Simon Butler
It Can't Happen Here: A Political History of Student Activism
By Graham Hastings
Empire Times Press, Adelaide, 2003
$30 (pb)
On September 27, 1971, five student draft resisters who had refused to fight in the Vietnam War announced to the Melbourne press that they were coming out of hiding. They were determined to set up a pirate anti-war station on the roof of the Melbourne University Student Union building.
After three days of conservative media hysteria (and continuous anti-war broadcasts from the students) some 150 Victorian police stormed the building to put an end to their very public embarrassment. Dozens of sympathetic student activists had barricaded the doors with desks, chairs, bookshelves — anything that came to hand. Barricade by barricade, blocked door by blocked door, the police advanced through the building causing thousands of dollars of damage.
Finally the police burst through to the roof of the building where they thought the radio station was based. But they found nobody there.
The pirate radio station had been moved to a safe location and the five draft resisters had already fled to Adelaide.
Graham Hastings' political history of Australian student activism, It Can't Happen Here, contains countless examples of the daring and provocative exploits of student activists, but this is not its greatest achievement.
Hastings' history is worthwhile, because it concentrates on how Australian student activism and life and student organisations have developed and evolved in the last 80-100 years. Young people and students have mobilised and radicalised around innumerable issues and campaigns, from excessive library fines to ending apartheid in South Africa.
While different tactics have been employed at different times, he shows that the most successful student campaigns have always involved masses of people on a sustained basis and have relied upon the power of mass action to achieve change rather than on false promises from corporate backed politicians.
Unrepentant about his own student activist past, Hastings (who is now a member of the Socialist Alliance) emphasises the inspirational achievements of student protesters. So although it certainly documents the fierce internal debates, the self-serving careerist student politicians and the sometimes harmful factional conflicts It Can't Happen Here still strikes an overwhelmingly optimistic tone. After all, Australian students have been instrumental in stopping imperialist wars like in Vietnam, combating racist attacks on Indigenous people, supporting trade union struggles, spearheading the women's liberation movement and fighting against the privatisation of the education system and more.
The book is divided into five separate essays. Together they represent the most comprehensive account of the origins, trends and achievements of the Australian student movement currently available. Hastings notes in his introduction that there are other somewhat partial, incomplete accounts of Australian student activism around. But as useful as they are, they tend to deal with specific campaigns or some specific aspect of the student movement only.
Section one of the book, "The Storm Breaks", deals with student activism from the emergence of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s through to the height of the movement against the Vietnam War. This was the high point of student activism when, especially after 1967, the radicalising student movement came into frequent conflict with the repressive forces of the state.
The second essay, "The Longest Occupation", shifts the focus to Flinders University in Adelaide and then on to the wave of militant campus occupations that swept the country from 1973 to 1975.
In 1973, Flinders University was the scene of the longest continuous student occupation of a university building. The conflict with the administration began over course content and examinations but quickly moved to control of universities and military research programs on campus. The university administration was so worried about the radicalising impact of the protests that serious plans were drafted to close the university down completely.
The third section is a comprehensive history of national student unionism from its first incarnation in the 1920s, to the radical Australian Union of Students in the 1970s, and through to the formation of today's National Union of Students.
In "Shooting the Messenger", Hastings provides a useful history of the myriad of legislative, legal and ideological measures that conservative forces have used to attack student organisations. This is particularly relevant to activists currently fighting against so-called Voluntary Student Unionism legislation.
Essay five of It Can't Happen Here, "Still Struggling" brings the history up until the late 1990s, covering the time when Hastings was a student activist. In this final essay, Hastings is definitely at his least objective. A few of his political opponents from that time, others on the left in particular, get a bit of an unfair serve. This shouldn't detract, however, from the clear intent of the chapter to prove the myth of 1990s student apathy, a myth.
It is a bit of a shame that It Can't Happen Here is missing an index. This will make the book slightly less appealing for future student rebels to use it as a reference on past struggle.
But the project is quite an achievement: slowly researched and written over a decade without the academic resources and backing other historians can access. Others will be able to add more to Hastings' effort in the future and some of the debates about "what really happened at that demonstration" and "who said what when" are sure to continue.
In Australia and internationally, young people have frequently been at the forefront of struggles against injustice and for radical social change. In some cases, like in France in May 1968, vibrant student actions have been the spark for momentous social movements involving millions of working people.
Although student life has been changed by rapid privatisation, it is still true that students have more time and freedom to reflect, study and think about social issues than most people do. If nothing else It Can't Happen Here illustrates that future dynamic student protest movements are inevitable, as long as injustices continue.
Anyone involved in the student movement during the last 50 years will be able to find at least one or two pages that they can lay claim to as their own modest, partial contribution to this history. Although Hastings' book is remarkably fair to conservative students, he doesn't claim to be writing with "objectivity". Hastings asserts that his history is a document firmly on the side of the "believers" not the "deceivers" of the student movement.
The "believers" are the young people who got involved in politics to fight against oppression and injustice. The "deceivers" have seen the student movement primarily as a vehicle to advance their own personal ambitions or mainstream political careers. This history is not for them.
The fighting traditions of Australian student activism have been kept alive and brought together in this work. But, as Hastings urges in his summary, the real task of student activists is not just to learn about past movements, but to do even better.
[Simon Butler was an education officer of the Sydney University Student Representative Council in 2001 and is a member of the Newcastle Socialist Alliance].
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, August 25, 2004.
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