High school students
Elisabeth Jackson
I got into a terrible argument with one of the teachers who thought that the war was a good thing; that the communists had to be stopped at any cost. He was from Eastern Europe, I think. And he was staunchly anti communist.
Alexandra Pierce
Something that surprised me when I started seriously looking into this era was the fact that high school students were involved in protesting. As a high school teacher myself, this actually shouldn’t have been surprising, given the number of students who have been involved in my time in protesting particularly around climate change. Nonetheless, it wasn’t something that had particularly occurred to me. But as you’ll hear, the issue of the Vietnam War and of conscription was a live one for at least some female secondary students. This episode features Elisabeth, Julie, Liz, Janet, Vivien, Jill and Fiona. They were born between 1948 and 1954 and were, obviously, at high school during this period.
As you heard at the start from Elisabeth Jackson, some girls found themselves in a school milieu where their opinions were in a minority. On the other hand, some of my interviewees remembered a supportive environment, or at least a tolerant one. Julie Harper, now Julie Stafford, had parents who were members of the Communist Party for some time:
Julie Stafford
“And I can't remember if I initiated it, or the other young person did, but I must have been 12 or 13, when there was a letter in the local paper. I think he initiated it and supported the, our involvement in Vietnam, and I wrote a 12 year old reply, to which he then replied, so we had this two, two fortnights in a row of published letters, which I did keep, and I've got somewhere and I tried to find them very quickly. See what they were like, I'd probably shrivel with embarrassment now, but - but yeah, so even at that age, I certainly was aware… In year - I think it was year 11 or 12. I can't remember. But I took a whole bunch of anti war badges to school and sold them to the year elevens and twelve students and I only recall that clearly because one person quite quite gladly bought it, bought a badge and put it on. And the next day she came back to me and asked if she could have her money back. And if I could take the badge back because her parents had told her they refused to let her wear it. And it's funny because that person became - went to the same uni as me. And we became - I still see her - we became friends. And yeah, we still have a chuckle over that. The fact that she wasn't prepared to stand up for what she believed in because her parents said, no way, give it back, you're not wearing that lefty badge.
Alexandra Pierce
Did the school react in any way to you selling them?
Julie Stafford
No, I think they were used to the Harpers, they sort of knew the Harpers so no, they - I don't recall. I mean, there were, there were good unionist teachers there, and probably a lot of the teachers supported it, I wasn't aware of which ones did. There were some very conservative teachers there.”
Alexandra Pierce
Sometimes, discussion of the Vietnam War was something that the school itself, or individual teachers, were encouraging. In her book about the history of Loreto College, called “A Row of Goodly Pearls,” Jane Carolan recalls discussions about the morality of the war in Vietnam, as well as other contemporary issues like civil rights and scholarships for Aboriginal students. Loreto is a Catholic girls’ school in Melbourne. Another girls’ school, Presbyterian Ladies College or PLC, printed a student poem in their 1971 yearbook called “Forgotten”, which begins “Oh solider / When you went to war / Did they cry?”. It’s an adolescent poem to be sure, and as an English teacher I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the student had studied Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum est” that year. It does tell you though that this sort of thing was seen as acceptable by the school. A few years earlier, in the 1966 PLC yearbook, there’s a note about a talk given by the Victorian president of the RSL, or Returned Servicemen’s League, a Brigadier Hall. While he focussed on the effect of the war on the South Vietnamese and the importance of Australian troops being there, the yearbook notes that, quote, “many girls did not agree with Brigadier Hall, and voiced their opinions during question time”. Liz Porter, who attended Methodist Ladies’ College or MLC, remembers a similar occasion in 1968:
Liz Porter
“And one Friday, the American ambassador came to speak. And I think that was when we were in year 12. Must have been. And I remember getting up and asking the question, something along the lines of "why does the American government feel always compelled to interfere in the political arrangements of other smaller countries? You know, from South America through to right now Vietnam?" And I don't remember his answer. And all I remember - what I do remember is the sense that I had done something terrible. The vibe I got from the teachers later, even though nothing specifically was said, I wasn't really called in and kind of told that I was - I'd been terribly rude. But that was the vibe I got. I remember feeling - because I was only 16. And probably quite a young 16 in a way. The fact I remember it says heaps, I think.”
Alexandra Pierce
In the 1968 edition of the MLC yearbook, which was called Silver and Green, Porter had a piece called “Student Unrest - idealism against ‘the Establishment’“ published, in which she discusses student “genuine disillusionment with society”. She wrote: “Particularly the issue of the Vietnam War has encouraged this student dissatisfaction and feeling of impatience in the face of an unjust war, perpetuated by a corrupt capitalist society, personified in the America of LBJ. Students feel, as, of course, do others that are older, that the war is scandalously unjust and contrary to all humanitarian considerations, and feel further frustrated by not having a vote to do anything about it.”
Porter told me that she had actually forgotten all about writing this piece, and it’s entirely possible of course that it was written as a set exercise rather than being motivated purely from a desire to communicate her feelings. Nonetheless, the fact that a 17 year old had access to these ideas and language does tell you something about their milieu. A couple of years before Porter, Dianne Walker wrote a piece called “Is Conscription to Vietnam Desirable”? which concludes with the statement, “Obviously Australia’s intervention in Vietnam is unjustified and conscripts should not be forced to take part in another country’s struggle for peace”.
Janet McCalman was also a student at MLC and in 1966 she wrote the Debating Notes for the college yearbook, noting both “an increasing concern with politics, in particular the Vietnamese war” and that some students at the school had attended “a talk given by Dr J F Cairns… about the Vietnamese war. This proved to be both stimulating and useful.” She remembers her school experience like this
Alexandra Pierce
Was the Vietnam War a topic that was discussed at school amongst students, or between students and teachers?
Janet McCalman
Yes, a lot. And particularly as my final year was 1966. And that was Dr. Wood's final year as principal. He was a clergyman, so he also took scripture classes. And in year 12, he took the Year 12s, what we called matric in those days, and he devoted really the whole year to talking about politics and Vietnam. And about that the domino theory was nonsense. And - now you need to check this with, even people like Brian Howe - but the, as I understood it, the Methodist Conference had condemned conscription for Vietnam. And I remember that a lot of the teachers signed a petition against conscription for Vietnam. So it was talked about formally in class. And interestingly, we had a lot of Chinese girls from Malaysia. And I mean, at that time, the enemy was seen as China, you know, the 1966 election, in black and white television just had poor little white Australia and this terrible black mass looming over us from the top of the screen. So there was sort of going to be a sort of gravity effect that this would all pour into Australia, which I suppose has always been the fear of the Asian menace. And that this was going to be inevitable, that the - communism was taking over the world. And that's how people were brainwashed. That's the narrative that Australian people had. So to counter that narrative was brave. And, you know, a number of the Chinese girls, I remember saying in one class, you know, that they, the Vietnamese - or, you know, they weren't Vietnamese, they must have been relation Chinese - but the idea that the government of North Vietnam was being run by China was ridiculous, because there was such an historical antipathy towards the Chinese in Vietnam. So, you know, that was a nonsense. So that came out in a class from students. I mean, what their narrative was, was one of national liberation.
Alexandra Pierce
Finally, Viven Santer was also a student at MLC at this time. She contributed an article to the December 1966 edition of Silver and Green, which I asked her to read aloud.
Alexandra Pierce
Other schools and teachers also encouraged students to consider these issues. Matriculation was the name given to the final year of high school.
Jill Reichstein
My journey started when I was doing my matriculation year at a private girls' school in Melbourne. And both my parents were fairly conservative. And I had a history teacher who - or politics, political science teacher - who was wonderful. And she discussed the Vietnam War. So we're talking 1967. And I was outraged. And I really started to get involved and have a look at it.
Alexandra Pierce
Another school with some students involved in protesting was the select entry government school MacRobertson Girls’ High School, familiarly known as MacRob. I have an advantage here in accessing some material, as my mother in law attended MacRob and still had some of her yearbooks, from 1966 through to 1969. I’m really sorry, future historians, but I do not have any of my yearbooks from Nightcliff High School. In 1966, Mollie in Form VI, which is the equivalent of Year 12, had a short, somewhat odd piece - sorry Mollie - called “Mirror on Vietnam.” It speaks of a knight convincing peasants that they have to join him in fighting disease and becoming tall and strong like him. I assume the knight is America and the squire is Australia and the peasants are the South Vietnamese? At the end the knight is covered in, um, “pusy running sores”, which I assume is meant to reflect the Americans not doing well in Vietnam but I’m really not sure. Anyway, the point is that the war is clearly already on the mind of a girl in the final year of high school in 1966. On the same page, Katy - also of Form VI, of Year 12 - reflects on a documentary she watched about “what was really going on”. She doesn’t seem to be completely opposed to the war as a result of the doco, but she mentions that she now knows atrocities are committed by both sides, “not… only by the Viet Cong”, and she also has a greater awareness of the suffering of the Vietnamese people. In 1967, Pam in Form VI has a spiky piece called “Does war serve a useful purpose?” - which does sound like a topic set by an English teacher. She starts with the sentence “ War is one of the safety valves of an exploding population” which is a bit shocking, frankly, and winds its way to eventually conclude with the sentence “War can serve a useful purpose only for those who attain power, yet their very desire for power must eventually cause their own destruction, making an empty mockery of all they thought they had achieved.” So a Year 12 attempt at being shocking and then reversing the argument. Again, though, it shows that the issue of war is on their minds. Finally, in 1968 and 1969 students used poetry to discuss the war. Jill, in form IV in 1968, wrote a short piece called protest, which finishes with the lines “Black faces, / Red faces, / Yellow and white / join in union to fight and protest.” Then the next year Sue used that favourite, the acrostic:
Why condemn
Anarchy and
Rape yet propagate this?
Voids
In
Endless
Time.
Nothing at
All for
Man
The first letter of each line spells “War Vietnam”.
And lastly for MacRob, in an archival box from CICD - the Congress for International Cooperation and Disarmament - there’s a note dated 28 May 1971. It specifies that Lynne Berlin is authorised by the MacRobertson Girls’ High Moratorium Committee to act as the delegate at the May 31st meeting, perhaps in the lead up to the third moratorium in 1971 although that’s unclear. What is clear is that the school had a Moratorium Committee - which may well have started the year before - and that students were actively involved beyond their own school grounds.
Gwen Goedecke
They all - a great number of the students from University High joined one of the great peace marches in Melbourne. So the principal sent letters to us all, us parents, saying that our sons and daughters have been suspended from the school until further notice. So I think it was a week or two, two weeks anyway, and they had to take them back again, didn't last that long. But it showed you the really backward mentality some people in high places - that they would suspend children from school because they took an anti war stance.”
Alexandra Pierce
My thanks to Gwen’s daughter Pauline Jones for providing this audio. I assume that Gwen is referring to the May 1970 moratorium, as it seems clear there were indeed a lot of students involved in that. Their participation was aided by the fact that in 1970, Victoria’s schools were on a three-term system, and the end of term 1 was the 8th of May. Which means that many schools would have finished early that day, which in turn means that it would have been easier for high school students to go to the moratorium. The Age reported in April 1970 that quote, “A stream of anti-vietnam, war literature is going into Victorian secondary schools - seeking student support for the Vietnam moratorium mass march.” (Ian Baker, “Anti-war campaign hits school”, The Age 18 April 1970). That article quotes Vera Boston, an organiser for Students for a Democratic Society, saying that students had a right to hear about the anti-war case.
These interviews don’t, of course, reflect the whole gamut of school students involved in the protests. As is always the case, there will have been plenty of students who were ignorant of what was going on outside of their own social lives, and plenty of students who supported the Australian involvement in the war, just as there was in the broader population. This episode shows, though, that at least some female high school students in Melbourne were engaged in the protest movement.