EARLIER THAT WEEK, Anna had picked up The Oz and read that the prime minister was planning a cabinet meeting at the Commonwealth Parliamentary Offices in Martin Place. Ever since the protests against the Vietnam War began, the PM’s people had rarely given out his schedule in advance. They had fucked up this time and created an unexpected opportunity to confront him directly. And not just him—the ministers responsible for the conscription laws and the conduct of the war would be there with him. Anna rang around the leaders of Students for a Democratic Society to convene an urgent meeting of its Action Committee.
There was a brief and intense debate at the meeting as the SDS had recently agreed to concentrate its resources on organising the first national Moratorium March. But that was months away, Anna had argued, and this was an opportunity to confront the top dogs now. The committee finally agreed with her that it was time to mobilise the widespread student anger over the National Service Act. The balloting process for conscription was being conducted under a veil of secrecy; the Act itself criminalised draft resisters, denying them the right of trial by jury; and it even sought to force university officials to divulge information about their students.
The SDS made no secret of its planned protest. Activists scrambled to distribute leaflets calling for an open meeting on the campus lawns to raise support for an action in Martin Place the following day. It was a well-attended, loud and angry meeting, which passed a unanimous resolution to stage a sit-in in front of the Commonwealth Offices. These details were accurately reported in the morning papers. Even the most rabid right-wing rag acknowledged that the SDS leaders had called for non-violent protest and advised students not to resist when police dragged them away.
As editor of the student newspaper, The Tribe, Anna convened an urgent meeting of her reporting and editorial team in its offices. They had much to do if she was going to remake the whole paper. Pierre Villiers was there with the photographer Dave Blatch and the most reliable members of her small team as she explained her intention to pull apart the planned edition so as to make space for coverage of the expected confrontation with the prime minister.
They all knew it was a bold decision. She was breaking the long-established slow rhythms of The Tribe, but one of the key campaign promises she had made when she was elected editor was that under her leadership the paper would become more relevant and report big events when they happened, not weeks later.
She gave an editor’s pep talk that sounded, even to her, like a footy coach before a big match. This was their first opportunity to really prove they could do it, but everything had to go right for them.
‘For God’s sake, try to behave like reporters not protesters,’ she pleaded. ‘If we get ourselves arrested, we’ll be buggered.’
She looked pointedly at Pierre, who ran his hands back through his long hair and winked at her.
‘What is it?’ she demanded.
‘Well, we should remember that having fun is half the fun.’
‘Very true, comrade. Except you won’t have much fun in jail. And we won’t have your story on the front page.’
‘We’ll be careful,’ said Blatch. ‘But that doesn’t mean the cops won’t target us.’
Anna nodded. ‘So, just in case, I’ve got a contingency fund for bail and the SDS have a group of friendly lawyers who’ll appear for anyone who’s arrested. They know our deadline, so our people will be treated as a priority. But nothing will happen until the following morning and, if the courts drag things out, we’ll still be in trouble. We’ll have to have all our copy and pics ready to go by Thursday arvo. So just don’t do anything silly.’
Pierre gave an ostentatious salute. ‘Righto, boss.’
As the meeting broke up, she took him aside. ‘We’re all right, aren’t we?’ she asked quietly.
‘Sure. What do you mean?’
‘Righto, boss? You finding it hard to take orders from a woman?’
Pierre looked surprised. ‘Oh, c’mon, Anna! You know better than that. I find it hard to take orders from anyone.’
‘Okay,’ she said, still uncertain. ‘I had to ask.’
Pierre just smiled. ‘Got a little present for you,’ he said, pulling a tiny glass medicine vial from his pocket. It was filled with white powder. He put it in her hand. ‘Peace offering.’
‘What is it?’ she asked cupping the vial in her palm.
‘Speed, very pure. You might need it over the next few days.’
She pocketed the thing and kissed him on the cheek.
‘Offer accepted,’ she said and went back to her office.
•
Anna had run for editor of The Tribe on a ticket backed by Students for a Democratic Society, but their support came with a price. Having delivered her the votes to take over the paper, the SDS acted as if they had won a beachhead in the Union Building and The Tribe’s offices became the de facto headquarters of their campus activism.
Anna had no real problem with that. As a founding member, she understood their desire to occupy ground in the middle of the university. It had been her idea to convert The Tribe into a journal of the New Left, so she could hardly object when they wanted to turn their principles into action. The SDS borrowed its tactics from the US anti-war movement and its philosophy from Tom Hayden, that movement’s most charismatic leader. Anna admired their revolutionary verve.
She used her first edition to republish Hayden’s ‘Agenda for a Generation’. The 1962 statement seemed to mimic the high-blown rhetoric of the preamble to the US Constitution: ‘We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit … Beneath the stagnation of those who have closed their minds to the future, is the pervading feeling that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well.’
The exhaustion of utopias … That was an idea Anna understood well. She had been raised by communist parents and spoon-fed The Party’s utopian ideals from her earliest days as a red-diaper baby. By her early teens in the Junior Eureka League, those beliefs were giving her bad indigestion. Eventually she spat them out completely and decided that the old left had destroyed itself by letting Stalinist murderers drag them around by the scruff of the neck. Her conclusions had threatened a serious rift with her father.
For years, as he rose higher in the ranks of the Australian Communist Party, Frank Rosen had patiently stated and restated his case for reforming it from within, but, as Anna’s understanding became more sophisticated, she grew more and more impatient with his arguments. World events made her case for her. Any foot-draggers who had not rejected the Soviets after Hungary, she told Frank, surely had no choice after the savage crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968.
Although it was not clear to Anna at the time, Frank Rosen had always been sympathetic to his daughter’s arguments. He was one of those leading the push for reform, but the CPA’s Stalinist faction fought them at every turn. Once Anna understood the role he was playing, she admired his determination, but she never forgave The Party for its downright hypocrisy. She warned Frank that no matter how hard the communists might try to reinvent themselves by recruiting from the vanguard of the anti-war movement they had nothing to offer idealistic young people.
But Anna never had the heart to tell him what she truly believed: that The Party was doomed to die a slow and ignominious death, and Frank Rosen with it. She wondered sadly if that was how she would one day have to sum up her father’s legacy. Perhaps silence was better? No, Frank would hate that. He would rather a fierce dialectical debate over his coffin than any sentimental nonsense.
Searching for alternative ways of thinking and organising, Anna found that Tom Hayden’s manifesto and his considered rhetoric best encapsulated the apathy and malaise that allowed bad things to happen unchallenged: ‘Feeling the press of complexity upon the emptiness of life, people are fearful of the thought that at any moment things might be thrust out of control. They fear change itself, since change might smash whatever invisible framework seems to hold back chaos for them now.’
As editor of The Tribe, Anna embraced what Hayden called the ‘synthesis of politics and culture’. She was using the paper to push the cultural boundaries on sex, gender, race and drugs. Sexual freedom was about a woman’s right to control her own body and naturally linked to the right to access contraception and abortion, personal freedoms constrained or suppressed by politics. She argued in forceful editorials that only political change would allow people to live freely.
Anna believed there was a broad but hidden consensus for change, and she opened up her pages for uncensored discussions—of homosexuality, of the emergence of the Black Power Movement among young Aboriginal people, and of a broader critique of Australian racism. She published consumer reviews of LSD tabs and buyers’ guides to the marijuana market. She created space for writers, poets, filmmakers and cinema reviewers—and on their behalf she openly challenged censorship laws. On these issues of personal politics, Anna gave The Tribe an edge it had never had, but, above all this, she made opposition to the Vietnam War the central theme of its coverage.
•
The following afternoon, Anna was in the middle of the heaving street protest outside the Commonwealth Offices in Martin Place. Over her shoulder she had slung a tape recorder, and in her right hand was a microphone that she waved as if it had magical powers to protect her. When she saw that the police had removed their numbered badges she knew things would get rough.
At 5.15 pm the protesters linked arms and surrounded the prime minister’s waiting limousine. Someone grabbed Anna’s arm and tried to draw her in, but she pulled away, sure this provocation would bring a swift response. Moments later, a flying wedge of police charged from the building’s entrance. The linked students ran towards them, and Anna found herself caught between the two groups of rushing bodies. Before she could react, she was roughly pulled out to one side. Stumbling backwards, she turned and saw Pierre.
‘Stay on your feet,’ he yelled and hauled her behind a column of the building. They braced themselves against the concrete, facing one another.
‘This’ll be ugly.’ But there was something eager in his expression, exhilarated.
‘Where’s Dave?’
Pierre pointed. ‘There!’
Dave Blatch was crouched next to another photographer in the lee of the column on the other side of the building as tumbling waves of people broke around it. In the space between the office and the black limo, a police line pressed forwards, tightly packed and flailing their batons at any human target. Then the ranks of protesters broke. A melee erupted, a battle for the space around the official vehicle. Students threw themselves onto the bonnet and banged at the windows.
As police tore demonstrators off the limousine, Anna watched Blatch capture the violent action in a sequence of shots. Isolated protesters were knocked to the ground and pummelled with billy clubs, others were rocking the limo from side to side. Those the police managed to cut out from the herd were dragged away and thrown into the back of paddy wagons. A young, red-faced man with long blond hair, sticky with blood, ran at the police screaming: ‘You cowardly cunts!’
A group of police charged the fellow, knocked him over and beat him until a young woman rushed over.
‘Don’t hurt him,’ she cried. ‘He’s bleeding.’
Anna watched as a constable, no older than the young woman, thrust her hard against a tree trunk. She slid down onto her bum, barely conscious. Prisoners jumped around inside a locked paddy wagon, screaming slogans, and it began to rock wildly. Other police dragged battered, limp bodies along the ground by arms or hair. Gradually the police got the upper hand and gained control of the space around the vehicle. Anna heard shouts behind her; she saw the doors of the Commonwealth Offices open and there was the prime minister, standing grim-faced in the doorway, transfixed by the chaos in front of him.
‘It’s him!’ she shouted to Pierre, who stumbled across the gap to tell Blatch. The photographer spun around, snapping shot after shot as the prime minister was rushed out in a phalanx of police and bodyguards. Peering around the column, Anna and the prime minister were face to face for a moment. Somehow she caught his attention and he stared at her with a puzzled intensity she would later describe as lascivious.
Anna felt a dark thrill, part righteous, part malicious. She wished him no actual harm, but she was proud of her own role in making the prime minister experience chaos and directly confronting him with the consequences of his decisions.
Then he was inside the limo, and—as protesters swarmed around it, screaming and beating on the windows—he was driven away through the chanting mob: ‘End conscription! End conscription now!’
They found out the next day that the former fighter pilot had refused to be snuck out the back; a Blatch snapshot caught the fixed smile on his scarred face as he salvaged a public relations victory: one man refusing to bow to an angry, disrespectful mob.
As Anna watched the PM’s escape, two students on the edge of the crowd threw down test tubes and crushed them with their heels. She quickly caught an acrid stench and her eyes began to burn. Whatever the gas was, she knew it was a stupid and dangerous escalation. People panicked, pushing each other aside to get away, and as it drifted out over the blue cordon and the police sniffed it in the air, they began beating their targets with renewed ferocity.
With the rest of the cabinet ministers still stuck inside the Government Offices, the police were desperate to clear the streets for the convoy of waiting Comcars. Now the prime minister was secure, the confrontation degenerated into a free-for-all in which press credentials counted for nothing. A Herald journalist was knocked down, his arm fractured, his spectacles shattered. Tape recorders and microphones were ripped from the hands of reporters.
Crouched low behind her column, Anna saw a cop snatch the camera from the hands of the photographer working alongside Dave Blatch. He smashed it repeatedly on the pavement and was about to lunge at Blatch’s Nikon when Pierre intervened, grappling with the rogue copper in an ugly, twisting dance.
Blatch managed to scurry away and Anna pulled him down next to her. Together they watched Pierre disappear into a knot of blue uniforms, shouting all the while that he was a journalist.
•
It was still dark when Anna drove into the empty university the next morning; The Tribe would be printed that day for distribution overnight. She parked at the Union Building, used her master key to get through the security entrance and climbed two flights of stairs to a pair of large orange doors, across which had been painted in swirling, psychedelic lettering The Tribe. Anna unlocked the door and stepped inside the empty newsroom. She switched on the low-hanging fluorescents and the familiar tantalising scene flickered in front of her: dormant typewriters and telephones, piles of copy paper, newspaper archives, tattered armchairs and the ping-pong table, one bat resting aslant a ball. On every other flat surface, ashtrays overflowed with crushed cigarettes and the nubs of joints, so recently smoked that the sweet resinous stench of dope hung in the air.
The walls were haphazardly decorated with political posters. Her own contribution was the framed front page of the June 1968 edition of The Black Dwarf with its defiant headline: WE SHALL FIGHT, WE WILL WIN, PARIS, LONDON, ROME, BERLIN. Tariq Ali himself had signed it and sent it to her as a gesture of solidarity.
Since she became editor, Anna had made sure to get here before the sun every second Thursday, which required both discipline and sobriety, neither of which came easily to her. It was her job to produce and distribute twelve thousand copies of the student paper every fortnight and she took the job more seriously than anyone who knew her might have predicted.
Anna made tea and toast in the kitchenette, careful to avoid contact with the petri-dish experiments being conducted in unwashed mugs and bowls. Things had clearly gotten out of hand again and she made a mental note to get a bit fascist about it at the next meeting.
Balancing her mug in one hand and heavily Vegemited toast in the other, she made her way over to the long, sloping table where each page would be roughly pasted up. She was pleased to see that the typeset galleys had come in on time. They included copy for each of the news stories, articles and poems, printed up in sixteen-inch lengths. The headlines were in too, all sized for the page and ready to be pasted into the final layout. Stacked in separate piles were the cropped photos, the artwork and the ads.
Anna’s task now was to go through ‘the book’, with its scaled-down versions of each page, so as to make sure the subs had got it right and it was delivered to the compositors’ room at Quality Press. It had to be there by midday to meet the deadline for the presses to roll that night.
Anna picked up the large photo she had chosen for the front page and examined it again. A young man, his teeth gritted in a rictus of pain, was being bent backwards by a police sergeant. The cop was a burly, middle-aged man with cropped white hair; his victim a nice-looking boy, neatly groomed and conservatively dressed. The cop’s left hand gripped the boy’s throat, thumb and forefinger tightening around his larynx. The boy’s eyes were shut, the sergeant’s hat was tipped drunkenly forwards, his own eyes half-closed and his mouth very close to the boy’s ear. Such tender violence, she thought and, looking closer at the photo, she imagined the cop whispering something in the boy’s ear: ‘I’m gonna fuck you, son … I’m gonna fuck you hard.’
The latent sexuality in this male-on-male assault seemed so flagrant that she wondered again if she should have referred to it in the headline, as Pierre Villiers had demanded. Pierre had written a vivid firsthand account of the clash and was so incensed by the violence of the state apparatus that he wanted the photo to carry an equally provocative banner: FUCKED BY THE PIGS!
Anna smiled. Of course Pierre would want that, the bloody Trot. His general view—And fuck the university establishment too; if they fuck with us, we’ll fuck them right back!—was a sentiment he would repeat often and loudly at editorial meetings. It was not that she disagreed with him—the vice chancellor and his cronies were conservative prigs—but she was much more of a pragmatist than Pierre. Her main goal was to keep the paper going. A shutdown, as a result of flouting censorship laws, would be disastrous.
She had moved The Tribe to the forefront of the anti-war movement at a time when the conscription regime was being progressively hardened, when the military-industrial complex was calling the shots and when the war showed no signs of slowing. She knew they had to play a long game, not a brief and glorious charge at the ramparts, and she laid her headline over the picture: POLITICAL PANIC EDITION.
She thought it worked well enough. Beneath the large photo, she arranged the second smaller strap- and by-line:
THE BATTLE OF MARTIN PLACE
Witnessed by Pierre Villiers
That should keep her star reporter happy. He might be a Trot, but he never rejected the bourgeois conceit of recognition.
She glanced at the poster Pierre had stuck high on the wall. Leon Trotsky, the man himself, stared out benignly across the newsroom, masquerading as a cool hipster with a wild mop of flyaway hair, wire-rimmed glasses and chin beard. Pierre’s hero hadn’t exactly shunned recognition either, but the old Bolshevik had learned the hard lesson about the futility of popularity without power.
After biting into her drooping toast, Anna wiped a smear of Vegemite from her chin, licked it from her fingers, and moved on to the inside pages where there were more strong pictures of police brutality. Filling much of page three was Dave Blatch’s startling picture of the prime minister in motion, the faces of his bodyguards registering their anxiety that this could all go terribly wrong. The headline said it all: POLICE STATE ON THE RUN.
She arranged the RESISTANCE AND REPRESSION headline across the top of pages four and five, and added a shot of her Trotskyite reporter being hauled away by police. Just as she had feared, Pierre had been one of the thirty protesters arrested. He faced the ubiquitous charges of resisting arrest and assaulting police. Pierre had not been bailed out until Thursday morning, but he had managed to hold onto a small notebook and pencil and had spent much of the night in the lock-up compiling his account of the action.
Eventually Anna stepped back from the pages to look at her handiwork, laid out on the slanting desk. She sipped her lukewarm tea and nodded with satisfaction. Then she moved on to the rest of the paper.