Student Action Australia's Continuing Attack

by Robert McDonald NUAUS

"Student Action" is the name which was originally given to a particular programme of student protests against the White Australia Policy.

These were organised in Melbourne in 1960. Since then "Student Action" has become a catch-phrase to describe a wide range of protest actions in all parts of Australia. These protests have concerned such issues as: the abolition of Capital Punishment, government neglect of Aborigines, South African apartheid. Civil Rights in America—and of course, the White Australia Policy and the harshness with which it is enforced.

Despite their wide variety, these protests—spread now over nearly five years—seem to me to have been linked together in a number of ways. They have been linked because all have derived from a fundamental concern with the problems and moral issues confronting society at large. They have been linked by their common basis in a rejection of the myth that the University is an ivory tower "far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife." They have been linked by the positive vision of the university as a vital focus for the life of the community and society from which it is inseparable. Thus it is that an underlying and unifying consciousness of social responsibility has linked all the differing student protests in Australia—and justifies our referring to them all, simply, as "Student Action."

If this basic unity is its first distinctive feature, then the second distinctive feature of "Student Action" is that it has been, very, distinctly, a phenomenon of the Sixties. In this, it seems to me, our decade is in striking and healthy contrast to the preceding fifties. The years from 1950 to 1959 were, it is generally agreed, the most inactive, apathetic and self-centred that Australian Universities have known.

The following brief description of the more important occasions on which this spirit of "Student Action" has been manifested will, I hope, be of interest as an expansion of the above rather bare facts.

In 1960, I was one of over 3000 freshmen at the University of Sydney—and I remember very vividly my first experience of this "new spirit." It was in the second week of the academic year, and the spur to action was provided by the news, on March 21, of the massacre which had taken place at Sharpeville, in South Africa. The following day a lunch hour meeting, attended by nearly 3000 students, decided—following speeches by student leaders and staff members—to hold a mass demonstration in the centre of the city during the 4.30pm to 5.30pm rush-hour that afternoon.

More than 2000 students took part, and it was by far the largest demonstration that Sydney had seen for more than ten years. On the same day, similar demonstrations were held in a number of other cities.

Later in 1960, in October and November, the students took the holding of national elections as the opportunity to spearhead a tightly-organised non-violent campaign against the "White Australia" policy. This campaign was officially known as "Student Action." It involved, amongst other things, students attending every political meeting and rally throughout the election campaign, simply in order to ask questions, and to show up as badly as possible the reactionary and morally indefensible way in which the White Australia policy is supported by both of Australia's major political parties.

The campaign received nationwide, and even international publicity. As a result of it, there are now firmly established Immigration Reform Associations in all Australian States.

They are dedicated to removing the White Australia policy— and the support for them is growing every year.

Because of the kind of continuing, steady attack on the White Australia policy described above, we have now reached the situation in Australia where the majority of informed opinion (whether personally "for" or "against" the Policy) is willing to concede that the breaking down of it is now inevitable and only a matter of time. For this it is not unfair. I think, to give considerable credit to the efforts of university students—the students of the sixties. The extent of their own commitment against the policy was revealed in a special survey organised by NUAUS during 1963. In this, it was found that 78 per cent of all Australian students are in favour of the change—whilst at Melbourne University the majority was a soaring 92 per cent.

Since 1960, a number of the student protests have concerned specific cases in which the Government's Immigration Policy has been applied with unnecessarily harsh severity. Thus in 1961, the government attempted to deport three Malayan-born pearl divers who had been living in Australia for nearly 14 years. So strong were the protests from friends and neighbours of the divers, and from students in Sydney and Melbourne, that the deportation order was at last withdrawn. Less successful, however, were our protests over the secret deportation to Communist China of our illegal immigrant from Hong Kong, called [unclear: William] Wong.

Other cases in which students have taken action against ruling of the Immigration Department have involved three Portuguese seamen who deserted their [unclear: shif] and were almost delivered up [unclear: t] the "merciful justice" of the [unclear: Sals] zar dictatorship; and move recently, very hard-fought efforts prevent the deportation of [unclear: tiny] Fijian-Indian girl named [unclear: Naney] Prasad.

Since the time of Sharpeville, in 1960, the feeling against Apartheid has been uniformly strong throughout our universities, and action has resulted a number of time.

Late in 1963, an all-white South African cricket team toured Australia and were greeted by picketing and demonstration in most cities. During the course of these students distributed thousand of copies of a special news sheet that NUAUS produced, setting out the facts of the South African situation.

Apart from the above-mentioned problems, the spirit of "Students Action" has found expression over a number of purely internal Australian issues. A typical one [unclear: is] that of Capital Punishment. [unclear: Ir] September, 1962, the Government of the State of Victoria declared that it would hang an insane murderer, Robert Peter Tait. For nearly two months, the students of Melbourne and Sydney conducted a full-scale campaign against this proposed hanging. For weeks a 24-hour-a-day vigil was maintained by students carrying placards on the steps of the Victorian Parliament Building.

Marches were organised; thousands of signatures to a petition were collected, and over a hundred thousand leaflets were distributed page 9the height of this campaign, [unclear: s] Premier of Victoria had to be [unclear: rescued] from a crowd of over a thousand chanting, booing students who surrounded his car, let [unclear: own] the tyres, and refused to [unclear: ow] it to move.

With the backing of every major Australian newspaper and [unclear: numers] community leaders, these [unclear: protests], at the very least, were successful.

That's sentence was changed to one of life imprisonment—and it [unclear: ow] seems certain that nobody will ever again be hanged in Victoria.

It was also in 1962, in Melbourne, at students launched an Education campaign which spread [unclear: rapidity] to other cities, and in a [unclear: some] what altered form continues today [unclear: s] an important means of attracting public attention, and government money, to the pressing needs our educational system.

One example of the methods [unclear: ow] being used, in this, was the [unclear: l-night] sit-in staged in the [unclear: Bail]au Library by several hundred [unclear: udents] early in 1964, to protest [unclear: d] publicise the Library's appallingly inadequate facilities.

At about the same time as the Library sit-in, students from Sydney University staged a massive demonstration outside the USA Consulate, in the centre of downtown Sydney, in support of more decisive efforts to give full civil rights to Negroes. This demonstration included the burning of a 20-foot-high cross, and resulted in the arrest of nearly fifty students.—Reprinted from "Young Asia."