Introduction
This is being recorded on Wadawaurung country, and I pay my respects to Indigenous elders past, present and emerging. The events discussed here occurred primarily on Wurundjeri land.
In 1968, a young man named Tony obeyed the National Service law and registered for national service as a 20 year old. When his date of birth was selected in the lottery for national service, he undertook his army training with the other men who were selected, and then went with the army to serve for a year in Vietnam. In May 1970, Tony’s father Desmond, who had been a soldier and fought for almost the entirety of World War 2 in almost every theatre of war, marched in the streets in a demonstration against the Vietnam War - while his son Tony was still serving overseas.
Desmond was my grandfather. Tony, my dad.
Growing up, I had some sense of “the Vietnam War” - Dad had served, although he rarely talked about his experience, and Australia sent troops, although nowhere near as many as America. In the movies, the Vietnam veteran was always a broken man, which didn’t match what I saw in my own dad but did occasionally see in men we knew. My dad was very involved in organisations like the RSL, and Legacy, and the Vietnam Veterans’ Association; we always went to ANZAC Day parades.
My dad died when I was 20, and he was just 52. It was a heart attack, and although as a child I hadn’t seen him as terribly affected by his time as a soldier, his death was ultimately attributed to the post traumatic stress he had thanks to his war service.
Several years after his death, when I was teaching a unit on modern history and got to the Cold War, the curriculum materials I had inherited had me teaching the anti-Vietnam War actions in America. I had vaguely heard about some of this, but didn’t know any of the details, so I had to rapidly educate myself. And this got me thinking about whether Australia had experienced anything like those protests. I vaguely knew about some big protests in the capital cities, but nothing more than that. Now keep in mind here that I was at high school in the 1990s. The Vietnam War, which officially ended in 1975, was barely history by then, and we just didn’t learn about it. At uni, I mostly studied ancient and medieval history. For me, Australian history was all way too young. And yes, this was absolutely reflective of a dismissive attitude towards Indigenous history, which I’ve been trying to rectify since I realised it. At any rate, I started casually looking into whether I could replace the American content of my course with Australian content. By some good fortune, my school happened to have a copy of a documentary called Save Our Sons, about a group of remarkable women in Melbourne, who opposed the Vietnam War and National Service, and whose actions even led to some of them going to prison. By even more immense good fortune, I got in touch with one of those women, Jean McLean. She actually came and spoke to my students, some of whom fell in love with her while others wanted to be her. And the more I listened to her, and the more I looked around and at that time couldn’t find anything specific about the involvement of women in the protests, the more sad I became that this was yet another arena where women’s voices had not been recorded in much detail.
Out of that frustration was born this project. Let me say at this point that the focus here is specifically on women who lived in Melbourne. I knew that I needed to limit my research so as not to get overwhelmed, and since I was living in Melbourne at the time it made sense to focus on that one city. If you want a sense of Australian women’s actions more broadly, Carolyn Collins’ 2021 book about Save our Sons is really interesting and well-researched.
Over the last several years, I have interviewed 57 women - and one man, about his mum. I have read student newspapers and ordinary newspapers, I have looked through archive boxes, and I have sent countless emails asking to be directed towards women who might have protested in any way, shape or form. Many people have been generous with their time, responding to my questions and giving suggestions. Of course, the women who have been interviewed have had an enormous impact on the way I think about this era, the way I think about the whole idea of protest, and the debt the 21st century owes to those women and men who on a mass scale - and really for the first time - showed that ordinary Australian people could object to government policy they found abhorrent.
Before I keep going, I want to stress that this is in no way intended as an attack on the Australian soldiers who served in Vietnam - neither the regular army nor the national servicemen. I’m not saying anything against the thousands of young men who did register for national service. A lot of work has been done in the last few decades about the experience of Australian soldiers in Vietnam, and that’s a really worthwhile and important aspect of historical inquiry. Too often Vietnam veterans were treated poorly, especially in the first decade or two after the war, and that is not something I condone. However, I don’t think it’s a case of either sympathy and compassion for soldiers OR examining the protests against the war they were serving in. To suggest that the two are mutually exclusive is reductive and just plain unhelpful. Both things definitely happened, and I think both things need to be understood. Ordinary soldiers need to be heard - and the voices of protesters also need to be heard. I should also note that I’m not necessarily condoning everything you will hear discussed on this podcast. I can’t know for sure whether I would have objected to the Vietnam War and national service. I like to think I would have, but actually most people in Australia supported the government’s decisions, and I can’t claim that I never follow social expectations. Please keep this in mind as you listen to the podcast.
Let me now provide some context for the issues being discussed in this podcast series. In individual episodes I’ll explain relevant dates and so on, but this is to give you a general understanding of what was happening. A lot of these statistics and dates are from the Australian War Memorial website.
Firstly, one significant issue we’re going to talk about a lot in this series is opposition to National Service, which is also often referred to as conscription. It has a contentious history in Australia. Before World War 1, there was compulsory military training for males between 12 and 26 years old, but that didn’t include service overseas. In World War 1, the government tried to introduce overseas service, but plebiscites held in 1916 and 1917 saw the Australian population reject the idea of conscription - making us the only English-speaking country to not have conscription for fighting in World War One. The compulsory training was ended in 1929 but then ten years later, at the start of World War 2, such training was reintroduced but only for service within Australia. In 1943, the federal government passed a law that expanded the definition of Australia to include New Guinea, which was then under Australian mandate - so men could be sent there as part of that compulsory military service. Functionally, this was conscription for overseas fighting. Compulsory training was discontinued briefly after World War Two, then revived again in 1951 and discontinued again in 1959. Coming to the time that we’re interested in, in 1964 the Prime Minister of Australia was the Liberal Sir Robert Menzies. His government introduced National Service that year, for the fourth time in Australia’s history - and again, at this point it was just for training within Australia. However, in 1965 the government changed the law such that national servicemen, or nashos, could be sent overseas - which meant going to Vietnam.
The National Service Act meant that every 20 year old Australian man was legally required to register for national service. It needs to be pointed out that this is actually a year younger than the legal voting age, which was 21, and this aspect was one of the problems raised by anti-conscription folk. Another problem was that, as I mentioned with my dad, birth dates were chosen as marbles from a lottery barrel, a few times a year, so it was completely random. The idea that conscription would apply only to a few unlucky men based on birth date was contentious. You could get a deferment or exemption on a few grounds, and theoretically it was possible to be classed as a conscientious objector but anecdotally that was very difficult. In the end, over 15,000 national servicemen served in the Vietnam War, 200 being killed and 1,279 wounded. National Service was abolished by the new Labor government under Gough Whitlam in December 1972.
Secondly, as well as opposition to conscription we’ll be talking about opposition to the Vietnam War itself. Now, the explanation for exactly why the war happened and what Australia was doing there has a long, much-discussed and somewhat contentious history. Vietnam had been a French colony, until the Vietnamese eventually kicked them out in 1954 after some significant fighting. The country was divided in two for what was meant to be a short period of time before elections to reunite. A nationalist, communist party took control of the north, under Ho Chi Minh, and the south was capitalist and theoretically more democratic and aligned with the US. In 1965, the US and then Australia got involved in support of South Vietnam, to fight against what were seen as communist insurgents from North Vietnam - and also communist sympathisers living in the south. Australia started winding back its involvement in late 1970, with many troops being withdrawn in 1971 under the Liberal government of John Gorton. Australian combat troops were completely out of Vietnam by December 1972, and Australia was officially out of combat in January 1973. During Australia’s involvement, 60,000 Australians served in the war, with 521 being killed and over 3000 wounded.
On a more local level, you also need to be familiar with a fascinating little piece of legislation called by-law 418. One of the key actions taken by protesters to raise awareness of their cause was handing out leaflets on the streets. By-law 418, though, was a Melbourne City Council statute that prohibited the distribution of leaflets without a permit. Now prior to the mid 1960s this by-law was basically being ignored, since leaflets were regularly distributed by shops and so on with no consequences. However, when people started distributing political pamphlets, it seemed like the council suddenly remembered their by-law, with many arrested and given fines for their actions. For their part, protestors argued that their right to freedom of speech was being impinged. Plus, it seemed that the council was in some way doing the federal government’s work, since if the leaflets urged young men not to register for National Service, the distributors were actually breaking a federal law, but they often only got the council repercussions. This by-law was eventually repealed in April 1969, an event that was absolutely a result of the anti war and anti conscription protests on Melbourne streets.
Finally, I should give some context for the nature of protest in Australia at this time. There had been lots of protests in Australia before the 1960s, of course, and they had taken lots of different forms. But the May 1970 moratorium in Melbourne was the biggest single public protest Australia had seen up to that point. The people who were involved in most of these protests had very little experience of being out on the streets in any sort of numbers. While the Moratorium had marshals, as far as I can tell none of the other demonstrations had such infrastructure around them. From perhaps the other side, the police didn’t have much experience with things like this either. I don’t want to get into a discussion of the history and nature of police violence, because that’s a completely different and important topic. But in terms of generally white people, working and middle class and men and women together, marching in urban and suburban streets, police violence or even intimidation wasn’t much in evidence in Australia at this time. You’ll hear some mention of violence in the episodes about Monash and La Trobe Universities, and they’re noticeable at those events because it was out of the ordinary. One other thing that a number of the women mention is that they have ASIO files, or that they think they were followed or had their phones tapped. ASIO is the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and I guess it can be regarded as like the Australian FBI. The women who came from background of Communist parents seemed to expect this sort of surveillance, while for others it might have been a surprise but basically became just one of those things that they had to live with if they were involved in protesting for any length of time.
So that’s the context of what’s to come over the next 15 episodes. The episodes will be thematic, rather than chronological, which means that you can basically listen to them in any order. Melbourne, Monash and la Trobe University each have their own episode, there’s an episode on how artistic women responded, and of course one about Save Our Sons. There’s one episode on the motivations of women for being involved, because they’re so varied, and the May 1970 moratorium gets its own episode too. I should note that pretty much every woman I interviewed is white. Australia in the 1960s is an Australia still functionally under the white Australia policy, so migration was largely white; and while Indigenous Australian women may well have objected to national service and the war in Vietnam, I have found no specific mention of their involvement in Melbourne activities. I should also note that I do not pretend that this is an exhaustive history of protest, even protest by women, in Melbourne. A few significant women died before I had the chance to speak to them, and of course there were many thousands of women at the 1970 moratorium - let alone those who wrote letters or housed draft resisters or spoke against the war at home or with friends. I’m also, of course, not actually the first person to examine the involvement of Australian women in the protest movement, as I have discovered over the last few years. This is AN history of the period, and there is room for more to be done.
Every episode of the podcast has a bibliography on the website. I won’t always say the full name of every speaker, but it will be noted on the website. The site also has some photos relevant to this period, links to other websites with useful information, and a few other bits and pieces that you might find interesting if like me you end up down this rabbit hole. I should also note I’ve edited the interviews for use in this podcast, both for clarity and to focus on relevant information.
I hope you’ll enjoy this exploration of an exciting and sometimes astonishing period in Australian history.