Sydney Push
Encyclopedia
Left-wing politics
In politics, Left, left-wing and leftist generally refer to support for social change to create a more egalitarian society...
intellectual sub-culture in Sydney
Sydney
Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...
from the late 1940s to the early '70s
1970s
File:1970s decade montage.png|From left, clockwise: US President Richard Nixon doing the V for Victory sign after his resignation from office after the Watergate scandal in 1974; Refugees aboard a US naval boat after the Fall of Saigon, leading to the end of the Vietnam War in 1975; The 1973 oil...
. Well known associates of the Push include Jim Baker
A. J. Baker (philosopher)
A. J. Baker is an Australian philosopher who is best known for systematising the realist philosophy of John Anderson.He studied under Anderson at Sydney University and has taught philosophy in Scotland, New Zealand, the United States and Australia. He was a prominent member of the Sydney...
, John Flaus
John Flaus
John Flaus is an Australian broadcaster, actor, voice talent, anarchist and raconteur. He was formerly a prominent film academic and theorist. He was born in Maroubra, Sydney....
, Harry Hooton
Harry Hooton
Henry Arthur Hooton of Sydney was an Australian poet and social commentator whose writing spanned the years 1930s-1961. He was described by a biographer as ahead of his time, or rather "of his time while the majority of progressive artists and thinkers in Australia lagged far behind"...
, Margaret Fink
Margaret Fink
Margaret Fink is a prominent Australian film producer noted for her important role in the revival of Australian cinema in the 1970s....
, Sasha Soldatow, Lex Banning
Lex Banning
Arthur Alexander Banning was an Australian lyric poet.Disabled from birth by cerebral palsy, he was unable to speak clearly or to write with a pen. "Yet he overcame his handicap to produce poems which were often hauntingly beautiful and frequently ironic, and gave to other, younger poets a strong...
, Eva Cox
Eva Cox
Eva Cox AO is an Austrian-born Australian writer, feminist, sociologist, social commentator, stirrer and activist. She has been an active advocate for creating more civil societies. She is a long-term member of Women's Electoral Lobby...
, Richard Appleton
Richard Appleton
Richard Appleton was an Australian poet, raconteur and editor who became editor-in-chief of the Australian Encyclopaedia and, in 1987, was co-editor with Alex Galloway of the posthumous Lex Banning poetry collection There Was a Crooked Man...
, Paddy McGuinness
Padraic McGuinness
Padraic Pearse "Paddy" McGuinness AO was an Australian journalist, activist, and commentator. He was notable for the evolution over his lifetime of his political beliefs...
, David Makinson
David Makinson
David Clement Makinson, D.Phil, , is an Australian mathematical logician living in London, England.- Career :Makinson began his studies at Sydney University in 1958 and was an associate of the Libertarian Society and Sydney Push...
, Germaine Greer
Germaine Greer
Germaine Greer is an Australian writer, academic, journalist and scholar of early modern English literature, widely regarded as one of the most significant feminist voices of the later 20th century....
, Clive James
Clive James
Clive James, AM is an Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet and memoirist, best known for his autobiographical series Unreliable Memoirs, for his chat shows and documentaries on British television and for his prolific journalism...
, Robert Hughes, Frank Moorhouse
Frank Moorhouse
Frank Moorhouse is an acclaimed Australian writer with a growing international reputation. He has won major Australian national prizes for the short story, the novel, the essay, and for script writing....
and Lillian Roxon
Lillian Roxon
Lillian Roxon was a noted Australian journalist and author, best known for Lillian Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia . Her niece Nicola Roxon, the Australian politician, is currently the federal Minister for Health....
. From 1961 to 1962, poet Les Murray
Les Murray (poet)
Leslie Allan Murray, AO , known as Les Murray, is an Australian poet, anthologist and critic. His career spans over forty years, and he has published nearly 30 volumes of poetry, as well as two verse novels and collections of his prose writings...
resided in Brian Jenkins's Push household at Glen Street, Milsons Point
Milsons Point, New South Wales
Milsons Point is a suburb on the lower North Shore of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. North Sydney is located 3 kilometres north of the Sydney central business district in the local government area of North Sydney Council....
, which became a mecca for associates visiting Sydney from Melbourne
Melbourne
Melbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...
and other cities.
The Push operated in a pub culture and comprised a broad range of manual workers, musician
Musician
A musician is an artist who plays a musical instrument. It may or may not be the person's profession. Musicians can be classified by their roles in performing music and writing music.Also....* A person who makes music a profession....
s, lawyer
Lawyer
A lawyer, according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person who is practicing law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain the stability of political...
s, criminals, journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
s and public servants as well as staff and students of Sydney University—predominantly though not exclusively in the Faculty of Arts. Rejection of conventional morality and authoritarianism formed their main common bond. From the mid-1960s, people from the New South Wales University of Technology (later renamed the University of New South Wales
University of New South Wales
The University of New South Wales , is a research-focused university based in Kensington, a suburb in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia...
) also became involved.
Academic contributors
Amongst the key intellectual figures in Push debates were philosophers David J. Ivison, George MolnarGeorge Molnar (philosopher)
George Molnar was a Hungarian-born philosopher whose principal area of interest was metaphysics, and who worked mainly at the Philosophy Department at the University of Sydney. In the 1950s and 1960s he was a prominent member of the university's Libertarian Society and associate of the Sydney Push...
, Roelof Smilde, Darcy Waters and Jim Baker, as recorded in Baker's memoir Sydney Libertarians and the Push, published in Libertarian Broadsheet in 1975. Other active people included psychologists Terry McMullen and Geoff Whiteman, educationist David Ferraro, June Wilson, Les Hiatt, Ian Bedford, Ken Maddock and Alan Olding, among many others listed in the article. An understanding of libertarian values and social theory can be obtained from their publications, a few of which are available online. There are also interesting critical articles in the Arts Society's annual journal Arna
Arna (publication)
Arna is an annual journal published by the University of Sydney Arts Students Society. Originally named The Arts Journal of the University of Sydney, it was published regularly between 1918 and 1974 under the auspices of the Faculty of Arts. After a hiatus of 34 years, publication recommenced in 2008...
by Baker and Molnar whose essay on Zamyatin's We concluded:
. . . Orwell spins out to its last conclusion the illusion that the fate of freedom depends mainly on the colour of the ruling party. "We", precisely because it presents its rebels as apolitical, as individualists if you wish, cuts through this falsehood. Zamyatin's superior social insight, although presented and presumably gained artistically and not by way of scientific analysis, consists first in his firm rejection of the rationality or finality of history and, second, in his recognition that anarchic protest against those in power, not the capture of power, is at the core of freedom.
A representative collection of Sydney Libertarian essays was published by L. R. Hiatt in The Sydney Line, printed in 1963 by the Hellenic Herald, whose proprietor Nestor Grivas was a prominent non-academic Push personality and champion of sexual freedom.
John Anderson
John Anderson (philosopher)
John Anderson was a Scottish-born Australian philosopher who occupied the post of Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University in the years 1927-1958. He founded the empirical brand of philosophy known as Australian realism...
, the Scottish
Scotland
Scotland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the...
-born Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University from 1927 until his retirement in 1958, was seminal in the formation of Sydney Libertarianism of which, however, he vigorously disapproved. In 1951, a group of his disciples, led by Jim Baker, had formed a proactive faction which split Anderson's Free Thought Society. They asserted that it was natural and desirable for critical thought to engender commensurate action, the principle on which the Libertarian Society was launched.
Social and cultural life
The intellectual life of the Libertarians was mainly pursued in and around the university, including neighbouring pubs like May's, the Forest Lodge and the British Lion. On evenings and weekends, it overflowed into the much larger 'downtown' social milieu known as the Push, which flourished at a succession of pubs and other places of refreshment including the Tudor, Lincoln, Lorenzini's Wine Bar and Repin's Coffee Shop; however, of greatest notoriety, was the Royal George Hotel in Sussex Street, which Clive James described in his Unreliable Memoirs:The Royal George was the headquarters of the Downtown Push, usually known as just the Push.... As well as the Libertarians and the aesthetes there were the small-time gamblers, traditional jazz fans and the homosexual radio repair men who had science fictionScience fictionScience fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
as a religion. The back room had tables and chairs. If you stuck your head through the door of the back room you came face to face with the Push. The noise, the smoke and the heterogeneity of physiognomyPhysiognomyPhysiognomy is the assessment of a person's character or personality from their outer appearance, especially the face...
were too much to take in. It looked like a cartoon on which HogarthWilliam HogarthWilliam Hogarth was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects"...
, DaumierHonoré DaumierHonoré Daumier was a French printmaker, caricaturist, painter, and sculptor, whose many works offer commentary on social and political life in France in the 19th century....
and George GroszGeorge GroszGeorg Ehrenfried Groß was a German artist known especially for his savagely caricatural drawings of Berlin life in the 1920s...
had all worked simultaneously, fighting for supremacy.
Since the mid-1950s, before extended pub hours replaced 6 o'clock closing
Six o'clock swill
The six o'clock swill was an Australian and New Zealand slang term for the last-minute rush to buy drinks at a hotel bar before it closed. During a significant part of the 20th century, most Australian and New Zealand hotels shut their public bars at 6 p.m. A culture developed of heavy drinking...
, Push night-life commonly consisted of a meal at an inexpensive restaurant such as the Athenian or Hellenic Club ("the Greeks") or La Veneziana ("the Italians") followed by parties held most nights of the week at private residences. These were very lively occasions with singing of folksongs and bawdy ditties such as 'Professor John Glaister' and many others. Accompaniments were provided by accomplished guitarists and lutenists (Ian McDougall, John Earls, Terry Driscoll, Don Ayrton, Brian Mooney, Don Lee, Beth Schurr, Bill Berry
Bill Berry (folk singer)
The Australian folk singer and songwriter Bill Berry was born in Redcliffe, Queensland. He began singing at an early age, and his sister Marie was a singer with the National Opera Company. He joined the communist Eureka Youth League An associate of the Sydney Push in the 1950s and early 1960s, he...
, Marian Henderson and others). Don Henderson
Don Henderson (folk singer)
Don Henderson was an Australian folk singer and songwriter. His songs including The Basic Wage Dream, Boonaroo and Put a Light in Every Country Window are widely played and sung in the folk music tradition.-External links:* .*...
, Declan Affley
Declan Affley
Declan Affley was an Australian folk singer and musician. He was born in Cardiff, Wales, and became a seaman, jumping ship in Australia in 1959.- Folk singer and musician :...
and Martyn Wyndham-Read
Martyn Wyndham-Read
Martyn Wyndham-Read is an English folk singer, notable as a collector and singer of Australian folk songs. He lived and worked in Australia from 1960 to 1967 and has been a regular visitor to the country since then....
are three well-known artists who were influenced by their time in the Push.
Protest and activism
Sydney Libertarianism adopted an attitude of permanent protest recognisable in the sociological theories of Max NomadMax Nomad
Max Nomad is the pseudonym of Austrian author and educator Max Nacht. In his youth he had espoused militant anarchism and in the 1920s he was a follower of the Bolshevik Revolution...
, Vilfredo Pareto
Vilfredo Pareto
Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto , born Wilfried Fritz Pareto, was an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist and philosopher. He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices....
and Robert Michels
Robert Michels
Robert Michels was a German sociologist who wrote on the political behavior of intellectual elites and contributed to elite theory...
, which predicted the inevitability of elites and the futility of revolutions. They used phrases such as "anarchism without ends," "non-utopian anarchism," and "permanent protest" to describe their activities and theories. Others labelled them as the 'futilitarians'. An early Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
quotation, used by Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich was an Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry...
as the motto for his The Sexual Revolution, was adopted as a motto, viz:
"Since it is not for us to create a plan for the future that will hold for all time, all the more surely what we contemporaries have to do is the uncompromising critical evaluation of all that exists, uncompromising in the sense that our criticism fears neither its own results nor the conflict with the powers that be."
Nevertheless, Push associates regularly assisted in organising and turning out for street demonstrations, e.g., against South African apartheid and in support of victims of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre
Sharpeville massacre
The Sharpeville Massacre occurred on 21 March 1960, at the police station in the South African township of Sharpeville in the Transvaal . After a day of demonstrations, at which a crowd of black protesters far outnumbered the police, the South African police opened fire on the crowd, killing 69...
; against the initial refusal of immigration minister Alexander Downer, Sr.
Alexander Downer, Sr.
Sir Alexander Russell Downer KBE , Australian politician generally known as Alec Downer, was born in Adelaide, a part of the Downer family and son of John Downer, who was a former Premier of South Australia and member of the Australian Senate.He was educated at Geelong Grammar School and at Oxford...
to grant political asylum to three Portuguese merchant seamen who jumped ship in Darwin; and against Australia's participation in the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
.
In line with the Libertarians' rejection of conventional political models, electoral activism was foreign to the Push, save to urge non-voting and informal voting. At the election after prime minister Harold Holt
Harold Holt
Harold Edward Holt, CH was an Australian politician and the 17th Prime Minister of Australia.His term as Prime Minister was brought to an early and dramatic end in December 1967 when he disappeared while swimming at Cheviot Beach near Portsea, Victoria, and was presumed drowned.Holt spent 32 years...
failed to return from a swim, artist and film-maker David Perry
David Perry (Australian filmmaker)
David Perry is an Australian photographer and filmmaker, based in Sydney. During work on the production of The Theatre of Cruelty in Sydney, July 1965, he joined Albie Thoms, Aggy Read and others in establishing Ubu Films—named after Alfred Jarry's play Ubu Roi—the precursor of the Sydney...
produced a highly acclaimed poster featuring a stylised pig wearing a bow tie. Its message was Whoever you vote for, a politician always gets in!
Events in the news
The most dramatic public event to impinge on the Push was the mysterious Bogle-Chandler caseBogle-Chandler case
The Bogle-Chandler case refers to the mysterious deaths of Dr Gilbert Stanley Bogle and Mrs Margaret Olive Chandler née Morphett on the banks of the Lane Cove River in Sydney, Australia on January 1, 1963. The case became celebrated because of the circumstances in which the bodies were found and...
of 1963 and its sequel, a heavily publicised inquest
Inquest
Inquests in England and Wales are held into sudden and unexplained deaths and also into the circumstances of discovery of a certain class of valuable artefacts known as "treasure trove"...
in which several Push personalities gave evidence. Another memorable incident involved the discovery of what news media recognised as a dismembered murder victim in an unlocked trunk at the foot of a city train-station escalator. This was later revealed to be a collection of body parts, the property of a doctor, found and used in a macabre practical joke by a notorious confidence trickster, the late Ashleigh Sellors (known in the Push as 'Flash Ash').
Dispersal after 1964
The year 1964 saw the gradual demise of the Royal George Hotel as the prime focal venue of the Sydney Push which dispersed its bustling social life to other traditional venues like the Newcastle, Orient and Port Jackson hotels in The RocksThe Rocks, New South Wales
The Rocks is an urban locality, tourist precinct and historic area of Sydney's city centre, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. It is located on the southern shore of Sydney Harbour, immediately north-west of the Sydney central business district...
near Circular Quay and the Rose, Crown and Thistle at Paddington
Paddington
Paddington is a district within the City of Westminster, in central London, England. Formerly a metropolitan borough, it was integrated with Westminster and Greater London in 1965...
, but also to alternative central-city pubs including the United States and Edinburgh Castle. By the early 1970s, the Criterion Hotel on the corner of Liverpool and Sussex Streets had become the watering hole of the last of the Push diehards. Meanwhile, Push hangers-on and 'tourists', now numbering hundreds, patronised pubs like the Four-in-Hand (Paddington) and the Forth and Clyde at Balmain, but these were venues of social entertainment, lacking the intellectual camaraderie, the informal folksong and the bohemian flavour of the 'George'.
The retired education professor Alan Barcan has published a personal account of his view of activism at Sydney University during the 1960s. Though he was not an eyewitness of Push life, he provides some relevant insights into how student life became infected by Push doctrines of freedom and rebellion, to a point at which the social movement was superseded and its leading personalities were dispersed or replaced with a new breed of social critics. As described by Barcan, this period saw the emergence of mainstream talents like poets Les Murray
Les Murray (poet)
Leslie Allan Murray, AO , known as Les Murray, is an Australian poet, anthologist and critic. His career spans over forty years, and he has published nearly 30 volumes of poetry, as well as two verse novels and collections of his prose writings...
and Geoffrey Lehmann
Geoffrey lehmann
Geoffrey Lehmann is an Australian poet, children's writer, and tax lawyer. Lehmann grew up in McMahon's Point, Sydney, and attended high school at the Shore School in North Sydney. He graduated in Arts and Law from the University of Sydney in 1960 and 1963 respectively...
, journalists David Solomon, Mungo MacCallum
Mungo Wentworth MacCallum
Mungo Wentworth MacCallum is an Australian political journalist and commentator.He is the son of Mungo Ballardie MacCallum , and Diana Wentworth a great granddaughter of the Australian explorer and politician William Charles Wentworth...
(Jnr) and Laurie Oakes
Laurie Oakes
Laurie Oakes is an Australian political journalist, commentator, and media personality. Since 1966, he has worked in the Canberra Press Gallery, covering the Parliament of Australia and federal elections....
, Oz magazine
Oz (magazine)
Oz was first published as a satirical humour magazine between 1963 and 1969 in Sydney, Australia and, in its second and better known incarnation, became a "psychedelic hippy" magazine from 1967 to 1973 in London...
satirists Richard Neville
Richard Neville (writer)
Richard Neville is an Australian author and self-described "futurist", who came to fame as a co-editor of the counterculture magazine Oz in Australia and the United Kingdom in the 1960s and early 1970s...
, Richard Walsh
Richard Walsh
Richard Walsh was an Irish Fianna Fáil politician. He was first elected to Dáil Éireann as a Teachta Dála for the Mayo South constituency at the September 1927 general election...
and Martin Sharp
Martin Sharp
Martin Sharp is an Australian artist, underground cartoonist, songwriter and film-maker. Sharp has made contributions to Australian and international culture since the early 60s, and is hailed as Australia's foremost pop artist...
, and maverick writer Bob Ellis
Bob Ellis
Bob Ellis is an Australian writer, journalist, film-maker and political commentator. He was a student at the University of Sydney at the same time as other notable Australians including Clive James, Germaine Greer, Les Murray, John Bell, Ken Horler, and Mungo McCallum...
. These were people who did not actively embrace the Push life but were strongly influenced by it.
Push personalities who emigrated to the United Kingdom included Clive James
Clive James
Clive James, AM is an Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet and memoirist, best known for his autobiographical series Unreliable Memoirs, for his chat shows and documentaries on British television and for his prolific journalism...
, Paddy McGuinness
Padraic McGuinness
Padraic Pearse "Paddy" McGuinness AO was an Australian journalist, activist, and commentator. He was notable for the evolution over his lifetime of his political beliefs...
, Chester (Phillip Graham) and Ian Parker (pictured above) who returned to Sydney in the late 1970s and was knocked down and killed while drunk, in Dixon Street. For some reason, a false account was promulgated that he died in a London street. Paddy McGuinness returned to Australia in 1971, working as a film critic, Labor ministerial staffer, right-wing newspaper columnist and journal editor until his death in 2007. Folksinger John Earls went to Bolivia and former Tribune (Communist Party of Australia
Communist Party of Australia
The Communist Party of Australia was founded in 1920 and dissolved in 1991; it was succeeded by the Socialist Party of Australia, which then renamed itself, becoming the current Communist Party of Australia. The CPA achieved its greatest political strength in the 1940s and faced an attempted...
newspaper) cartoonist Harry Reade went to join Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba (and returned in 1971 at the same time as Paddy McGuinness). The disabled poet Lex Banning
Lex Banning
Arthur Alexander Banning was an Australian lyric poet.Disabled from birth by cerebral palsy, he was unable to speak clearly or to write with a pen. "Yet he overcame his handicap to produce poems which were often hauntingly beautiful and frequently ironic, and gave to other, younger poets a strong...
travelled to England and Greece in 1962-64 but returned and died in Sydney in 1965. The accomplished folksinger Don Ayrton departed to settle at Kuranda
Kuranda, Queensland
Kuranda is a town on the Atherton Tableland in Far North Queensland, Australia, it is 25 kilometres from Cairns, via the Kuranda Range road. It is surrounded by rainforest. At the 2006 census, Kuranda had a population of 1,611.-History:...
in Queensland where he committed suicide in 1982. A tragedy occurred as Paddy McGuinness was departing for Italy by ship in May 1963. The farewelling crowd included a young Push lady, Janne (or Jan) Millar, who fell to the concrete dock floor from a height and suffered fatal head injuries. A number of other tragic deaths occurred in this decade, including some from substance abuse
Substance abuse
A substance-related disorder is an umbrella term used to describe several different conditions associated with several different substances .A substance related disorder is a condition in which an individual uses or abuses a...
which was becoming a regular part of Sydney culture at the time.
Many young Push associates simply moved on to careers in the profession
Profession
A profession is a vocation founded upon specialized educational training, the purpose of which is to supply disinterested counsel and service to others, for a direct and definite compensation, wholly apart from expectation of other business gain....
s and academia
Academia
Academia is the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research.-Etymology:The word comes from the akademeia in ancient Greece. Outside the city walls of Athens, the gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning...
. A reunion organised by André Frankovits at the Royal George/Slip Inn in 2000 attracted over 100.
On the demise of the Push, Anne Coombs has stated: [. . .things began to change] in 1964, the year the Beatles came and brought into the open that new phenomenon: 'youth culture'. Citing this, Alan Barcan added "In advocating free love and opposition to authority, the Push and the Libertarians anticipated the new post-1968 morality. But the adoption of many of their ideas by society undermined their raison d'être".
External links
- The Push (Australia's Culture Portal)
- The Push and Critical Drinkers
- Essays on Sydney Libertarians and Anarchism
- Student activists at Sydney University 1960-1967: a problem of interpretation by Alan Barcan
- John Tranter: Review (1996) of Anne Coombs's book
- Tales of The Royal George
- A. Coombs, 'Sydney Push' in A Companion to Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand