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From Helpless Natives to Revolutionary Heroes: An Evolving Ethic of Solidarity

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Transnational Protest, Australia and the 1960s

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements ((PSHSM))

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Abstract

Moving from South Africa to Sydney, Victoria to Vietnam, the opening chapter explores how a series of anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles awoke a new Australian student movement in the early Sixties. An ethic of solidarity slowly developed during the Sixties, beginning with activism against Apartheid in 1960, for civil rights legislation in the USA during 1964 and culminating in a form of militant identification with Australia’s undeclared enemy in Vietnam during 1966–7. While these moments shared many similarities, the manner in which solidarity was articulated and practised transformed from the assisting of helpless natives to the supporting of revolutionary heroes—and laid the foundations for the many social movements that would flourish in later years.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Michael Hyde, All along the watchtower: Memoirs of a 1960s revolutionary (Carlton, Vic.: Vulgar Press, 2010), 105.

  2. 2.

    For a recent volume exploring this theme, see Samantha Christiansen and Zachary Scarlett, eds., The Third World in the Global 1960s (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012).

  3. 3.

    Jeremy Prestholdt, “Resurrecting Che: radicalism, the transnational imagination and the politics of heroes,” Journal of Global History 7, No. 3 (November 2012): 508.

  4. 4.

    On the importance of such uses of language in early Labor movement politics see Nick Dyrenfurth, Heroes & villains: the rise and fall of the early Australian Labour Party (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2011).

  5. 5.

    Citied in Lachlan Grant, “The Second AIF and the End of Empires: Soldier’s attitudes towards a “Free Asia”, Australian Journal of Politics and History 57, No. 4 (December 2011): 489.

  6. 6.

    Heather Goodall, “Port Politics: Indian Seamen, Australian Unions and Indonesian Independence, 1945–47,” Labour History No. 94 (May 2008): 43–68.

  7. 7.

    Thomas Olesen, “Globalising the Zapatistas: From Third World solidarity to global solidarity?” Third World Quarterly 25, No. 1 (2004): 257. For further elaboration on these types of solidarity see Thomas Olesen, International Zapatismo: The Construction of Solidarity in the Age of Globalisation (London: Zed Books, 2005), 102–11, and for an in-depth look at the history of solidarity activism see David Featherstone, Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (London: Zed Books, 2012).

  8. 8.

    Aarons, What’s Left, 56.

  9. 9.

    On Australia and the Bandung Conference see David Walker, “Nervous Outsiders: Australia and the 1955 Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung,” Australian Historical Studies 36, No. 125 (2005): 40–58 and Christopher Waters, “Lost Opportunity: Australia and the Bandung Conference,” in Bandung 1955: Little Histories, ed. Derek McDougall and Antonia Finnane, 75–87 (Caulfied, Vic: Monash University Press, 2010).

  10. 10.

    For Australians in Bandung, see Cecily Burton, “Report on Bandung,” Meanjin 14, No. 3 (September 1955): 395–9. For lack of Communist interest in Bandung and decolonization outside of the Soviet sphere, see Heather Goodall, “Uneasy Comrades: Tuk Subianko, Eliot V. Elliot and the Cold War,” Indonesian and Malay World 40, No. 117 (July 2012): 209–30.

  11. 11.

    The APC was indeed under some level of Communist control, though party members were always in a minority. See John McLaren, “Peace Wars: The 1959 ANZ Peace Conference,” Labour History 82 (May 2002): 98.

  12. 12.

    Bernie Taft, Crossing the Party Line: Memoirs of Bernie Taft (Newham, Vic: Scribe, 1994), 53–4. See Stuart Macintyre The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from Origins to Illegality (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1998) for more on this early history. The lack of Macintyre’s second edition covering the post-war period, however largely leaves scholars with either dated material like Alastair Davidson, The Communist Party of Australia: A Short History (Stanford, Cal.: Hoover Institution Press, 1969) or avowedly party-political works like Tom O’Lincoln, Into the Mainstream: The Decline of Australian Communism (Cartlon: Red Rag Publications, 2009). Some work by historians like Phillip Deery and several Masters and PhD students have recently gone some way to filling sections of this post-war narrative. See, for example, Phillip Deery and Rachel Calkin “‘We All Make Mistakes:’ The Communist Party of Australia and Khrushchev’s Secret Speech,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 54, No. 1 (2008): 69–84, Rachel Calkin, “‘Cracking the Stalinist Crust:’ The Impact of 1956 on the Communist Party of Australia” (Masters Thesis: Victoria University, 2006) and Douglas Jordan, “Conflict in the Unions: The Communist Party of Australia, Politics and the Trade Union Movement, 1945–1960” (PhD Thesis, Victoria University, 2011).

  13. 13.

    Ibid, 72–4; 101–2.

  14. 14.

    NUAUS constitution quoted in Jennifer Clark, Aborigines and activism: race, aborigines and the coming of the 1960s to Australia (Crawley, WA: UWA Press, 2008), 145.

  15. 15.

    Jodi Burkett, “The National Union of Students and Transnational Solidarity, 1958–1968”, European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 21, No. 4 (2014): 545.

  16. 16.

    Clark, Aborigines and Activism, 123.

  17. 17.

    W.J. Hudson, “This affects us,” Semper Floreat, 28 February 1958, 3.

  18. 18.

    Clark, Aborigines and activism, 147.

  19. 19.

    Olesen, “Globalising the Zapatistas,” 257.

  20. 20.

    Clark, Aborigines and activism, 147.

  21. 21.

    Van Gosse, Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretative History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 53–62.

  22. 22.

    Ian Turner, “The long goodbye,” Outlook 14, No. 6 (December 1970): 3.

  23. 23.

    Ibid, 3.

  24. 24.

    “South Africa—Explosion Point,” Outlook 4, No. 2 (April 1960): 2.

  25. 25.

    See Tom Lodge, Sharpeville: An Apartheid Massacre and its Consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 234–279.

  26. 26.

    See Alan Barcan, From New Left to Factional Left: Fifty Years of Student Activism at Sydney University (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2011), 23.

  27. 27.

    For work on previous Australian engagement with apartheid, see David Tothill, “Trying to Sell Apartheid to 1950s Australia,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 17, No. 1 (2006): 143–71.

  28. 28.

    John Glyde, “Students in Martin Place,” Outlook 4, No. 3 (June 1960): 14–5.

  29. 29.

    Clark, Aborigines and activism, 132.

  30. 30.

    “Police give a hand in protest on Sharpeville,” Honi Soit, 7 April 1960, 1.

  31. 31.

    G.M., “What was the point?” Honi Soit, 7 April 1960, 2.

  32. 32.

    Peter Grose, “The political power of student demonstrations,” Honi Soit, 4 August 1960, 6.

  33. 33.

    Christopher A. Rootes, “The Development of Radical Student Movements and their Sequalae,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 34, No. 2 (August 1988): 174.

  34. 34.

    Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley, Cal: University of California Press, 2001), 3.

  35. 35.

    K.T. Fowler, “The Incoherent Rebellion,” Outlook 4, No. 4 (August 1960): 9.

  36. 36.

    Olesen, “Globalising the Zapatistas,” 259.

  37. 37.

    Youth Against Apartheid newsletter, January 1965 in Langer, Albert Volume 1, A6119 3931, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.

  38. 38.

    Chicka Dixon interviewed by Gary Foley, 5 and 12 May 1995, ORAL TRC 3282, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

  39. 39.

    Clark, Aborigines and activism, 152.

  40. 40.

    Sean Scalmer, Dissent events: protest, the media and the political gimmick in Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002), 14.

  41. 41.

    Bob McDonald, “Student Politics: by a participant,” Honi Soit, 19 March 1963, 5.

  42. 42.

    Scalmer, Dissent events, 15.

  43. 43.

    Pete Steedman quoted in Clark, Aborigines and activism, 157.

  44. 44.

    Olesen, International Zapatismo, 109.

  45. 45.

    Bill Stanner quoted in Ann Curthoys, Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2002), 1.

  46. 46.

    Charles Pyatt II, “Negro thanks on protest,” Honi Soit, 30 June 1964, 2.

  47. 47.

    “Police give a hand,” 1.

  48. 48.

    See Curthoys, Freedom Ride for the key academic account of this protest. For an interesting comment on its transnationality, see Scalmer, Dissent Events, 11–30, and for its revealing of the spatial politics of race see Penelope Edmonds, “Unofficial apartheid, convention and country towns: reflections on Australian history and the New South Wales Freedom Rides of 1965,” Postcolonial Studies 15, No. 2 (2012): 167–90.

  49. 49.

    Glyde, “Students in Martin Place,” 14.

  50. 50.

    Dan O’Neill, “The rise and fall of student consciousness,” Semper Floreat, 20 May 1976, 10.

  51. 51.

    See both John Murphy, Harvest of Fear: A history of Australia’s Vietnam War (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1993), 140–9 and John Percy, A History of the Democratic Socialist Party and Resistance, Volume 1: 1965–72, Resistance (Chippendale, NSW: Resistance Books, 2005), 50–84 for overviews of these developments.

  52. 52.

    Murphy, Harvest of Fear, 159.

  53. 53.

    Rootes, “Radical Student Movements,” 174.

  54. 54.

    Hall Greenland, “Medi-Cong,” Wednesday Commentary, 2 March 1966, 2.

  55. 55.

    Hall Greenland, “Medical Aid for Vietnam Fund,” Wednesday Commentary, 20 April 1966, 2.

  56. 56.

    Olesen, “Globalising the Zapatistas,” 258.

  57. 57.

    Hall Greenland, “Open Letter,” Honi Soit, 13 July 1966, 4.

  58. 58.

    Ibid, 4.

  59. 59.

    J. V. R Hearder, “Medical aid for Viet Nam,” 31 March 1966, in Communism—control of Communist propaganda in Australia—Vietnam War, A1838 563/20 Part 2, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.

  60. 60.

    For more on the club’s radicalisation see Daniel Robin, “Melbourne’s Maoists: The Rise of the Monash University Labor Club, 1965–1967,” (BA Honours Thesis, Victoria University, 2005).

  61. 61.

    Michael Hyde, All along the watchtower: Memoirs of a 1960s revolutionary (Carlton, Vic: Vulgar Press, 2010), 15.

  62. 62.

    Monash Labor Club Committee for Aid to the National Liberation Front, Which Way Treason (Melbourne: Monash Labor Club, 1967), 1–2.

  63. 63.

    “On Vietnam,” Print, 27 July 1967, 2.

  64. 64.

    “On National Liberation,” Lot’s Wife, 8 August 1967, 5.

  65. 65.

    Karen Steller Bjerregaard, “Guerrillas and Grassroots: Danish Solidarity with the Third World in the 1960s and 1970s,” in Between Prague Spring and French May: Opposition and Revolt in Europe, 1960–1980, Martin Klimke, et al, eds., 213–4 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011).

  66. 66.

    “Labor Club Manifesto: A case for Action-Socialism,” Woroni, 3 August 1967, 4.

  67. 67.

    James D. Le Sueur, “Decolonising ‘French Universalism’: Reconsidering the impact of the Algerian War on French Intellectuals,” The Journal of North African Studies 6, No. 1 (2001): 167–186.

  68. 68.

    For more on this and its influence on Australians see Denis Freney, A Map of Days: Life on the Left (Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1991), 152.

  69. 69.

    “They want to help kill Australians,” Daily Telegraph, 18 August 1967, 2.

  70. 70.

    Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (Senate), “Defence Force Protection Bill, Second Reading,” 7 September 1967, 513.

  71. 71.

    Ibid, 513.

  72. 72.

    Louis Clark to Michael Hyde, personal communication, undated (c. July–August 1967) in Albert Langer Papers, Z457, Box 36, Folder marked “NLF AID, Correspondence Inward—pro-campaign 1967–1968”, Noel Butlin Archives, Canberra.

  73. 73.

    Douglas Wilkie, “Frontiers of Treason,” The Sun, 28 July 1967, 23.

  74. 74.

    David Nadel interviewed by Peter Parkhill, 14 December 2001, ORAL TRC 5108, National Library of Australia, Canberra.

  75. 75.

    Ibid.

  76. 76.

    Graeme Davison and Kate Murphy, University Unlimited: The Monash Story (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2012), 125.

  77. 77.

    Roger Dampney, “Why did the Yanks bomb Hanoi,” Honi Soit, 20 July 1966, 2.

  78. 78.

    See Robert K. Brigham, Guerrilla Diplomacy: The NLF’s Foreign Relations and the Viet Nam War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999) for more on how these activists were viewed as essential to the Communists’ diplomatic efforts.

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    Jon Piccini

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Piccini, J. (2016). From Helpless Natives to Revolutionary Heroes: An Evolving Ethic of Solidarity. In: Transnational Protest, Australia and the 1960s. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52914-5_2

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