By Bob Gould
Four days before Saigon fell in 1975, when it had become clear it would fall, ABC Radio interviewed a spectrum of Vietnam protesters on their attitude. They chose to end the radio piece with my comments, which were, in sum: that I was not a pacifist, that my first political sentiments in life had been an interest in the struggle for Irish independence, and that when the battle-scarred NLF guerillas marched into Saigon, I'd be cheering.
Nothing that has happened in the 20 years subsequent to May 1, 1975, has led me to change this basic view.
The primary issue with Vietnam was always a struggle between the Vietnamese movement for national independence and unification, which happened to be led by Stalinists, and first French and later US imperialism. US and Australian troops had absolutely no moral right to intervene in Vietnam.
In the event, the regime in independent and united Vietnam has, as Stalinist regimes go, turned out to be a relatively humane one.
In the context of Vietnam now, I would support the demand for political freedom, trade unions independent of the state and the legalisation of political dissent, but that is in the context of the now successful completion of the struggle for national independence, and it is also the business of the Vietnamese masses themselves, without imperialist interference.
The 20 year long imperialist blockade of Vietnam has, in fact, hindered the development of internal democracy in Vietnam. I find it particularly sickening that right-wingers who supported the war against the Vietnamese people somehow manage to justify supporting a political role for the Pol Pot forces in Cambodia.
From 1965 to 1972 my life was totally dominated by the campaign against the imperialist intervention in Vietnam, of which, as the secretary of the Vietnam Action Committee, I was one of the main initial organisers.
It's worth recording the fact that the courageous and early
opposition of the Labor federal opposition leader, Arthur Calwell, to conscription and the dispatch of Australian troops to Vietnam was the major initial factor that made it possible to build a mass movement of opposition to conscription and to the war in Vietnam.
In the critical first two years of Australia's major involvement, 1965 and 1966, when the war was still overwhelmingly popular in Australia, a small number of people of the anti-Stalinist left, three of whom were John Percy, Rod Webb and myself, founded the Vietnam Action Committee. Two young representatives of the indigenous social democratic left in the ALP, Barry Robinson and Wayne Haylen, the son of one of Calwell's closest confidants, left-wing Labor MP Les Haylen, founded the Youth Campaign Against Conscription. These two organisations, in alliance, in September 1965, took the initiative in regular mass demonstrations against the war and conscription.
The fact that Calwell, in the position of ALP parliamentary leader, opposed conscription and the dispatch of the Australian troops, enabled us to reach a far broader audience than we could ever have achieved without Calwell's bold stand on the question.
Many of us who started the antiwar agitation were also involved in the ALP, and the very real battle in the ALP on the Vietnam war was an important part of the struggle.
The Communist Party, which still had a major influence in the labour movement, were quite strongly opposed to the ALP and the broad antiwar movement having a central policy of withdrawal of Australian troops from Vietnam. They considered this policy too leftist. They favoured a policy for the mass movement of "Stop the Bombing and Negotiate", and the official left, including the Communist Party, did everything in their power to weaken Calwell's stance in favour of withdrawal.
The battles of those days are reflected, for instance, in the rather venomous attitude adopted towards Arthur Calwell by Tom Uren in his autobiography.
The political battle over Vietnam policy raged in the ALP for the next seven years. Initially the branch membership of the ALP in NSW in 1965 was pretty moribund and pretty right wing, pretty much like today, but Calwell's stance on Vietnam led to a massive influx into the ALP of opponents of the war, which radicalised the ALP for the next generation. It has taken 10 years of Hawke/Keating deracination to get
the ALP back to the more or less right-wing composition it had in 1965.
In 1992 Greg Langley interviewed me for his excellent book of oral history on Vietnam, A Decade of Dissent, published that year by George Allen & Unwin and still available.
The following extracts of his interview with me, in my view adequately cover my own activities and the activities of the Vietnam Action Campaign. They follow here, along with a short extract from the reminiscences of Anne Curthoys that also bear on the topic.
Gould joined the ALP in 1955 at the age of sixteen. In the late 1950s, he associated with small revolutionary socialist groups who were critics within the framework of the left wing.
We were called Trotskyists, and the Stalinists attacked us and called us police spies, wreckers, and agents of the CIA. That was the kind of slander aimed at anyone who opposed the predominant widespread Stalinist influences.
In 1967, Gould was expelled from the Steering Committee of the NSW Left for indiscipline. He had moved a motion at that year's State Conference to restore the ALP's policy on Vietnam to full withdrawal — in line with the party's position under the leadership of Arthur Calwell.
That motion was in opposition to the official position of the NSW Left wing which, at the time, supported the watering down of the Vietnam policy. Although most of the Left-wing delegates at the conference supported Gould's stand, he was the only one punished.
The year things started to happen was 1965. At a CND meeting, we decided to set up the Vietnam Action Committee (VAC) and I became secretary. We collaborated with YCAC, because we had similar aims, and called a demonstration in Sydney in September.
Three hundred people turned up, mostly students and a few trade unionists. The trade unionists were suspicious, because they had been told by their leaders that we were wrecking CIA-ASIO bastards. But they responded to our call because they were angry about conscription. We had a little demonstration on the footpath and got four lines in the Sydney Morning Herald.
We then organised another protest for October, a few days
after a similar demonstration in America which was the biggest anti-war demonstration of that time. We got a fair bit of publicity as a flow-on.
The Revolutionary Socialists and Oppositionists decided to use qualified civil disobedience at the demonstration to get publicity. A couple of days before the demonstration, the leaders of the CPA agreed there should be civil disobedience. They still hated us, but they wanted to get in on the act.
That was larger, and about 500 people attended. We were circling Martin Place but, at one point, instead of going back up the other side, we started walking up Pitt Street.
There was no mall then, and we walked along with the traffic at 5.30pm on a Friday night. It took the coppers completely by surprise, and we were halfway from King Street to Market Street before they could get in front of us.
About 50 of us got pinched including Jack Mundey, Peter Black, the mayor of Broken Hill, an Irish CP member called Joe Dryburgh, and other colourful characters.
It was not a violent demonstration. It was completely passive, except the coppers threw us around a bit, but it was effective in terms of publicity across the nation.
A piece later appeared in Outlook which described my raucous voice on a loud hailer and my five-year-old daughter, a veteran of many demonstrations, climbing on her mother's back to get a better view of daddy ...
There was tension [in Sydney] between the broader peace movement and VAC over aims and methods. We favoured full withdrawal and self-determination for the Vietnamese, but the official peace movement hankered for a more moderate policy of withdrawing to holding areas.
They held peaceful Sunday demonstrations for families, and we favoured Friday night marches that confronted shoppers. We specialised in militant, colourful demonstrations with occasional acts of civil disobedience, but were not preoccupied with fighting the police.
The ground rule with the Askin Government was you couldn't occupy the streets but, if we had the numbers, we just did and there was often a bit of pushing and shoving with the coppers.
We were prepared to get in the coppers' way, but civil disobedience was strictly a means to an end. We didn't want a lot of people pinched, and we didn't have the fetish for martyrdom the Melbourne Maoists displayed.
The classic demonstration that year was against President Johnson. VAC decided we would confront the cavalcade, but the official peace movement said this was a bit too leftist. They were worried demonstrators might tangle with pro-Johnson crowds, but eventually they caved in.
The police gave us permission to have the eastern end of Hyde Park. We got there at six in the morning on a warm spring day. Representatives of the Croatian National League and the Mormons were also there, because the police had given them the same bit of turf.
Our troops started arriving faster than theirs, so we got the front positions and little Stalinist pensioners even occupied the pensioner seats up the front.
By 9am, there were about six or seven thousand people, by far the biggest demonstration in Australia against the war up to that point, and right in the middle was a solid bloc of about 300 or 400 Mormons and a couple of hundred Croats were at the back. Both groups were welcoming Johnson, so it was tense.
The Mormon Tabernacle Choir started up, and they had an enormous organ which drowned out our chants. Dave Taylor, an engineer from New Zealand, said, "Bob, we can't have this". He went to Woolies and bought some wire cutters and all of a sudden the Mormon Tabernacle Choir went off the air. Then it's on the air. Then it's off the air. Then it's on the air. After about ten minutes of this, it went off the air for good.
When Johnson finally came, our strategy proved right. The crowd just erupted, poured onto the road, and laid down. That is when Askin made the famous comment, "Run the bastards over".
I was up a tree all the time, trying to direct the traffic against this imperialist monster, and it was incredible. People were going everywhere; it was way beyond control.
It was an extremely effective demonstration and we fought hard to have it, knowing it would erupt in non-violent civil disobedience. Everyone who participated felt happy and elated, and it didn't lead to the masses being alienated. In
fact, it dramatically symbolised that many Australians were opposed to the war.
Ann Curthoys: "In 1966, I was studying fourth year honours and was not very active, though I attended a lot of demonstrations during the lead up to the elections. I was also involved in VAC, which Bob Gould organised. By involved, I mean I went along and helped fold mail-outs.
"Gould managed to take the leadership of the youth in the anti-war movement away from the CPA, which was a leading organisation until then. Gould had a confirmed form of Trotskyist politics and a more confrontational approach that appealed to a lot of people.
"Even though I was a member of the CPA, I attended the demonstrations his group organised. The distinctions were not as sharp as people sometimes think, or as they were to become later."
I was a full-time functionary of VAC and lived off my then wife, Mairi Petersen, who loyally supported me for two-and-a-half years. It was a hectic, tense, and stressful time, and I have never worked harder.
We had no resources, but we did amazing things. Before the Johnson visit, we roneoed a pamphlet with eight pages and a printed cover with a picture of Johnson on one side and a photo of a Vietnamese woman with her children swimming in a river to escape cross-fire. The caption read, "Consider her. Confront him."
We sent that to 30,000 people. We had to scrape together the pennies. Stamps cost six cents and it was a lot of money to us, but we did it.
Later, we rented a building in Goulburn Street, on the edge of Chinatown, and ran VAC from upstairs. Resistance, a youth organisation, had the back room and I ran the Third World Bookshop from the front. The shop was supposed to support the whole venture.
From September 1965 to early 1970, I probably participated in organising a significant demonstration a month, to say nothing of hundreds of minor events.
You literally lived from one demonstration to the next. It was a terrible workload in a way, but it was extremely exciting. You felt you were contributing to the cause of sweating humanity ...
I started the Third World Bookshop in 1968 and it was financed by a mortgage on my wife's and my house at Woollahra. It shared premises with VAC and Resistance.
There was a cultural transformation going on throughout this whole period and censorship was a thorny issue. The Third World Bookshop was often raided because of the material we sold.
The first time was for a pamphlet produced by John Percy called How Not To Join The Army. We were tipped off before the raid by a sympathetic copper, so we were well prepared.
At the time, we had a poster with a picture of Jesus Christ on it and the caption, "Wanted: Jesus Christ — for sedition". We stuck one in the shop window and when the television cameras arrived to film the police carting away this beat-up little Gestetner — our engine of revolution — they lingered on this poster. We were deluged by requests for this poster for weeks and sold thousands.
We were also busted for selling Portnoy's Complaint but the most interesting case was over Michelangelo's David.
Just before Resistance split in early 1970, we were busted for printing Aubrey Beardsley posters. Some of them were mildly erotic, and some not at all. The problem was that some of them had pricks in them.
We had been selling these posters for several months when the coppers raided one busy Saturday morning. They busted in to the storeroom and charged Keith James, Jim Percy, and me for resisting arrest. As they were pulling down the posters, one of the customers said, "Well I suppose if you're taking those Beardsley's, you'll be taking that as well". He pointed to posters of David.
A constable looked at it and said, "Sarge?"
"Yer, take them."
Our defence said the resisting arrest charge depended on the legality of the pornography charge. We argued that in the lower courts, and the resisting arrest was adjourned until the pornography charge was heard, but that never happened. The courts were overcrowded, and they didn't want to be clogged up with a huge case like this, particularly one where they could be made to look utterly ridiculous.
We still had to go to court every couple of months for an
adjournment, and it dragged on for years. It became a standing joke. One paper even ran a brief piece comparing us to "The Flying Dutchman".
This periodic reunion of Jim Percy, Keith James and myself at Central Court every three months or so for five years assumed a rather piquant quality. The split in Resistance, which took place almost immediately after the initial arrest, eventually located all three of us in rival factions quite hostile to each other. But we were old associates who had been together in the past for a few years in the same grouping, and these strange reunions in Central Court gave us the chance for cautiously comparing notes on current developments, a little bit outside the context of the current factional battles.
Eventually a magistrate said, "This is ridiculous". He released us with no conviction recorded in order to get it out of the courts, but the whole case showed the attitudes of the time. Heaps of things were banned — films, plays, books, and magazines. In Victoria, they even banned a book called Fun In Bed. It's obvious the censors never bothered reading it because it was a book of games for children with disabilities.