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ASIO as Aide Memoir
Comment on ASIO File No. 533/71
by Graeme Dunstan
Released ASIO reports are the "official" biographies of my generation of activists. They tell us who we were, what we were doing and when. But they are far from accurate. More like aids for memory.
Wendy Bacon kindly contacted me about a mention i got in her released files.
Was there a Counter Culture Group at University of New South Wales in 1971? And was she a member?
The answer is, as i recall, no.
There was certainly a counter culture awareness on the campus. Counter culture was the air we breathed in those days of resistance.
In 1971 i was a co editor of Tharunka and we were exploring the facets of the counter counter with each edition differently themed and with its own guest editor.
But there was no Group as such. We were a dispirit group of undergraduates - student radicals united in opposition to the Vietnam War, conscription and censorship. But little else.
Wendy Bacon et al had been coeditors of Tharunka the year before and i the Director of Student Publications. Their campaign against censorship, which i supported in the Students Union, got us all indicted for obscenity.
In 1971 Wendy and Liz helped produce a couple of special editions, the so called Sex edition which came with a supplement, bundles of which went missing on arrival on campus. And i recall a special edition published in response the Bathurst riots of October 1970.
Truth is that while i have always been an admirer of Wendy, we rarely spoke and rarely met on campus. A couple of email exchanges over the years. Handing over the ASIO file was the first time to my recall that we had ever shared a coffee and a chat.
So no there was no Counter Culture Group as some kind of campus club. The designation of us as a Group was made by ASIO. We were a Group to be targetted for obstruction and dispersion.
So who was behind this? Who the author of the report?
It was certainly not from someone close. In other words the Students Union were not infiltrated by ASIO. Otherwise they would have included the name of Student Union President John Geake (the late).
Geake was a fabulous play power operator and the driving force of the Students Union of the time. As elected Executive member of the Australian Union of Students he backed the Nimbin Aquarius Festival and subsequently set up Paradise Valley, one of the first 'multiple occupancies in the Nimbin valley.
I reckon this ASIO report comes from a mole in the UNSW Registrar's office. And i have no doubt that his role was known to Vice Chancellor Rupert Myers, the successor to the founding VC Sir Philip Baxter who rose to prominence as a chemist on the Manhattan Project and later served as Chairman of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission. At technocratic vision, secrecy and spooks second nature.
As I recall there were two Deputy Registrars with a student services briefs. One was the tweedy and much beloved Brock Rowe who looked after colleges and overseas students from the Colombo Plan. The other was more managerialist. I can't recall his name (oh to have John Geake to prompt me) but he took over attending Students Union Council meetings from the founding Registrar MacCauley who had grown weary of our disrespect for his administration.
This fellow looked to me like a North Shore Liberal and he had a thing about Tharunka being out of control. He voiced his concern to me on a number of occasions. And also his determination to do something about it.
In the ASIO file you can read that concern expressing itself as fear of the influence of campus outsiders, notably waterside workers. The plural is an exaggeration but it is true we tended to be outer directed. At the time we editors saw the student press as a wing of the alternative / underground press which was then flourishing. We saw our readership as being both campus and extra campus.
So i can understand the ASIO mole / Deputy Registrar's concerns. And also ASIO's because we of the student/underground press were manifestly winning the propaganda war against the Indo-China war. This is what made us dangerous.
So what did he do? You can see the presentiment in his report. He rustled up the Christians and the Jews who combined in a Student Union election campaign to oust the influence of the counter culture. For the second half of 1971 the UNSW Students Union had a President from the Evangelical Union and Director of Student Publications (DSP) from the campus zionist club.
Together they set about creating trouble and obstruction for me as coeditor. The latter i remember was a total greenhorn in regard to student poltics and publishing and he appeared to me as an over mothered, mincing dolt, especially when compared to the intellectual zing of Wendy Bacon, John Geake, Liz Fell and company. But then he was likely only 19 and up against my 29 years of age, and five hyper active years (1965-67 and 1970-71) of student activism.
There were fierce debates on the Student's Union Council and me passionate but despairing. I remember slagging off about the DSP's crass stupidity in the columns of Tharunka, columns for he insisted on vetting pre publication. His precious ego had been so wounded that his father came to the Students Union to beg me to be kinder.
The parting struggle was over the editorial stipend. In those days the Tharunka editorship came with a stipend of about $2000, a stipend that i had instigated originally with support of Rupert Murdoch's News Ltd back in 1967. By tradition the stipend was paid per edition published. So when the hostile Students' Union exec cancelled some editions, i wanted our paid stipend none the less. And they weren't gonna let me have it. Banging my head on a brick wall. Time to go.
So it was the counter culture Tharunka years ended with a whimper rather than a bang.
But not that we grieved. We had our time of influence on the campus and moved on to other spheres of influence. For me it was to a brief stint of high school maths teaching in 1972 (Blacktown Boys High), and thence to answer the call of Aquarius; Wendy to prisoner activism.
But it is interesting to note that it was a similar allegiance between Christians and Jews that brought down the Australian Union of Students a couple of years later. More ASIO intervention i have no doubt.
Graeme Dunstan
20 February 2013
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