The 1960s have been described by Australian historians Robin Gerster and Jan Bassett as âa decade of transit and of transition, of comings and goings, of cultural trafficâ.1 It was a period of great hopes and dreams sandwiched between the conservatism of the 1950s and the rise of the New Right, and one that was experienced, perhaps more than any before it, as truly global. âYouthful dissidenceâ, an American Central Intelligence Agency report from September 1968 warned, was âa world-wide phenomenonâ. âThe revolution in communication [and] the ease of travelâ ensured that âriots in West Berlin, Paris and New York and sit-ins in more than twenty other countries in recent months [have] caught the attention of the whole worldâ, the report ominously warned.2 Daniel Cohn-Bendit, French student leader and self-professed international revolutionary, perhaps best captured a similar global consciousness when he reminisced: âParis, New York, Berkeley, Rome, Prague, Rio, Mexico City, Warsawâthose were the places of a revolt that stretched all around the globe and captured the hearts and dreams of a whole generationâ.3 Such sentiments were not limited to the student ghettos either. Che Guevaraâs call for the creation of âtwo, three, many Vietnamsâ mirrored the multiplication of anti-colonial struggles across the Third World, while other dispossessed or marginalised groups from Indigenous Australians to women and homosexuals mobilised these ideas of liberation to their own ends.4 It was, then, a period in which the utopian idea of a global revolution beyond classes, nations, and various other artificial human divisions seemed not only possible but perhaps inevitable.
Activists and governments alike, then, believed that what Simon Prince has termed an âimagined community of global revoltâ underlay the deep connections and networks that âmadeâ the 1960s.5 Despite the fact that such activists ânever know their fellow-members, met them, or even hear of themâ, to borrow Benedict Andersonâs description of imagined national communities, âin the minds of each lives the image of their communionâ.6 Or, in the words of University of Queensland lecturer, anti-Vietnam War activist, and leading theorist of the Australian New Left Dan OâNeill, it was â[a]s if we had all been moles burrowing along in our own different undergrounds, who came out into an open space of emotion and thought blinking at one anotherâ. âWe discovered, with some interestâ, OâNeill continued, âthat we were probably part of an international ânew leftââ.7
Global Radicals uncovers the processes whereby social movement activists âbecameâ transnational during the 1960s. It looks deeply into a world now largely condemned to what E.P. Thompson once so aptly labelled âthe enormous condescension of posterityâ.8 Australiaâs cultural cringe and a lack of sustained academic engagement have ensured that 1960s dissent in the antipodes has merited only isolated attention. Even the little work that has been undertaken is often dismissive, with Lani Russell bemoaning the âAustralian exceptionalismâ that presents Australians of the 1960s as deeply conservative.9 Activism arrived âby airmail subscriptionâ, as Gerster and Bassett remind us in their controversial cultural history of the period. Social commentator Hugh Mackay strikes a similarly dismissive tone, arguing that while perhaps âintrigued, saddened, even alarmedâ by the global struggles of the era, Australians were ânot really engagedââat least until well into the 1970s.10
These public memorialisations, as is so often the case, neglect more than they remember. As Kristin Ross notes in her investigation of the political events of May 1968 in Paris, the period has âbeen overtaken by its subsequent representationsâ, and the popular image of the 1960s is often framed by the ideological coordinates of the present.11 Yet, if one relies on the ephemeral tracts, the student and underground newspapers, the organisational minutes, and the often overblown reactions of mainstream media and various government agencies then it is possible to break through these misunderstandings, finding âa whole new world of themes and preoccupationsâ, as OâNeill puts it.12 It is the narratives of the well known as well as ordinary and often overlooked activistsâyoung and old, black and white, women and menâthat emerge from these documents, and they reveal much about Australiaâs and the worldâs experience of the 1960s tumult.
Employing a case-study approach, this book analyses the expanding global imagination and practice of transnational social movements by drawing together a series of seemingly unconnected personalities and stories. From Sydney and Melbourne University students who created a furore in the mid-1960s by donating funds to the National Liberation Front (NLF) to Aboriginal activists who used globally mobile ideas of Black Power to quicken the pace of change, and students from Malaysia and Singapore who used Australia as a base to protest crimes in their homelands. A thorough exploration of how this imagination came to be, what it meant for those involved, and the debates it engendered is central to this analysis. The politics of solidarity with overseas struggles as well as the place of global ideas and practices in the radical press of the period will be explored in Chap. 2, highlighting an evolving âethic of solidarityâ with overseas movements and an increasing absorption and contestation of overseas ideas and theories. The role that public and private spaces played in radical political and everyday lifeâhow âactivists mapped characteristics and qualities of themselves onto the cityâs surfacesâ as Belinda Davis explains in her work on West Germanyâalso cannot be ignored, and occupies Chap. 3.13 Activists imagined and constructed globally attuned locations and spaces of dissent while acting out these ideas in the public domain, providing a way of contextualising this expanding global imagination and its concrete impacts.14
Yet, while an activist could read about and attempt to copy an overseas event or study a foreign theorist, experiencing these ideas first hand meant not only that they could be better understood, but also imbued a returning traveller with a new authority or authenticity. Often denigrated as ârevolutionary tourismâ, Chap. 4 makes the argument that travel by a diverse array of Australian activists to overseas locations like Algeria, China, Cuba, France, Vietnam, Czechoslovakia, and of course, the USA were more than just fleeting adventures. Travel played a role in the discovery, dissemination, and uptake of new ideas about radical politics and culture, and provides historians a window into the dispute and contestation of global ideas in local environments. Arrivals, however, could be just as important as departures. The arrival of people and ideas, whether in the form of itinerant radicals or âobsceneâ protest publications, proved to be just as productive and controversial. Visitors from the Second and Third Worlds, the USA, and Europe, all applied for, and were often denied, access to Australia. Chap. 5 recounts these experiences, providing a view of how activists responded to these border controls, as well as how government and security agencies tried to understand these developments. Perceiving this transnational imagination from the perspective of those in power as well as those outside of the traditional or national narrative forms an important part of this book. Chap. 6 explores the multiplying global imagination of the Australian indigenous movement and its flirtations with the transnational ideals of Black Power and the Chinese Revolution, while the Malaysian and Singaporean overseas students who both challenged home governments and their place in Australian foreign policy through forging a transnational alliance with Australian students occupies the final, seventh chapter.
In arguing for this expanded global imagination, I do not pretend that previous activism avoided international engagement. Indeed, Australian radicalism has always had a global dimension. The Labourites, Socialists, single taxers, and First Wave Feminists that characterised 1890s social movements existed within âa highly trans-national world of political ideas and cultural cross-fertilisationâ, taking lessons from the suffragettes, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the often misconstrued ideas of Karl Marx to form their supposedly sans doctrines radicalism.15 By the 1930s, however, the degeneration of the previously inspiring Bolshevik Revolution saw a closing of this global imagination. What the Communist International (Comintern), and later the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) said was often received as gospel by communists and fellow travellers who viewed global events and political opportunities through a Soviet lens.16 The 1960s saw not only the multiplication of new groups outside of this orbit, but the Old Leftâs uneven globalisation as well.
If Australian radicals were heavily blinkered by Moscow, the population in general maintained an equally distorted view of international developments. Examples of global engagement like small-scale activism around work conditions in China during the 1920s, the blocking by wharf unions of pig iron shipments to Japan in the 1930s, and more popular support for the postâWorld War II Indonesian independence movement stand almost alone against the all-encompassing âyellow perilâ, given a red hue after the Chinese revolution and the threat of falling dominos to Australiaâs immediate north.17 This political culture was only further stultified by the Cold War and the Australian governmentâs fearful attitude towards decolonisation. The Liberal government of Robert Gordon Menzies and his successors (1949â1972) fostered an attitude of aspirational consumption domestically, while delegitimising dissent towards Australiaâs increasingly outdated imperial loyalties and its overtly racist, increasingly defunct, White Australia Policy.18 It was against this closed mind that many individuals and groups sought to rebel from the late 1950s onwards, often by moving beyond the physical and ideological borders of the natio...