By Dave Riley
When I left school at the end of 1966 I had two passions — theatre and politics. But they seemed contrary to one another. While I was able to indulge my dramatic bent at university, my political commitment was much more variable.
Radicalisation only truly visited me during 1969, and then I gave myself up to it with abandon.
As a student at a Catholic school in the '60s, meditating on the spectre of communism was our substitute for social studies. We were taught to be rabidly anticommunist. So, as a youth with a vague interest in the struggle between good and evil, I was recruited during my final school year to an organisation which was then being established by B.A. Santamaria.
With his years in the National Civic Council behind him and his ready access to the Catholic establishment, Santamaria drew together a coalition of right-wing forces to combat the emerging youth radicalisation. With such conservative luminaries as the academic Dr Frank Knopfelmacher, the Zionist demagogue Isi Leibler, the Bulletin poet and journalist Vincent Buckley and the sons of stalwarts of the Democratic Labor Party, Santamaria aimed to organise a viable right wing on the nation's campuses committed to pursuing the war against communism in Vietnam.
Peace With Freedom — as the coalition called itself — organised camps and held its initial meetings at an aptly named Jesuit-run establishment, the Institute of Social Order. The young men (young women being thought not up to the task), recruited from within the Catholic school system, were urged to do their darnedest to combat antiwar sentiment on the campuses they were soon to attend. To shore up the campaign and hone our militancy, we met fortnightly.
It was at the second of these meetings that I was asked to address the topic, "Why we are in Vietnam". Facts always seem to ruin a good story, because in researching the history of the conflict I soon realised that maybe Australia should not be there at all. Nonetheless, I dutifully delivered a formula talk with Santamaria sitting next to me and nodding effusively as I dealt with the rationale of Australia's involvement.
Despite the enthusiasm of our mentor, I never went back, and thereafter adopted, albeit passively, an antiwar stance.
It wasn't the war that then dominated my thinking, but social injustice. I became part of a cross-campus movement which we called Social Involvement. Initially under the auspices of the Brotherhood of St Laurence, students volunteered their labour to off-campus community projects which could utilise their skills. I coordinated student involvement in the nearby mental hospital. We would run discussions and tutor in English. We later established a choir and a weekly coffee shop.
These successes encouraged further experimentation, so by the end of the year I was directing revues and cabarets put on, and mainly written, by the patients themselves. We established quite an enthusiastic theatrical ensemble that then decided to tackle a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, Trial by Jury. By this time I was working in campus theatre with Louis Nowra, who I invited to join the production. He rewrote the script, and we incorporated many new songs that we thought might suit a comic opera now set amongst Chicago gangsters.
It was this incident that Nowra recently reworked into the highly successful play, Cosi, which is currently being turned into a feature film. I mention this because while Cosi concertinas the period into one event coinciding with the first Moratorium, Nowra distorts the political outlook of his characters by trivialising their opposition to the war.
This projection of energy to off-campus activities was a strong and pervasive sentiment. There seemed something indecent about the ivory tower concerns that dominated university life. We denigrated the degrees we were supposedly working towards as "meal tickets" and considered that true meaning could be found in practice only by merging with the rest, particularly the oppressed, of society. With my penchant for extracurricular activities, I readily volunteered to find out.
After a short stint in a Melbourne bank — through whose windows I could watch the student marches against the war that were becoming more frequent — I joined the building industry as a labourer. By this time, I had attended my first of many antiwar demonstrations and had gone AWOL from the Army Reserve (initially joined as a substitute for being conscripted).
Although I had attended one meeting of the local branch of the Young Labor Association, its activities seemed more social than socialist. I started to haunt the left bookshops in town and read periodicals such as Red Mole, Intercontinental Press, and the Communist Party's weekly newspaper, Tribune. After the CPA reaffirmed its opposition to the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, I thought they must now be OK and signed on as a Communist.
My revived enthusiasm for political activism radically changed my theatrical interests. Now greatly influenced by Marxist playwrights such as Bertolt Brecht and Peter Weiss, I tried to envisage a theatre that was relevant to the times. So when I returned to university part time — now even trying to look, with my leather jacket and closely cropped hair, like my hero, Brecht — in 1970 I formed Boxiganga.
Initially Boxiganga was a radical street theatre group that proclaimed itself an exponent of clown power. Our first production was a short agitational antiwar play which we worked up for the May 8 Moratorium. We thereafter toured it to schools by invading them during the lunch break; we also performed at city building sites and would march down the middle of Little Bourke Street in Melbourne to put on impromptu performances in the post office square.
During my year away from campus — La Trobe — there had been a major leftward shift in student consciousness, and I found that it was into politics and radical theatre that I could invest all my energies. The huge success of the May 8 Moratorium had encouraged the campus left and broadened the audience for its revolutionary ideas. We led occupations of the university's careers and appointments office and thereafter the administration building in the week leading up to the July 4 antiwar mobilisations.
By this time my political outlook was being clarified by the experience of working with other groups. While the activism and boldness of the campus left enthralled me, its shallowness and impulsiveness seemed not to address the scale of the problem of which the Vietnam War seemed only a part.
My time in the Communist Party had been instructive, because with the regular run of meetings and selling Tribune I learned a certain discipline that was lacking in the student milieu. However, the membership of the CP seemed positively conservative when compared to the gregariousness of the students. Ultimately the tug of my peers was too much, and I resigned my membership in the Communist Party to become a non-aligned student activist and theatrical entrepreneur.
Without the money to pay my fees, and certainly without the inclination to study, I rejoined the work force as a shipping clerk for ICI. One day during my regular sortie among the Melbourne bookshops I picked up a copy of the new periodical, Direct Action. From the first, DA was clear what it was about — and what it wasn't. It was offering its readership the opportunity to build a new political formation that was neither Stalinist nor dismissive of the traditions of the Marxist movement. I thought: this is the outfit for me, and I joined the Socialist Youth Alliance.
After my time in the Communist Party and among the student left, SYA was a delight. We'd meet, discuss, decide what we were going to do — then do it. Politics were much more focused, and there was a role for everyone who joined. Membership seemed a great discovery because all your activity was harnessed into the one great endeavour.
We grew quickly that year as we garnered a major role for ourselves in the antiwar, feminist and student movements. It was during the height of one of our many campaigns that I was approached to join a discussion group around the journal Socialist Review, which had seen only one edition. I was told that the plan was to form "the nucleus of a future revolutionary party".
Actually, I thought that SYA suited me fine and hadn't considered that anything beyond our youthful exuberant commitment needed to exist. But the notion seemed sound, and we formed the Socialist Workers League (later the Democratic Socialist Party) in January the following year. If we hadn't, where would someone like me be today?
In the meantime, Boxiganga had moved toward more structured performances, mostly indoors. Inevitably, its politics sharpened as it became more Marxist in orientation. As some of its members were drawn more deeply into political activism, and thereafter joined me in the SYA, others decided that counter-cultural and lifestyle endeavours were more worthwhile. With one wing pondering which rainforest mushroom had more magic than a previous one, and the other actively organising against capitalism and war, the group inevitably split and wound itself up with a production based on the independence struggle in Papua New Guinea.
In hindsight, the period of mass mobilisations against the Vietnam War possessed a wonderful logic. Huge social and economic forces were involved in the conflict but once you decided which side you were on — and did something about it — your life changed dramatically. With all the present brouhaha about World War II, it is worth remembering that while the parents of my generation were marched off to war, many of their sons and daughters organised against it. Let's not forget that.
I moved across the full political spectrum within a very short period of time mainly because I wanted to put my energy where my mouth was. Without that willing activism, my experience of the time would have been totally different. And without the continuing legacy of the organisation we formed out of it, I would not still be politically involved nor remain an antiwar activist today.