Our Unpolluted Shores: Radical Arrivals and the Politics of the Border

Piccini, Jon

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-52914-5_5

Jon Piccini⁴

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

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Abstract

This chapter explores those overseas “agitators”—described by one activist as “proven newsmakers”—who either tried or threatened to visit Australia, the reasons these individuals found their visits curtailed, and how activists and the media reacted. The mindset of government and its security apparatus will be explored with reference to theoretical work on the (re)production of the border, as the definition of who or what was subversive shifted in line with changing Cold War realities and the rise of new social movements. Activists and sections of the media used these exclusions to paint government as parochial and philistine, as was equally the case in the context of literary and political censorship. This, however, was more problematic, with activist use of violent images of disfigured Vietnamese civilians to challenge the hypocrisy of the censorship regime raising serious moral and ethical questions from within the protest community.

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Notes

1.
W.J. Morrison, “Statement on the Seizure of 86 copies of a publication – American Atrocities in Vietnam – from the International Bookshop, Pty. Ltd., 17 Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, on 1st. September 1966”, in Youth Campaign Against Conscription papers, MS 10002, “Correspondence—1966”, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.
2.
On its crude production see “The Farce of Censorship,” The Age, 9 September 1966, 2; on its newfound popularity see “Rush for Viet Pamphlet,” The Age, 21 September 1966, 3.
3.
“Roosevelt Brown meets the press,” Smoke Signals 8, No. 2 (September 1969): 6.
4.
“‘Hot-Head’ Blast on Black Power,” The Sun, 1 September 1969; “Meagher hits back at Black Power leader,” Ballarat Courier, 30 August 1969; “‘Happy to forget’ that visit,” The Herald, 30 August 1969, reproduced at http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/images/history/1960s/aalbp/rbdx.html, accessed 5 January 2012.
5.
The work on Australia’s policing of its border, particularly focused on the White Australia Policy, is voluminous. For example, see Andrew Markus, Fear and hatred: purifying Australia and California, 1850–1901 (Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1979); Sean Brawley, The white peril: foreign relations and Asian immigration to Australasia and the United States, 1919–1978 (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1995); Gwenda Tavan, The long, slow death of white Australia (Melbourne: Scribe, 2005) and Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008).
6.
Nicole Moore, The Censor’s Library (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2012), 346.
7.
Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 26.
8.
Ibid, 7–8.
9.
Ibid, 21.
10.
Martin Klimke, <Emphasis Type="Italic">The other alliance: student protest in West Germany and the United States in the Global 1960s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 5.
11.
John Playford, “The Mandel Affair,” Revolution, July 1970, 8.
12.
Donald Horne, Time of Hope: Australia 1966–1972 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1980): 66.
13.
“Angela Davis visit?,” Sydney Morning Herald, 9 June 1972, 2. For more on the case and the campaign see Bettina Aptheker, The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999 [1975]).
14.
Bob Baker to Gloria Garton, 18 July 1972, Communist Party of Australia Records, 1920–1987, MLMSS 5021, Box 110, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.
15.
“Angela Davis now invited to speak in Sydney,” The Age, 9 June 1972, 2.
16.
“Angela Davis visit?,” 2; “Outgoing Cablegram, 27 September 1972,” in USA—Relations with Australia—Visitors to Australia—Angela Davis—Invitation to Australia by Moratorium for Black Rights Committee, A1838 250/9/9/23, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.
17.
Klimke, The Other Alliance, 4, 104–7.
18.
Richard Jobs, “Youth Movements: Travel, Protest and 1968 in Europe,” American Historical Review 114, No. 2 (April 2009): 394; 398.
19.
Ibid, 376–7.
20.
Ibid, 396.
21.
“Note on the General Significance of the ‘New Left’ on the Western World”, A12389/A30/PART 7, National Archives of Australia, Canberra. Underlining in original.
22.
David McKnight, Australia’s spies and their secrets (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 217–8; 232.
23.
Margaret Henderson and Alexandra Winter, “Memoirs of Our Nervous Illness: The Queensland Police Special Branch Files of Carole Ferrier as Political Auto/Biography,” Life Writing 6, No. 3 (December 2009): 352.
24.
ASIO, “Vietnam Moratorium Campaign National Anti-War Conference 17th–21st April 1971” in Vietnam Moratorium Campaign, A6980 S250654, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.
25.
For more on Kisch see Heidi Zogbaum, Kisch in Australia: The Untold Story (Melbourne: Scribe, 2004).
26.
Anthony Albert Yeates, “Outside Men: Negotiating Economic and Political Development in Papua New Guinea, 1946–1968” (PhD Thesis, The University of Queensland, 2009), 1. See also Donald Denoon, A Trial Separation: Australia and the Decolonisation of Papua New Guinea (Canberra: ANU E-press, 2012).
27.
See Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2008).
28.
David Walker, “Nervous Outsiders: Australia and the 1955 Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung,” Australian Historical Studies 36, No. 125 (2005): 40–59.
29.
Editorial, “Bandung has a meaning,” The Age, 20 April 1955, 2.
30.
Editorial, “Anzac and Asia,” The Sun-Herald, 24 April 1955, 18. On the timing of this decision, see Christopher Waters, “After Decolonization: Australia and the Emergence of the Non-Aligned Movement in Asia, 1954–55,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 12, No. 2 (2001): 162 and Walker, “Nervous Outsiders,” 47.
31.
See Jennifer Clark, Aborigines and activism: race, aborigines and the coming of the 1960s to Australia (Crawley, WA: UWA Press, 2008), 15–40.
32.
“Application for Permit to Enter the Territory of Papua, 17 March 1960,” Gluckman, Max Volume 1, A6119 1230/REFERENCE COPY, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.
33.
“Minister Replies On Visa Refusal, Security Interference,” The Mercury, 31 August 1960, 16.
34.
“The Gluckman Affair,” 19 October 1960, Gluckman, Max Volume 2, A6119 1231/REFERENCE COPY, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.
35.
They believed that the Gluckman case “may indicate a pattern of Communist planning in relation to Papua-New Guinea and the Australia National University” and that Gluckman and his associates launched “a planned attack on security processes”. See ASIO, “Communist Anthropologists—The Australian National University—Papua-New Guinea,” Gluckman, Max Volume 2, A6119 1231/REFERENCE COPY. Margaret and Winter, “Memoirs of Our Nervous Illness,” 352.
36.
Hannah Forsyth, “The Ownership of Knowledge in Higher Education in Australia 1939–1996” (PhD Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2012), 98.
37.
Paul Hasluck, A Time for Building: Australian Administration in Papua and New Guinea 1951–1963 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1976), 406.
38.
“Reasons for entry bar undisclosed,” Sydney Morning Herald, 31 August 1960, 3; “Security police now ‘secret police’ Ward says,” The Sun, 8 September 1960, 4.
39.
“Ban on Gluckman ‘shames Australia,’” Tribune, 9 September 1960, in Gluckman, Max Volume 2, A6119 1231/REFERENCE COPY.
40.
“The Gluckman Affair,” Gluckman, Max Volume 2. A6119 1231/REFERENCE COPY.
41.
“Independence can be ‘cup of poison,’” The Age, 5 September 1960, “N.G. Ban on Professor Defended,” The Age, 5 September 1960, in Gluckman, Max Volume 2, A6119 1231/REFERENCE COPY.
42.
Editorial, “Minister should give facts,” The Age, 29 August 1960. 2.
43.
Kevin Blackburn, “Disguised anti-colonialism: Protest against the White Australia Policy in Malaya and Singapore, 1947-62,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 55, No. 1 (2001): 101.
44.
Editorial, “NG Ban harmful,” The Herald (Melbourne), 31 August 1960. In Gluckman, Max Volume 2, A6119 1231/REFERENCE COPY.
45.
“Minister should give facts”; “NG ban harmful.”
46.
Yeates, “Outside Men,” 148.
47.
Ibid, 177–87.
48.
R.L. Harry to Minister, 2 September 1963, “Soviet Visa Applications—Australian Peace Movement,” Union of Australian Women—Third National Conference, Sydney September 1963, A1209 1963/6602, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.
49.
P. Barbour, “Invitation by the Union of Australian Women to Olga Ivanovna Chechetkina and Zoya Vasilievna Zarubina, Nationals of the USSR,” 29 August 1969, Union of Australian Women—General, A6980 S250370, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.
50.
On student protests against the invasion see Wednesday Commentary, 4 September 1968.
51.
Peter Heydon, Secretary, to Minister, “Proposed Visit of Two Soviet Women,” 12 September 1969, Union of Australian Women—General, A6980 S250370.
52.
Ibid. The UAW was a stronghold of Stalinists in the Party, lead by Freda Brown, who was along with her husband Bill to play a leading role in the 1971 pro-Soviet Party split. See Mark Aarons, The Family File (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2010), 224–5; 228.
53.
T.A. Smith, Chief Migration Officer, to Minister, “Ms Lidia Alexeevna Barmina (50) and Ms Lyudmila Mikhailovna Kasatkina (49)—Russian business visitors,” 9 September 1979, Union of Australian Women—General, A6980 S250370.
54.
P. Barbour to Secretary, Department of Immigration, “Proposed Visit of a Vietnamese Women’s Delegation at the invitation of the Union of Australian Women,” 29 August 1969, Union of Australian Women—General, A6980 S250370; R.F. Osborn, Assistant Secretary, Department of External Affairs to The Secretary, Prime Minister Department, “Viet Nam,” 27 August 1969, Union of Australian Women—General, A6980 S250370.; R.F. Harris to the Minister, Department of Immigration, “Request from Union of Australian Women for Admission of two Vietnamese women as visitors,” 5 September 1969, Union of Australian Women—General, A6980 S250370.
55.
“Note on the general significance of the ‘New Left’ for the Western world,” A12389 A30/PART 7.
56.
Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, “The ‘New (Young) Left’ in Australia: Recent Trends in Theory and Strategy,” November 1969, A12389 A30/PART 7.
57.
“Note on the general significance of the ‘New Left’ for the Western world,” A12389 A30/PART 7.
58.
John Playford, “The Mandel Affair,” Revolution, July 1970, 8.
59.
This document is reproduced in Rowan Cahill, “Security Intelligence and Left Intellectuals: Australia, 1970,” International Gramsci Journal 1 (2008), Article 5.
60.
Playford, “The Mandel Affair,” 8.
61.
“Marxist expert refused visa”, The Australian, May 13 1970, 3; Playford, “The Mandel Affair,” 8.
62.
It is still only possible to guess as to ASIO’s motives and debates they engendered, given the National Archives have up until the submission of this thesis failed to release their records on Mandel, after nearly two years of processing.
63.
Playford, “The Mandel Affair,” 8.
64.
Julie Rigg, “Australia: In need of care and protection?” The Australian, 14 May 1970, 12.
65.
Henry Mayer and Owen Harries, “The Mandel Affair,” Sydney Morning Herald, 15 May 1970, 2.
66.
“CP of A interest in Aborigines,” 15 March 1961; “Paul Robeson,” 8 March 1961 in Robeson, Paul Volume 2, A6119 5034, National Archives of Australia, Canberra. For more on the details of Robeson’s trip and reaction from Indigenous Australians, see Ann Curthoys, “Paul Robeson’s visit to Australia and Aboriginal activism, 1960,” in Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia, eds. Francis Peters-Little, Ann Curthoys and John Docker, 163–84 (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2010).
67.
Undated, untitled (censored) report, Sykes, Roberta Volume 2, A6119 4229, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.
68.
Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (House), “Immigration,” 24 March 1966, 592; 600.
69.
On the role the everyday activities of citizens perform in the imposition of borders see Edith Sheffer, “On Edge: Building the Border in East and West Germany,” Central European History 40, No. 2 (2007): 307–39.
70.
Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, 81.
71.
A.W. Buckley to Under Secretary, Department of Immigration, March 5 1970, in Black panther power movement, A446 1970/95140, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.
72.
Douglas Rose, “Churches: down to earth,” Courier-Mail, March 24 1971 in Black panther power movement, A446 1970/95140.
73.
R.F. Kunde to Minister for Immigration, April 6 1971, in Black panther power movement, A446 1970/95140.
74.
“Angela Davis now invited to speak in Sydney,” The Age, 9 June 1972, 4.
75.
Charles Huxtable to Minister for Immigration, June 9 1972, in Black panther power movement, A446 1970/95140.
76.
These and other details of Gregory’s trip and the nature of ASIO surveillance discussed in Christopher Joyce, “Wanted: Dick Gregory,” National U 6, No. 12, 29 September 1970, 16.
77.
Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, The Red Army Faction and revolutionary violence in the 1960s and seventies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 116.
78.
Ibid, 116.
79.
“We won’t allow aliens to interfere, says PM,” The Australian, 5 September 1970, 1.
80.
Kenneth Randall, “Lynch defends visa ban: Visit would be a ‘threat to nation’, Minister claims,” The Australian 3 September 1970, 1.
81.
Joyce, “Wanted: Dick Gregory,” 16.
82.
James Plimsoll to Peter Heydon, 1 September 1970, in Vietnam Moratorium Campaign, A6980 S250654.
83.
“Gregorian Moratorium,” The Australian, 3 September 1970, 10.
84.
“Gregory Lynched: Statement by the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Whitlam,” 2 September 1970, Personal Papers of Prime Minister E.G. Whitlam, M170 70/70, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.
85.
Peter Smark, “Gregory shapes up—in anger,” The Australian, 4 September 1970, 1.
86.
Joyce, “Wanted: Dick Gregory,” 16.
87.
“September Moratorium, 1970,” in Vietnam Moratorium Campaign, 1970, A1209 1970/6340 PART 2, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.
88.
“Angela Davis now invited.”
89.
“Pulley tour a success,” Direct Action, September 1970, 3.
90.
Moore, The Censor’s Library, 1–2.
91.
Ibid, 222–3.
92.
Geoffrey Dutton, “Moral Protectionism,” in Australia’s Censorship Crisis, Geoffrey Dutton and Max Harris, eds, 96 (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1970).
93.
Moore, The Censor’s Library, 236. For more on Australia’s history of censorship see, amongst others, Peter Coleman, Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition: 100 Years of Censorship in Australia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1974); Augustine Brannigan, “Crimes from Comics: Social and Political determinants of reform of the Victorian Obscenity Law, 1938–1954,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology 19 (1986): 23–41 and Deana Heath, Purifying Empire: Obscenity and the Politics of Moral Regulation in Britain, India and Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
94.
Quoted in Moore, The Censor’s Library, 239.
95.
Morrison, “Statement on the Seizure.”
96.
Freney, A Map of Days, 264.
97.
J. Percy, How not to join the army (J. Percy: Sydney, 1968).
98.
Attorney-General’s Department Minute Paper, received 16 July 1968, How not to join the army, A432, 1968/354, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.
99.
Malcolm Mackay, “Dr. Mackay’s reply to Anglicans,” The Age, 8 October 1968, 5; CPD (House), “Question: National Service,” 30 May 1968, 1787; CPD (House), “Petitions: The Little Red Book,” 18 October 1972, 2747.
100.
Freney, A Map of Days, 264.
101.
For more on these anti-censorship campaigns see Dominic Bowes, “Exposing Indecency: Censorship and Sydney’s Alternative Press, 1963–1973,” (BA Honours Thesis, University of Sydney, 2012) and Tim Briedis “‘Pornographic poison of the mind’: the Tharunka scandal, The Little Red Schoolbook and Sex Education at Fitzroy High,” Unpublished paper, 2010.
102.
Frank Moorhouse, “Porno Politics,” in Uni Sex: A study of sexual attitudes and behaviours at Australian Universities, eds. Wendy Bacon, et al, 35 (Dee Why West, NSW: Eclipse Books, 1972).
103.
Briedis, “Pornographic poison of the mind,” 9. For more on The Push see Sex and Anarchy: The Life and Death of the Sydney Push (Ringwood, Vic: Viking, 1996).
104.
Dennis Altman, “The Politics of Cultural Change”, Paper presented at the Socialist Scholars Conference, May 21–24 1970, in Altman, Dennis Patkin, Volume 1, A6119, 3692, National Archives of Australia, Canberra.
105.
Dutton, “Moral Protectionism,” 97.
106.
Altman, “The Politics of Cultural Change.”
107.
Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (House), “Question: Importation of Book,” 11 April 1972, 1399.
108.
“The Pamphlet,” Resistance Newsletter, 1968, 1–2.
109.
“Rush for Viet Pamphlet,” The Age, 21 September 1966, 3.
110.
Editorial, “A stupid ban in Victoria,” The Australian, 6 September 1966, 6.
111.
Morrision, “Statement on the Seizure.” In YCAC Papers, MS 10002, “Correspondence—1966.”
112.
Editorial, “A Censorship Surprise,” The Age, 5 September 1966, 2.
113.
David Morawetz, “Strange vice attitude,” Farrago, 23 September 1966, 4.
114.
Interview with Margaret Holmes, conducted by Siobhan McHugh, 1993, in ORAL TRC 2761/8/20-21, National Library of Australia, Canberra.
115.
“The Culture of Repression…The Politics of Freedom,” The Act, c. 1973, 2.
116.
“Mr Griffith…what is obscene?” The Act, c. 1973, 3.
117.
“School kids Oz,” Troll, September 1971, 9.
118.
Quinn Slobodian: Foreign Front: Third World Politics in 1960s West Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 135.
119.
Denis Freney, “The Youth Revolt in Suburbia and the Anti-War Movement,” in National Anti-War Conference, Sydney, February 17–21, 1971—Papers Presented, np (Sydney: Self-published, 1971).
120.
“School Kids Oz,” 9.
121.
Slobodian: Foreign Front, 135.
122.
On Violence in Bonny and Clyde see John Allen, “Bonnie and Clyde,” Tharunka, 4 June 1968, 11. On the wide availability of pornography see Richard Walsh, “A note from a victim,” in Australia’s Censorship Crisis, eds. Geoffrey Dutton and Max Harris, 131–2 (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1970).
123.
Slobodian, Foreign Front, 135.
124.
Mark Lyons, “Children of Vietnam—an editor’s apology,” Tharunka, 1 August 1967, 7.
125.
W. Bottomley, “Lyons’ Diatribe,” Tharunka, 5 September 1967, 7.
126.
Judith Butler, “Photography, War, Outrage,” MPLA 120, No. 3 (May 2005): 823–4. For more on the politics of suffering and its uses throughout history, see Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown, eds., Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
127.
Quoted in Mark Young, “Student Radicalism at the University of Queensland, 1966–1972” (BA Honours Thesis, The University of Queensland, 1984), 66.
128.
“In the year of the pig!” Resistance Newsletter, August-September 1970, 3.
129.
Direct Action, January 1971, 1.
130.
Paul Coe, “Racism and the anti-war movement,” in National Anti-War Conference, Sydney, np.
131.
For more on the ‘collective construction’ of borders see Sheffer, “On Edge,” 307–39.

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Jon Piccini

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Piccini, J. (2016). Our Unpolluted Shores: Radical Arrivals and the Politics of the Border. 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_5

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Published: 10 May 2016
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