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Friday, 7 September 2007

SPECIAL REPORT...

History rerun - Sydney's radical past revisited...

The Goulburn Street enclave

Saturday night, 35 Goulburn Street.The liveliness of the youth culture of the late-1960s was given free reign at Resistance. The bearded figure in the white shirt just off centre-right is Rod Webb. He's talking to Suåsie Edwards, who has her back to the camera, dark shirt, and Stephen Voysey (left of group). At right, Stefan Couani holds a drink. On the left, Ivan Rapak, a Yugoslav (wearing a Che Guevara shirt printed on the Resistance premises) - checks out at Frank Lee's bottle (Frank, an Englishman, is sitting, dressed in white). The woman sipping her drink to the right behind Ivan is Anlita Krieg. In the background of the image, second from the left corner facing the camera is Lin Stanton. The woman seen in profile on the right of the group is Diedre (last name forgotten).

Kate reclines on a dilapidated lounge - taking life easy in the backroom of 35 Goulburn Street. As well as centre for political agitation and weekend cultural activities, the premises was a place where youth could come to spend time with those they knew.

It was an eclectic little shop, number 35. The counter was at the opposite end to the streetfront and, immediately in front of it, shoppers would sort through troughs of LP records to find albums by the likes of The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin and The Holding Company. Looking up, they would see a roof plastered with Personality Posters - big A1-size black and white portraits of everyone from Che Guevara to Malcolm X to the rock stars of the day. There was no other bookshop like it. This was its attraction.

Already packed to the ceiling, the bookshop soon outgrew the premises and spread into the adjoining number 37 when it became available. With number 37, Resistance gained a workshop that was set up as both storeroom and printing studio. Here the Gestetner - the tabletop rotary drum printer of the day - was located, as was the silk screen press on which posters and T-shirts were printed with the icons that signified youthful rebellion and Resistance. TheT-shirts, emblazoned with the likes of Che Geuvara and Karl Marx, became constant sellers in the bookshop, Geuvara significantly outselling Marx. The Resistance newsletter was produced on the Gestetner as were myriad other political tracts. Silkscreening and printing was usually done by Bluey Fisher, an activist who drove a meat delivery truck for a living, or Kevin Childs, a technician with the Post Office.

The large room behind number 35 was venue for Saturday night parties, live folk music or poetry readings and film screenings. Here were consumed flagons of rough red claret and here partygoers would sometimes spend the night on the couches. The floor above accommodated Resistance's core people such as the Percys, Keith James, Bluey Fisher, LIn Stanton and others who came and went over the years.

The first employee

Bluey Fisher's response is fast and sharp: "Give me a break. I just got home from work. I want to rest". Bob Gould apologises and goes back into the bookshop. Bluey, normally an easy-going character, is tired. The last thing he wants to tackle is the job that Gould had thought up for him.

Voluntary labour was crucial to the operation of both the bookshop and to Resistance. The incident demonstrated how reliance on it could be overwhelming for those within the organisatioon's core group. At what point did voluntarism become exploitation?

None worked harder than Keith James. He became the bookshop's first employee and was to be found behind the counter of number 35 or 37 where he was, at times, assisted by volunteers. I knew Keith in the final year at Brisbane State High School (BSHS) but never discovered why he made the journey from Brisbane to Sydney. Somehow, he discovered the bookshop and had become radicalised. For a BSHS student, that must have been an unorthodox life journey as the school was then, and still is, a selective school with high expectations of its students. A government school that expressed greater affinity with the city's private secondaries, it was considered a part of the Brisbane establishment. Accepting such allusions when I entered the school, I became increasingly skeptical of its pretentions although I racall no reason which led to such an attitude. It was, in those days, a traditional establishment that did not take kindly to the few male students who grew their hair a little longer in acknowledgement of the changes the 1960s were starting to bring.

Keith must have missed out on being conscripted into the army - selection for service was made by drawing balls with dates on them from a barrel, as I later discovered when my birthday was selected. If the date was yours, it was two years in the green machine. Being conscripted was an matter of chance and it is this that led to perceptions of unfairness and gave rise to the call: "All in or none in", a popular sentiment even when there was widespread support for the war in Vietnam.

Keith's was a perplexing personality, at times light and joking, at other times displaying the seriousness of a dedicated politico. Yet he was always quietly spoken and came across as a gentle sort of person. On one occasion he revealed a vulnerable side that was well hidden below a hard political surface. The incident happened one afternoon outside the Salvation Army doss house next door. Keith revealed the incident to me, describing how he was on good terms with the manager but found it distressing to see him beat a homeless man in the lane leading to the entrance to the hostel.

My last encountered with Keith James was in the late-1980s. He was on Parramatta Road in Leichhardt, selling leftist newspapers. On occasions after that I would wonder what had become of him.

Expansion

Numbers 35 and 37 - the two sides of the old two-storey building - were the core premises in the years that Resistance rose to prominence as a leader of the anti-war movement in Sydney. When it took over number 37, a large sign - simply stating 'Resistance' - was painted across the first-storey front of the building, announcing the presence of the place to any who might not yet know of its existence.

Soon, 37 was as packed with books, T-shirts, posters and the other stuff Gould found to sell as 35 had been. Fortunately, the need for larger premises was answered when a three-storey building across the road at number 20a - today, a travel agency - was vacated. Into this more than adequately sized premises the bookshop and Resistance operation moved.

There was so much space and Gould set about filling it with an expanded range of titles. A counter was set up opposite the entrance and a long shelf was built against the facing wall. Here were displayed a bewildering range of papers including editions of the US 'underground press', the alternative newspapers most of which came from the US West Coast. Included was the glossy and radical Ramparts magazine, the producer of which would later become a supporter of President Ronald Reagan and a Neoconservative. There were also papers reporting the music scene.

Gould leased the entire three floors. The street-level floor became the more spacious Third World Bookshop, the second floor storeroom and office, the top floor a meeting room and venue for film screenings, music and parties. One evening an aspiring filmmaker screened one of his early, short films here. His name was Phil Noyce and he would later rise to prominence and produce a film of Graeme Green's classic novel, The Quiet American. On another evening, the drummer of a band that was packing up after a party decided that it was too much trouble to carry his bass drum down the stairs. He threw it out the window.

Number 37 remained in operation for a short time after the acquisition of 20a, but the entire operation eventually moved across.

Confronting the official busy-bodies

The cars stop abruptly on the street and quickly empty of their occupants. Into the shop they pour, their leader approaching the salesman behind the counter. He damands all copies of whatever particular book is at issue this time. Faced with this surly mob of Vice Squad officers, the salesman complies and hands over the offending copies. These are loaded into the cars, the mob embarks and off they drive. Another enagament in Sydney's censorship war has been fought.

Not quite, though, for - like the war in Vietnam - the city's censorship battle is a guerilla struggle. Bob Gould is knowledgable and cagey when it comes to this low-intensity conflict with the city's enforcers of morals and vice. He knows the terrain, tactics and order of battle of his political enemy and was prepared for the expected raid. Like any good tactician, he has forces in reserve - the bulk of the offending stock. This he had distributed and secreted in different parts of the shop just in case the enforcers of public morality should decide to execute a more thorough incursion into the bookshop's innards. Perhaps that explains why the quantity of siezed stock was disappointingly small.

Not long after, the media arrive to cover the siezure. It is not chance that has summoned them but Gould's active instinct for publicity - the addage that any news is good news reached its peak with Gould's exploitation of the police siezures. Occasionally, and apparently inexplicably, the media would be present when the police arrived.

Things settle down and the shop resumes trading. A day ot two go by. Customers come and go. Then a man enters the bookshop. He's an average-looking character, dressed like a city worker, clearly not a member of any radical counterculture. He browses awhile, as if waiting for the counter to be free of customers, then approaches. "Have you got any copies of that book they banned?", he says furtively. The salesman looks up and does not respond for a few moments as he assesses the would-be customer. Is he a genuine buyer? Is he a plain clothes police officer out to make a bust?

Coincidentally, the salesman has copies of the offending title, right there under the counter. They are not the entirety of the stock, of course, just a dozen or so in case there is another raid so that is all that will be lost.

Such encounters were not uncommon when Gould joined the anti-censorship push that would eventually liberalise the outdated literary censorship the city had existed under for far too long. Times were changing and public expectations along with them. The late 1960s brought hightened pressure to be rid of what was seen by a now-better educated and more open minded populace as anachronistic laws formulated by official busybodies that presumed they had some right to tell adults what they could and could not read. Gould, never one to shy away from the controversy on which he thrived, took action by selling the offending books. Today, the likes of Portnoy's Complaint would not raise an eyebrow but in the late-60s it was daring stuff, and illegal.

Bookshops in distant cities - a mixed success

Time, 2am. Place, a coffee ship in Railway Square. The year, the early 1990s.

I was with Yvonne Gluyas, a one-time habitue of the Goulburn Street premises. She is soon to move to Tasmania then spend some years in China where working for CCTV, the national television network, and finally as a foreign editor at Beijing Review.

We sip at the warm, black liquid in our cups as the conversation moves on to people we had known. We discuss how most had gone off into the world after the Resistance period, never to be seen since, but, sometimes and usually by accident, how we have occasional contact with one or two. Where are the others now, we ponder. I mention how I have not seen John Hales for years but Yvonne admits she sees him from time to time, when he is in town.

At just this time the door swings open and a tall, burly, blond-haired figure walks in. We looked up in amazement but are too stunned to say anything. John Hales looks over and says hello, strange finding you two here at this time of morning.

An easy-going man, John was a long-time worker for Gould in his Sydney bookshops. That included the second-hand record and book shop in Pitt Street, in those days just a few doors from the city's premier second-hand record dealer, Ashwoods. John went to Adelaide in the early-70s to manage Gould's new venture there. That lasted longer than the earlier Melbourne shop had but it, too, was destined to close. Success in other cities was Gould's for only short periods of time.

Days of attraction

People might have been attracted to the Third World Bookshop because it was a highly visible beacon of anti-war activity, the literary culture bringer of youth movement trends in the United States, of the turbid rebellion sweeping the streets of Paris in May 1968, of the thousands on the streets of London at that time. It was the place in Sydney where the radical slogan of the time seemed to be made manifest - "Dare to strugle, dare to win - London, Paris, Rome, Berlin". Just add Sydney to that list. Where else but the Third world Bookshop could you buy Ramparts, the US underground press and find the recordings of the West Coast sound in Sydney, not to mention the odd banned title?

The larger-than-life personality of Bob Gould was critical to the success of the bookshop and the youth movement that its premises hosted. There is no question that the movement would have been the lesser without the bookshops... it is hard to imagine how it would have developed without the focus the bookshops gave it... they were the locus of the early years of opposition before increasing disillusion with the war drove hundreds of thousands into the massive Vietnam Moratorium marches.

For Gould, the end of the war and the dispersal of the anti-war movement brought a transition to the conventional book industry. Today, Bob Gould is a somewhat eccentric character who operates one of Sydney's untidier and overstocked but none-the-less fascinating book stores in King Street, Newtown.

>>> next: The people