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Friday, 7 September 2007

SPECIAL REPORT...

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

Dissolution

Sol Gluyas was an occasional visitor at the Goulburn Street premises

When it was confirmed that Gough Whitlam had been elected prime minister we knew that change was imminent, that a breath of political fresh air was set to blow the accumulated cobwebs of Liberal Party rule from Canberra's dusty corridors of power.

Whitlam got to work straight away. Conscription was ended and the troops were to be brought home from South Vietnam. A new, social democratic future seemed about to open.

And open it did. Suddenly, there was an air of change and freshness and it would go on to characterise the Whitlam years. Not all shared it, of course, and many opposed it as fears about the direction the country was taking were drummed up and exploited by conservative forces. But is was that indefinable sense of change that released a new dynamic, an excitement, into Australian society in the 1970s.

A story did the rounds that, when the new government announced the abolition of conscription, a soldier on sentry duty art a military base near Sydney laid down his rifle and walked off immediately. Conscription was to be abolished, certainly, but not at that very minute.

Sentiment against Australia's participation in the war had been growing over the years. Public feeling had travelled the distance from support at the start of involvement to mass opposition. It appeared that years of campaigning by the likes of Resistance had paid off.

Environmentalism - a troublesome movement

History, not the wishes of political activists, dictates how movements rise and fall. Although there would be an upheaval when Whitlam was dismissed in 1975, the period after 1972 was to be free of major political movements until the birth of the environment movement and the hard-fought campaigns to save the Franklin River and the forests. But in 1972 that was still 15 years in the future. When it came it would be a movement that would largely bypass the Left as it brought different social classes into alliance.

In the late-1970s, Bob Gould summed up the Left's ambivalence to environmentalism by denigrating it as a 'middle-class' movement. Certainly, was right in saying this, but so too had been Resistance, itself a part-creation of Gould.

John Percy had no such qualms. He and his supporters soon got to work to developed a strategy that sought to exploit the political potential of the environment movement and to direct it in a leftward direction. The newspaper Green Left hit the city streets, soon going national. The paper is still in production, suggesting strongly that there remains a core of leftist sentiment among the populace and that there has been a level of radicalisation among contemporary youth, something the Democratic Socialist Party, which now contests elections, seems to have more than a little to do with. Interestingly, the party has spawned Resistance reborn, suggesting that even in new generations there is potential for radicalisation with a leftist trend.

Bob Gould's evident antipathy to the environment movement had, by November 2002, evolved into a more considered appraisal. That was evident when he reflected on the rise of the environment movement and its transformation through participation in electoral politics.

"By far the biggest political expression on the Left of the changing educational composition of the population is the emergence of the Greens as a mass current to the left of Labour, mainly located in the tertiary-educated new social layers of the population", he wrote in an online forum.

The Left had been slow to intervene in environmental politics, but with class struggle an ever-fading possibility, they grabbed at the only viable oppositional politics on offer. But in 1972 that lay in the future.

Out with a whimper

There were no farewell parties, no formal good-byes, no acknowledgement that what had become a broad social movement was coming to an end. It was out with a whimper. There one day, gone the next. The public closed the book on that brief period of history, breathed a sigh of relief and moved on. Its historic mission complete, the anti-war movement faded.

The election of the Whitlam government signalled change for Resistance, too. No more war meant no further need for the anti-war movement and the organisations that made it up. Anyway, since the turn of the decade Resistance had been largely sidelined by the organisations behind the Vietnam Moratorium and the broader anti-war movement , the socially acceptable face of opposition.

Opposition to war and conscription had been the hook that caught people, that brought them into an organisation seemingly friendly because of its identification with the youth movement of the late 1960s. Now that the social democrats were in power in Canberra, there was no new political cause on the horizon, no new mission to fill the vacuum left by the ending of the war.

Adding to the sense that a period in social history was coming to an end was the fact that the youth movement had entered a process of change. Hippy, as it was created in the US in 1967 and 1968 was gone of course, though the notion and term were to linger for years. The counterculture of the late-60s with its loud rebelliousness, its psychedelia, its action on the streets was in transition towards a different form, one that would see the reinhabitation of select rural areas and a focus on other issues. It was a phase change in the same way that water, when heated, turns to steam; this time, the anti-war counterculture of the last half decade of the 1960s and the year or two following that time was about to turn into a back-to-the-land, organic movement with foci far removed from war and leftist politics.

Resistance's leadership must have been aware that the ending of the war threatened the collapse of the organisation but there was little they could do about it. Their attempt to set up a more conventional political organisation in the form of the International Marxist League had crashed in the mire of factional politics. There was nothing else.

A time of dissipation

These were days of dissolution for the New Left, that child of the dissident political awakening of the late-1960s. Its job done and with nothing new to reinvigorate it, the movement dissolved quickly. All those hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who at some time had a connection with the Third World Bookshop and Resistance were about to disperse. It was the scattering of the radicalised, a scattering that proceeded quietly and unannounced.

By 1972, a number of people who had formed the Resistance core had already left the city. The Childs brothers, Megan James and friends had moved to the north of the state, as had Lin Stanton, to join the Alternatives in their adventure in the new ruralism. Other familiar faces had gone quietly, not to be seen again. A few would resurface decades later, uncovered by a technology unimaginable at the time - the Internet and Worldwide Web - but most remain undiscovered, out there, somewhere.

After the ending of a momentous and protracted event like the Vietnam war and the opposition it generated, there comes a weariness to those who have been involved, itself a natural response to years of effort. There is a need to pause and recuperate, to take time to realign before entering some new phase of life.

It was the end of a tumultuous perod of Australian history, and it was not the type of ending that becomes apparent only in hindsight, it was palpable.

The radicalised scattered

As they entered the early seventies, none of those still around Resistance were aware that, soon, they would disperse to new places and new lives, that they would never again see many of the faces so familair, people with whom they had shared those few precious years as they moved into adulthood. Some would maintain contact for a time, but with few exceptions even those ties would become tenuous as the years advanced.

Before the end of Australia's involvement in the war there were signs that things were changing. Peace talks were underway between the US and North Vietnam and although they dragged on for a seemingly excessive length of time they did hold promise that the conflict would be brought to an end.

In the end, the Viet Cong and their North Vietnamese allies stormed into Saigon. Images of the hasty helicopter evacautions from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon... the press of the crowd of fearful South Vietnamese outside the embassy gates trying to get out of the country... the images of evacuation helicopters being pushed over the side of a US aircraft carrier to make space for those waiting to land... are embedded in the historic record and in the minds of those who saw them on television. But perhaps the images that best sum up those momentous final days were those made by Australian news cameraman, Niel Davis. Who can forget the sight of a tank, Viet Cong flag flying, crashing its way into the grounds of the presidiential palace in Saigon? More than any other, those few minutes of film signified the end.

Many people passed through Resistance during the anti-war years... it had been like a succession of faces that appeared and lingered before moving on.

By 1972 my links with the bookshop had become infrequent although I maintained contact with people like Yvonne Gluyas, who was still involved in some way. But within a year Charmaine Gibson, one of those North Shore girls, and I would pack a rucksack each, say goodbye to Sydney and hello to the mountains of Tasmania. The new dream of life in the country was our dream.

It was a similar story for others. For some, there was a shift into mainstream careers, families, mortgages and suburban life - the step from the freedom of youth into the surety of conventional livelihoods. A few would be detained by their politics and seek more mainstream outlets, perhaps in the Australian Labor Party. A few left the city to start new lives in other states or other countries. Others travelled, wandering for a time as they sought a new life role.

This was the early-1970s, the time of Australia's 'back to the land' movement and the associated 'alternative' culture. It was into this that some moved to build new lives and homes on the intentional communities that had started to dot the landscape of Northern NSW.

This new social movement had been in progress since the late-1960s but it was not until the 1973 Aquarius Arts Festival in Nimbin that it really took off - it was as if that festival articulated what it was that those involved were seeking and opened the gates to its realisation. For those who had spent their early adult years in the politicised atmosphere of Resistance, entering this new movement was to enter a largely non-political milieu. Seen in the perspective of years, it was a natural follow-on from a politicised youth into a more settled period of adulthood, a means of continuing to live a less-than-conventional existence but with the opportunity of settling somehere permanently.

The Third World Bookshop continued at 20a Goulburn Street well into the 1970s. Then, as Gould's Book Arcade, it moved uptown, adjacent to Town Hall Square. After that, the shop moved to Parramatta Road in Leichhardt. Finally, Gould set up in King Street, Newtown. There he remains.

The Whitlam government introduced a new dynamic into Australian society that satisfied the desire for political reform of many who had been associated with the anti-war movement. The years that followed were tumultuous for Australian politics and gave rise to much passion and anger, but the issues were short-lived and, unlike the war which had sparked years of turmoil, they quickly passed into history.

Looking back, it as if a sharp divide was crossed in 1972. It was like stepping into a new time in which there was nothing with the immediacy and durability of the Vietnam war as a rallying point. Even if something had come up, the people had by then dispersed, their energy dissipated.

>>> next: What was learned?