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'Up the New Channels'

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'Up the New Channels' VOLUME V ❖ ISSUE 2: UQ CENTENARY ❖ 2011 ❖ 75–86 An interdisciplinary journal for the study of history, philosophy, religion, and classics ‘Up the new channels’ STUDENT ACTIVI S M IN BRI sba NE DURING AU S TR A LI A ’S SIXTIE S Jon Piccini This paper seeks to locate the development of Brisbane’s New Left student movement within a growing body of transna- tional studies on ‘the sixties.’ In particular, it focuses on the interrelation between global issues such as the Vietnam War and the local realities of Queensland under the supposedly oppressive and philistine Country-Liberal government, and the role this played in cultivating a radical practice during the sixties and seventies. Appropriations of urban space, both on and off-campus, were vital to youth activists fashioning oppositional identities within the parameters of this transnational mediation. Foco Club, headquartered in what was then Trades Hall, provided a place for youth entertainment and political involvement on an otherwise culturally-sterile Sunday night, while students’ continued attempts to redefine The University of Queensland as a space for struggle, saw a variety of interlinked contestations with the state, administration and other, less radical, students. An important, if overlooked, period of Brisbane’s youth history is thus contextualised, placing the city firmly within a developing narrative of the transnational sixties. Oh yes, we all know that young people are hedonistic and naive, and perpetually dissatisfied. But the joke is that the dissatisfaction is starting to be articulated.1 n 1970, several dozen Brisbane activists collectively published a wide-ranging assault on the capitalist Iuniversity, using as a case study their base at The University of Queensland. This work, entitled Up the Right Channels, now constitutes one of the largest and most important publications of Australia’s New Left.2 Offering a systemic analysis of the operation of higher education in late-capitalist society, particularly its complicity in the managerial ‘degree factory’ as well as the continued bloodshed in Vietnam, the book contained lengthy critiques of individual faculties and schools for failing to live up to their liberal pretensions. This was only the best-known of hundreds of leaflets and publications, demonstrations and spaces which constituted Brisbane’s experience of the transnational ‘sixties,’ recently elaborated by Simon Prince as an ‘imagined community of global revolt.’3 Drawing on overseas examples—particularly from the American Students for a Democratic Society—mixed with local concerns related to matters such as freedom of speech and conscription, Brisbane student activists sought to establish new ‘channels’ of resistance by holding bookstalls and rallies on campus, while setting up social centres, headquarters and cultural venues within the city itself. These ideas and activities provided means of challenging what activists perceived as a conservative political life and philistine culture. 1. Dan O’Neill, ed., Up the Right Channels (Brisbane: James Prentice, 1970). 2. Ibid. 3. Simon Prince, “The Global Revolt of 1968 and Northern Ireland,” The Historical Journal 40:3 (2006): 851. JON PICCINI is currently in the early stages of a PhD in the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics at The Uni- versity of Queensland on the transnational nature of sixties protest in Australia, particularly focusing on the role of travel, reading and spaces in the creation of political-cultural identities. Crossroads ISSN 1833-878X. PICCINI ❖ ‘UP THE NEW CHANNELS’ 76 This paper will discuss Brisbane’s experience of the global New Left phenomenon during ‘Australia’s sixties’—a period which is said to have begun with the 1965 decision to conscript soldiers for Vietnam and ended with the Whitlam Government’s dismissal a decade later. Through the intersection of local concerns with global ideas and issues, student radicals were able to establish ‘alternative cognitive maps that corresponded to a new type of politics’—one beyond Cold War certainties of consumer capitalism and Stalinist state-socialism.4 These maps, it will be argued, were not purely mental or imagined, but took the form of a lived geography encompassing both campus and the surrounding city, with a plethora of activist enterprises and spaces being constructed in these often hostile terrains. Historian Belinda Davis explains this process well in her analysis of the urban politics of West German New Left activists. These rebellious youths ‘mapped both the[ir] dreams and the everyday means to reach them onto gritty West Berlin … inspired by and taking advantage of the city’s internal spaces, its possibilities for networks … that lay behind the surfaces.’5 It is the development of this truly transnational, yet consciously metropolitan, ‘new type of poli- tics’ in the supposedly staid and boring Brisbane of the 1960s and 1970s which this paper seeks to reveal. After a discussion of origins and precursors, focus will shift to the youth club Foco, whose mixture of culture with radical politics made it a decidedly ‘sixties’ enterprise, and to two particularly vivid examples of campus conflict loosely surrounding the September 1970 Vietnam Moratorium. Though this selection is in no way an exhaustive examination of the myriad events that constituted Brisbane’s experience of the global sixties radicalisation, these ‘moments’ reveal much of the flavour of the time, contributing to our understandings of a tumultuous decade. ‘… THE DRY PLAINS OF AN T I P O D EAN PHILIS T INISM ’: QUEENSLAN D ’S POLI T ICAL CUL T URE AN D T HE BIR T H OF A NEW LEF T Queensland celebrated its first 100 years of statehood in 1959. It was a year of socialist revolution in Cuba, growing insurgency in Indochina and persistent unrest in America’s segregated south.6 In the eyes of mainstream opinion, however, such global occurrences barely warranted attention; instead, celebration was the order of the day. An almost-divine heralding of progress and regional exceptionalism characterised proceedings, encapsulated well in the dreadfully-titled work accompanying celebrations, Triumph in the Tropics.7 A souvenir guide to festivities distributed by the conservative Courier-Mail fell prey to a similar sense of torpor. Half a page was devoted to Indigenous people (and even then only to the profitable, white-managed craft industry), two pages to what passed as ‘culture,’ while the remainder abounded with tales of primary industry, rugged bushmen and far-flung regional centres. The capital Brisbane, with a population of 500,000, warranted only six pages, with its newest architectural marvel, an eleven-storey “skyscraper” taking centre stage.8 The sense of pervading political hubris emanating from these pages carried over into cultural activity, with Raymond Evans, amateur poet and literature buff as well as ardent protestor, relating how ‘wowsers in Queensland strode confidently across the dry plains of antipodean philistinism’ during much of the sixties.9 What little bohemian cultural activity Brisbane hosted during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath had, as Betty Churcher described, 4. Timothy S. Brown, “‘1968’ East and West: Divided Germany as a Case Study in Transnational History,” American Historical Review 114:1 (2009): 70. 5. Belinda Davis, “The City as Theater of Protest: West Berlin and West Germany, 1962–1983,” in The Spaces of the Modern City: Imaginaries, Politics and Everyday Life, ed. Gyan Prakash and Kevin Kruze (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 264. 6. For an interesting new overview of this seismic year, see Fred Kaplan, 1959: The Year Everything Changed (New York: Wiley, 2009). 7. Raphael Cilento for the Historical Committee of the Centenary Celebrations Council of Queensland, Triumph in the Tropics: An Historical Sketch of Queensland (Brisbane: Smith and Paterson, 1959). 8. Arthur Henry Smout, ed., Queensland Centenary: The First 100 Years 1859–1959 (Brisbane: Penrod and the Courier-Mail Printing Service, 1959), 98–104. 9. Raymond Evans, “A Queensland Reader: Discovering the Queensland Writer” Queensland Review 15:2 (2008): 77. ❖ VOLUME V ❖ ISSUE 2 77 been washed away by the outflow of American servicemen and subsequent return to the antipodean 10 An interdisciplinary journal for the study status quo, leaving surviving institutions ‘gasping for air in the sub-tropical and staid city.’ of history, philosophy, religion, and classics The continuation of this arch-conservatism into the late sixties, only symbolically (or rather, aesthetically) challenged by the construction of the Torbreck apartments in Highgate Hill, provided impetus to radicals’ well-justified sense of living in a colonial backwater. Activist imaginations of the city and its capacity for spatial appropriation were informed by the town’s realities alongside their own ‘ideological’ presuppositions. The type of indolent regionalism evoked by the state’s political establishment drove activist-writer Gerard Lee to scornfully describe Brisbane as ‘a nowhere place, a non-entity,’ a town with ‘everything except an identity,’ which served only a utilitarian purpose to the real job of state: primary industry.11 Lee’s descriptions of the city invoke those of contemporaneous authors like David Malouf, who paint a quiet country town of weatherboard houses, poorly maintained colonial façades and Country Women’s Association bake sales.12 This mask of quaint civility must, however, be seen as papering over a seedy, corrupt underbelly, where separation
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