By Nix Herriot
SOE is republishing the transcript of meeting delivered to the Labour History Society with permission
Presentation for Labour History Society (South Australia)
Sunday 1 December 2024, 2pm
On August 1st, 1974, over a hundred students launched a sit-in of the Flinders University administration building. Adelaide’s Advertiser offered a sensational portrait of the occupied Registry. Journalist Bernard Boucher wrote:
Students had erected a barricade across the entrance road in readiness to repel any unwelcome visitors, particularly the police. Perched like a keep on the top of the hill, [the Registry] was bedecked with defiant banners and slogans … ‘People’s Occupation. Fight Oppression,’ ‘No Cops on Campus’ and ‘Kick the Bosses, Coppers Out.’
Graham Hastings even claims that some radicals, “carried away by the drama … decided to bring guns, ready for a Eureka Stockade-style fight to the death.” In typical Maoist parlance, the building had become a ‘People’s Registry’. “Come and use it,” the students wrote. “Show that a university’s resources are for the people and not the bureaucrats and their bosses!”.
Now, Flinders might have seemed an unlikely breeding ground for student rebels when it first opened in 1966 as South Australia’s second university. But, by the early 1970s, this new suburban institution had become a cauldron of radical ideas. With its radical culture and Maoist style of politics, Flinders was an epicentre of dissent during what historian Arthur Marwick calls the ‘long 1960s’.
The month-long student occupation of the Registry was Australia’s longest university sit-in. It was a climactic confrontation between activists and the university administration. The aim of this paper is to place the occupation into historical perspective. In particular, I want to illustrate how, in the years prior to the occupation, Flinders earned a nationwide reputation for radicalism and ‘trouble making’.
Historical attention to Australian student radicalism remains insubstantial. The limited literature that does exist is heavily concentrated on Australia’s largest cities: Sydney and Melbourne.
In Adelaide, many people of a particular age will know a former Flinders radical or might recall some of the antics which came to define that campus. Yet, although this past exists in local folklore, Flinders remains almost invisible in the written history of student radicalisation. Understanding the journeys taken by its students helps us locate South Australia within the broader narrative of sixties protest.
My research uses oral history to understand how students constructed their radical identities. How they furnished Flinders with a distinct political tempo and the local, national and transnational dimensions of their protest. It uses the testimony of 11 former activists to explain how a particular cohort of students became radicals. Documentary records, student publications and newspapers, help reconstruct this past. But, in many ways, the story is limited if we look only to yellowing leaflets in a library archive. Oral history tells us not just what happened, but why. The more intangible motives and motivations of historical actors.
Enduring myths of the 1960s have flattened political radicalism into a series of aesthetic significations: sex, drugs and rock and roll. Seizures of Youth, Robin Gerster and Jan Bassett’s influential history of the sixties, offers a cynical depiction of Australian student activists. In their view, students were privileged, hedonistic and naive poseurs.
This perspective simply echoes the conservative views of Adelaide’s mainstream press, which dismissed the occupation as a “stupid prank” and “silly student caper”.
According to Gerster and Bassett, Australian students did nothing more than mimic overseas trends. “Almost all” youth dissent, they write, was “based on forms of protest developed in the United States.”
These over-simplistic formulations neglect the much more complex, and indeed interesting, dimensions of student radicalism. For instance, they cannot account for the ways in which global ideas like Maoism resonated strongly within a unique local context.
So, part of my intention is to challenge patronising and dismissive understandings of student activism. Flinders students were motivated by more than just youthful naivety or a desire to imitate overseas protest. They took to the streets in solidarity with struggles in Vietnam and South Africa. Many hoped to make revolution in their own country. And this laid the foundations for battles on campus as activists fought to democratise Flinders University.
Young people could have participated in many activities during the long 1960s. But instead of simply hanging out, smoking dope or chasing romance, many students were attending demonstrations, labouring over a hot gestetner to print radical literature and trying to convince the world that it needed to change. What motivated students to become politically involved? And what was driving radicalism at Flinders?
Flinders was expected to draw its cohort from students dwelling in Adelaide’s southern suburbs. Proximity and convenience were meant to dictate choice. But the experimental culture of this young institution quickly became a magnet for less conventional students who were receptive to radical political and cultural worldviews.
Former student Chris Beasley explained: “Flinders was seen as the new person in town … where interesting ideas and new subjects like sociology … would be taught. I thought, obviously, if I can get into university … I will go to Flinders”.
Other interviewees cast their enrolment as a conscious political choice. As high school friends, Jeff Richards and Steve O’Brien both “wanted to go to Flinders”. “We could have probably easily gone to Adelaide University,” Jeff remembered. “But we wanted to go to Flinders because it already had the reputation for radicalism”.
When they arrived on campus, students sought outlets for their ideas. And this was captured best, I think, in a radical print culture.
In 1969, Martin Fabinyi and Rod Boswell purchased a printing press and installed it in their Parkside sharehouse. “Suddenly the household was an editorial office, a printing factory, and a distribution centre,” Fabinyi recalled. From their back room, Empire Times was born.
The first issue blasted a censorship threat in an irreverent style which would come to define this young newspaper and Flinders more broadly. “The SRC are licking the arses of the Union Board bureaucrats who want to censor Empire Times. We don’t intend to let these bastards wear us down”.
The luxury of owning their own printing press allowed the student editors to foster a polemical and provocative publication which articulated the mood of growing political rebellion. Empire Times saw itself as part of this rebellion, taking sides on controversial issues well ahead of public opinion.
Anni Browning, the first female editor, remembered how “causing a stir was really page one for us.” Empire Times aimed to shock and it often did, enraging conservative sections of society. This included politicians who condemned the paper in state parliament.
A front page from 1969 openly defied the Crimes Act by defacing a commonwealth advertisement and urging 20-year-old men not to register for national service.
Other early editions proudly supported campaigns against racism, against sexism, against militarism and many other issues. Editor Ian Yates aptly described Empire Times as a “weapon to advance causes”.
In 1970, the Australian concluded that Empire Times was “plucky, brash [and] the most lively” of all university papers.
Transnational solidarity as a engine of radicalisation
In particular, Empire Times helped to articulate a globally conscious radicalism among students. In 1968, revolt from Paris to Saigon, from Japan to Czechoslovakia, saw new ideas and reference points enter the student vocabulary. In 1969, the editors offered freshers a “guide to superheroes”, including Eldrige Cleaver, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Che Guevara and other heroes of international revolution.
For many activists, political upheaval abroad suggested that students could act as agents of social change. When we spoke, Andrew remembered how “We’d read about the French student riots in the late ‘60s and found out that they could have overthrown the government if they’d just kept moving forward. That was always at the back of people’s minds, that these things could affect change.”
It was opposition to the Vietnam War that really catalysed student protest in South Australia and stimulated new forms of radical activism. For many young men, the terrifying prospect of conscription was an immediate threat.
In 1969, Flinders student and draft resister Peter Hicks threatened to napalm a dog in protest against Australia’s involvement in Vietnam. Hicks generated front-page news headlines and outrage across Adelaide. His threat, of course, was never carried out. In an interview, Hicks explained that his intention was to highlight the hypocrisy of people “horrified by the thought of napalm being used on a dog” but “prepared to condone the burning of humans in Vietnam”. The stunt typified the highly provocative and bold style of dissent at Flinders.
Flinders students were not only important participants in South Australia’s anti-war movement. They broke from the analysis and strategy of existing peace organisations. Many understood the Vietnam War as a symptom of capitalist imperialism rather than a mistaken or immoral policy to be reformed. The military-industrial complex, they argued, had to be destroyed, both at home and abroad.
Student protests were militant, confrontational and disruptive. The pacifist chant of ‘Peace Now’ was replaced by ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF are gonna win’.
In addition to Vietnam, many students were motivated to act against racism. In our interview, Ian Yates recalled his growing “international awareness” of apartheid in South Africa. South Africa’s all-white rugby team, the Springboks, toured Australia in 1971 and Ian was among the students who protested the match at Norwood Oval. Other interviewees remembered yelling themselves hoarse and bombarding the players with firecrackers. Anni even defied police and ran onto the pitch. Outrage against injustice in Vietnam and South Africa, she said, “encouraged me to actually break the law.”
Articles in the radical press were ecstatic. The Flinders Worker-Student Alliance reported the game like this: “Black Africa won the match at Norwood Oval last night … Our militancy and effectiveness will be a great morale booster to the progressive forces inside South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe. As Mao points out: ‘The joint struggles of the people of all countries support each other’”.
Although highly idealistic, this internationalist perspective demonstrates how Australian radicals saw themselves as part of what historian Simon Prince calls an “imagined community of global revolt”. Although many students saw Adelaide as the ‘backblocks’ of global capitalism, they shared an international language of dissent. Militant identification with overseas struggles offered one powerful motivating frame for students taking to the streets during the early 1970s.
Understanding the Maoists
The political worldview of Flinders student radicals was strongly influenced by Maoism. The Maoist Worker-Student Alliance became a dominant force on campus and played an important role in the 1974 student occupation. A 1972 manifesto in Empire Times announced the Worker-Student Alliance’s radical philosophy: “We are a rapidly growing group of revolutionary workers and students, united in three main principles – opposition to US imperialism, fighting fascism in Australia, and opposition to capitalism.”
There is little evidence to suggest that large numbers of Flinders students were members of the secretive and Melbourne-based Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist). However, Maoist politics, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, had widespread appeal.
Flinders was home to radically-inclined academics like prominent anti-war activist Brian Medlin, as well as young China specialists like Bill Brugger. These academics helped generate an interest and sympathy for Maoist ideas.
With his long, dark hair, NLF badge, beard and moustache, Medlin almost adopted the air of a guerilla leader in the eyes of some former students. Jeff Richards—a member of the rival Trotskyist Socialist Youth Alliance—remembered Medlin as a “Che Guevara-like character” whose mystique contributed to his perception of Flinders as a “great place” to study.
Former Maoist Mark Rohde told me how “studying Chinese politics” at Flinders was profoundly influential on his development as an activist. Differentiation from tepid social democracy and the ‘Old Left’ was another decisive factor. Mark explained that “the reason I went towards the Maoists rather than the Communist Party was because the people in the Communist Party just seemed to me not much different from the Labor Party.”
The appeal of Third World ideas, of Maoism, challenges Gerster and Bassett’s claim that Australian radicals were simply “mesmerised” by American models of rebellion. In fact, for young onlookers in the West, China’s Cultural Revolution seemed to suggest that a supposedly socialist society could combat the kind of dull bureaucracy that afflicted Stalinist Russia.
The People’s Registry and the degree factory
All these global events and ideas set the stage for battles on campus as activists fought to democratise Flinders University. This culminated in the dramatic occupation of the central administration building, the Registry, in August 1974.
The spark for the occupation was a dispute in the History Discipline over assessment and student demands to abolish compulsory examinations. “In retrospect,” Jeff reflected, “having optional History exams seems like a little thing compared to everything else that was going on in the world. But that seemed to catch fire”. So, why were students, only recently radicalised by a war in Southeast Asia, so concerned about something as provincial as university assessment?
To answer this question, it’s worth considering how Flinders activists developed a critique of their own institution and its role in society.
Former activists often remembered their time at university as the best time of their lives. Flinders was undoubtedly an incredibly exciting place to be. University “just lit me up”, Judith Wotherspoon reflected. “Finally, I had a way to find out the things I’d been looking for”.
But nostalgia for the past can obscure the extent to which Flinders was also a site of disillusionment and tension during the early 1970s.
Steve, a participant in the occupation, remembered his first year at Flinders as a rude surprise. “I’d seen my brothers go to university,” Steve explained, “and I had this illusion that it was all hippie-type love and caring and all that sort of thing.” In reality, “Flinders was basically a big, cold, grey concrete structure on the top of a hill”. In our interview, Steve’s metaphor of an inhospitable physical environment drew attention to dissatisfaction with the conditions of university life.
Activists often referred to Flinders as a ‘glorified high school on a hill’. It epitomised the new, mass-production, degree factories of the global 1960s. University was, in their view, little more than “a trade school drawing sharp distinctions between teachers and taught.” Students perceived, within their own institution, a paternalism, an elitism, that they loathed in wider society.
They responded by demanding the democratisation of their university and with radical ideas about education.
When Flinders first opened in 1966, it would have been unheard of for students to be consulted on course content and teaching methods. But, by 1973, some courses had become pedagogically experimental and politically radical. The Philosophy Discipline, where Brian Medlin resided, implemented group assessment and proclaimed itself a “participatory democracy of staff and students.” As they returned to campus from anti-war demos, students clamoured for more socially relevant degrees. In response, Medlin transformed the curriculum by introducing courses such as ‘Marxism Leninism I and II’ and ‘Applied Philosophy: Vietnam, Imperialism and the Nature of Man.’
In 1973, against the objections of some male academics, students and staff pioneered Australia’s first Women’s Studies course. Chris Beasley eagerly remembered how “We were asked to come together in tutorials, which might include people from the community who hadn’t finished high school. The idea was to have a genuinely community-based knowledge grouping, consciousness-raising groupings in a way.”
Similarly, Medlin’s ‘Politics and Art’ course saw students collaborate with workers in artistic projects. Medlin wrote of how: “Some brought into the classroom a whiff of factory grease or the smell of saddle-soap and a demand that even the most complex ideas be expressed intelligibly and without pretension.”
Students actively championed a democratic culture through their own actions. Empire Times rejected the single editor model in favour of collective groups of up to nine students who were responsible for producing the paper. Bruno Yvanovich even recalled how the Flinders reserve-grade football team “decided that we weren’t gonna have a coach” and proclaimed themselves “the People’s Team”. “I think we were hauled before the League at one stage for bringing the game into disrepute,” he said, but “It tells you something about the ethos of the time, that we had this collective leadership model.”
These innovations expressed a growing desire for a radically democratic university which might, in the words of the student occupiers, “serve the needs of ordinary Australian people.”
However, there were still plenty of conservative disciplines at Flinders. The intransigence of some senior academics, including in History, frustrated student activists. And this reached a climax in 1974, with the occupation.
In 1971, the School of Social Sciences had established limited consultative committees, in response to demands for student representation. Yet, as Jeff Richards wrote at the time of the occupation, these structures “remained completely powerless to effect any change. This caused an escalation in the struggle by the students to have their demands satisfied.”
On July 31st, 1974, students approached the head of history, Professor Robin Moore, to voice their opposition to compulsory exams. Judith remembered the encounter: “He was walking down the corridor towards his room … somebody asked him a question, and he turned around and said, ‘You don’t expect me to speak to just a bunch of students, do you?’ I thought, well, this is your employment, I would expect you to speak to a bunch of students! He just went in and locked himself in and that enraged the students of course.”
Regardless of whether this interaction unfolded exactly as Judith remembered, it affirmed the view of student radicals that “condescending and elitist” academics were unsympathetic to their demands. Frustration with this allegedly ‘fruitless discussion” sparked their decision to occupy the Registry.
Whereas consultative committees were seen as a formal method of ‘managing’ dissent, students viewed their sit-in as an instance of direct democracy. Mark’s memories of the occupation affirmed a picture of vibrant political discussion: “The meetings that I attended were very democratic. Everyone had a chance to speak, everyone was respected … There was a lot of discussion, a lot of contention of ideas.” Decisions and demands were debated and voted upon collectively at general occupation meetings, sometimes involving several hundred students. For some participants, this atmosphere of camaraderie was a transformative and empowering experience.
But camaraderie does not always mean equality. Male and female participants in the occupation did not necessarily have the same experience. Judith remembered “constant problems between blokes and women”. “All the domestic work”, she said, “was left to the women.” Judith’s memory of having her “hands in the sink” complicates Mark’s portrait of participatory democracy. Although few male interviewees recalled gendered conflict within the sit-in, women often reflected on what they saw as the masculinism of male radicals, especially the Maoists. As Chris Beasley told me, “The New Left was looking pretty old in lots of ways.”
After the occupation, Sally Trevena and Belinda Porich penned this letter to fellow radicals. “We are prepared to be militant, and revolutionary,” they said, “but not at the dictates of sexist male revolutionaries.”
Experiences of sexism were common in the global student movement throughout the 1960s. Italian historian Luisa Passerini says that sexism often “posited the problem of women’s liberation in a more urgent mode than before.” At Flinders, like elsewhere, feminism began to develop as a more autonomous political force.
The occupation had taught Sally and Belinda that they could not “automatically view the left as our allies … our primary political allegiance is to other women.”
Confronting the liberal-capitalist university
By 1974, student radicals had also developed a critique of the liberal conception of education. In their view, university was not a ‘community of scholars’ committed to the pursuit of knowledge, independent of broader society. On the contrary, universities were institutions of capitalism, churning out obedient graduates to serve the needs of a competitive and individualistic society.
A 1969 cartoon from Empire Times illustrates this critique. It shows a winding procession of smiling graduates, pouring down a hill and surrounded by the corporate logos of Holden, BHP, CSR and Shell. Watching on approvingly are a well-dressed couple and a police officer.
What really gave momentum to this critique was the opening of Vice-Chancellor Roger Russell’s personal papers during the occupation. Judith, again, remembered: “Somebody went up through the ceiling and broke into Roger Russell’s office and they rifled through his files.”
Russell was Australia’s first American-born Vice-Chancellor. And based on evidence from his files, students alleged that Russell had carried out research for the US military, possibly including biological and chemical warfare. If assessment had been the original spark, the ‘Russell files’ were the fire that dramatically broadened the occupation. Graffiti outside the Registry demanded Russell “repudiate or resign”.
Some staff alleged that the occupation was a shadowy Maoist conspiracy to wreck the campus. In this view, Russell’s research was an entirely unrelated or opportunistic issue.
It is possible that student Maoists harboured suspicions about Russell and wanted to make him a target. However, this narrative ignores how student concerns intersected with their radical critique of the university and society more broadly.
As early as 1970, one student broadsheet had implicated universities in a global system of imperialism. It suggested that “degree shops” maintain a society “which needs Vietnams to maintain itself.”
One 1974 publication likened the issue of exams to “the tip of an iceberg”. It goes on to say: “To begin with, most people saw the occupation as a rather simple matter: it was all caused by the arrogance and intransigence of one particular professor. However, we have come to realise … that we have to look at the whole nature of the University, and at the function which those in power wish it to have.”
Flinders, in their view, had become a loyal servant of the military-industrial complex. The portrayal of Russell as an agent of US imperialism was significant because it chimed with growing concern about American influence in Australian society, especially among Maoists. It reinforced the worldview prevalent among many activists at Flinders.
As the then secretary of the student union, Ian Yates, explained to me, “the reason that the Roger Russell issue had a wider appeal was the concern about American imperialism, its behaviour in different countries around the world.”
Indeed, the revelations about Russell could only have had such an explosive effect in the context of the preceding political radicalisation I’ve described.
At Flinders, many students cast their conflict, in suburban Adelaide, as a confrontation with American imperialism and conventional education. Steve O’Brien laughed when he said: “We wanted to be Che Guevaras.” But, as Jeff Richards wrote from the Registry at the time: “the role of the Vice-Chancellor in military research clearly shows that the university is not the ‘liberal’, ‘autonomous’ institution that it is portrayed as.”
Conclusion
August 28th brought a swift and dramatic end to the month-long occupation. Hundreds of staff stormed the Registry, dismantled the barricades and violently evicted the 50 remaining occupiers. Unfortunately, for the radicals, the timing of their occupation overlapped with university holidays. This meant that there were relatively few students around campus to support them.
Graham Hastings concluded that the occupation proved to be the “last hurrah” of the Vietnam generation. The mid-to-late 1970s are generally understood as a time of disillusionment and decline for Australian student radicals.
While the occupation certainly wasn’t the opening act of a new chapter of radicalism, it would be wrong to see it as the end entirely.
On the first day of semester two, Flinders’ largest ever student general meeting endorsed the occupation and demanded a response from Roger Russell. This was followed by protracted battles on campus, as activists continued to resist the administration and draconian disciplinary charges against participants. The occupation inspired a wave of unrest at Macquarie, Monash and ANU.
But perhaps the longer-term impacts were felt most beyond the campus and out of historians’ view. As Jeff put it: “Radicalism hadn’t exhausted itself. It had begun to transform,” spreading further out into the community.
A short march down the hill was the giant Tonsley Park Chrysler factory. There, Maoist radicals from the Worker-Student Alliance threw themselves into rank-and-file agitation. And many other students went on to become trade union members, organisers and militants. Women championed their liberation and feminism became a strong strand of politics, on and off campus.
Contrary to common stereotypes, not all activists cut their hair, abandoned progressive politics and embraced the mainstream. The students I interviewed maintained a pride in their past activism and solidarised with students today facing new challenges like increased tuition fees. Almost all told me that they learnt far more in the streets and the sit-in than the classroom. Many remain socialists and advocates for social justice. Anni put it well when she said: “The things that happened then made me who I am now … There’s no regrets”.
To conclude, far from a simplistic imitation of American protest, or the naive ‘seizures of youth’, student radicalism at Flinders was a dynamic and globally conscious movement. Activists were radicalised through their militant support for international struggles and they came to develop a democratic critique of their own institution which mirrored their view of society more broadly.
50 years on, much more needs to be done to piece together the story of student radicalism, especially its many afterlives and legacies. At a time when universities are occupied not by students but by neoliberal management, and remain in the service of war and militarism, there is much to celebrate in this radical history.
