Jon Piccini

Australia is rarely considered to have been a part of the great political changes that swept the world in the 1960s: the struggles of the American civil rights movement, student revolts in Europe, guerrilla struggles across the Third World and demands for women’s and queer liberation. This book tells the story of how Australian activists from a diversity of movements read about, borrowed from, physically encountered and critiqued these and many other overseas rebellions, as well as locating the impact of radical visitors to the nation. It locates Australian protest and reform movements within a properly global – and particularly Asian – context, where Australian protestors sought answers, utopias and allies. It dramatically broadens our understanding of Australian protest movements, presenting them not only as manifestations of local issues and causes but as fundamentally tied to ideas, developments and personalities overseas, particularly to socialist states and struggles in near neighbours like Vietnam, Malaysia and China.

This paper discusses the entwining of Australian communists, trade unions and indigenous activists: a much-studied topic. However, I approach it from a " transnational " perspective, unearthing intersections between global ideas and local activism through a case study of how the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and trade union bodies under its control or influence sent particular indigenous activists abroad during the 1950s and 1960s. It looks at why the CPA would invest the time and money in these trips, and what indigenous Australians thought they could get out of them. In so doing, it explores the possibilities and limits of this form of globally-centred solidarity, and adds a new dimension to our understanding of international communist and trade union politics.

How has left wing radicalism changed in Queensland during the 20th century. This paper looks at discontinuities between a primary production focused unionism in the so called 'Deep North' and activism amongst students and intellectuals during the period of the Vietnam war in urban Brisbane. It also highlights the often ignored continuity of strong women's involvement in both of these struggles.

This paper was completed as part of a Summer Scholarship with the Queensland Historical Atlas project in 2010.

During the 1970s, as Australia’s overseas student program moved from development aid to mass market, a group of Asian students sought to politically engage Australians on issues of poverty and political repression in their homelands. This article explores how such an alliance was formed between largely Malaysian overseas radicals and their Australian counterparts, who sought both to inform others of realities in their homeland and organise vocal protests, particularly against the visit of Prime Minister Tun Abdul Razak to Australia. It also looks at government responses to this. Malaysia condemned troublemakers abroad and Australia considered ways it could silence their activism, which risked becoming an impediment to bilateral relations. In telling this story, it is hoped that historians and policymakers alike can come to a deeper understanding of how the political activity of these temporary transnationals influenced the transformation of overseas student policy.

The Communist Party of Australia (CPA) increasingly adopted ideas of universal rights throughout the 1960s. Responding to changes in the Soviet Union and the party's increasing irrelevancy at home, leading members of the CPA theorised a universal notion of rights—one that applied equally either side of the Iron Curtain—to critique Soviet actions on a variety of questions. In a local setting, the party aired for the first- time significant critiques of its history and practices, particularly rethinking its fraught relationship with Australian democratic freedom and rights, and recasting itself as a defender and extender rather than an ideological opponent of such ideas. Though brief, this engagement with these previously apostate ideas tells us much about the nature of the Australian party during this turbulent period and adds to our understanding of the transnational evolution of activist rights rhetoric and ideas.

The 2009 passing of Woodstock’s 40th anniversary provided a window into what many scholars have termed the ‘memorialisation’ of the sixties. In Australia, this takes on forms similar to those in the United States and Western Europe, particularly France, whereby the reality of events move away into a clichéd representation. This paper explores this process through a critical reading of recent sixties memorialisations against the memories and contemporary sources of those involved in the period’s activism. It finds that the usual narrative of the decade—a youthful, individualistic and fundamentally cultural, apolitical rebellion hides a much more complex and interesting narrative of a revolt that sought to ‘explode’ these very categories.

Throughout the “long Sixties” a diverse array of Australian activists traveled beyond what was popularly known as the “bamboo curtain” into the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This paper will argue that they found not the monolithic “red menace” presented by media and government, but an often contradictory set of images mediated by their own political agendas and the changing nature of Chinese politics. More than useful idiots, these radicals took important political lessons from their Chinese counterparts, engaging in a largely unacknowledged process of transnational exchange. Through investigating three key groups of antipodean travelers – Communist Party members in the 1950s, student and worker revolutionaries in the late 1960s, and Indigenous activists in the early 1970s – it is possible to understand how not only their diverse political agendas, but also the changing realities of Chinese domestic and foreign politics, impacted on the lessons they took home. Drawing on memoirs, newspaper and magazine articles as well as archival sources, a light will be shone on this period of political and cultural exchange across seemingly impassable Cold War boundaries, illuminating Australia’s often forgotten involvement in the Sixties experience.

Victor Turner describes the individual experience of travel as ‘liminal’. Opening new vistas of possibility, it upturns ordinary social conventions and codes, constructing in their place new communities of hope and change. Such utopian moments of encounter are, however, just that—moments that are fleeting and generally inconsequential. This paper seeks to understand and critique Turner’s ideas of liminality, pilgrimage and communitas within the context of Australian social movements in the ‘long’ and ‘global’ 1960s. Though often ignored or marginalised in local and international scholarship, Australia had a much more complex and interesting experience of this period than the paucity of scholarly work would indicate. In fact, a variety of activists in areas ranging from Indigenous rights to the peace and workers movements pushed the boundaries of political discourse during a period marked by stultifying social and cultural climates. Through a focus on three travel narratives—those of Brisbane radical Brian Laver and young Communist Party of Australia (CPA) members to Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria during 1968, Sydney Trotskyite Denis Freney to Algeria in the early 1960s and five Indigenous activists to a Black Power conference in Atlanta, Georgia in 1970—this paper will highlight the importance of global connections to Australian social movements. The notion of liminality will initially be critiqued through a focus on pre-histories to travel: the ideas, rumours and local problems that can be glossed over in work heralding the power of the moment. Such moments of encounter were, however, still transformative for these activists, with their variety of experiences facilitating what Turner called communitas, spontaneous affinities and solidarities across borders of race, culture and understanding. The pilgrims’ return concludes this discussion, with their ‘translation’ of global ideas into new, local contexts giving them the role not just of a missionary, but also a mediator—disrupting travel’s supposed fleetingness and locating its importance to the transnational flow of ideas during the Sixties.

The World Festivals of Youth and Students – elaborate Soviet sponsored gatherings attracting thousands of young people from across the globe – provide a window into how Australian radicals encountered, critiqued and abandoned Soviet communism during a period historians term the ‘long 1960s’. This article demonstrates that the diverse experiences of attendees at three Festivals not only reflected the changing realities of global Cold War politics, but also provides an alternative view of developments in Australia, as the Old Left was superseded by the New, and demonstrates how their experiences were used locally for political gain. Finally, by unearthing how the local and the global became intricately bound and interrelated during the period, I show how international experience both reflected and aided the changing nature of Australian radical politics.

The 1970s were in many ways transformative for Australian society. ‘Fixed, fast-frozen relations’ were challenged in ways never previously thought possible. White Australia ended, the reality of indigenous dispossession was forced onto the national consciousness, and as this conference explores, the personal became political. This paper adds to our understanding of a tumultuous decade by exploring a micro-history of the publication of Dennis Altman’s Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (1971/2). I look closely at the work itself and Altman’s personal archive to explore the different reactions the author’s brief minor celebrity engendered in the form of letters, reviews and polemic. In so doing, the complexities of making the personal political are explored, with particular emphasis given to Altman’s theory of ‘liberation’. Melding Marxism with Black Power and Psychoanalysis, liberation for Altman – much like similar employments by the second wave feminist movement – meant more than just “the absence of oppression” in personal relations, but a social, and necessarily political, revolution. Yet, Altman’s marrying of political theory and everyday life was deeply controversial, revealing significant contestation and debates around politicising the personal in Australian radical movements and broader society.

This paper discusses a transnational relationship based on circuits of solidarity: how the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and trade union bodies under its control or influence sent several indigenous activists to the Soviet Union and the ‘Peoples Democracies’ of Eastern Europe during the 1950s and 1960s.  These trips pose questions: why did the CPA invest the time and money in these trips, and what did indigenous Australians hoped to achieve by participating. I begin by exploring the entwinement of the CPA, trade unions and indigenous politics throughout the 20th century, before moving on to three case studies. In so doing, I explore the possibilities and limits of this form of globally-centred solidarity, and add a new dimension to our understanding of the Cultural Cold War, as well as international communist and trade union politics.

In this paper I want to look at three different ‘moments’ or ‘figures’ of engagement by Australian activists with the ‘third world’ – and specifically the Vietnamese national liberation struggle against US imperialism. These Australians imagined themselves as not only in solidarity with the Vietnamese, but as experiencing similarly colonial predicaments. Jennifer Ruth-Hosek argues that West German student radicals “mapped what they read as the neo-colonialist relationships between the U.S. and Third-World countries onto the U.S.-FRG relationship”. I extend on this, arguing that certain movements not only re-mapped the Vietnamese struggle, but re-translated its messages as well. Student radicals in Melbourne imagined themselves as ‘fighting behind the lines’ against the US empire, women’s liberationists translated the Vietnamese experience to understand the colonisation of their everyday lives by patriarchy, while Aboriginal activists saw both the connections between their united struggles for liberation, and the limitations of such comparisons.

This paper 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 is explored, 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

My recent book, Transnational Protest, Australia and the 1960s: Global Radicals tracks how Australian radicals engaged with the border throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. This was a time of significant change in Australia. The Immigration Restriction Act was replaced in 1958 by the more innocuous Migration Act, which while casting aside the dictation test, left the basics of the system intact. The exclusion of ‘coloured races’ continued unabated, although discourse shifted from problems to colour to those of culture and political instability. Conservatives voiced frequent concerns that any further liberalisation of the migration system would be dangerous, with one parliamentarian commenting “we should not import into this country the problem that has beset other countries”, while another put it more bluntly: “we don’t want a Little Rock in Australia”.

Encouraged by Elizabeth Reid’s talk at the ‘How the Personal Became Political’ symposium at ANU, I decided to take a look into her significant archive at the National Library of Australia. I want to use this blog post to look at some very interesting material I discovered, particularly the documents, letters and speeches Reid and other produced during International Women’s Year, 1975, and the year’s signature event, a huge UN conference on the theme of ‘Equality, Development and Peace’ in Mexico City. Here, the intersections, and perhaps contradictions, of a government-mandated feminism are apparent.

Human rights have been a hot topic of late. The Australian Human Rights Commission president, Gillian Triggs, has been accused of politicising her position, while The Australian newspaper and conservative politicians have led a campaign against Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. Why has Australia’s long commitment to human rights bodies and legislation suddenly become such an issue? After all, the Human Rights Commission celebrates what amounts to its 35th anniversary this year, and Section 18C has been on the books for more than 20 years. Answering these questions involves in part looking at Australia’s previous reception of human rights. Contrary to federal minister Christopher Pyne’s recent suggestion that Triggs “stay out of politics and stick with human rights”, Australia’s historic engagement with human rights norms has always been informed by the politics and prejudices of the day.

What practical uses did the cornucopia of international human rights gatherings sponsored by the United Nations pose to those working for progressive goals in local contexts? What relationship did the goings on of the General Assembly in New York, the immense bureaucracy surrounding it and the various seminars, conferences and gatherings occurring in varied geographic locations have with those downtrodden individuals and groups trying to make meaning of the UN’s proclamations worldwide?

One of these individuals was Australian, Shirley Andrews. Scientist, communist and folk dancer, Andrews was a pivotal member of the Council for Aboriginal Rights, a group she would be Secretary of from 1951 until 1961, after which she worked as its research officer. The CAR, founded in the years immediately after the promulgation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, was heavily influenced by this document’s high talk of universal rights regardless of race or ethnic origin. The group’s founding constitution declared its fidelity to the Universal Declaration, hoping “to help the aborigines to win for themselves the liberties envisaged for all people by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the conditions for advancement necessary for their very survival.”

Amnesty International was founded in Britain in 1961, and alongside groups such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) broke with the cold war mould. By condemning ‘east and west’ and upholding universal values – whether unilateral nuclear disarmament or human rights law – irrespective of the political allegiance of those involved, these groups challenged the 1950s conservatism that had made progressive campaigning so difficult in the West. The CND, founded in 1958, grew exponentially in this period: its famous Aldermaston marches attracted 150,000 people in 1961 and 1962. It attracted patronage from church leaders and literary figures, played a significant role in having the UK Labour Party adopt an anti-nuclear programme in 1960, and branches quickly sprung up around the world – including in Australia.

Amnesty International (AI), on the other hand, launched with little fanfare or immediate interest. As historian Jan Eckel puts it, “the London organisation was by no means an instant success”. Branches folded as quickly as they were formed, and the organisation’s policy of spreading via personal networks proved “a depressingly slow task”.[1] I want to postulate here that Amnesty didn’t take off because its rigid system of prisoner ‘adoption’ across the three worlds, which closely hued to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proved stultifying and conservative.

This paper, adapted from a speech given in June this year, revolves around some documents I have looked at recently in the Fryer Library at UQ on opposition to Expo 88. In so doing, I explore what this opposition was, who was involved, what they wanted, and whether they can be seen to have succeeded in any meaningful way. But equally, I look at the experience of opposing Expo as a case study in how the past informs activism, and draw some general conclusions on what place ‘the past’ has in contemporary social movements – particularly the importance of historical memory but also the danger of what social scientists call ‘over-likeness’.

Today, opponents of the West Village development in Brisbane, WestConnex in Sydney and the recently halted East West Link in Melbourne are all asking similar questions to those of the 1970s. Why are multibillion-dollar projects put ahead of green spaces and affordable housing? And why do ordinary people so rarely get a say over the cities they inhabit? The story of Mundey’s union, the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF), and its successful campaigns to save historic locations like The Rocks and green spaces like Kelly’s Bush shows why this radical heritage speaks to contemporary Australia.

My book, Transnational Protest, Australia and the 1960s, published by Palgrave MacMillan shines a light on the processes of global political engagement that made the 1960s a transnational decade. It explores how Australian activists sought out, engaged with, experienced, and translated global ideas – from anti-colonial struggle in Vietnam to the Black Power movement in America and student-worker politics in France.

The ‘right to the city’ is back on the agenda. In Brisbane, hundreds rallied this past Saturday against rapacious development in the city’s migrant and student heavy West End. In Melbourne, houses resumed for the construction of a now scrapped tunnel in Collingwood are being occupied by the homeless. These and other movements are asking questions: why is Australia’s construction boom – a part of the shift from the mining industry to other forms of investment – leaving so many out? Why are high-rises being built, and left largely vacant, while people go without shelter at night? And why are ordinary people in the suburbs these towers are being constructed, over whom giant cranes now perpetually linger, being left out of the debate on how they want to live?

Recently, an upturn in indigenous struggles in Australia have seen the legacies of colonialism and genocide forced back onto the national radar. Protests against the closure of indigenous communities, the continued forced removal of Aboriginal children by welfare agencies, and the birth of youth-led groups like Warriors of the Aboriginal Resistance (WAR) are but a few examples of this. Instead of the sanitised government-sponsored campaign to ‘Recognise’ indigenous peoples in the Australian constitution, many of these activists are looking back to the global struggles of the 1960s and 1970s for their political inspiration.

The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a strong and proud indigenous movement that demanded not just recognition, but liberation, part of a global movement of colonial peoples. Just last year, Meriki Onus, a leading member of WAR, declared that “Australian militant Aboriginal activism has been dormant since the 70s”, replaced with the calls for recognition, native title, or individual “human rights”. “The 1990s were dire in terms of organizations for and by black Australians”, Onus explained, “[s]o we’re here to change that. And unlike other groups we’re not here to dance with other existing enslaving power structures.” Consequently, WAR consciously looks back to the transnational imagination and practice of the 1960s and 1970s.

Analysis of some of the issues brought up by SBS/Blackfella Film's fantastic documentary Black Panther Woman. Looks specifically at constructions of gender in 1960s-1970s social movements, and the politics of travel. Particularly both the euphoric and more circumspect responses from different activists to physically encountering the US Black Power movement.

Human Rights: a refrain that has almost become a byword for progressive activism. If, pace Jameson, post-modernism is the cultural logic of late-capitalism, human rights is the politics of the post-political era. Yet, those on the left­—from the liberal twitterati and Non-Government Organisations, to some on the radical end of the spectrum—try to appropriate this language. In doing so, the left are “running to the barricades of liberalism,” as James Muldoon puts it in a recent article for Overland journal, no longer interrogating these ideas as “white, masculine bourgeois ideology,” but holding them up as “the best that can be hoped for in the current political climate.”

Blackfella Films/SBS’s Black Panther Woman (directed by Rachel Perkins) provides a fine portrait of its protagonist, Marlene Cummins, as well as an at times fascinating, frustrating, sad and inspiring tale of the interconnections of global ideas, local activism and ingrained misogyny, making a significant contribution to a field with relatively little scholarly engagement.

This thesis explores Australian social movements during the long Sixties through a transnational prism, identifying how the flow of people and ideas across borders was central to the growth and development of diverse campaigns for political change. By making use of a variety of sources—from archives and government reports to newspapers, interviews and memoirs—it identifies a broadening of the radical
imagination within movements seeking rights for Indigenous Australians, the lifting of censorship, women’s liberation, the ending of the war in Vietnam and many others. It locates early global influences, such as the Chinese Revolution and increasing consciousness of anti-racist struggles in South Africa and the American South, and the ways in which ideas from these and other overseas sources became central to the practice of Australian social movements. This was a process aided by activists’ travel.

Accordingly, this study analyses the diverse motives and experiences of Australian activists who visited revolutionary hotspots from China and Vietnam to Czechoslovakia, Algeria, France and the United States: to protest, to experience or to bring back lessons. While these overseas exploits, breathlessly recounted in articles, interviews and books, were transformative for some, they also exposed the limits of what a transnational politics could achieve in a local setting. Australia also became a destination for the period’s radical activists, provoking equally divisive responses. A fearful government controversially barred many international activists, from Marxist economists to Black Power radicals, while those who successfully crossed the border, in particular international student-activists, mobilised Australians to fight repressive governments in their homelands. Through navigating these underexplored areas of the recent past this thesis unearths how and why the idea of global revolution affected a range of activists, and the practice of radical politics, locating Australia as a peripheral yet engaged participant in what historians now call the global Sixties.

Brisbane experienced a particularly vivid representation of the transnational youth rebellion known as the sixties. Groups of political cultural radicals were fashioned by the struggles of this era, ranging from the Vietnam War and racial oppression in America to debates over civil liberties and university reform in Brisbane itself. In reaction to these issues, global examples of similar activism and the realities of a state less than accommodating, if not violently opposed to, their demands, activists sought to establish a subterranean network of locations and spaces around the city from which to challenge political and cultural conservatism while living out differential lifestyles. These spaces witnessed the disintegration of political activism into cultural activity, creating a variety of operations which sought to unite a dispirit community of countercultural drop-outs with radicals of a more polemical bent. Foco Club, a combination of rock music, poetry, films, books and political discussion held on a Sunday night in Trades Hall was the first large scale attempt of this nature, drawing thousands of youths to its membership roles as well as representatives of conservative authority seeking its closure. Foco’s example provided inspiration to further venues and ‘counterinstitutions’, from the Red and Black Bookshop to HARPO, all of which worked to solidify a radical ‘map of meaning’ to Brisbane protestors. Finally, 4ZZZ-FM can be seen as a consolidation of these traditions into an institution capable of reaching a ‘mass minority audience’, while its appropriation
of a legal medium to led to a significant degree of internecine conflict. These spaces were not only vital to the existence of Brisbane’s successful activist subculture, but also give hints as to what a truly urban radical practice would look like today.