I moved into Carlton at the end of 1969, when I was a nineteen year old university student. It seemed a very romantic place to live. There was a lot of night life around the hotels, especially the University Hotel, and the Prince Alfred. A great mixture of people used to go drinking in those hotels. Before I moved here, I had this idea that Carlton was a suburb full of crazy bohemians and bikies, and also 'politicals' and alcoholics. It was a little different. There were a lot of Italian people; the student houses were isolated like islands amongst the sea of Italian houses. There would be kids playing on the streets and in the backyards, and you could hear the sound of the language all around you. The houses were cheap to rent. The suburb was run down and you could rent a room for $6 in those days, $8 for a big room. That's when student living allowances were around $20, so that's low rent.
The student houses had interesting people living in them as well, people who were unemployed, or professional political people. There were also houses that were entirely political. A big house on the corner of Palmerston Street and Station Street was a Students for a Democratic Society house. There was only a small core of people who were fulltime SDS organisers, about half a dozen, but there were between fifty and a hundred people who were students but who spent most of their time working on organising things, such as painting up slogans around the city. In Carlton, it was very political to walk down the street; all the slogans would be about conscription and the Vietnam war. There were some other houses with Workers Student Alliance people in them, and that was a very much bigger group with branches at each university, and about fifty to a hundred full time politicals. They believed that they were revolutionaries, that they were in the vanguard, and they were sure that there was going to be a revolution within a matter of few years. There were artists living in Carlton in those days, although they were starting to move out to Fitzroy. There were also boarding houses.
Within a few years, people began to lose in the revolution being around the corner. There was a proliferation of social drugtaking in Carlton, and lots of LSD dealers. When I lived opposite the police station in Drummond Street, above the former Pram Factory, there was an LSD dealer living in the house there with us. People used to take it with a cavalier attitude. People recognised the hazards of drug taking to some extent, but it was also seen as a philosophical, self developmental thing. Most of the young people who lived in Carlton would have experimented with drugs I think, certainly the people that I mixed with. One dealer was a final year law student who was supplementing his Commonwealth scholarship living allowance. Another was a tram driver. He had an American girlfriend from San Francisco who was very glamorous, and she had all the correct and accurate hippy argot. There was certainly a sense of community and you would know a large number of people. Anywhere you went on the streets or to see a movie at the 'bug house', you would know who half the audience was, that such and such a person was a big Maoist for example.
I guess student houses were much the same as they are now. You wouldn't have a common room. All the rooms would be used, apart from the kitchen of course, as bedrooms, one person or a couple per bedroom, and the houses generally wouldn't have hot water. The student houses were of a very poor standard, mainly original Victorian terraces that had never been modernised, except that generally most rooms would have a powerpoint. No heating, and you would be thrown out if you bought a heater because of the effect on the bills. People were not interested in cooking much. There was a lot of vegetarianism, but they were a sub group amongst the people who lived in Carlton. For instance the political people wouldn't like vegetarianism, that was very suspect, and it was at the very degenerate end of hippy culture to them. You would see incidents at a party where someone was discovered to be vegetarian, and other people would hold them down on the floor and force a chop from the fridge into their mouths as a joke. The vegetarians were reasonably scrupulous about their food and would use herbal toothpaste, for example, even though they were living in the centre of pollution. There was a lot of car traffic through Carlton, and there would be an endless stream of cars whizzing by.
Some of the students would get on with the old Australian neighbours, but mainly the students were too wild and weird for them. The old residents would see them walking out of their houses with red flags, or they would be playing music all night, or doing strange drug affected things in the back yard. It was an area where people felt free to do pretty well as they pleased, and there was nothing much of a police presence in Carlton. It was very unusual for anyone to get hassled on the streets. The only time you really saw police was parked outside coffee lounges. I don't think the Italians had any time for long haired students. In those days just having long hair was enough to cut you off from the rest, and if you walked along the street, people on the street and from passing cars would yell out, 'Have a wash!' It was just as if they were dealing with some other form of life. It was dangerous as well to walk the Carlton streets late at night if you had long hair, because 'poofter bashing' was in and you were in danger of being taken for a poofter because of your long hair. There was also the class based bashing with working class kids coming in and having a fight with some middle class unit students. Long hair was a health hazard then. Carlton was relatively safe, but there was that danger of visiting bashers coming in.
When I started living in Carlton, I was looking at being conscripted in the next year. I had been thinking about it for years, and I had formed strong anti government views on a whole range of subjects, centering on our involvement in Vietnam and conscription. When I came to the University it was delightful. In previous years in High School I had held these views, and everyone regarded me as a political ratbag. Suddenly there were lashings of left wing people you could mix with, and they mainly held more extreme views. There was a pacifist society that I was initially interested in, having these more suburban liberal values, but that only had a very small membership and they were a pretty wimpish lot. The more vibrant and exciting organisations were SDS and WSA. Some of the WSA people were very committed and quite a few of them went to gaol during the period. With people actually going to gaol and others being harassed by Commonwealth Police, it did seem like a genuine struggle. When you went to meetings of groups like the draft resisters' union, there would be Commonwealth Police there, or special branch people. It was known at the time that they employed students to do reconnaissance for them, but I think they would have got pretty low grade information that way.
The draft resisters' union was an interesting one, because the people there had this martyrdom motif. They were centred in Carlton, an SDS offshoot. The committed members who were all trying to get themselves in prison were frustrated by the Government, which decided that it was counterproductive to have any more of them imprisoned. The ones who got in early were the only ones that got gaoled. A lot of the stuff was very corny; they would play Joan Baez records dedicated to David, her spouse who was an American draft resister. In fact it was all modelled on American things, apart from WSA which had a bona fide political party system, with better informed activists and organisers. WSA was like a genuine communist organisation. Not many Trotskyites in those days, I only ever became aware of Trotskyite oganisations around the end of the seventies.
In the early seventies people were more concerned with the common enemy, the Government under McMahon I guess it was then. 'Lynch Lynch', 'Bury Bury', 'Smash U.S.Imperialism', were some of the slogans of the time; (Les Bury was Minister for Defence.) There were a lot of demonstrations, of course, at least one a week, 'bona fide' demonstrations with lots of students, probably the general student body mobilised to go down into the city. On other days, there would be smaller demonstrations where there were really only those organisers going along in groups of twenty or thirty. They were actually the better fun to go on. The Students' Representative Council at Melbourne University would get involved in the larger demonstrations. Brian Burdekin was the SRC President in the early seventies. He would contact the police to get approval for the demonstration and lead it down Swanston Street with a megaphone. (He's now got a won derful career in Federal politics as a personal staffer for Bob Hawke.) He did a very good job. But the small demonstrations the police weren't informed of and they would only turn up after the protesters had had their fun.
Chris Haywood and Max Gillies at the Pram Factory
A typical thing we would do was to walk into post offices and seize registrations, because they'd only hand them out two at a time. If you went in and asked for a big bunch they wouldn't give them to you. Twenty of us could hop the counter and help ourselves. That was an activity that took place in these political houses, filling in false forms which was a very successful campaign, not a very publicised one but it caused the Government to abandon attempts to track down individual draft dodgers. Apart from the problem of having too many in prison, it seemed that their records were corrupted so much that they just took the passive conformists who registered and kept calling them up.
A lot of people who didn't want to go to the war but who didn't want to make a fuss about it or run risk of a fine or imprisonment, would register and hope that they would get ballotted out. If they were drafted up they then hoped that they would fail the medical or even attempt to fail the medical. One guy starved himself down till he looked like a Changi prisoner eventually and he failed his medical for being underweight, but that was unusual. At that stage most would suddenly become very diligent students to protect their student exemption and hope that the war would be over by the time they completed.
It was mainly men who were involved but there were women who devoted themselves to it as well. But this was all pre women's liberation, the Vietnam thing. But as soon as those two or three feminist books came out, women who were students in Carlton who were politically active became more occupied with that. There was a huge student movement in those days. Hundreds of people would take part in one of these weekly demonstrations, and thousands on any major demonstration. They'd be men and women and everyone who cared about those issues. But as far as the full time political organisation went, participants were mainly men. I think student men needed to make a lot of accommodation to the women's movement. I think they all immediately thought of themselves as feminist men because they saw it as the correct line and even part of Communist tradition. But they were all terrible sexists. I think that women were suddenly treated a lot better in that period, changing from the early to late seventies.
People actually did go to consciousness raising groups. Most people's girlfriends would go to one of these groups. The women's understanding of the situation was much more acute than the men's. They could sum up their own situation pretty acutely.
To anyone with any kind of political feeling 'swinging' was American degeneracy and part of the whole American madness, another aspect of their sick culture. The American youth culture was expressed in movies in the seventies like 'Zabriskie Point' or 'Woodstock' or '2001'. They were very influential movies I think. People started wearing those jackets, or blankets over their heads, headbands and necklaces for men, beads, and people would sew patterns on the bottom of their jeans, or decorate their clothing. A big influence was John Lennon rather than San Francisco, HaightAshbury stuff, even though most of the psychedelic music was American.
Most people whom I mixed with in those days never thought that they would have a full time job or a career. It was very easy to get by in those days of full employment before talk of the recession. Lots of people were talking about going back to live in the country even though they were from the city. Very few actually made it out into the country because it involved dropping out of your course. It was usually done after a bad LSD experience or some experience in which all these big decisions were taken about radical change in lifestyle. Even those who didn't manage to find a place in the country believed that they were not going to lead the materialistic life. Wherever you went people would be sitting round playing music and listening to music and taking drugs. Everyone would dress out of an opportunity shop and never consider buying any clothing new, apart from socks and underclothes The only things people would buy were a record player and records.
Very little of our lives was involved with study because they were relatively easy days for students. The seventies were the high point of liberal educational ideals, and the idea that people should be given the opportunity to explore their areas of interest without having to be tied down to examinations. Many of the Arts students went to non examination subjects. All you had to do was a few essays and people would do those in intense bursts and the rest of the time they'd be free to pursue their interests and sit around the Cafeteria. It was a very popular place to purchase drugs.
I hadn't heard much of the Carlton Association and I don't think any of the students had any interest in it. But I became aware of it later on with the Citizens Against Freeways Movement, because that had a common membership with the Carlton Association. It was an issue that all Carlton people were interested in. The W.S.A., whose biggest branch was actually in North Melbourne rather than Carlton, took up the F19 Freeway issue, and there was involvement by young people who otherwise wouldn't have gotten involved in the Carlton Association, struggles such as the Kleenex factory or Brooks Crescent. There would be an occasional article in the student newspaper about the Housing Commission struggle, but the students themselves weren't very interested. It was just carried by the residents of North Carlton.
Carlton seemed like the best place in the world to live. It seemed really exciting. You could go along to La Mama or later on the Pram Factory and see plays by Buzo and Romeril and Williamson, produced in their original productions and acted by people whom you would then see on the streets or know, who were just living in nearby houses, or just next door. That seemed fantastically relevant. It made the suburb seem as glamorous as it had appeared from the outer suburbs, going there from High School. The reality exceeded the expectation.