists in Resistance and the Vietnam Action Campaign established the International Marxist League. But the different perspectives in the group over the future development of Resistance and the nature of the party group surfaced almost from the start... The IML was more a grouping of factions, the main activists in Resistance."

For Resistance, this was to be a time of change - the movement based around the Goulburn Street base was to split and the Percys were soon to move out. Their relationship with Bob Gould became acrimonous when he retained ownership of the bookshop. The enmity that developed between them led to the Percys' renaming Robert Steven Gould as 'Robert Thieving Gould' due to his control of the bookshop. As John Percy put it: "(The IML) didn't meet again. So we had a situation of cold split until the middle of 1970. Our faction won control of Resistance, Gould emerged retaining control of the Third World bookshop" (www.dsp.org.au/dsp/hist 1.htm/#Intro). The relationship has never been fully repaired. And that was how Resistance came to an end.

The passing

It was all over by 1972. The marchers - the small numbers of 1967 that grew to more than a hundred thousand as the war became increasingly unpopular - were gone.

It is interesting to speculate whether the success of the VMC was such a success for leftist groups like Resistance. Resistance led the campaign at a time when opposition to the war did not enjoy broad popular support. It had been the catalyst that helped to bring the larger movement into being. Credit for building a mass movement is not all its alone, however. By the time of VMC, public disillusion with the war had reached such a peak that it was becoming a liability to the government and, in Vietnam, the war had bogged down as US military might met the determination of a better armed and organised North Vietnam Army and Viet Cong.

The mainstreaming of opposition drew people away from the small radical organisations. There was strength in numbers and the radicals no longer had those numbers. Opposition to the war moved from the radical fringe to middle Australia.

The election of the Whitlam government further reduced the momentum towards radicalisation. With the ending of Australian involvement in the war announced and a new social democratic era in the offing, what was the point of joining a radical organisation whose work appeared to be complete?

For most, the notion of democratic socialism picked up at Resistance and in the broader groupings that constituted the New Left would pass. At best, its legacy would be a predisposition to social equity and democratic process. A few would go on to activism in their local Labor Party branch. Some, such as lawyer Meredith Bergman who campaigned against censorship but was not a member or Resistance, would rise to prominence in their professions - in her case, law. But for most, the leftist ideology of their youth would soon be replaced by the pragmatism of mainstream life.

Next: Paranoia and police spies