The Seventies: The personal, the political and the making of modern Australia

By Michelle Arrow

In 1970 homosexuality was illegal, God Save the Queen was our national anthem and women pretended to be married to access the pill. By the end of the decade conscription was scrapped, tertiary education was free, access to abortion had improved, the White Australia policy was abolished and a woman read the news on the ABC for the first time.The Seventies was the decade that shaped modern Australia. It was the decade of It's Time', stagflation and the Dismissal, a tumultuous period of economic and political upheaval. But the Seventies was also the era when the personal became political, when we had a Royal Commission into Human Relationships and when social movements tore down the boundary between public and private life. Women wanted childcare, equal pay, protection from violence and agency to shape their own lives. In the process, the reforms they sought — and achieved, at least in part — reshaped Australia's culture and rewrote our expectations of government.In a lively and engaging style, Michelle Arrow has written a new history of this transformative decade; one that is more urgent, and more resonant, than ever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Mar 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781742244440

Book preview

MICHELLE ARROW is an award-winning historian based in Sydney. She is an Associate Professor in Modern History at Macquarie University, where she teaches and researches postwar Australian history, the history of popular culture, and the ways history is depicted in television and film. She has won a national award for her university teaching and her two previous books have both been shortlisted for prizes. Michelle has also produced history for radio and television: in 2004, she was a historian–presenter for the ABC TV series Rewind, and in 2013, with Catherine Freyne and Timothy Nicastri, she made the radio documentary Public Intimacies: The Royal Commission on Human Relationships, which won the 2014 Multimedia History Prize in the NSW Premier’s History Awards.

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

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© Michelle Arrow 2019

First published 2019

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

ISBN: 97814742234700 (paperback)

9781742244440 (ebook)

9781742248899 (ePDF)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

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This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

Contents

INTRODUCTION  |  Public intimacies

CHAPTER 1  |  From liberalism to liberation

CHAPTER 2  |  The personal is political

CHAPTER 3  |  ‘It’s Time’

CHAPTER 4  |  1975: National consciousness-raising 109

CHAPTER 5  |  What do you think?

CHAPTER 6  |  A nation of bank tellers

CHAPTER 7  |  Backlash

AFTERWORD  |  The personal remains political

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

INTRODUCTION

Public intimacies

The drive to Chester Hill takes you past service stations, schools ringed with high fences, and red and blond brick houses, some of which have seen better days. At Chester Hill, amid the sprawl of Western Sydney, is the New South Wales repository of the National Archives of Australia. The National Archives describes itself as ‘the nation’s memory’. The records housed here have all been generated by the Commonwealth government: everything from immigration to repatriation, cabinet papers to banned books. This all sounds rather grand, but the building itself is a no-frills kind of place, with its own rituals for researchers. Bags go in numbered lockers, which open with keys. You need to bring your own lunch, which you eat silently in a quiet kitchen. At around 9.55 each morning, a coffee van – Cafe2U – swings into the car park, selling flat whites and iced donuts. The archives is a place to spend time in your own company; you can go a whole day without talking to another person, beyond exchanging pleasantries with the archivists who work there.

Throughout 2012, I visited the National Archives every week because I had found something extraordinary there. In 1974, Gough Whitlam’s Labor government had initiated a Royal Commission on Human Relationships. To contemporary ears, a government inquiry into ‘human relationships’ doesn’t seem so strange: after all, we’ve now lived through decades of public discussion of our intimate lives. But back in the Whitlam era, a Royal Commission into Human Relationships was new and confronting. It was conceived as a way to investigate the prevalence of abortion in Australia, but it grew much bigger than that. Underpinned by Whitlam’s ethos of ‘open government’, the Commission invited Australians to tell them ‘what do you think?’ about sex and sex education, abortion, family life, family planning, parenthood, child care, women’s rights and homosexuality. People wrote and responded to the Royal Commission in a myriad of ways. They gave evidence in person. They phoned in. They participated in research. They wrote official submissions, which were available for public inspection at the National Archives while the Commission was sitting. All of this material informed their final recommendations – more than 500 of them, published in five hefty volumes that caused a sensation and a scandal when they were finally released in 1977. When the work of the Royal Commission had finished, all of this evidence was archived and filed away safely at the Chester Hill repository. In 2012, I started opening those boxes, and the voices of mid-1970s Australia spilled out of them.

Archival research is one of the most enjoyable parts of a historian’s job. I still get a quiet thrill when I open a box of original files: untying the pink linen ribbons, opening the manila folders. Sometimes you read an original document and you can see instantly how it animates a broader idea. Sometimes you even find things that make you laugh. The submissions to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships were as diverse as the people who wrote them. Whether they were typed on letterhead, handwritten on floral stationery, or in block letters on plain lined paper, they expressed a range of emotions: love, anger, loneliness, bewilderment, determination. People wrote with ideas for how to make human relationships better. They wrote to plead for political and social change: sometimes they sought to prevent it. But occasionally, these submissions expressed something so personal – so awful – that it stuck and swirled in my head for days afterwards. I was left with this feeling more than once on my drive home from the archives.

Take the submission from a woman who had had seven miscarriages during her three-year marriage in the late 1950s. The miscarriages were caused by her ‘ignorance of contraceptives, my [now] ex-husband’s fear of responsibilities, and his resultant method of eradicating them by the use of a few well-aimed kicks to the stomach and breasts’.¹ Her description of a botched abortion, undertaken without any anaesthetic, which left her haemorrhaging in her bed, was extreme. However, her experience of domestic violence, her lack of contraceptive knowledge, and her difficulties finding a doctor willing to perform a safe abortion were far from unique in this era. She had written to the Commission ‘in the knowledge that yours is a bona fide organisation … and it is written in the hope that it may, eventually, help other women’.²

This letter was deeply, almost unbearably personal. This woman’s grief and trauma were palpable on the page as I read it at the National Archives, all those years later. She told her story to strangers because she wanted it to persuade those in power to make change, ‘to help other women’. In writing about her life to the Royal Commission on Human Relationships, this woman inserted her personal experience into the political domain. She placed a deeply private memory on the public record to make a claim for abortion law reform, for better support for women in violent relationships, for better education about contraception and sexuality.

This kind of public intimacy was both a new way to talk about private life and a new political strategy, all at once. It’s best summed up by the women’s liberation slogan ‘The personal is political’. This is an idea that seems so obvious to us today that it’s hard to conceive of a time before it, but it was genuinely transformative. Women’s liberation and gay liberation were built upon this core principle, which had many permutations: from coming out and consciousness-raising to the creation of women’s refuges and political demonstrations like the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras that were equal parts party and protest. The idea that the personal could also be political made Australians rethink the boundary between public and private. It has changed our political and social life. But all too often, this change has been obscured when we tell the national story of the 1970s.

In Australia, we have long viewed the 1970s as a decade of political upheaval. This is the story that is told (and retold) from the point of view of the Canberra press gallery. The centrality of the Dismissal of the Whitlam government on 11 November 1975 in our public memory of the 1970s (every year there are new revelations, new books) frames the decade as the setting for a tragic clash of personalities and a constitutional crisis, as well as a conspiracy theory or two.³ More recently, a second narrative of the 1970s has also taken hold. This story foregrounds the economic upheaval and crisis of the period – the stagflation, the end of the long boom, the oil shocks – to frame the 1980s and 1990s as an era of crusading deregulatory reform, setting the nation on a path to prosperity. In this gloomy story of the 1970s, crafted by journalists like Paul Kelly and George Megalogenis, Whitlam is praised for his tariff cuts, while Fraser is blamed for his inability to make tough decisions on economic reform.⁴ This narrative was forged in the wake of the ground-breaking reforms of the Hawke–Keating governments in the 1980s and it reflects the centrality of economics in our framing of contemporary political life: from the 1980s onwards, the nation became the economy. Such a narrative requires a genealogy, and telling the story of the 1970s as a decade of economic policy failures provides one.

I’M NOT SUGGESTING THAT THIS STORY OF THE 1970s is an entirely inaccurate one, or that the pain that the economic downturn caused in ordinary people’s lives was imaginary. But we construct historical narratives to serve our purposes in the present. This narrative warns us of the dangers of inaction in the face of economic instability. It was crafted to persuade us of the necessity – and success – of economic reform. Today, as we tally the mounting costs of the deregulatory economic reform agenda, we might write this history differently.⁵ But an economic narrative tells an incomplete story of Australia in the 1970s, and it obscures the extent to which the decade was an extraordinary era of social reform. The seventies saw the emergence (or reawakening) of many social movements – against the Vietnam war, for women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, environmental protection and Aboriginal land rights. It was the decade in which many of our fundamental ideas about marriage and sex were challenged. It was also the decade in which Australians began to accept the reality that their country was no longer just ‘White’, and adopted multi-culturalism. All these movements reshaped our social norms and our political culture, even if their impact was partial and uneven. The seventies, then, was a turning point in the history of modern Australia, and changes in the ways we regarded the private experiences of women, children, gays and lesbians, and recognised their distinctive needs, were fundamental to that shift.

To appreciate the scale of the changes wrought across the 1970s, think back to Australia in the years after World War II. Many Australians experienced the postwar years as peaceful, happy and prosperous. There was suburban expansion and a baby boom. An ambitious program of migration and refugee resettlement increased our population. New consumer goods appeared and more and more people had the means to purchase them. Incomes rose, unemployment was low and home ownership increased.⁶ Yet the Australian way of life could cast long shadows. Many Indigenous people were alienated from their traditional lands and subject to intrusive state controls. Homosexual acts remained illegal across Australia. Abortions were illegal and often dangerous. Women being terrorised by their husbands had few places to go. Unmarried mothers were left with little choice but to give up their babies for adoption. Girls deemed to be in ‘moral danger’ were packed off to institutions. Indigenous children were (and sadly, still are) being removed from their families in high numbers. Inequality between men and women was widely experienced, unchallenged by law and socially sanctioned. Sexual ignorance was common. Most of these problems were considered ‘private’; they were rarely discussed publicly, and they were certainly not on the political agenda.

By the 1960s, seeds of discontent were slowly germinating.⁷ Postwar prosperity created the conditions for the rise of a new, more educated middle class, who articulated new liberal perspectives in public debate. This group had a more critical take on the accepted wisdoms of Australian life: they questioned the cultural cringe, called for reform to censorship and the White Australia Policy, campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty, the improvement of Aboriginal rights, and changes to abortion law. But for the most part, these sixties campaigners positioned themselves as experts or civil libertarians, acting for the rights of others, not for themselves. The Homosexual Law Reform Association of the ACT, formed in 1969, was explicitly not a homosexual organisation: founder Dr Thomas Mautner declared that ‘we are not a society for homosexuals, and to my knowledge, no member of our committee is a practicing homosexual’.⁸ To publicly identify as homosexual, and to ask for rights and protections on the basis of that identity, was not yet possible in 1960s Australia.

‘The personal is political’ was one of the most famous formulations of the Women’s Liberation Movement. It destabilised a foundational concept of modern political culture: the notion that there were two separate spheres of life, public and private. In this formulation, the public was the space of politics, government and paid work; the private was the place for home, intimacy and domesticity. The division between the two was strongly gendered, reinforced by ideology and government policy, especially around the meanings of Australian citizenship. Citizenship is key to understanding these changing ideas of public and private. While it seems like an abstract, remote concept, citizenship determines who belongs to the nation, and the terms under which they are included. For much of the 20th century, Australian citizenship was defined, in exclusionary ways, by racist ideologies like the White Australia Policy and restrictive laws governing Indigenous people.

Citizenship was also shaped by ideas about gender. Citizenship defines people’s rights and responsibilities, and historically, Australian’s rights to the protection of the state through welfare, for example, were determined by your gender as well as your race. The foundational Harvester judgement of 1907 maintained that male wages would be determined by the needs of a male bread-winner with a wife and dependent children. This wage system – a form of social welfare – devalued women’s domestic work and ensnared women as dependents of their husbands.⁹ In response, white Australian women argued for special rights and protections on the grounds of their valuable national service as mothers, which further reinforced the gendered division between public and private spheres.¹⁰ The assumption of male power within the family also left women and children vulnerable to abuse: for example, domestic violence and rape in marriage were often viewed as ‘private’ matters rather than crimes – indeed, rape within marriage was not criminalised nationally until 1991. Indigenous men and women struggled to keep their families together in the face of government policies that sought to separate Indigenous children from their families. ‘Privacy’ was not an equal right. In some cases, privacy perpetuated oppression.

Across the 1970s, our ideas of what was ‘public’ and what was ‘private’ began to change. Second-wave feminism criticised the idea that what happened in private was beyond the realm of politics.¹¹ As the split between public and private came under question, so too did the ideas of citizenship that had developed from it. Feminists no longer argued that motherhood was the basis of women’s contribution to the nation; gays and lesbians argued that keeping their sexuality ‘private’ was oppressive and harmful. Challenging and contesting the boundary between public and private life was central to the liberation movements of the 1970s. The changes their challenge wrought in Australian social, cultural and political life are the subject of this book. It asks: how did the personal become political, and how did this change reshape the boundary between public and private life? How did this reshaping of what we thought of as public, and what we thought of as private, transform Australia in the late 20th century?

The women’s movement, the push for gay and lesbian rights and the sexual revolution saw the personal brought to bear on the political in new ways. It was a shift that rewrote our expectations of government. It generated new ways to ‘do’ politics and to become political. Women, in particular, emerged in the 1970s as a distinctive constituency with their own political demands: for women’s refuges, child care centres, equal pay and a host of other reforms. These new demands on the state did not just change women’s lives – they changed our politics, the role of the state and the ways we thought about citizenship. They also created new kinds of political allegiances that did not always map neatly onto a male-dominated politics of left and right, Liberal and Labor. For example, while Gough Whitlam created the women’s advisor position on his staff, many of his MPs remained vehemently opposed to abortion rights for women. Later, Malcolm Fraser faced spirited feminist opposition within his own party as he struggled to limit government spending on feminist services. Conventional left/right politics did not always accommodate women’s needs. As one woman told the 1974 Women and Violence forum – an event organised by Sydney Women’s Liberation in which women told stories of their experiences of male violence – ‘my husband was a socialist when he bashed me’.¹² This new politics of private experience carved new allegiances that cut across long-standing political divides, and it continues to do so, in often unpredictable ways.

It is important to note that these changes have not always been progressive. Sometimes a change is just that – a change – and we can trace these changes without yoking them to a narrative of progress. We can easily mistake decriminalisation of homosexuality or the Sex Discrimination Act as moves towards ‘equal rights’ when in fact they do not guarantee these rights. These rights movements have been overwhelmingly white (though they had vocal Indigenous critics) and mainstream feminism today is often still guilty of privileging the concerns of middle-class women, instead of focusing on building broad, intersectional coalitions. Those seventies activists who wanted to dismantle the nuclear family and abolish marriage might cringe at the idea that same-sex marriage became the political issue for LGBTQI people in 2017. The emergence of neoliberal economic prescriptions in the late 1970s stymied and distorted many of the women’s movement’s key reforms. Child care, demanded by mothers as a right to respite for the work of motherhood as much as a workplace entitlement,¹³ was soon tied in public debate to the goal of increasing women’s work-place participation and alleviating the ‘burden’ women placed on the welfare system. By the end of the decade, the ground had shifted beneath the feet of the liberation movements, and the logics of competition and deregulation had changed the framework of possibility for revolutionary gender and sexual politics. To be interested in the 1970s, then, as the American scholar Victoria Hesford noted, ‘is to be interested in the alternatives offered to what has become our neoliberal present’.¹⁴ The seventies can provide us with a roadmap to understand the present day, but the era also gives us a glimpse of a different way of thinking about the nation, a way of imagining national belonging outside the framework of efficiency and productivity.

It is curious, considering the wide-ranging changes that occurred during the 1970s, that few Australian historians have tackled the 1970s as a decade worthy of analysis in its own right. While there have been book-length studies of the 1950s, 1960s and even the 1980s, the only stand-alone study of Australia in the 1970s is Frank Crowley’s Tough Times: Australia in the Seventies, written in 1986.¹⁵ This is in sharp contrast to the US and the UK, where many historians and writers have turned to the 1970s to unearth an origin story for contemporary political and social fractures.¹⁶ There is much more specialist scholarship examining the social movements of the 1970s, which is supplemented by memoirs and auto/biographies of key participants in these movements.¹⁷ The history of the 1970s is history within living memory, and the struggles over its meaning are still unfolding, particularly in memoir and biography.¹⁸ Yet somehow the social movements and social change of the decade sit just outside the frame through which we see the 1970s – a colourful, but not central, part of the larger economic and political story of ‘It’s Time’, stagflation, oil shocks, constitutional crisis and Dismissal. This book places them front and centre and positions them as key drivers of change. While many participants in the women’s and gay and lesbian movements were also part of other social movements (like Indigenous rights and environmental movements), this book is primarily concerned with the ways new understandings of gender and sexuality transformed Australia, and as a result it focuses on the women’s movement and the gay and lesbian movement.

The book begins in the 1960s and ends in the early 1980s. I don’t pretend to have written a comprehensive history of the decade. Instead, this book largely narrates Australia from a national viewpoint, though it also tells stories from different parts of the country. I have particularly focussed on the moments where women and sexual minorities have asserted their rights in relation to the nation, and the state. The Royal Commission on Human Relationships is central to this story, because it marked a moment where the Federal government signalled its openness to hearing these narratives from ordinary people. It was a stage on which many of the decade’s biggest social movements could put forward their case for national inclusion. That it has been almost entirely forgotten is extraordinary. Through its reading of the Royal Commission submissions, written by people who were experiencing a decade of exciting change and unsettling possibilities, this book offers a new perspective on the 1970s in Australia.

Women’s liberation and the gay and lesbian rights movements were deeply invested in personal transformation and personal change. Acknowledging this, The Seventies focuses on the moments where these movements, these people, spoke out in the public sphere, and made claims to rights and protections in the language of personal experience. The book begins with the heterosexual white men advocating for modest reform for men charged with homosexual ‘offences’ and ends with the radical feminists of Women Against Rape trying to lay wreaths for rape victims on Anzac Day. Chapter 1 examines the shift from progressive reform to the radical politics of liberation. From the creation of feminist-run women’s refuges to gay men being sacked for coming out on television, Chapter 2 identifies the ways the idea that ‘the personal is political’ slowly began to transform our ideas about gender, sexuality and citizenship. Chapter 3 looks at the unique convergence between the women’s movement and government that occurred when the Whitlam government was elected in December 1972, and investigates what happened when a young philosophy tutor and women’s liberationist, Elizabeth Reid, was appointed the first women’s advisor to a national leader anywhere in the world.

International Women’s Year – 1975 – ended up being both a high and low point for the women’s movement in Australia. It was a watershed moment for feminist culture, but it also exposed and aggravated tensions within the movement, against the backdrop of the crisis and dismissal of the Whitlam government, as Chapter 4 explains. Chapter 5 tells the story of the extraordinary Royal Commission on Human Relationships. This largely forgotten investigation into intimate and family life in Australia was a bold experiment, but it was doomed to obscurity by the Dismissal and the budget cuts inflicted upon it by the Fraser government. Chapter 6 investigates the fate of the Royal Commission and women’s policy under Fraser, while Chapter 7 investigates the rise of conservative religious groups and anti-feminist politics in the late 1970s. It also examines the resurgence in gay and lesbian activism that occurred at the same time. The book ends with a brief reflection on the ways the new politics of public intimacy – of making claims to rights and protections in the language of personal experience – continues to shape our public life.

Today, the histories of social movements like women’s and gay liberation are still not widely understood. Contemporary feminism is often framed as a pathway to individual empowerment or a lifestyle brand, obscuring and distorting its history in the process. We also live in an era where the gains achieved from these movements can, as Gisela Kaplan put it, look like a ‘meagre harvest’.¹⁹ Governments wind back changes; privatisation undermines arrangements between activist-led services and the state; and reforms that seem inevitable – like amending the marriage act to allow same-sex couples to wed – were mired in partisan politics for years before change was finally achieved. Australia is a unique case study in the ways that social movements ‘fandangoed’ with the state, because in many cases, progressive Labor governments in the 1970s and beyond responded to those seeking change by hiring specialist advisors or officers, sponsoring legislation and law reform, and providing funding for new services. In the often uneasy alliances between social movements and government, new rights and protections for women, gays and lesbians were created. But would they hold in testing times, amid economic difficulties and the rise of reactionary political groups? Revisiting the history of the 1970s now, as we continue to work through the consequences of the social, cultural, political and economic changes wrought across that decade, seems more urgent, and more resonant, than ever.

1

From liberalism to liberation

Kate Jennings grew up in Griffith, a New South Wales town ‘on the edge of red-dirt country’, roaming the family farm with her brother.¹ She left in 1966 to study English at the University of Sydney. Like many men and women of her generation, Jennings was drawn into the protests against the Vietnam war. By the end of the decade, these protests escalated into large-scale moratoriums, designed to grind cities to a halt. The first Moratorium in May 1970 was Australia’s largest anti-war demonstration to date: more than 200 000 people stopped work in protest. The second Moratorium was in September 1970, a smaller, more radical protest that resulted in 173 arrests in Sydney alone.² The organisers planned a pre-march rally at Sydney University. Despite the fact that some of the anti-war movement’s hardest-working members were women, the rally’s line-up of speakers was entirely male until the women demanded, and won, the right to be included. Jennings – who would later become famous as the editor of the groundbreaking feminist poetry collection Mother I’m Rooted – wrote the speech at a ‘boil’. ‘We were saying […] give us our rightful place, and they were saying, you’re good for typing and tea-making, scut-work and screwing.’³ It was so incendiary that none of the women would deliver it, which is how Jennings came to deliver one of the women’s liberation movement’s great speeches to the crowd on the Sydney Uni front lawn.

In a quavering voice, Jennings warned the crowd that she was a ‘manhating braburning lesbian member of the castration penisenvy brigade’.⁴ She excoriated the young men of the anti-war movement for their hypocrisy and myopia: ‘go check the figures, how many Australian men have died in Vietnam, and how many women have died from backyard abortions?’ Jennings was infuriated by men’s failure to see women’s issues as political issues: ‘You won’t make an issue of abortion, equal pay and child minding centres, because they’re women’s matters, and under your veneer you are brothers to the pig politicians.’ ‘All Power to Women’, she ended’.⁵

Those who were there remember the outrage that greeted Jennings’ speech. It was great theatre. Jennings had intended to wound and provoke the earnest young men