Radicals: Remembering the Sixties

By Nadia Wheatley and Meredith Burgmann

The Sixties an era of protest, free love, civil disobedience, duffel coats, flower power, giant afros and desert boots, all recorded on grainy black and white film footage marked a turning point for change. Radicals found their voices and used them.While the initial trigger for protest was opposition to the Vietnam War, this anger quickly escalated to include Aboriginal Land Rights, Women's Liberation, Gay Liberation, Apartheid, Student Power and workers' control'.In Radicals some of the people doing the changing including David Marr, Margret RoadKnight, Gary Foley, Jozefa Sobski and Geoffrey Robertson reflect on how the decade changed them and Australian society forever.Radicals Remembering the Sixties will make you feel like you were there, whether or not you really were.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Apr 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781742245133

Nadia Wheatley

Nadia Wheatley is a multi-award winning Australian author. She has written many books for children, including MY PLACE (illustrated by Donna Rawlins), which won the 1988 CBCA Book of the Year Award for Younger Readers. Nadia lives in Sydney.

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Index

Introduction

Meredith Burgmann and Nadia Wheatley

Saturday 6 June 2020. 1.30 pm.

We stand in Sydney’s Town Hall Square, two women in our seventies, holding handwritten placards. Meredith’s says, ‘Remember John Pat. 1966–1984’. Nadia’s says, ‘Solidarity! Black Lives Matter’.

We have stood here before, many a time, for a variety of campaigns and causes. But this time is a bit different. Mindful of the pandemic, we are both wearing face masks, and we are doing our best to stand a metre-and-a-half from other protestors. After weeks of lockdown, it feels surreal to be outdoors and in a crowd, but the oddest thing is that, as we look at the faces (also mostly masked) around us, we see no one whom we know. Indeed, there seems to be no one else here over the age of forty. We find it a cause for optimism that our generation of Sixties radicals is not irreplaceable.

From the microphone at the top of the steps, speeches crackle, interspersed by periodic bouts of chanting. Around us, a sea of red, black and yellow surges and swirls.

The recent death in the United States of George Floyd and the subsequent protests by the Black Lives Matter movement have given a new edge to the Aboriginal campaign against deaths in custody, which has been running since the 1980s. Signs around us bear the number 432: the tally of Indigenous Australians who have died in custody since the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. None of those deaths has led to a single conviction of any officer of the law.

‘Too many coppers, not enough justice!’ the chant rises.

The Law is out in force today, and it looks as if violence (not to mention a public health problem) could well result from the way police are acting. Barricades are preventing social distancing by squashing people close together.

‘Just like the old days’, we agree, as we survey the ranks of uniforms.

But what was it that originally took the two of us onto the streets?

ONE OF THE BEST-KNOWN SLOGANS OF THE SIXTIES IS THE claim that ‘The personal is political’. Although no one is sure who first said this, nevertheless it expresses the spirit of the time.

Of course, in any era, people bring their personal history to their political life, but in this book we relate the personal stories of a number of people from our generation who – either in reaction to a particular Sixties issue or simply in response to the zeitgeist – rejected the political views and values of their family, school, church and class. These radical about-turns were often accompanied by epiphanies, awakenings, revelations and other such ‘aha’ moments.

Five decades on, our society seems to have moved so far from that hopeful and innocent era that even using the word ‘radical’ may need a bit of explanation. In the current political climate, the term has come to be associated with the kind of people who go off to fight for ISIS or who occasionally run amok in their homeland. It is also used for members of the alt-Right.

To describe such racists and warmongers as radicals is an affront to those of us who became radicals in the Sixties and who continue to see ourselves as radicals to this day. For us, radicalism means openness and freedom. It means the particular kind of grassroots organisation and New Left ideology that arose in opposition to the hierarchical structures and dogmatism of the Old Left. And it means fun, not fundamentalism.

It was this that the two of us were discussing a few years ago over dinner, when we came up with the idea of a book about the Sixties. After all, both our lives had been transformed over a short period in 1968, initially through our involvement in the anti-Vietnam movement, but soon through taking part in other campaigns.

To outsiders, witnessing our sudden donning of National Liberation Front badges and our increasingly frequent appearances at the Central Court in Liverpool Street, we probably seemed surprising radicals. Both of us were from middle-class and politically conservative backgrounds. Both of us had been educated at single-sex private schools. Both of us were raised in the dreary puritanism of Sydney Anglicanism. But – as we relate in our own accounts in this book – there was a great difference, too, in our respective backstories.

Apart from any personal issues we might have brought to our activism, for both of us – as for all the comrades whose stories we tell here – the catalyst for our radicalisation was the shared experience of growing up in the political circumstances of Australia in the 1950s. Certainly, the ferment of the Sixties was an international phenomenon, and for young radicals from Berlin to Berkeley it represented some sort of reaction to a Cold War childhood. But in this country, there was something in particular to drive us wild.

This was a person known to his supporters as ‘Ming’ and to his class enemies as ‘Pig Iron Bob’. Elected in 1949 to head the first Coalition government of the Liberal and Country parties, Prime Minister Robert Gordon Menzies cast a long shadow over the childhood and adolescence of our post-war generation.

For a twenty-year-old Australian today, who has lived through seven prime ministers, it would be impossible to imagine how stultifying it was to grow up under a single one – and a patriarchal, conservative one at that. For many of our contemporaries, the snowy-haired father of the nation was conflated with the father who was forever telling them to turn that flaming rock-and-roll music down, and get a haircut while they were at it!

It is easy to point to the Menzies government’s support for policies such as White Australia and Assimilation, not to mention the military commitment in Vietnam, but just as bad was the cultural repression. Growing up behind the white picket fence of Menzies’ Australia was deadly boring.

To our parents, however, this social and political stasis seemed wonderfully safe. They had suffered the doublewhammy of coming of age through the Great Depression and the Second World War. Unlike their generation, we had shoes on our feet, food on our plates, fillings in our teeth, peace in our time (kind of), and most of all – we had education! What did we have to grumble about?

Nothing – and everything!

Often unable even to say what was wrong, we knew we had to make our escape, using whatever resources we had.

Whereas Millennials can express their views by way of Twitter, TikTok and Instagram, most of us did not even have what we called ‘a telephone’ (now known as a landline) in our cockroach-infested share houses and bed-sits. If we had a message too long to graffiti onto a wall, we had to type it onto a wax stencil, and then crank out inky copies on a duplicating machine.

Or we could go onto the streets and seize front-page headlines by getting bashed and arrested by police. That was social media, in the Sixties.

BUT WHEN WERE THE SIXTIES?

A mood and a movement, more than a specific slice of time, the decade is defined in this book as roughly spanning the years between 1965 and 1975.

In accordance with this chronology, the start of our Sixties is marked by a change that occurred within the anti-Vietnam movement after the introduction of conscription in November 1964 – a change that over the next few years brought both a broadening of support and an intensification of activism. The year of 1965 saw the Freedom Ride for Aboriginal civil rights, and in 1967 a whopping 90 per cent of Australians voted YES in the referendum that was widely seen at the time as some sort of guarantee of social justice for Aboriginal people. (A promise still not delivered.)

In January 1966, Menzies finally retired, but the Coalition landslide in the federal election later that year was a terrible blow both to the Labor Party and to opponents of the Vietnam War. It did, however, result in Gough Whitlam being elected to the leadership of the ALP.

For our generation, there was still no relief from growing up under a Coalition government. Over the next six years, the highest office in the land was successively held by a man who disappeared at sea, a man who drank too much, and a man whose main distinction seemed to be his overly large ears. Their policy initiatives remained effectively the same as those of Menzies.

Meanwhile, the anti-war movement received a boost to its profile in response to police bashings of protestors during visits by American President Lyndon B Johnson (October 1966) and South Vietnam’s Prime Minister Air Vice-Marshall Ky (January 1967). By 1968, the explosion of what seemed to be revolution in Paris and Prague was mirrored on the streets of Australian cities, even if we didn’t have any cobblestones to throw at the constabulary.

With the first Moratorium (1970), this decade reached midpoint, before moving into the anti-apartheid campaign of 1971 and the Aboriginal Embassy (founded under a beach umbrella outside Parliament House on 26 January 1972), and on to the optimism of the November 1972 It’s Time election. True to his promise, Gough and his government ended conscription, brought the troops home from Vietnam and replaced the White Australia Policy with something new, called ‘multiculturalism’. All of this was a victory for radicalism.

Our ‘Sixties’ concludes with the Dismissal of the Labor government in 1975, and the return of a Liberal/Country Party Coalition under a wealthy squatter who told the unemployed that ‘Life wasn’t meant to be easy’.

But if that is a rapid recap of some of the political campaigns of the decade, politics alone did not make us radicals. As the various stories related here make clear, every radical brought a personal narrative to the struggle.

CHOOSING PARTICIPANTS FOR A BOOK SUCH AS THIS IS A BIT like inviting people to a party. You need enough diversity to provoke interesting conversations, but you want the guests to have enough in common to avoid too many fights afterwards in the car park. As well, any guest list has constraints of availability and geography.

In this case, the geographical challenge was our own. Coming from Sydney, we knew more people from here, but our ‘guests’ also include people who grew up or came of age in Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra, Rockhampton, Townsville, Nambucca Heads, Hobart and Brungle, in the Snowy Mountains.

While Australian radicalism of the Sixties was a diverse phenomenon, the stories included here give a sense of its range. And these accounts do all fulfil the brief of being about awakenings and conversions. Most of our participants had parents who voted for Menzies – if they didn’t vote for the DLP! There is only one person who was what Americans call ‘a red diaper baby’, and she found her own pathway to a part of the Left that was anathema to her parents.

In this eclectic mix, there is a Maoist, an Anarchist and a Trotskyist, as well as a number of people who (like us) were lower-case socialists, communists and anarchists, or a mix of all three. Others were not aligned with any particular ideology. There are two lesbians and a gay man, and a plethora of feminists. Australia in the Sixties was by and large an Anglo monoculture and this is reflected in the backgrounds of our guests, but there are three people whose families had recently arrived from Europe, and there are three First Australians.

As far as occupations go, there is a folk singer (of course!). There is a union organiser. There is a historian. There is a mathematician. There is an actor. There is a schoolteacher, and a doctor. There are two journalists, and two lawyers. Perhaps more surprisingly, there is a tennis professional. There is also a professional marijuana grower. One person is an avant-garde artist; another is a sculptor of light.

For all of these individuals, the crucial thing that would shape their lives was the spirit of the Sixties.

That spirit was a powerful and heady mix of street marches and sit-ins, of sexual liberation, of music (folk and rock), combined with alcohol and/or drugs (which, in those halcyon days, were mostly fairly gentle). This was reinforced by a particular type of comradeship shaped by the experience of living in crowded share houses together, handing out leaflets together, getting arrested together, boozing together or getting stoned together, and singing Spanish Civil War songs together. Although there were schisms and divisions between followers of different ideologies and factions, we all believed we could change the world.

And it was this same belief that caused the two of us, at the age of seventy-plus, to stand in Town Hall Square on 6 June 2020, in defiance of the premier’s ban on public gatherings and in support of Aboriginal people campaigning against deaths in custody. Under our face masks, we were silently singing ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’.

FINALLY, A PROVISO: THIS BOOK DOES NOT SET OUT TO BE a comprehensive history of the era. Think of it, rather, as a bunch of people talking to the two of us and – through us – to each other, and to you. This conversation is a collective reminiscence composed of individual awakenings that turned twenty people into radicals. While we have done our best to check facts, ultimately the meaning of these ‘aha’ moments is in the eye of the beholder. You may know different versions of some of these stories, but always bear in mind:

If you remember the Sixties, you weren’t there.

MEREDITH BURGMANN

That glorious time to be alive

I was born and bred in the north-western Sydney suburb of Beecroft, which I’ve always described as the second most boring place in Australia. When I was seven, we moved to the next-door suburb of Cheltenham, which is THE MOST boring place in Australia. Happily white, Protestant, middle-class, public-servant families lived in leafy surrounds and world ignorance. Unlike the racy residents of the North Shore, we were too upright and boring to have classy sex scandals, or casual embezzlement incidents. Even our railway connection, the ‘main line’, was considered so unstylish that ‘main line’ residents were to be pitied.

I was the third of four children, which totally suited me. I was ignored my entire childhood, being neither the son, the first daughter, or even the baby. I was left to my own devices and never felt any pressure to be anything. My mother was the daughter of a fierce Country Party misogynist grazier from the Southern Tablelands and my father was the oldest child of the ‘Red Bishop’ of Canberra and Goulburn – Ernest Henry Burgmann – about whom I was to learn a lot in later life. But growing up in Beecroft and Cheltenham, all I knew about him was that he had baptised or confirmed most of my friends – and most of New South Wales, it sometimes seemed.

The reason I didn’t know about my grandfather’s very radical activity was simply because my mother hid it from us, and my father, who was a very reserved person, never thought to talk about it. I’m sure he would never have thought it was in any way an issue, but I think my mother, who at this stage was a card-carrying member of the Liberal Party, would have found it a bit disturbing. She much preferred to think of him as the holy man rather than the political man. For us children, he was the warm, all-embracing grandad who liked to tell us of his years as a bullocky and timbercutter. ‘Always have a sharp axe’ was his astute advice.

However, having a grandfather who was a bishop always made me feel slightly special, which I think I carried with me through most of my childhood.

I grew up with my mother’s conservative politics. Although my father – head of the textiles division, and later chairman, of CSIRO – had been a quiet Labor voter all his life, he never really talked about his political views. On the other hand, my mother, who was very outspoken, convinced me that Sir Robert Menzies was a great man and that Arthur Calwell was a bit … ‘common’ was the word that was used.

It’s important to point out here that both my parents were very committed Christians, and we were brought up believing in Christian concepts of equality and justice. There was no racism, apart from the unthinking 1950s racism of expressions like ‘nigger in the woodpile’. But there was no belief that any person was better than anyone else. And certainly, there was a view that women were equal. In fact, I think my mother always basically believed that women were better. She was determined that my two sisters and I have an education, because her father had pretty well refused to let her have one – even though he had encouraged her brothers, who really weren’t as academically inclined as the girls in the family.

DESPITE HAVING BEEN BROUGHT UP ATTENDING SUNDAY School and church (I came top of Divinity in the Sydney diocese when I was ten), I had never been a very committed Christian. I found it difficult to sit in church and listen to the fire and brimstone sermons of our very low church Anglican minister, with whom my mother had constant disagreements – my parents coming from the more intellectual and progressive high church tradition of Canberra and Goulburn. And although I was very influenced by my Christian upbringing, in that strictures such as ‘do unto others’ and ‘look after those who cannot look after themselves’ were very ingrained in me, I’m not sure I ever really believed. The only time in my life I felt I was having a religious experience was when I was ‘saved’ by evangelist and English cricketer the Reverend David Sheppard, in 1963. I went forward to the altar in St Andrew’s Cathedral in Sydney in an emotional moment, but looking back I have never been quite sure whether it was the fluency of his sermon or his batting strokes that swept me along.

After the local primary school at Beecroft and ‘Opportunity Class’ at West Ryde, I arrived at my secondary school, Abbotsleigh, in second year. I had spent my first year with my parents in England and Europe, where my father was working. At the time, my parents thought I was doing correspondence school work, whereas I was actually roaming the halls of the Imperial War Museum, which was free; or soaking up the Constables and Hogarths in the National Gallery; or watching Alec Guinness and Brian Rix in Drury Lane farces (for the incredibly cheap price of a shilling in the bleachers during the matinee sessions). In short, I had done no school work in the entire year, so was at a bit of a loss when I arrived in high school.

Abbotsleigh was a typical posh Anglican girls’ school on Sydney’s upper North Shore, except for one thing. The headmistress was Betty Archdale, famous as the captain of the English women’s cricket team and purported to be the first woman to hit a century at the Sydney Cricket Ground. Although her cricketing triumphs were always foremost in my mind, more important in terms of our schooling was her mother’s suffragette background and her own reputation as a radical educationist. ‘Archie’ gave us current affairs lessons, lectured us on the importance of self-discipline and refused to call us a ‘ladies’ college’. We were a ‘girls’ school’ and that was that.

During my time there, I also had a history teacher who, looking back, was obviously quite a radical. But regardless of what we were being taught in the classrooms, something else was going on in our heads. We knew we were expected to grow up to be North Shore matrons. We were meant to marry a King’s boy or, second best, a Barker boy, and become a grazier’s wife; or to teach for a while before marrying a North Shore doctor.

I never really fitted that paradigm, because I just didn’t look like a North Shore girl. Not only had I committed the worst social faux pas, which was to live on the ‘main line’, I had bad skin and very, very unruly hair, which I have struggled with all my life. I didn’t understand fashion or style, because my mother had no interest in clothes or fashion at all. I lived almost entirely in the mind, and obsessively played cricket, hockey and tennis without being a proper part of the Abbotsleigh circus. Although I was made Head Girl in my final year (1964), I never really felt that I fitted in.

Long story, but most of the ‘academic’ stream of my year failed both maths exams in the Leaving Certificate. Although I matriculated, I did not get into Sydney University, so I decided to do the Leaving again. As I’d been Head Girl, I couldn’t possibly go back to Abbotsleigh, so I enrolled at Sydney Tech in Ultimo, and that was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.

At tech, I came across good teaching in all my subjects, even maths, in which I got an A (something I still boast about to this day). And this also gave me a year to think about the world. I suppose it was almost like having a gap year, which was not a common thing in those days. During my time at tech, I met friends of my older sister, Bev, who had already arrived at Sydney Uni. My sister’s friends were all from either the SCM – the Student Christian Movement – or from the Newman Society, which was the progressive Catholic organisation at university. I found the guys – and it was mostly guys – from the Newman Society very interesting and compelling characters. This was a weird development. I’d never really known a Catholic until then. I’d certainly never talked to one. I remember coming home from a day with my sister’s friends and saying to my mother, ‘Mum, there are all these Catholics at university’. And she said, ‘Yes, dear, there are lots in the world’.

SO I ARRIVED AS A FIRST-YEAR STUDENT AT SYDNEY University in 1966, still with quite conservative views about party politics, but feeling increasingly concerned about the issue of Vietnam because of my … I would like to say conversations, but really it was me sitting around listening while the Catholic intellectuals from the Newman Society – such as Father Ted Kennedy, Bob Scribner, John Iremonger and Peter Manning – held forth about politics. These children of Rome and a few token Protestants, including my friend David Garrett and my sister Beverley, would sit round campfires late at night either at ‘Scribby’s’ shack at Bundeena or at Father Ted’s lodge on Parramatta Road (yes … yes … we had campfires at the lodge).

Apart from the faux glamour of being with big boys talking about important stuff (Scribby was my first-year history tutor), my growing unease about our presence in Vietnam was both an intellectual concern and an emotional response to the increasingly brutal images on our tiny boxy television screens every night. I was much more concerned about the issue of the war than I ever was about conscription. I was opposed to conscription, but to me the issue seemed to be that we were sending people overseas to kill other people in our name. By the end of 1966, I had decided that the war was wrong. What was probably more devastating at a personal level was that the ongoing revelations of the falsehoods surrounding the Tonkin Gulf incident – the pretext for America’s escalation of the war – had also convinced me that my government was lying to me. They were not telling the truth about Vietnam … so what else were they lying about?

University was a huge liberation for me in many ways. I became involved with the Students’ Representative Council (SRC), standing to be the Arts Women’s Rep in my first year at uni. There, I met Sydney identities Michael Kirby, Richie Walsh, Bob Ellis, Geoff Robertson, Alan Cameron, Jim Spigelman, Percy Allan, Beth Cameron and Dany Torsh – all of whom are still my friends. Of these new friends, Geoff Robertson probably had the greatest influence on me; we became quite close, and he acted almost as the Svengali in many of my escapades at university.

By the time I got to university, whatever religious belief I’d ever held had just slipped away. So what was to take its place? A wonderful teacher at Sydney Tech, Henri Strakosh, had given me the classic English history book The Common People (by GDH Cole and Raymond Postgate) to read. This had a huge effect on me. Reading about the vicissitudes of working-class English people resonated much more deeply with me than any political tome could have. My Anglophile mother and my aversion to reading difficult theory combined to make The Common People my perfect little ‘aha’ moment.

The influence of that book and my strengthening opposition to the Vietnam War led to me waking up one day and deciding I was a socialist. It was as simple as that. It sort of came to me overnight, and I remember going into the SRC offices in the old MacCallum building the next day, meeting Geoff Robertson in the corridor and saying, ‘Geoff, Geoff, I think I’m a socialist’. And he said, ‘Don’t be silly, Meredith. We’re all socialists’.

During this first year at university I got involved in the sit-ins in the Fisher Library protesting about the increase in library fines. Dany Torsh’s then husband, Max Humphreys, had organised the protests, and when Humphreys was expelled for this little example of participatory democracy Geoff Robertson decided to take his case before the Proctorial Board, an ancient and previously unknown appeal tribunal of university grandees. To my astonishment, I was chosen as his witness. Geoff explained to a reasonably anxious fresher – me – that he wanted a really respectable student participant to be the star turn. This was the last time that I was to be described as respectable. Appearing before the Proctorial Board was quite terrifying, but there was also a sense of excitement – and being put through my paces by Geoff was a real thrill. Perhaps it was a portent of things to come, and my endless court cases of the next few years. However, at that stage I had still never taken part in any protest outside the university.

IN 1967, MY SECOND YEAR AT UNI, I STARTED LIVING AT Women’s College. As I had barely scraped through first year, my parents reasoned that this would give me more time to apply myself to my books. I of course reasoned that it would give me more time for my extracurricular activities: I was playing table tennis for the university, I was secretary of SUDS (Sydney University Dramatic Society), and I was still very involved with the SRC – and of course I was having a fantastic social life. I had discovered the Forest Lodge Hotel and the delights of alcohol. I had also discovered how to iron my hair, which improved my social life immeasurably.

Throughout my time at Women’s College, I found myself more and more alienated from the North Shore lifestyle. Although I had never really felt I fitted in, I became even more convinced of this as I saw my college friends demeaned and put upon by the rugger bugger boys from the male colleges. The difference between my male friends on campus – the cheery, whiskery, slightly nerdy boys of the tacky Left – and the boys from the surrounding colleges, was huge. I couldn’t understand how college girls could put up with it.

My only close friend in this environment was Nadia Wheatley. Very late one night when I was sitting in my room, struggling with John Donne and his obsession with roses and death and other stuff, I heard a clump clump clump coming along the corridor. Opening my door, I discovered Nadia – wearing a red flannel nightie and gumboots – on her nightly mission to salvage the last of the toast from the kitchenette in our wing. Once we had introduced ourselves she took pity on my obvious lack of ‘Eng Lit’ aptitude and thus began my regular late-night poetry instruction. This was to last for the two years I was in college and certainly helped me through the torture of English honours. We might have bonded over my problems with the English romantics but our friendship was forged over our protest activity and ensuing arrests. (The only other girl in college who openly opposed the war was an American exchange student, Shelley Hack, who ended up in Hollywood as the fourth Charlie’s Angel – but that’s another story.)

IT WASN’T UNTIL JUNE 1968 THAT I TOOK PART IN MY FIRST demonstration against the war. I’m not sure what led me to actually take to the streets. I suspect that it was just inevitable. The assassinations of Martin Luther King in April of that momentous year and Bobby Kennedy in June had rocked our world. Especially Bobby … He had promised to stop the war, and we believed him. I remember walking back to Women’s College crying after hearing of his death, because now the war would continue and Vietnam would be bombed forever. I think we all believed that the electoral road had been taken away from us by violence, so maybe it was our turn to throw some bombs.

Hey hey LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?

Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, dare to struggle, dare to win!

In one tumultuous fortnight, I took part in a sit-in at the Commonwealth offices in Martin Place; protested against Prime Minister John Gorton, also in Martin Place; celebrated Independence from America Day by occupying Liberal Party Headquarters in Ash Street; and demonstrated outside the Young Liberals Conference at Anzac House.

The demonstration against John Gorton turned out to be my first arrest. We had sat down in Martin Place outside Gorton’s Sydney office, and we decided to stay there until we were all removed. It was mortifying to eventually find on my charge sheet that I was charged with obstructing access to the men’s toilet in Martin Place. We had absolutely no idea that that was where we were sitting. The arrest seemed almost anticlimactic. It wasn’t frightening; it wasn’t even particularly exhilarating. But I had a certain satisfaction that I was doing my bit towards stopping the war. And my major concern was that my knickers didn’t show as I was dragged away.

Another ironic moment, which I didn’t really savour until much later, was that I shared the paddy wagon with John Fisher, the shy, gangly grandson of Andrew Fisher: the Labor prime minister who had dragged us into the First World War, promising Britain our colonial support ‘to the last man and the last shilling’.

Finding myself locked up, I realised for the first time the incredible boredom that hits you when you are held on your own in a room with no reading matter and no one to talk to. This was often my problem, as in many of my arrests I was the only girl detained. I could always hear the male arrestees down the hallway all having wonderful arguments and singsongs. There would be, say, thirty in a cell, whereas I’d be down the other end of the corridor on my own, or perhaps with a nice lady pickpocket or shoplifter. Bliss it was indeed when other girl protesters like Nadia Wheatley and Helen Randerson joined me in those smelly cells.

The media fell upon the image of the fallen North Shore schoolgirl with the clerical pedigree. ‘Bishop’s Granddaughter Rides into Battle’ and other embarrassing headlines became the order of the day.

Exactly a month after my first arrest, one of the more bizarre episodes of my increasingly weird life occurred. The leader of Students for a Democratic Society, Mike Jones, had decided that we should picket the Regent Theatre in George Street because it was showing a ‘shoot ’em up’ pro-Vietnam War movie, The Green Berets, starring John Wayne. Mike was considered to be charismatic and was certainly a powerful orator. I was not entirely sold on his charismatic qualities, but I was continually astounded by his confidence and his absolute certainty about the correctness of all our actions. Self-doubt was not in Mike’s DNA. It was the first time I had ever encountered such certainty, and it was remarkably comforting.

So, a small group of us gathered outside the beautiful old Regent Theatre and started handing out leaflets to the uninterested theatregoers. Suddenly the police appeared and arrested every one of us. Talk about over-reaction! A lovely photo exists of me being gripped in a huge bear hug by Chief Inspector (later Assistant Commissioner) Stackpool of Sydney City Area Command. They had even sent in the heavies.

The explanation for this blanket clean-up was only revealed years later. A fellow student (later a very senior public servant) had rung the local police as a prank and told them that we had planned to rush down the aisle and cut off