The Cold War and Beyond
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University of Wollongong Research Online Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive) Faculty of Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities 7-1985 The Cold War and Beyond Rowan Cahill University of Wollongong, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers Part of the Arts and Humanities Commons, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Cahill, Rowan, The Cold War and Beyond, Overland, 99 1985, 44-48. https://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/2022 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] stor... DAY TRIP TO SURFERS Craig McGregor 2 THE KILLING GROUND R.N. Callender 25 I AM MONARCH OF ALL I SURVEY Michael Wilding 41 pi8J THE OTHER SIDE OF THE OCEAN Desmond O'Grady 7 fe•tures MRHAWKE'SAUSTRALIADAY Don Watson 16 . FLOWERS FOR THE RUSSIANS RolfHeimann 19 SWAG Stephen Murray-Smith 22 COMMENT Elizabeth Perkins 28 JOHN MANIFOLD Bill Scott 38 ~ THE COLD WAi.bND BEYOND Rowan Cahill 44 PROMETHEAN SCIENTIST james M. Holquist 54 ROOSEVELT IN AUSTRALIA Joe Rich 59 THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL D.]. O'Hearn 62 BOOKS Hugh tretton 65, Stuart Macintyre 68, Frank Kellaway 70, Kylie Tennant 72, Gary Catalano 73, Chris Borthwick and Linda Jakab 75,john McLaren 77, Mary Lord 78, John Herowim 79 poeii"J by Mike Ladd 6, Dorothy Hewett 29, David Winwood 30,John Hawke 30, R.H. Morrison 30, Silvana Gardner 30, Charles Rimingtou31, Peter Kirkpatrick 31,JeffGuess 32, Philip Martin 33, 36, Shane McCa11ley 33, Fiona Place 33, Terry Harrit1gton 34, Frank Kellaway 36, Tony Page 36, Lyndo11 Walker 37, Cotmie Barber 37, Graham Rowlands 37, Robert Drummond 49, jenny Boult 50, Lily Brett 50, Gary Catalano 51, R.G. Hay 51, Kate Llewellyu 52, Peter Hansen 53, Elly McDonald 61 gNphics Lay-out and cover design by Vane Lindesay. Cover drawing by Rick Amor. Illustrations by Vane Lindesay, Rolf Heimann, Rick Atnor and Robert Dickins. Printing: Currency Productions, Fitzroy Ov~;rlmtd i a quarterly literary magazine. The subscription rate is sixteen dollars a year (four issues); for students and pensioners the subscription is eight dollars. Life subscriptions are available for $100 each. Bankcard subscriptions and renewals are accepted (quote number). Manuscripts, are welcomed but self-addressed envelope required. Overland receives assistance from the Literature Board of the Australia Council and from the Victorian Ministry for the Arts. Temper democratic, bias Australian We pay minimum rates of forty dollars for a story or feature and fifteen dollars for a poem. Address all correspondence to: Editor, Overland, PO Box 249, Mount Eliza, Victoria 3930. overland Editor: Stephen Murray-Smith. Assistant Editor: Barrett Reid. Associate Editors: Ken Gott, Nancy Keesing, Vane Lindesay, July, 1985 Stuart Macintyre, John McLaren, Leonie Sandercock. Contributing Editors: Dorothy Hewett (Sydney), 99 Jim Gale (Adelaide), Donald Grant (Petth), Gwen Harwood (Hobart), Martin Duwell (Brisbane), Laurence Collinson (London). ISSN 0030-7416. The Cold War ROWAN CAHILL and Beyond A discussion of Australia' First Cold War 1945-1953, Volume I: Society, Communism and Cult~ae, edited by Ann Curthoys and john Merritt (A lim and U11win, $24.95). Reagan, amazing new science-fiction weapons, arms ( 1984) wa a courageou , trail-blazing attempt to add race, talk of war, paranoia about nuclear armageddon, literary flesh ro historic bones· and before him, and still spies, belligerent.foreign policies . a sense ofdeja vu. 1 amongst my favorites, Ralph Gib on' mode r volume of am reminded ofthe 1950s, when I was a kid. I am a child memoirs My Years in the Communist Party ( 1966}; Don of the Cold War; bom in the shadows of Hiroshima and Watson's biography Brian Fitzpatrick: A Radical Li/e Nagasaki, promised World War 1li some fourteen times ( 1979) made its contribution; o roo did lan Turner' to date, had atomic-blast emergency drills and {all-out autObiographical essay "My Lohg March" (Overland shelters shoved down my throat before I was tett, was 59}. Memoir by John Sendy, len Fox, Ja k Beasley, terrified in early adolescence by Nevil Shute's haunting George Stewart and Nancy Wills have helped to make the On the Beach. shadows move· Richard Hae e in Rebels and Precursors One night dztring the Falklands War I sat hz the lounge ( 1981 ) ha charred some of the cultural terrain. Frank room with my sevetvyear-old son, watching a TV report Hardy' neglected The l-Iard Way ( 196 1) graphically on the sinking of the General Belgrano; the boy cuddled captured the paranoia, danger, fear, and loathing of the into me as close as he could and looked into my fa ce to period. Bur in pire of aLl rhis the night remain . And ask me in an afraid, halting voice, was there going to be generally rhe ol.d War is neglected. another World War. 1 said no, but felt he tuas not con There are rea n for rhi . The period is only now vinced. 1 hugged him and felt a"ger that he could not beginning to hake itself free from the restriction placed grow up innocent. At the same time my mi11d shifted into on research by the rhirty-year rule traighr-jackcr on reverse to another time, another lou1zge-room, a110ther archival ource ; obviously researchers have been pur off father. My son was me, and I was my own old man. Same by the inaccessibility of some material. Bur there ha question, same concern; deja vu. b en, and rilJ is, a plethora of oral-history sources; and the private collections of some Left bower-bird are avail able. I sugge t that pa11 of the xplanarion for the neglect of rhe old War in Australian histodcal/culrural writing The Cold War tends to lie on rhe pages of Australian lies in rhe fact that a true history of rhe period would history and textbooks as a bland term; a near pigeon-hole involve rransgre ing the laws of libel and defamation in which to deposit a decade or o. few have gone our of that so inhibit investigative writing in thi counrry. For their way to make the period live, to recreate ir. For many rbe Cold War was a time when a lot of people, conserva AusrraJians it is simply the 19S0s, a period which aw the tives, maJI '( ' liberals and leftists alike, acred in ways they release of youthful exuberance via tbe importation of wouJd today be ashamed of; and there are quite a few American rock-and-roll; a bit of tension here and there, reputation built on and. lillian Hellman's memoir of bm basically a quiescent time. Fo.rgotten or ignored are America in rhe 1950 · were aprly titled Scoundrel Time; the fears and the shadows; the police spie · the agents the e word · equally fit rhe Australian scene during rhe provocateur; the informers; the progressive people who sam period. were subjected to frame-up attempts for crime· as diverse More imponanr however i rhat if we are ro under as carnal knowledge and spying· the intimidation of liber stand the C ld War, we have to also understand the als and leftists, the police raids on their homes and offi e ; politics and cuJrure of rhe lat 1930s and the 1940 . And the bashings; the impriso nment of orne leading lefr-wing if rhi is to happen we will have to expose some mon- identities; the cen or hip ; the hare and loathing whipped trous keletons ollecring dust in their variou closer . up by a lap-dog conservative press rhar transformed Ues The biggest i that which centre · around the Bri ·bane into 'facts'; the hate and loathing that festered under Line conrrover y of World War II and I can only ech Parliamentary p~ivilege; and the people who were frigh and upporr rhe words of Humphrey McQueen here: tened into silence ... "There are reason for believing rhar the 'Brisbane Line' There are exceptions to my generalization. For exam was nor a military line - but a political one; that it marked ple, the Roger Milliss autobiography Serpent's Tooth the border between those parts of Australia which would 4411 Overland 99-1985 ----..... ,... -,.. be conceded to the Japanese to be administered directly implicit in their title, that the period 1979 to the present is by them and those sections of Australia which would be Australia's Second Cold War. run by a Vichy-style government in Canberra".1 Vance The book begins energetically with an essay by Stephen Palmer in a 'Crisis Number' of Meanjin, March 1942, Alomes, Mark Dober and Donna Hellier, an attempt to referred to the Australian quislings: "whisperers, recreate the feel of life in the late 1940s and early 1950s. fainthearts, near-fascists, people who have grown rotten This has been negatively commented upon by some ·re through easy living ... " viewers, but I find it comprehensive, lucid, mind-jogging, In my biography of Rupert Lockwood, in progress, I. entertaining and, for those who are too young to have will have something to say on this subject; for the mo known the period personally, as good an introduction as ment I merely note that the main players who were willing will be found. The authors take us for a quick trip to betray Australia in the 1940s were still on, or close to, through a suburban world, in places still characterized by the political stage during the Cold War. TheirYri'anipula degrees of pioneering as the urban sprawl of the capital tion of anti-communism in the 1950s was ironic, given its cities pushed out into the bush; an isolated world about emphasis on fifth-column traitors and the politics of to be changed by mass-immigration, mass-production, betrayal; they knew all about it.