A POTTED PROTEST HISTORY: 1962-72

A POTTED PROTEST HISTORY: 1962-72 by Rowan Cahill* [Panel contribution to webinar “Opposition in Australia, Japan, and South Korea to the U.S. War in Indochina”, Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee, October 2024. Ten minutes were allocated. Intended for an audience with little knowledge of Australia or of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Published on website ‘Rowan Cahill: Radical Historian, Author, Educator’, 1 November 2024.] In 1962 the conservative and rabidly anti-communist Australian Government of Prime Minister Robert Menzies sent 30 military advisers to join the South Vietnam and US war effort in Vietnam. In 1964 this was substantially increased to combat troops. During the course of Australia’s participation in the war, which ended in 1972, some 60,000 Australians served, of whom 523 died as the result and some 2400 wounded. Amongst those who served, and amongst these casualties, were 16,000 conscripts. Australia has never felt at home in Asia and through much of the twentieth century tried to maintain itself as a white racial society. A settler-colonial state created via Britain’s invasion beginning in 1788, and war with and dispossession of the First Peoples, Australia is an island continent a bit smaller in size than the US (minus Alaska and Hawaii), sparsely populated, 53% of it desert or almost so. Today it hosts a population of nearly 27 million. In the 1960s some 11 million. Federated and independent as a nation since 1901 it has historically looked for and to a powerful friend/ally to come to its aid in times of perpetually feared invasion. Its experiences with Japan during World War II, which included air and naval attacks on Australian soil and in its waters, heightened this fear. Until the Fall of Singapore and the end of British power in Asia in 1942, followed post-war by India’s exit from the British Empire, the ‘Mother’ country provided this security, real or imagined. Subsequently, based on the close military and strategic relationship forged during World War II between Australia and the US, successive Australian governments have attached the nation to the military and strategic interests of the US. In November 1964 the Australian government introduced Conscription. The Australian Army was not sizeable enough to do the job ahead in Vietnam and recruitment drives were not yielding the quality of manpower needed. A selective scheme was concocted involving all males as they turned 20 years of age, a year before they gained the right to vote. To avoid compromising the economy and the workforce, the scheme was designed to select 1 in 12 males, letting the rest get on with their lives. By the 1970s, these odds had lengthened to 1 in 17. All up from its introduction until it ended in 1972, some 63,735 males were conscripted out of a pool of 804,000 registrants. Conscription involved two years of continuous full-time military service followed with another three and a half years of part-time service in the Army Reserve. Selection was by the spin of a lottery barrel with ballot balls representing birth dates. Draws were made twice a year depending on which half of the year your birthday fell. The scheme created two classes of conscripts. Males already in the workforce who were conscripted went straight into the army. Males who were conscripted whilst engaged in university studies could defer military service until the completion of their first degree, providing there were no failures along the way. This gave them time to understand the nature of the war in Vietnam and for those who figured the war was wrong, how to express this. Thus the nation’s universities became hotbeds of agitation, organisation, resistance. By the mid-1960s there were more university students in Australia than ever before. Post-World War II, Australian governments had determined that national security and economic growth needed more and higher education, there had been a post-war baby boom, and accommodating expansions of school and university systems. Initially Australia’s intervention in the Vietnam War and Conscription had widespread public support. Saying NO to both in the early years was no easy or simple matter as it took place in a national culture profoundly ignorant of Asian histories, societies, and cultures – a national culture susceptible to simple anti-communist Cold War rhetoric and Domino Theory political understandings. Initial opposition tended to be quietist and educational. The preferred mode of protest took the form of Letters to the Editor, petitions, small peaceful demonstrations, educative public meetings with guest speakers aiming for media coverage of dissident opinions, and the circulation of literature contesting government policies. The first voices raised and actions against the war came from long established political organisations and from activists with track records and/or family links to a dissenting/oppositional past, and from a peace movement with a history, traditions, and links that can be traced back to the early twentieth century and Australia’s involvement in the Boer War. But that was the quiet before the storm and opposition intensified and grew. Protest actions became increasingly confrontational and disruptive. There was a mushroom growth of anti-war, protest groups and organisations. Cheap offset print technology produced a tsunami of protest literature. Symbolic of increasing militancy was the Australian tour of US President Johnson in October 1966. While the Australian Prime Minister declared ‘All the way with LBJ’, in the streets protestors disrupted his cavalcade, there was police violence in retaliation, and in Sydney the hosting Premier of NSW told his driver to ‘run over the bastards’. The following year the militant and powerful Seamen’s Union of Australia dramatically placed bans on Australian merchant ships taking war materials to Vietnam. Producing a substantial and dramatic shift in public opinion against the war was the Tet Offensive in February 1968. This dramatically exposed the spurious ‘we will win, we are winning’ claims of both the Australian and US governments. So effective were mounting protest and opposition that in 1969 the Federal government considered draconian legislation to curb free speech, the right of assembly, and anti-war protest generally. But it was a tide that could not be turned. In 1970 and 1971, Australians turned out three times in tens of thousands in its cities and towns in Moratorium protests against the War and Conscription. The largest of these took place in Melbourne with an estimated 70,000-100,000 present. By this time the Australian government was considering withdrawal from Vietnam but had no time frame. And as far as it was concerned, the protestors according to one of its leading spokesmen were “political-bikies packraping democracy”. These Moratorium protests were the result of hard and difficult work by activists who managed to cobble together united action from amongst the many protest organisations, factions, interests across the nation, thus mobilising people intergenerationally across divides of politics, ideologies, race, gender, social class, religion. Amongst early and high-profile critics of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, and of Conscription, were prominent members of the centre-left Australian Labor Party, Australia’s oldest political party. The party had taken Australia through World War II but lost national office in 1949 in a Federal election featuring a Cold War fear mongering campaign launched by conservative forces. It had been out of office since, and these early critics were isolated voices in their Party. It wasn’t until much later that the party’s leadership and rank and file had read the wind and that efforts by anti-war/anti-conscription activists within the party were successful. In October 1969 the Labor Party promised to immediately withdraw Australian troops from the Vietnam War if elected, and in 1971 to end conscription. All of which immediately happened following its election to the leadership of the nation at the end of 1972. And with this too, the bonus release of anti-war resisters from prison and cancellation of a backlog of prosecutions against a legion of activists yet to be arraigned. ********** *ROWAN CAHILL is a graduate of the universities of Sydney, New England, and Wollongong. Conscripted for military service in 1965 in the recently introduced selective National Service scheme, he became a Conscientious Objector and prominent in the Australian student, anti-war and New Left movements of the 1960s and 70s. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation began its dossier on him in 1967. He has variously worked as a farmhand; as a teacher in schools, the prison system, universities; as a freelance writer; and for the trade union movement as a publicist, historian, and rank and file activist. He has published widely in mainstream, trade union, social movement, and academic publications. Author of numerous books his most recent, co-authored with Terry Irving, are Radical Sydney: Places, Portraits and Unruly Episodes (UNSW Press, 2010) and The Barber Who Read History: Essays in Radical History (Bull Ant Press, 2021). Currently he is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Wollongong (New South Wales). Rowan Cahill 24 October 2024 2 | Page