Global Thought, Local Action: Australian Activism during the Vietnam War 1961-1972

Abstract

This thesis is a history of protest practice in Australia during the ‘long 1960s’. It begins with the coordinated protests against nuclear proliferation in the eastern states in 1961 and 1962, and ends with the Vietnam Moratorium Campaigns. It examines the intersections between anti-war and anti-conscription protest, the anti-nuclear campaigns of the early 1960s, and the anti-Apartheid protests that emerged during the 1971 South African rugby team tour of Australia. Rather than offering a history of Australian activism as an organisational network or monolithic, homogenous ‘movement,’ it treats protest as an exercise in political meaning-making, and traces the development of protest practice over time. This focus contests the characterisation of the arrival of the New Left in Australia after 1966 as a watershed or moment of rupture, and draws out long-term continuities in Australian activism. It also provides for an analysis of the transnational influences on Australian protesters without falling into the contemporary trap of labelling protest derivative. This methodological approach reveals that Australian protesters in the Vietnam epoch shifted between two major ideological explanations for their protest. One framed protest as a representative activity on behalf of an imagined Australian public, on behalf of whom protesters critiqued government policy and held the government to account. Protest organisations attempted to position themselves as representatives of the public, and used public opinion to legitimate their ideas. By contrast, liberalism’s concentration on individual sovereign rights especially nourished anti-conscription activists, whose protests made much of the principle of non-interference in the private lives of citizens as a foundational model of citizenship. This thesis will chart the development and evolution of these two explanations of protest, their interactions and fusions. Through their careful articulation of protest as a democratic process and an individual right, and their sustained presence in public conversations about commitment and conscription, Australian protesters helped to change the meaning of the Vietnam War in Australian public political life.