Monash University students: Aid to the NLF
Kaye Lovett
Anyway, what galvanised myself, I suppose and, and the whole of Monash University, was already medical aid was being sent to the NLF. And that hadn't really caused any rumpus. I think that had been done by Melbourne Uni initially. And then it was suggested that we should send nonspecific aid.
Alexandra
I’ve given the three main universities in Melbourne in the 1960s an episode, focusing on the actions of their female students. You can find them all on the website, and in your feed. This is an additional episode about Monash University because of one particular event in the history of the Monash Labor Club, and that is the collection of funds to send to the National Liberation Front, also known as the NLF. The NLF was the group sometimes called the Viet Cong. It was a South Vietnamese communist organisation, and their actions were aimed at overthrowing the existing South Vietnamese government - that is, the government that the United States and Australia were supporting - and reuniting the South with the North. In this way the NLF can be seen as a nationalist organisation. Exactly how they were portrayed by the media back then, and are portrayed by historians today, often comes down to the author’s political perspective. Nevertheless, the point is that Australian troops were fighting against the NLF. And as I said at the start, some students at Monash University were involved in collecting money to send to the NLF. It would be worth listening to the other Monash episode before listening to this one, if you haven’t already, because it provides context for what was happening at Monash along side the events mentioned here. And the women you’ll hear from here - Kaye, Helen, Martha, and Christine - all feature in that episode too.
According to the timeline developed by Ken Mansell, who was himself a Monash student from this time (https://labourhistorymelbourne.org/taking-to-the-streets-against-the-vietnam-war-a-timeline-history-of-australian-protest-1962-1972-introduction/taking-to-the-streets-against-the-vietnam-war-a-timeline-history-of-australian-protest-1962-1972-1967/), the Monash Uni decision to start raising funds takes place in July 1967. You can find that timeline on the Labour History in Melbourne website, and I’ve got a link on my website. Monash is not the only university whose students collect funds for medical aid to the NLF, with Labor Clubs at Melbourne Uni, Sydney Uni and the Australian National University all doing it as well. In Melbourne, though, the Monash Uni students seem to have been the most obvious about it, and also seem to have got the most attention. I suspect this is partly because the university’s vice chancellor actually declares the collecting of money on campus as illegal, which got a lot of backlash from students at the time. As well as this university ban, the federal government also took notice, and passed the Defence Forces Protection Bill in August 1967, which made it illegal to send aid to North Vietnam or the NLF. The Red Cross and other I guess offical bodies were exempted, but sending money via anyone else risked a $2000 fine or two years in jail. As far as I can tell, no one was charged under this law.
Before I go on, there are two possibly confusing things that come up in this episode, so let me attempt to clarify them. Firstly, you’ll hear that there are different recollections about exactly who had the idea of collecting and sending money, and the truth about that is, as far as I can tell, lost irretrievably to the mists of time. But the fact that it happened is in no dispute. Secondly, sometimes, as in the first excerpt you’re about to hear, people talk about sending money to the North Vietnamese. Now as far as I can tell this did also happen, but was a separate issue from the campaign to send aid to the NLF. So whether these things have become inseparable in people’s memories, or whether they were basically inseparable at the time, I’m actually not sure, so apologies in advance if that gets confusing - I guess at this distance, the reality is that with both the National Liberation Front, and North Vietnam, they were communist groups and being fought against by Australian troops, so at this distance in time the difference may be hazy. Secondly, in this first excerpt you’re about to hear, Helen mentions Albert Langer, and Langer-ite tactics; Langer was a very prominent student activist at the time, who identified as a Maoist, that is the version of communism as modified by the Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong. In the second excerpt, Martha mentions Dave Nadel, John Price, and Peter Price, who were also Monash Uni radicals.
Helen McCulloch
we went to the conference of the student Labor Clubs. The conference in Sydney, would have been in '66, I think. The Sydney University Labor Club had started up a fund, a sort of a fundraising thing, to send some money to the North Vietnamese, for hospitals and medical equipment and so on. And I said that's a very good idea, we ought to do the same. And we debated it in the Labor Club and so on. So the Maoists with the usually Langer-ite tactic got up and push it a bit further left and said, No, we should send them unspecified aid so that they can spend it on whatever they want. So - you've heard of all this?
Alexandra
I've heard a little bit of this. Yeah, I'm fascinated by the progression.
Helen McCulloch
Oh, yes, it's definite progression. I mean, I learned a lot from Albert Langer. And one is that you put up something that other people regard as so outlandishly left wing that they'll vote for the next one down, which is the one that you want to get done anyway.
Alexandra
Would - did you support the idea of sending unspecified aid?
Helen McCulloch
In general? Yes, I did. So we ran two funds.
Alexandra
A medical one and a non specified one.
Helen McCulloch
Yes. And we kept them separate from the Labor Club's financial movements and dealt with them entirely separately.
Alexandra
I know that some politicians tried to make that basically a treasonous action.
Helen McCulloch
I know.
Alexandra
So I guess my my question to you - and with zero judgment or anything - but why? Why support combatants with money when they were fighting against Australians? What was the - what was your purpose?
Helen McCulloch
The Australians ought not to have been there. That's the basic reason. The more you looked into what was going on in Vietnam, the more you could see that the Vietcong indeed had a case, a major overwhelming case, and that they ought to be supported. So that was the thing. At this point, it wasn't pacifism, it was supporting one side against another.
Martha Kinsman
Dave Nadel was president from 1966 to 1967. And - but there was an ASLF ... there were two - ASLF was the Australian Student Labor Federation, Australia wide. There was - and they used to meet, I think in the May holidays, from memory, because I can't remember ever going to one in summer. There was one in 1966. And then there was one in May 1967. And that's where the idea first came up - and it was in Sydney from recollection; it must have been in Sydney because I wouldn't have gone otherwise. I certainly didn't have the money. It was always in Melbourne or Sydney, I think; sometimes it was in Brisbane. That's where, and I can't remember whether it was formally raised, but that's certainly where the first discussions came up about, not just protesting the Vietnam War, but in fact, not necessarily supporting the NLF, but recognising that right was on their side, that it was their war, not ours. I'm sure Dave Nadel went to that ASLF one. And I'm sure because he's been involved in Victorian politics all his life, that he will remember that better than I do. So that, when I came back from that - must have been about June, there's a huge amount of press about it, in the Victorian press, in particular. That meeting of the Labor Club, which I went to just as an ordinary person, you know, member, there was - somebody moved a motion about protesting against the Vietnam War, or, you know, confirming our opposition to the Vietnam War. And I got up and said, That's not good enough, what we should be doing is actively supporting the NLF. And I don't think anything happened at that stage. It wasn't accepted as a motion or anything. But after that meeting, Peter Price came and talked to me and said he and John Price, his older brother, had been thinking along the same lines and they from recollection had been influenced by - they certainly weren't Maoists - they had been influenced by Bertrand Russell. So I went and had a look at Bertrand Russell and found that, you know, this great philosopher was also saying something similar. So then there were a number of meetings about getting this motion together. And I can't remember whether I moved it and Price seconded it, or Price moved it and I seconded it, anyway it was the two of us together, and it got through. And immediately, the Maoists sort of got interested in us, you know, they couldn't allow this to happen. I think - there were a number of meetings and sort of committees and groups of people, and Albert was certainly involved in it as was Nadel. I don't recall, however, that the other famous Maoist, Mike Hyde, was at that stage involved. I don't think so. And then we moved this motion. …
Alexandra
Can you expand on that a little bit more as to why you thought that was important or necessary as a step for Australian students?
Martha Kinsman
Well, there was an intellectual component that - I'm really, thinking back, it seemed to me, I said it before, self-evident that you - if you were really engaged in an issue, that was a military issue, you took sides. It might have been something to do with my father in Spain or something, but I don't think so. Certainly, when those young men pointed me to Bertrand Russell, and I realised that it wasn't a particularly radical thing anyway - it was also a personality thing. I was very impatient with everybody faffing around with you know, "we oppose the war". And it was thirdly that while that kind of position wouldn't have worked in the Australian community at large, then if you adopt the thing of trying to push people to the left, it had a chance of working among students, particularly because of conscription was by then a very, very serious issue for young men, including students. So there was an intellectual, there was a political reason, there was an emotional thing and I was a fairly impatient person. It was almost a sort of, let's cut the crap stuff position. You know, it didn't surprise me. I mean, I had been thinking about it since that Sydney conference, which might have been as early as 1966 or early in 1967 - I can’t remember.”
An article in The Age on July 28th, 1967, noted that Martha Campbell, whom you just heard, had been interviewed for half an hour by plainclothes police the day before, about the issue of raising funds to the send to the NLF. The edition of the Monash student paper Lot’s Wife which came out on 8 August 1967 featured a long article called “On National Liberation” written by Martha Campbell. In it she presents an overview of the recent history of Vietnam as part of an argument about why the National Liberation Front is having success. She dismisses the suggestion that the NLF is gaining increased support because of the use of terror, and argues that quote “To support the NLF in the present context, while half a million foreign troops are denying the Vietnamese this freedom, is not to imply that the NLF is always right. It is to state in no uncertain terms that self-determination and independence is the right of every nation, and that the NLF is the only effective force fighting for this cause in South Vietnam.”
If you’re interested in seeing what students at the time published about this issue, there’s a remarkable booklet called Which Way Treason? published on 28 August 1967, by the Committee for Aid to the National Liberation Front. You can access it from the Reason in Revolt website, which I’ll link to it on the website (https://www.reasoninrevolt.net.au/objects/pdf/d0643.pdf) - plus there’s an image of the front page of this booklet on my website, women conscription war dot com, courtesy of Ken Mansell.
Unsurprisingly, the campaign to send aid to the NLF did get a lot of publicity. It was significant enough to feature in the Gallup poll in September 1967, when one of the questions was “Do you think people here should - or should not - be allowed to send money to the Viet Cong - other than through the Red Cross?” 90.2% of people said that it should not be allowed. There are reports that students who spoke in favour of these actions on campus sometimes got heckled, or even had flour bombs thrown at them. It’s unclear exactly how much money in total was sent to the NLF for either medical or unspecified aid.
Kaye Lovett
Anyway, what galvanised myself, I suppose and, and the whole of Monash University, was already medical aid was being sent to the NLF. And that hadn't really caused any rumpus. I think that had been done by Melbourne Uni initially. And then it was suggested that we should send nonspecific aid. Now this idea came up, I think, from Albert Langer. And it was a political gesture that he knew would cause a reaction. People at that time, were very angry about what was happening to the Vietnamese people, you know, in terms of the use of napalm and defoliants, and also, we did not believe in the domino theory that they used to justify the war, appealing to people's, the older generation's memory of the fear of the Japanese, you know, that they deliberately invoked that, I think. So, there was a strong belief that, you know, a lot of lies being told, and that allied to the fact that people were dying, Vietnamese people and Australian soldiers. There wasn't hostility to Australian soldiers. It was felt that they were victims. A lot of people initially got involved in this aid to the NLF. Now I wasn't initially involved and there were these huge discussions all over Monash, you know, in the cafe and everything where people argued back and forth, and there were meetings and everything, it was a really political galvanisation process I guess. I remember Max Teichmann, who was politics lecturer, he was a nice man. He was against the war - he spoke at a meeting and said that he could not support non-specified aid to the NLF, because, you know, he'd fought in the Second World War and, and he thought this was a terrible betrayal of our soldiers, you know? He had a point. But people were very international, more, in their outlook rather than national, at that time, and idealistic in an international way.
Alexandra
Were you starting to think like that?
Kaye Lovett
Yes, I became convinced by the discussions. …
and, of course, it got incredible publicity, you know, negative of course, but - but for people who were perhaps, hadn't thought about the war, it made them think about the war. And some people would be more inclined to identify with the young anyway, I think, you know? It was the beginnings of a youth revolution, you know, Mary Quant, miniskirts, all that sort of thing, and the music and everything. So, anyway, they passed the act in parliament. Albert came up with the idea that - he canvased to see who was prepared to defy the act. And I was one of the people who was prepared to defy the act. Because I'd been convinced by this time of the rightness of the cause.
Alexandra
It seems like a very big step to go - to being willing to defy a federal - a piece of federal government legislation.
Kaye Lovett
Yes, I know. I know. When I look at it now I think 'bloody hell!' But we really, you know, really, really, we were consumed, I think, by our opposition to the war, you know. I remember friends, you know, at uni, who were, you know, not intimate friends, but friends, you know, who were against the war trying to talk me out of it. And, you know, saying, you know, you've no idea what prison would be like, which of course they were right. And I remember hitchhiking home from Monash, because it was the most dreadful place to try to get to from public transport. And picking up with friends. And I had tears running down my face, you know, because of the emotion of everything. … Anyway, as I said, the government were very smart, because they ignored it. They didn't want any more publicity, and they didn't want to throw young people in jail and make them martyrs. Yeah. So that was that.
Alexandra
So with the aid to the NLF - did that mean that you were going to - you personally sent money or you were fundraising?
Kaye Lovett
We were fundraising. I think - we I think we did contribute some money. I can't remember - it might have been something like $8. We didn't have much money. I mean, I was there on the studentship.
Alexandra
What led you to be one of the people who was sort of the face of the collecting money for the NLF - what inspired that?
Christine Ross
I guess, we were a small group of close people who sort of all loved each other and cared about each other's opinions and stuff. And I suppose we just decided, you know, who would put their name to these donations? Because, you know, there was lots of discussion at the time about whether we should collect just medical aid, and then the more radical said, you know, no, we don't want to - we really want to support the fighting as well. And, of course, that turned a lot of the public against us because we were supposedly giving money that might fire bullets that would kill our boys that were over there, that sort of stuff - there was a lot of that sentiment. But you know, I just thought it was the right thing to do. Once again, it was one of those things where you just say, Well, I guess you put your money where your mouth is.