I’m doubling up here, but the first story here in particular, from Ceci Cairns (member of Save Our Sons), is just too good not to include. In this excerpt, Ceci remembers some of the things she did while campaigning against the Vietnam War.

Transcript

Ceci: I went to meetings, I did everything. And eventually we were harbouring draft resisters, driving them around, having adventures. You know, it was pretty adventurous and funny. Sort of very funny things happened. Like the day I stole a car. Very funny things. I lived in South Melbourne at the time, and when we drove draft resisters around, we tried to get different cars. Because we knew we were being watched and followed, and everything. And how much we knew, I’m not sure, but we just were very careful. So I used to sometimes borrow my grandmother’s Mercedes Benz, or I’d borrow someone else’s car. 

Anyway, one day, we ran out of cars, and Jeanie said, “Well, look, you’ll find–” gave me a set of keys to a blue Holden, and said, “Look, the car will be parked halfway along your street.” So I walked out of my house, walked halfway along the street, and there was a blue Holden. And it was open. And I thought, oh, that’s a bit peculiar. Anyway, I hopped in, and on the front seat was a packet with fresh, hot chips on it. And I thought, that’s funny. So I ate a chip, and put the key in, drove off. Get to the meeting place, I’ve taken the wrong car. I mean, I’ve stolen a car. So the absolute nightmare was, what if I get caught in a stolen car? [laughing]

Alex: With a draft resister. 

Ceci: Yes! So I thought, I’ve just got to get back to that car park, get rid of this car – so I just drove back. By this time, it was about three quarters of an hour later, because by the time we realised what had happened – and where I was living was opposite the South Melbourne football ground. And it was a football day, so there were no car parks anywhere near where I took the car from. I had to park it again about a mile away. And so that was one of the sort of mad sort of adventures that happened. [laughing] Yeah, it’s very funny. But it’s a sort of – breaking the law on all fronts, it was getting a bit too much. 

Alex: Were you involved in the more mundane things, like handing out pamphlets and those sorts of things?

Ceci: Oh God, yeah, all the time. Yeah. Absolutely. In fact, that’s what it was. And that’s – I mean, for instance, we used to meet on the library steps, outside the Melbourne Library in Swanston Street. And every – I can’t remember if it was every week or every month. A few of us met there with a sign saying Anti-Vietnam War – Stop The Draft, or whatever it was, Join Us. And we met there week after week after week for I don’t know how long. I mean, it seemed like years. And occasionally someone would come up, you know, we’d meet someone. But most of the time, we just did it. I learnt how long it takes to – you know, that movement was a movement that – my God, it didn’t build up to the moratorium quickly. It was that kind of drudgery that we – we just did. That gradually built up to the huge moratoriums.

If you know of a Melbourne woman involved in protesting against the Vietnam War, please leave a comment!

Sue McCulloch was heavily involved in the Draft Resisters Union, becoming the secretary and treasurer, as well as the Congress for International Cooperation and Disarmament (CICD). Here she talks about the siege of the student union building at Melbourne University.

Transcript:

Sue: And I was involved in the siege at Melbourne University. I think it surprised everybody, really, what it turned into. It was – the idea was to – again, to kind of embarrass the law enforcement agencies and the government by bringing attention to the fact that there were people who felt very strongly about conscription and the war. 

And the idea was to hold a kind of public demonstration in which four of the draft resisters would appear, and then be supposedly smuggled out of the building where they were to appear – but, in fact, what happened was that they appeared at the Melbourne University student union, and then it was decided to kind of barricade ourselves in, so that I think they could make media appearances. And there was this huge – it went on for several days, and we basically took over the union. The student union. And by the time the police arrived, in a kind of classic manoeuvre, I suppose, they did a dawn raid. I think, maybe, thinking they could catch people unawares. But by this stage, we’d barricaded ourselves in with chairs that went up and down the – you know, completely blocked the stairway of the several floors, and the draft resisters were not out of the building, they were, in fact, still in the building, hidden behind a very thin partition wall. There was a false wall that was discovered in one of the union rooms upstairs. And they were actually in the building when the police barged in, and eventually got their way up through this maze of chairs and came into the room where they were supposed to be. And there was nobody there. But, in fact, they were only, you know, like, a few centimetres away. And they said, you know, they had to be very careful not to cough, or not to alert anybody to them. And then, eventually, they were sort of smuggled out some time – I think, progressively, sometime after that. 

Alex: You were in the union house for the entire siege?

Sue: Yes, yes. I was. In fact, I was the voice on the radio. There was a radio station called Radio 3DR that was set up, an illegal radio station. Which was itself a rather terrifying thing to do, because that contravened the Broadcasting Act. And that actually had very serious penalties. And just before we were about to go on air, somebody told me what these penalties were, and they were like – I don’t know – ten years’ jail, and a huge fine. And I sort of went on, and I had no idea what to say. So they just went, “Right, you’re live to air now,” and, you know, and I started speaking. And I said something like, “Hello, this is Radio Resistance 3DR, and we’re trying to give power to the people.” And I think I sounded quite terrified, because I was just – I’d just been told of, you know, what we might be facing if we were caught.

If you know of a Melbourne woman involved in protesting against the Vietnam War, please leave a comment!

Judy Maddigan went to Melbourne University and participated in several demonstrations against the Vietnam War. In this excerpt she discusses her motivations for being involved.

Transcript

Judy: I came from a family that wasn’t interested in politics at all – my parents would have voted Liberal all their lives; we used to live out in the seat of Kooyong which of course  was Robert Menzies’ seat – so I wasn’t interested at all in politics. When I went to university I didn’t – wasn’t involved in any political activities except for the Vietnam War. And I think a lot of people were involved in the Vietnam War – apart from the practice of war, we should never been fighting because it had absolutely nothing to do with us – but the system of selecting young men to go and fight, which was in my view it was extremely unfair – and the fact that they couldn’t get enough volunteers, I would have thought would show that most people in Australia think it’s totally inappropriate.

Alex: So if you came from a family that was, I guess, relatively conservative for the time, and so on, what made you I guess, aware of Vietnam? And what made you think that it was a war Australia shouldn’t have been involved in – like was the news, was it friends? 

Judy: I think it was probably more – more being at Melbourne University and all the newsletters came out, and other people talking to us about it. So – and there was huge amount of publicity about in the time, and the guys who refused to put their name in a hat, who got into terrible trouble. I think if I hadn’t been at university, I’m not sure it would have been different or not. But certainly, I think being at university and like, there were discussions about it all the time, people talking about it all the time. But even on the news, like there were so many – continually people disagreeing with us being there. And there’s still people saying you shouldn’t do that; if you want to send people you should have a national service system, so everyone has to go for six months or something. But just – I think the fact that it was so unfair, just, you know, bad luck. And if you think like in the time, so… ’60, bit over ’60, middle ’60 – most of us would be hard pressed to find Vietnam on a map if we’d been asked where it was. And I think the other thing – but I have a bit to do with RSLs – so I have corrected them on some cases, because a lot of those soldiers think that all those marches were against them. So I try and make it clear, it wasn’t about you. It was saying you should never have been sent there in the first place. I’ve never met an ex servicemen who fought in the Vietnam War, who thought was a good idea. And it’s very hard to meet an ex servicemen who thinks any war is a good idea. Which I think is the truth about it. And I think – but some of those people I think were devastated. And I think once again, that’s because the government put – kept putting out media about doing your service for the country and all of the rest of it, which was absolute crap of course, had nothing to do with Australia at all, Vietnam was never going to bomb Australia, and we lost the war anyway. What was the point?

Alex: And do you think at the time you were more concerned with Vietnam or conscription, or were they just so intertwined it’s a pointless question?

Judy: Well, they were very intertwined I suppose. I think it was mainly in Vietnam more because of the unfairness of it, which brought in, you know, the way they were conscripted, which, as I said, I think many people thought it was awful, which – it was awful. And I think – and even I’m thinking when I went to work, you know, people who are sitting there petrified on the day they used to draw the lots – numbers – out of the hat or whatever they did, you know, that one of their family members or their boyfriend or the man next door or something got drafted – so it made, it made the community really anxious and nervous, and that stuff was there till they stopped doing it, which was a great relief to all. 

If you know of a Melbourne woman involved in protesting against the Vietnam War, please leave a comment!

Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo was (as you’ll hear) involved in protests and demonstrations from a very young age, mostly because of her father, Sam Goldbloom. She was heavily involved in organising various actions throughout the era of the Vietnam War. In this short excerpt she talks about her motivation for being opposed to the Vietnam War.

Transcript

Alex: Were things like the Vietnam War and conscription being talked about at home or amongst your family.

Sandra: Mum wasn’t particularly political, but dad was extremely. … There was always, almost always something political would come up at dinner. “See that butter sandwich, the price of that butter is determined by…” and so on. In my teens, I was part of a organisation called the Youth Peace Group, which was kind of a spin off from the Victorian Peace Council, which was the Victorian branch of the Australian Peace Council, which was – basically it was a pro Soviet peace thing, but they did some really good work. And long before moratoriums, like from the early 60s, members of the Victorian peace group were protesting the Vietnam War. Twenty people would show up, you know – “Vietnam? where’s that?” – people didn’t have a clue where it was. …

Alex: Would you have described yourself as a pacifist?

Sandra: No, never. No, I was never a pacifist. I’m still not a pacifist.

Alex: Why would you not see yourself as a pacifist?

Sandra: Well, because I think there are times when people have to fight because you can’t – you can’t just say, listen, America, would you leave here? Listen, you know, China, Russia, whoever you are – I mean, people have to often take up arms or stones or rocks or whatever they – in Middle East, you know, whatever they need to take up – to get rid of what I think of it as oppressors. No, I mean, I’ve never been a pacifist and I’m still not.

Alex: So when it came to thinking about the Vietnam War and Australia’s involvement in Vietnam: you objected to that, obviously. How were you thinking about why Vietnam was a problem as a war?

Sandra:  Australia only went there to – to kiss American arse, just as they went to Afghanistan, and every other war that it’s fought apart from World War Two, in which we were very late to take part. Otherwise, certainly everything postwar that we’ve done, Korea, and so on, so on. It’s all been, you know, as I say, to kiss American arse, and under the misguided belief that if we ever got into any trouble ourselves, then the Americans would come to our aid. And I know full well that the Americans will come to our aid if and only when it suits them politically and financially and diplomatically and every other -ly. … So I never thought that Australia should be engaged. And I certainly didn’t think the Americans should be engaged.

If you know a Melbourne woman who was involved in protesting against the Vietnam War, please leave a comment!

Ceci was probably the youngest member of the Melbourne SOS (Save Our Sons). She was a young mother when she first joined. The Jeanie she mentions in this short excerpt from our interview is Jean McLean.

Transcript

Ceci: I came from a family – my father was a conscientious objector in the Second World War. And my family were Labor Party supporters. My father probably would have been a Communist, except he had differences with the way the Communists were behaving in Europe, and he never joined the Communist Party. 

But he was – he basically believed in, sort of, socialism, and in peace, and he was totally anti-war, obviously. And he was an official conscientious objector. Which meant you were officially in the army. 

And so I come from that sort of background, which I’m still dedicated to, that idea of freedom and peace, and anti-war. I mean, I’m anti the whole idea of armies anyway, I think they should be – I mean, I think the way they’re trained, which is to kill – basically to kill people, they have to be trained to – they have to be brainwashed into thinking the people they kill aren’t actually human beings like them. And so they become monsters without even realising. So perfectly normal people can become terrible people. As we keep finding out about army generals and things, who go wrong. 

And so that’s my position. I very deeply feel all that. So when – I remember when I was at school, and I was about seventeen years old, reading then about – in the early days of Vietnam, when America actually was very influential in the politics of Vietnam, and put – I can’t remember the history of all that … So I was interested from an early age in Vietnam, anyway. To do with being at school, I suppose, and what was interesting in that era was, there was a great deal of information out there about what was going on in the world. I think, despite all our media, and despite our flash, flash, flash of information, we actually – there was a deeper understanding of the politics, if you bothered to read it, at that time. 

And, of course, over the period, sort of, ten years after that, the papers were full of terrible photographs which illustrated what was happening. And I think everyone who became anti that war learnt a lot from those photographs, which I’m sure everyone says. 

So that’s my kind of position. I wasn’t particularly – I mean, I had feminist sensibilities, but I didn’t come at it because I was a feminist. I came at it because I wanted justice for everyone, and justice for the Vietnamese. I wanted justice for the young men who were coerced into being in the army. The cruelty for those young men, putting them in a situation that they had no idea what they were going into, just seemed to me so unjust. 

So that was where I was coming from. So when I realised how much I was – I knew I was on the side of the anti-Vietnam people, and I must have met up with Jeanie somewhere, and said, “Hey, I want to join you.” [laughing] 

If you know a Melbourne woman who was involved in protesting against the Vietnam War, please leave a comment!

Jill Reichstein attended Monash University and was involved in numerous demonstrations against the Vietnam War. This is a short excerpt from our interview, where she talks about her motivation for being involved.

Transcript:

Jill: My journey started when I was doing my matriculation year at a private girls’ school in Melbourne. And both my parents were fairly conservative. And I had a history teacher who – or politics, political science teacher – who was wonderful. And she discussed the Vietnam War. So we’re talking 1967. And I was outraged. And I really started to get involved and have a look at it. I mean, I knew we were involved in it, but I didn’t sort of take a lot of interest

I didn’t think we should be sending our soldiers to fight in a war that had nothing really to do with us. And I think I was slightly anti American. And I didn’t like the idea of following what Americans did. And I just didn’t understand the rationale behind it. I mean, it was a war in a country between the North and the South. Obviously, America was spooked. But I didn’t understand the rationale behind it. So I started writing essays at school against the war. And then the following year, I went and lived in the UK for 12 months. You know, my parents wouldn’t let me travel. But they let me go to a liberal arts college, which sort of – wasn’t a finishing school, because we actually, we actually did politics and history. And there were an amazing range of women – there was 100 women living out in the country near Oxford – so I ended up spending a lot of time with people in Oxford, who were also very politically opposed to the war. And so I’d go down to the demonstrations in London, that’s when I first started to participate in the anti-war demos, concerts, etc. And then when I came back to Melbourne and went to Monash University – hotbed of, you know, political unrest – a lot of my friends, and in fact, my future boyfriend, he was a draft dodger. So there were all all of those issues for me that I faced. So I ended up going to quite a lot of the demonstrations here in Melbourne – quite memorable to think that our streets were just 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of people who were opposed to it; providing safe havens for people who were avoiding it. And so that election night when Labor won was just such a celebration.

Alex: Were you were opposed to conscription early on, or did that develop later?

Jill: No I felt it was challenging somebody’s liberty to tell them they had to go and fight somebody else’s war. And I probably didn’t really understand the political agenda behind it, other than mimicking what America was doing, which I really disliked, and I thought to force someone to fight in something they didn’t believe in was inappropriate. 

If you know a woman who lived in Melbourne at the time and was involved, please leave a comment!

(TL;DR: all March I’m posting excerpts from interviews I’ve conducted.)

For a few years now, I have been interviewing Melbourne women who were involved in protesting against the Vietnam War and the National Service Act.

Let me explain.

• The Vietnam War: Australia sent its first troops into Vietnam in 1962, and officially withdrew in 1973. Different people have different views on why Australia was involved. They tend to revolve around fear of Communism (ie the “domino theory” that said countries were falling to communism, or could do so, in a steady domino-like pattern), following America’s lead, fighting for South Vietnamese independence from an encroaching North, or imperialism. About 60,000 troops were sent in that decade (including my dad); 521 died, and 3,000 were physically wounded (many more later diagnosed with PTS, and other issues probably related to things like Agent Orange, a defoliant used in the war)
  • It’s called the American War in Vietnam.

• The National Service Act: passed in 1964 at the instigation of PM Robert Menzies. Menzies’ argument was about “aggressive Communism” all around Asia. 20 year old men had to register for service, and if their number was called, they were required to serve 24 months with the Army. Initially this was for service at home; six months after the legislation passed, it was expanded to include service overseas, and less than a year later Menzies announced conscripts would be going to Vietnam (including my dad). “Natios” (national servicemen) were chosen twice a year: marbles that represented birthdays were put in lottery barrels, and several would be plucked out. Not registering for the national service was a crime; so was not turning up if your number was called. There was the possibility of registering as a conscientious objector, but it was pretty tough.

• Protest against both Australia’s involvement in Vietnam and to the National Service Act started right at the beginning, all around Australia, but it was definitely fighting against the prevailing attitude for several years. There were existing peace groups that wanted to do things like ‘ban the bomb’ and who had been holding Hiroshima Day marches and peace congresses for years, who moved right on to protesting this new war. And there were new groups that started up, and new people who got involved, because of this specific war and this new legislation. Early on, they were a small group. By May 1970, though, when there were moratorium marches all around the country, it wasn’t so small: estimates of the number of people in Melbourne who participated on 8 May 1970 range from 60-100,000.

• One of the first acts of Gough Whitlam’s new government in November 1972 was the repeal of the National Service Act; he had campaigned partly on that, and on officially withdrawing Australia from the war.

Many general histories of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War give scant room to the opposition. Some of them don’t take it very seriously at all. If it is mentioned, then some of the sensational stories – like the draft resistors who evaded arrest – tend to get most coverage. If women are mentioned, then it’s SOS – Save Our Sons – and in Melbourne, it’s particularly Jean McLean (which honestly I can hardly blame them – check out this recent interview and then this picture from back in the day) who gets star billing. Maybe also ‘the Fairlea Five’: five women (including McLean) who went to prison for eleven days for ‘Wilful Trespass’ – they handed out leaflets about conscientious objection in the Department of Labour and National Service.

All of which is a long way around to saying that I decided someone should fill the gap: all those other women who were involved in protesting against the war and conscription – sometimes fiercely, and for years – and that I guess I could be that person. Happily, it’s not just me: last year, Carolyn Collins’ book about SOS all around Australia was published, and it is fantastic.

Throughout Women’s History Month I’m going to post short excerpts from the interviews I’ve conducted, to give a sense of why women were involved and what sort of things they did.

If you know a woman who lived in Melbourne at the time and was involved, please leave a comment!