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!