Monash University students
Jeni Thornley
“I think on campus, what drew me in was Monash was actually really a place of incredible ferment around the war. And they - a whole series of sit-ins began, which is, you know, I forget which hall it was in a really main, like, not just in lecture theatres, but a major hall or theatre. And we'd have visiting speakers. So there was this kind of movement to educate people about the war, which was happening on campus with speakers. And that happened at lunchtime, sit-in meetings. And then out of that grew the movement on campus.
For reasons we don’t have time to go into here, Monash University ended up being the place with probably the most radical student group for this time, called the Monash Labor Club. Now there could be an entire podcast series about the Monash Labor Club and its politics and various significant members. Suffice it to say that by the mid 1960s, it is not affiliated with the Australian Labor Party because they, the Monash Labor Club, had gone far too far left - indeed many of its most prominent members declared themselves communists of one stripe or another. You will hear the names Albert Langer and Michael Hyde a fair bit in this episode, as they were deeply involved in all of the political things happening on campus at this time. If you’re interested, Hyde has two books about the period, although the veracity of his accounts has occasionally been, hmm, questioned.
In this episode, you’ll hear from Jeni, Kerry, Judith, Liz, Helen, Kaye, Andra, Shirley, and Martha. They were born between 1946 and 1950, so they were in their teens and early 20s throughout the Vietnam War period.
I acknowledged in another episode that students who were protesting don’t necessarily reflect the opinions of all students. In the June 25 issue of 1968, the Monash student paper Lot’s Wife published the results of a poll asking students about their attitudes to conscription. Women made up a third of respondents, with their responses being very similar to the those of men. Asked about the national service system, 83% of all respondents said they didn’t support it; and 69% said they supported some form of organised resistance to the present system of conscription. These numbers suggest that a significant proportion of the student population did agree with the attitudes of those protesting.
As you listen, please remember that I am in no way claiming that this episode is a complete record of what went on at Monash during this time, even in protesting the war and conscription. It’s more of an overview or a sample of events and attitudes.
Christine Ross
We held many meetings, we printed off things, newsletters and all that sort of stuff. We held lots of lunchtime meetings at Monash. Yeah, was part of various organising committees.
Alexandra
Did you get involved in any of the speaking - did you get involved in sort of that upfront stuff?
Christine Ross
Not really, I wasn't very confident. And you know, when I look back now, I lacked a lot of knowledge, really. I wasn't - I was always I wasn't a student. I was working at the bookshop and I was always a bit intimidated by those people who I thought were my intellectual superiors. I was basically, you know, a working class girl really. …
Alexandra
Were you involved in those Monash actions in 1968?
Christine Ross
Yes, yes I was. …
But you know, the '68 demonstration, you know, the cops were all over the place. They were just picking up people, you know, right, left and centre. And, you know, they said that I'd sat down in front of a tram and all this crap, you know, which is totally untrue. Didn't think about it - I don't know that I would have - fairly dangerous thing to do to sit down in front of a tram. But I got front page of the Sun, so that wasn't too bad.
Alexandra
Right. How did your family react to you being on the front page of the Sun?
Christine Ross
Well, when I was bailed out, I can remember a friend of my father - and my father was a wharfie - and he walked in and he said, What will your mother say? But I think in a way, they were, they were worried about me because they thought, you know, I might be injured or something. But they didn't know until the next morning until they saw this all over the paper. But I think in a way, they were quite proud that we were standing up for ourselves.”
The 1968 demonstration mentioned by Christine Ross just then was at the American consulate in Melbourne, on July 4th of that year. It wasn’t only Monash students who were present, and it wasn’t organised by Monash students, but a lot of Monash students were involved. Protests had occurred at the consulate in 1967, too, and then again in 1969. The Monash student paper, Lot’s Wife, reported on these events at the consulate. The issue from July 11, 1967, for example includes three photos from the demonstration, which shows several women present. Several of the Monash University women I spoke to were also involved in these July 4th events:
Alexandra
From the outside looking in to Monash at the time, the thing that really stands out is the July the fourth -
Kerry Langer
Oh, yeah -
Alexandra
- protests; you were involved in some of those.
Kerry Langer
Yep.
Alexandra
What was the thinking around that? Was it primarily around that American imperialism kind of idea and making a stand there?
Kerry Langer
Yeah well we pushed the line - most groups, particularly the CPA, they had this view that you shouldn't be too radical, because you'll drive people away, you've got to bring them into the movement, just because they want sort of peace, and they want negotiations and things; if you go out and say, you know, "smash US imperialism" - and you actually say that, it's not - a lot of people thought, well, the war was a sort of mistake, or rather than a, you know, quite deliberate sort of thing, a policy, not just some sort of foolish, not knowing what you were doing. So we talked about imperialism or US imperialism, as we called it, and also victory to the NLF. And a lot of young people took that up just because it was very bad to say that. But, so that's what we were pushing there. And the July Four demonstrations had always been what we would say is piss weak, people'd go along, and they'd sit outside the embassy with candles and they'd do vigils and say they were [unclear] and everything. And we thought, no, we'd make a much bigger - if we're going to get into this and make a much bigger impact. So I think July 4 1968, I remember pretty clearly because we planned it. Which is funny, because we had to deny it in court afterwards. I mean, we didn't exactly plan it, but we, you know, had, we probably - I can't remember exactly what we did. I mean, I know that we went along, we had rocks, and some people had gunpowder in matchboxes, which had been taken out of crackers, which were illegal then, fireworks, and someone possibly had some petrol. I don't know about that, because there was an accusation about it, that someone tried to burn the embassy down. I don't remember that we planned anything like that. But the idea was, we were going to be right at the head of the demonstration, and we were going to really get into it as soon as we got there and coordinate a bit. I can't remember what the coordination was. But so we got there. And the police didn't really expect - they were just used to these more quiet things. And then suddenly rocks are flying. And there's a great sort of melee, people getting arrested. And various people charged with riot afterwards. And that - to me that was, I thought it was exciting, I thought it was fun. Okay? It wasn't just - it was like you're outwitting authorities or something and doing better than they are. And see, a number of people got charged with riot, like Dave Rubin and someone else went and pulled down the American flag from the flagpole. And that was a bit of a big deal. And he was charged with riot - I mean, I actually don't, didn't think - he was a bit of a problem in some ways, I suppose. But - and so it was Albert and a bunch of other people as well. And I remember that I didn't know much about legal matters. But I had heard that you didn't have to answer questions in court. I was really young, mentally anyway - that, you know, like incriminating questions. Someone had said something - but so I got to the court and I wasn't charged with anything, but they called me as a witness for the prosecution just on the spot. And then produced my school bag, which I'd had there for - a University High School school bag, and said it had been found there and it had in it rocks and match boxes full of - at least one - full of gunpowder. And I actually don't remember whether I had that match box or what I had. So they called me to the stand and asked me if it was mine - I started answering the questions you see, at first, and people gave me looks in the court. Like, I had sworn to tell the truth, not on the Bible, but whatever. And then I thought - I remembered, I said, Oh, no, I'm not answering that question because it might incriminate me - because I always thought that was ridiculous. If it's going to incriminate you, you've incriminated yourself anyway. So, because it got to the point of, I was going to have to say all sorts of things I didn't want to say. So that was, that was in the newspapers, I remember. And I must have seemed a bit silly. But then when it actually went to the County Court, and only - at that point was Albert, they dropped the charges against everybody else. And this is the funny thing about the planning. The cops would often be a bit dumb when giving evidence and they had Michael Hyde in the stand as a witness for the prosecution, you know, the prosecution in court - or maybe I don't know who called him. But the policeman was reading out what his evidence against Michael, he was saying that Michael had been calling out "get the eggs, long live Ho Chi Minh," right? And actually he did call that out. But in court - I think Albert cross examined him actually. It just made the cop look really stupid, like, Who would ever be calling out that? I mean, how ridiculous - "get the eggs, long live Ho Chi Minh" - it was exactly what Michael would have done. We must have had eggs that we were gonna throw and he was calling out to someone, you know, "Where are the eggs? Get them." I know, remember these things because they were funny. And it was always - I think we always had the upper hand for several years. That no matter what they did, we found a way around it. And that was the difference I think with our politics in Melbourne in particular, that we sort of kept thinking of ways that we could - for instance, the next year, I think was the next year, we knew they'd be ready for us at the consulate. So we decided instead of doing that we just marched straight past the consulate - no maybe it was the year afterwards. I don't remember. And we went to Honeywell, which was, had some - and attack that - you know, they were totally surprised, because they had the whole - I mean, of course, the whole march didn't know, it was just we would have been in the front. "Come on, keep marching," and the police are just standing there and we just go right past them. Things like that. So I suppose it's a bit like guerrilla warfare or something.
Judith Buckrich
“And then we were also, we went to a demonstration at the old American consulate, which was in St Kilda Road -
Alexandra
This is the July the fourth -
Judith Buckrich
That's right. So that was a big thing. And -
Alexandra
So tell me more about that. Did you see or get involved in any of the violence at that one?
Judith Buckrich
I didn't get involved. But I was very close, I didn't realise how close I was to the front and then when I did realise how close I was to the front, I sort of backed away: I thought, Look, I don't want to get arrested, even though Dad was great and said, Look, if anything happens, you can just ring me. But there was - there was, you know, a lot of violence and the horses always were such a - poor horses, you know, the fact that there were horses were, was really what created a very scary feeling. You know, that you're, you know, there and the horses are there. And somehow, I don't know, it was really interesting, you know, that - you didn't want to hit a horse. But you did want to hit a horse, you know, you kind of - and then yeah, and then the Labor Club had all these, I think they handed out something with phone numbers that you could call. My vague memory of that is that - but yes, that was a very tense, very tense demonstration. Yeah. Yeah.”
Kaye Lovett
Well, there was '68, July the 4th, the attack on the embassy. I wasn't involved with storming the embassy, and I wasn't involved with throwing stones at the embassy. But they were arresting people, right. And I got caught up in the emotion of the moment and tried to tear this person who was being arrested away from the cops. And when I got, you know, grabbed by a police person, policeman, I got another woman arrested, because I called to her to try and help me get away. So yes, we got arrested. And I was taken to the Russell Street watch house, my god talk about 19th century primitive: thrown into this pitch black cell and right, no light, nothing. And and there was some foetid toilet in the quarter and some blankets that I was almost afraid to put on because I'm sure it hadn't been washed in 50 years. Just thrown in. I also remember being fingerprinted, which I thought was fairly outrageous. I didn't know that they fingerprinted you before, you know, you were found guilty sort of thing. You know, I don't know if that was legal or not actually, I never bothered to find out. Oh one of the good things was we could actually call out to each other, you know, so that - that was something so I didn't feel completely isolated. Anyway, a lot of people raised bail, and I don't think I was in there very long. I wasn't in there overnight, would have been only a matter of a couple of hours, I suppose. It's hard to tell when you're in the dark in a nineteenth century condition. And then we came out. I was charged with resisting arrest - that's right. Oh I know the story I was gonna tell you. One of the guys who was arrested who was at the desk said this policeman was boasting about how he arrested this woman and got a nice feel of her big breasts. Anyway, I heard that later, not at the time. So it did come to court. I had a lovely lawyer represent me at no charge. And he advised me to plead guilty. So I did and got off with a good behaviour bond. That was in 1968. “
These women had marched when the American president, Lyndon Johnson was in town in 1966, and in the moratorium in 1970 as well, which you can hear about in the episodes about those events. They also participated in somewhat more mellow demonstrations, as Helen McCulloch and Kaye Lovett recall:
Helen McCulloch
And the council put a ban on us, they wouldn't let us stand on the footpath, and so on. And they wouldn't let us hand out pamphlets. And they wouldn't let us approach people and talk with them. So we worked out a tactic: Saturday morning, we'd all go into the city and stand on the street corners, with a big poster hanging around our necks saying, I'm against the war in Vietnam. I'd like to talk to you if you'd like to talk to me. And people approached us. You know, that's how we did it.”
Kaye Lovett
John Price came up with this really good idea. He suggested that we all wear a badge saying, I'm against the Vietnam War, I'm willing to talk to you if you want to talk to me. And then we'd go into the city square on a Sunday morning, Saturday morning, and talk to anybody who wanted to do, which we did. And, you know, sometimes we were talking to young soldiers, but because we were women, I mean, they were more interested, I think, to see if they could con us off, I don't think anything we said would have made much difference to them. But yes, that was extremely effective.”
In April 1968, the paper Lot’s Wife features an article from Helen Fletcher and John Price discussing this tactic. It notes that the people involved would meet at 10am at the City Square, and then disperse throughout the city in groups of 2 or 3, trying to talk to people. A couple of months later, in June 1968, a letter to Lot’s Wife signed by four people, including one woman - Margaret Indian - affirm that this project definitely has worth. They say that their discussions “stimulate interest with a desire to want to know more,” and that - perhaps unsurprisingly - the most receptive conversations have been had with young people.
Public demonstrations weren’t the only things that were going on, of course. The Labor Club had a newsletter called Print. Judith Buckrich mentions the need to roneo the newsletter; this is like and early version of photocopying but a lot more time-consuming and a lot more physically demanding.
Judith Buckrich
“But it was so exciting. And you know, you arrived at Monash University, and the Labor Club was printing Print every day. So the first thing you did, as you entered the university, was picked up your daily issue of Print. And that was, you know, your day laid out. And I can tell you, because I wrote a history of Grenville Street, which I'm not sure if you've seen, but of course, Print was, you know, the Labor Club's metropolitan office was in Grenville Street in The Bakery. And they roneoed Print every night, down in The Bakery, and then took it over to Monash University. I mean, it was the most extraordinary, you know, when, when you think about what that means - that they were writing, you know, the stuff and then they roneoing - and that was five days a week during every day that the university was open. And everybody picked up their copy of Print before they did anything else, including all the people who didn't agree which there were quite a few of; most of them were in the engineering department, which was so funny that they were - it was so strange. Why were the engineers not against - I don't understand. And of course, there were not many women in the engineering department in those days.”
Kerry Langer
You just sort of went to uni to talk to people and hand out leaflets and go to meetings and write leaflets and -
Alexandra
So you got involved in that aspect?
Kerry Langer
We did all of that, yeah.
Alexandra
The writing for - is it Print already at that stage?
Kerry Langer
We brought Print out daily
Alexandra
Yeah. That's extraordinary. That just must have taken -
Kerry Langer
Print was pretty clever as well, it was humorous.
Alexandra
I've read bits and pieces of them; a lot of them have been digitised.
Kerry Langer
Yeah, some of them were silly. Some of them were quite good. Once it came out seven days a week it - obviously the quality fell but, so there was that - but of course we had to do it on, all on Gestettners, and we'd type it with old typewriters and correcting fluid and that sort of thing.
Alexandra
So you're doing that bit as well?
Kerry Langer
Oh all of it. We did everything. And we got a printing press at one point - that was a nightmare, learning how to use that and I just went off my head I remember, you know, you'd be up all night trying to make it work. It was a frenzy and thing is that times moves more slowly though when you're younger, like I - it was only a few years but it seems like it went on for ages. But I've forgotten a lot of it except that I saw - I haven't seen my ASIO file but I saw Albert's and there's a lot about me in there. That made me remember some things - I thought we were just at one constant meeting?”
Alexandra
And you were involved in writing for Print and doing the the actual distribution and so on, in your time with the Labor Club?
Andra Jackson
Yeah, and having meetings there, having discussions. So it was sort of quite a fertile meeting place for people that had been or were active on campus, but also people from other organisations or outside the university. People who weren't attending the university could meet up to and discuss tactics, strategies, that sort of thing. I must add that within the protest movement, there was a wide range of views so that there were people that were considered pacifist, right through to - at Monash, with the Labor Club, people that had more Maoist leanings, and they were quite, they were often quite dismissive of people that wanted to take more peaceful approach. For example, we had a debate in the Labor Club, which I spoke against, which was to encourage people to join the army to get access to weapons. And there was a motion to endorse that idea, which, if I recall correctly, didn't get through in the end. But that gives you an idea of the extreme views, the range of views, you know, from one extreme to the other. Well I opposed it, because I just thought it was sheer fantasy. Not at all practical. And I, I guess I supported a more middle-ground approach.
Alexandra
When you were writing for Print, were you mostly writing things like, here's why you should support the Labor Club, here's why you should oppose National Service and the war - is it those sorts of, is it that sort of copy that you were writing?
Andra Jackson
I think we were trying to write in a more conversational newsy style. But we were writing about wider campus issues, too. We had a whole worldview - a philosophy about how things could be different.”
Andra Jackson also wrote for Lot’s Wife on occasion. She had a very long piece in a June 1969 edition, called “USA: The villain of the peace” - that’s peace, P E A C E, meaning opposite of war - which begins with the sentence, “The main disruptive force dividing the world today is US imperialism”.
Shirley Winton
We went - we did paste ups in the middle of the night, we used to go to paste ups, and we...
Alexandra
Just on like neighbourhood streets?
Shirley Winton
Yeah, on neighbourhood - and in the city. And this was at the height of where the, the anti Vietnam War protestors, particularly like the Monash Labor Club I suppose - when was raising money for the NLF, so there was really, anyone associated, you know, with even opposition to the Vietnam War was really maligned. I mean, you know, we were just pariahs. And so we went and did quite a lot of paste ups. They were the kind of the, the brave things… I remember handing out leaflets in the city, and just - and we were just, you know, abused, and – oh, yeah, this is before, this is two years before the moratorium, you know, and that just shows how quickly the public opinion can change. And, so we got - we were abused as communists, as traitors, we should be thrown in jail, all those kinds of things. And so I think some of us felt quite, you know, isolated. So there was a tendency to kind of join together. And that's where the women are really - we were having that solidarity, because there was - I remember there were with the, I had a group of about, we had a group of about eight women who were involved in the Monash Labor Club, and then later, even beyond that, who were involved in the anti-Vietnam War activities. And it was the things we did, we did together, because that - there was this - it was bad enough being against the Vietnam War, but being a woman who's being outspoken - and I remember I was waitressing at the time, you know, to make money, to raise money for my uni fees. And I mentioned the war to one of the other people working there and I was - I thought I was going to get the sack. I mean, it was just that, really that bad… So we did a lot of letterboxing. And I think that one of the, some of us in particular were, and women were kind of - I thought the women that I was with anyway, had a – quite a strong view of that we need to get outside that kind of left bloc, you know, that we need to do much more outreach work to connect with, with a broader community and, and so there was a lot of letterboxing. And some of the places, like places that we worked, we worked at, we handed out leaflets and tried to engage in conversation. And I mean, there was some, you know, there were some pretty adventurous things that were done too, but - I don't think I had the full courage to - I did some, but not - I didn't have the full courage.”
That’s Shirley Winton, and I have to disagree with her here because I think the things she was doing did require quite a lot of courage. Meanwhile, there were other things happening at Monash that were less controversial. An Arts student named Kay Minahan, for instance, wrote to the paper Lot’s Wife in September 1967, praising an upcoming campus Teach-In, which is when a bunch of people voluntarily get together to learn about a particular issue, usually something political, and in this instance it would be a Teach-in about the Vietnam War. Later that month, also in Lot’s Wife, Catharine Leitch and V Simmons - which I think is Virginia Simmons, mentioned by several people I spoke to - both wrote letters upholding the idea that protest was a good thing, explicitly arguing against a letter from a previous edition.
One of the things I’ve been interested in, obviously, is not just the actions that women undertook but also how they understood their place in the protests, and the importance of women in the protest movement, and I asked my interviewees directly about that idea. I’ve actually got a whole episode about this issue if you’re interested in how women responded to the question more broadly, but for this episode we’re focusing specifically on how women felt about Monash University and the experience there for female students. Some of these women actually weren’t particularly interested in the question, which is interesting in itself: that is, they didn’t see it as a particularly relevant line of inquiry, because they didn’t see their protest as an issue relevant to them being female. This is Kerry Langer - who was married at one time to one of the most famous student protesters of the period, Albert Langer, although Kerry was involved in the protests before being involved with him. After Kerry, you’ll hear Martha Kinsman:
Alexandra
Did you feel like at Monash there were a lot of women involved?
Kerry Langer
Um, well, quite a few. But I mean, I didn't - in terms of women, I'd have to think about it. I mean, I didn't feel dominated by the men, particularly, I don't think; or not in the sense that they had anything over me just because they were men; didn't seem to be a male thing. But definitely, women were just less comfortable, less confident, just because they were at the time. I don't feel that people jumped on women, because they were women, or particularly put them down because they were women, I mean, maybe I just didn't notice. But I hung around with the men anyway. Or that - sort of more men in the leadership, I guess. And I never really thought about it as that they were men, like, they were people, in that sense, that I knew; maybe some of them were saying sort of sexist things or whatever. It just isn't something that stands out to me.”
Martha Kinsman
In the Communist Party, there's a book by Amira Turner, Ian Turner's wife, called The Hammer, the Sickle, and the Washing Up, which was about how women in the Communist Party were expected to do the washing up and make the tea and make the sandwiches and stuff. I don't recall much of that, in student politics. Certainly, there were a lot more men involved. And certainly in terms of theoretical analysis, I don't remember any women other than Jill Jolliffe, and possibly me, although I can't remember writing anything at the time. But I don't remember any women getting very involved.
On the other hand, some of the women did reflect on how they felt gender had some impact.
Alexandra
When you think about the Monash Labor Club, kind of as as a group, were there - did you feel like there were as many women involved as men or was there are more of a disparity, one way or the other?
Andra Jackson
There was more of disparity, and often some of the females became involved because they were girlfriends. So initially, when the impact of the Women's Lib movement started to seep in, some of the males that had dominated the Labor Club were pretty dismissive of that. And it was, it was younger females, that had just started at uni, that started to speak up and express themselves, but it did take hold.
Alexandra
Do you think your involvement with the Monash Labor Club - and the involvement of obviously lots of other women as well, even if you weren't kind of half of it - was it, not was it, how important was it for you and other women to be there, do you think? What sort of an impact did you have?
Andra Jackson
I think it was very important. And I think that - I mean, I did get up and speak at meetings. And I think that we were listened to, and certainly at demonstrations outside of the campus, I think members of the public, you know, took note that it wasn't just males, it was a combination of males and females that were thinking about these issues and taking a stand and protesting. I do recall on campus though, when we did have one of these mass meetings, Albert - you probably recall Albert Langer - I remember him walking through the crowd. And there were a number of females that were involved, including the woman that became his wife, and a number of other females. And I remember someone from the conservative side of politics, commenting very loudly, There goes Langer and his harem. So that was - that at stage was the attitude to, from outside the Labor Club, to the women that were involved in the Labor Club. But you know, that certainly changed once the influence of the Women's Liberation Movement started to filter through.”
Alexandra
Do you think that it was significant that women were involved?
Liz Aird
Unfortunately, women weren't significant. I mean, you know, like, this was... it's a patriarchal society. And the men were doing it all; the women were there in a - there were a few women who stood up, you know, I can't remember their names. But there were some women who stood out and spoke up, but they were probably considered a bit way out there, you know. Women were definitely there - looking after their men probably. But it was, I mean, it's just a different time. You know, you didn't even think of it like that; it was a man's world. And they were - they were the important ones. And I'm sure that a lot of women could have been getting up and making more noise. But it wasn't really done.
Alexandra
Do you think the protests would have been different if they had just been men present at the Fourth of July, for instance?
Liz Aird
Yeah, well, I think they might have been more violent. Because young men like to bravado and they might have done a bit more of provoking horses, and - I mean they were throwing marbles under the horses anyway. But, yeah.”
Alexandra
How different do you think it would have been at Monash if women hadn't got involved? Would the student movement still have had the, the energy or the ability to do stuff?
Shirley Winton
Oh no, it'd be much more, I reckon it'd be much more marginalised. I think that the contributions that some women made really propelled that - the Monash Labor Club - and I think that some of the courageous that some women took, you know, actually had quite an impact.