a multicultural History of Australia
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Period: White Australia »
Commentary on: Emerging social movements »
Prof Andrew Jakubowicz.
Text Commentary
It's time for a new Australia...
Late 1960s - Social ferment as many people question past assumptions and policies
In the late 1960s, Australia was experiencing a period of ferment - such as that shown here in an anti-conscription and anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Sydney.
People were becoming much more willing to disagree with government, to voice attitudes that would have been suppressed a few years earlier. The second wave of feminism provided an impetus to the revival of the women's movement; Indigenous people were arguing for rights denied them for nearly two centuries; homosexual activists began to lay claims to freedom of belief and behaviour.
The millions of immigrants who had arrived in the previous twenty years had contributed many new perspectives to the social mix, and yet were increasingly uncomfortable with the somewhat limited opportunities that were available to them. The economic recession of the early 1960s had challenged the perception of Australia as a place of limitless good fortune, while the Europe they had left was improving economically. Indigenous groups were pushing forward agendas for political and cultural recognition, while many women were no longer prepared to accept the traditional roles and limited possibilities that they faced. Australia was part of a wider world in which questions of equality, justice and the rights of previously marginalised or powerless groups were now on the social agenda - and the society was feeling the winds of change.
In the United States the Civil Rights Movement, led by luminaries like Martin Luther King Jnr, wanted to free the Blacks from economic and social oppression. That movement had begun to confront the racist structures in the USA through marches, sit-ins, freedom rides, boycotts and legal action. Australians concerned about similar issues drew on these ideas to help them fashion their own way forward.
In the summer of 1965, Australian activists including University of Sydney students and Charles Perkins, who became the first Aboriginal person to graduate from university anywhere in Australia, hired a bus to take a Freedom Ride through northern NSW. Based on the American model, it drew attention to the appalling living and social conditions suffered by Australian Aboriginal people and to the discrimination they experienced. The Freedom Ride exposed most white Australians for the first time to the experiences of black Australians and was one of the factors that helped generate the overwhelming support in 1967 for the referendum which was to permit Aboriginal people to be counted in the Australian Census and to be allowed to vote.
The policy of assimilating Aboriginal people into white society was on its way to being dismantled and the struggle by Aboriginal people to reclaim their heritage and their land took on renewed vigour.
It was not only Aboriginal Australians who were radicalised in this period; the so-called "Age of Aquarius" saw the dawning of other political and social movements which altered Australians' conservative self-image for ever. The "baby boomers", post-war children who had grown up in peace and prosperity, began to rock social certainties and roll the comfortable assumptions of their parents. While their dads and grand-dads had "packed up their troubles in their old kit bags" and gone off more or less willingly to war, the '60s generation challenged the right of the Government to send them to Vietnam to fight in a war which many believed unjust and irrelevant. The Vietnam Moratorium Movement, protest marches, resistance to conscription for the war in Vietnam, and flag burning were all symptomatic of the political awakening of Australia's youth. Some followed Timothy Leary's advice to "turn on, tune in, and drop out", while others began to fight for Aboriginal rights, the rights of women, for conservation and against racism, particularly apartheid in South Africa.
A new politics of identity was being developed, one which spoke to peoples' desire for individual freedom to pursue lifestyles, cultural practices and social behaviour meaningful for them. It grew in parallel with the traditional politics of class or economic position - and often alliances emerged across groups. A growing self-consciousness among immigrant groups throughout the '60s was evident in the increasing pressure to end White Australia, to extend citizenship to non-Europeans and to abandon assimilation as a government policy. The apparently calm surface of Australian society had been sufficiently ruffled by the social movements of the '60s for ethnic communities to become more vocal about their needs and potential for contribution.
Further reference:
Burgmann, Verity Power and protest: movements for change in Australian society, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, 1993.