April 30 is the 20th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War and the reunification of Vietnam. The war and the fight against it were important influences on world politics at the time and continue to affect attitudes and ideas today. In coming weeks, we hope to present a number of features on the antiwar movement in Australia.
CONNIE FRAZER was not involved in politics prior to the antiwar movement. We present here her account of the late '60s and early '70s in Adelaide, abridged from an oral history project conducted by MARG McHUGH. After the war, Connie Frazer remained politically involved; she is still an activist in the women's movement and in the Democratic Socialist Party.
I really was caught up in being a housewife then. I was aware of the war in Vietnam going on, because by then we had TV, but there'd been so many little wars here, there and everywhere, and there was no scare about the bomb at that time. I didn't really take much notice: "Oh yeah, war in Vietnam". I hardly knew where Vietnam was.
Then one day I was going shopping in the city and I'm crossing over King William Street to Rundle Street, as it was then, and thinking about what I'd got to buy, and I saw this news placard. All it had written on it was "Conscription!", and it just pulled me up. I felt, "I've spent 16 years trying to teach my son that war's a bad thing, and now they're talking about taking him away and putting him in the army". It just sort of rose up inside me. I thought, "No way, no. I'm not going to let them take him."
It really jolted me out of the way I was living. My husband being a boiler maker, he used to get the union paper and I always used to read it, because I always read everything that came into the house, and of course they started talking about the marches against the war. I used to think, "I should be joining in that". And I thought, "Well, no I couldn't, I'd be too scared" — there might be trouble.
And I had this crazy idea — I don't know where I got it from, probably something I read — that when you were in amongst a lot of people, you sort of lost your individuality, became part of a crowd mind. I think I was scared of that too, and the fact that I hadn't really left my home for quite a while.
It went on and on, and the pictures on the TV got worse. Then they started calling young men up. Although I knew Doug was under the age, he started getting roused by all this and started wearing his moratorium badge. We had a letter from his school one day from his teacher to say that Douglas wasn't allowed to wear this in school and had cheeked the teacher back when he was told to take it off. He'd already got into trouble with wearing his hair, not that long, but longer than most.
My husband and I both agreed that he should be able to wear it if he liked. So I wrote a letter back saying that we agreed with him, that we were against the war too. Apparently he'd told one particular teacher who wore an RSL badge that he didn't see why, if he could wear his RSL badge, Douglas couldn't wear his moratorium badge, and of course that was the trouble. He got a bad report that year, and I'm sure it was only because of this, because he usually got good ones, and he got good ones afterwards.
One day all the students were asked not to go to school that day and to march in the moratorium, — and all the students at university, and Doug came home and announced that he was going to march, and I said, "Well I'm going too".
He was quite shocked that his father wasn't going. When he was in the navy, they called in — I don't know which town in South Africa — and his father caused a riot there by giving a seat to a black woman and getting punched by a white for doing it. A pregnant black woman — very pregnant — and as he said, he was always taught by his mother that you should get up and give a pregnant woman a seat and he saw no difference between black and white. This bloke hit him, and of course he hit back and that caused a riot. He was put in jail for seven days, and then he was told never to come back to South Africa again.
So of course Douglas knew this about his father and he naturally thought that he would be in the moratorium. I suppose it was also because he was scared of losing his job; he explained later that, because he was so quick tempered, he thought he might have caused trouble.
I announced that I was going, and then I thought, "Oh, what have I said?". There was talk about this particular march, that there was some right-wing fascist type people and they had announced that they were going to disrupt the march. I thought, "Oh gee, what am I getting into?".
I still had this stupid way of thinking. Well, it wasn't really stupid because we weren't that well off, and I couldn't afford to lose a good coat. I thought, "If I wear my old coat, it won't matter if I get blood on it, but on the other hand perhaps one should wear one's good coat to show all these people it's not a lot of rat bags against the war". I can't really remember which one I wore now. I'm inclined to think I wore my old one because I was sure there was going to be blood.
I was a bit worried too, because it wasn't that long after my cancer operation. I had a badly swollen arm from it, and if it got knocked — I was a bit scared of that too.
I went and nothing happened. I marched with some women who were in an organisation called "Save Our Sons", and they had three wooden banners. One said "Save", one said "Our" and one said "Sons", so that three people marching together said, "Save Our Sons" — they didn't have to have a big banner. At various times I marched with "Save" and "Our" and "Sons", but I never joined in them, though they tried to get me to join. I didn't want to be that involved.
However, I did go to one or two meetings in support of the draft resisters. One of the Quakers' houses was hiding a lot of them. One particular time in a little union hall in the city, all the news was about this particular bloke from Adelaide who'd vanished, who'd burnt his draft card and was hiding somewhere. I remember turning to a young man sitting next to me while we were waiting for the meeting to begin, I was talking about it, and I said, "I hope they don't catch him", and he said, "Well, don't say anything, but that's me".
I did start handing out leaflets about draft resisters. They used to burn their cards in Elder Park. I can remember one older man coming up to me, and when I handed him a leaflet, looking at it and screwing it up in a ball and throwing it down in front of me. I picked it up and said something rude.
There was one particular moratorium — probably the first, I'm not sure — where one of the speakers was a black woman from South Africa. She had come to ask the people who were demonstrating at the moratorium to go along to the rugby football ground, because the South African rugby footballers were out here and of course everybody was protesting against them. With two of my other friends, we all decided to go along.
Of course it was packed. What got me was everybody was paying money to go in to demonstrate. Most of the people weren't demonstrating; they were just shouting encouragement at the people who were running on the pitch and disrupting. I thought, "Gee, in a way they're supporting it financially", and I refused to go in and pay the money. Then I thought, "Well I am stupid". I was left out there at the front of the football ground, and I could hear them all inside shouting, and I'm just stuck there and it was freezing cold.
The bloke that was organising it happened to come out, and I was talking to him about it, and he said, "Well you might get in presently, because after a while they stop taking money and you can get in for nothing". So I got in finally. I'm joining in for a while, and I was amazed at the number of people who were more concerned about harassing the police than the footballers. Obviously the police were not well liked. And this wasn't all young people — it was a lot of older people too.
Then the footballers decided to pack it in because they weren't getting anywhere with their game. The rumour was they were supposed to be going to some sort of a banquet at, I think it was, the Unley Town Hall. Of course everyone was told, "Go along to the Unley Town Hall; protest outside there". So along we went.
When we got there, the people who were organising the banquet had got wind of what we were going to do and they'd called the whole thing off, so everybody was told to go, and all the students were going back to the university. My two friends and I were sitting on this seat, absolutely tired, because this was after midnight and we'd been out since early morning protesting at one thing or another. We were sitting on this seat quietly, and all of a sudden there was this terrific noise.
I can't remember how many, but a lot of policemen on motorbikes came up, and then a lot of policemen on horseback, and they all sort of charged into the crowd, who were mostly students, who were all peacefully dispersing; there was no provocation at all for this. They pushed everybody towards us, who were sitting on our little seat there, and I said, "We'd better get out the way or we'll be crushed", and we would have been.
I thought to myself, "Gee, there ought to be something about that in the media", because it was after midnight in a suburb. Somebody must have heard. You couldn't help hearing all that noise — a riot in Unley. Of course it immediately infuriated all the students, and they started throwing smoke bombs and all sorts of things, and we were all in the middle of it. Not a thing on any of the media — any of the papers, TV, radio or anything — and I thought, "Oh, that shows".
You see, when I marched in these moratoriums, a lot of the young people, I remember as we passed the Advertiser, they used to shout out, "Smash the capitalist press". And I used to sort of tut-tut to the person next to me and say, "We're not here for that — we're here to stop the war". But I gradually came to realise that there was something in what they said. It was like that happening.
Then there was the event when again it was rumoured that there was going to be trouble on this particular day. When we got there all the police on horses were lined up with their batons and everything, and I thought, "Oh dear, it doesn't look too good, does it?"
We started off, and when we got as far as Parliament House, the police said, "Look, you're not to go any further — you'll have to stop. You're to stop and disperse." The bloke that was leading the march told all the demonstrators to put their banners in the middle of the road and we would set fire to them, that we weren't going to stop protesting.
So there's everybody throwing their banners into this fire, including my "Save Our Sons" people and all their banners, they were really nice ones, and they lost their banners in a moment like that, and I thought, "What a shame — just because he's told everybody to do that". Then the police started putting the front rows into paddy wagons. I'd told Douglas, "Don't go to the front of the march, because if there's any trouble you're the first ones to be arrested", and of course he was arrested.
I was further back. I saw a policeman — a horse's hoof coming towards me. I thought it was time I wasn't here. A policeman grabbed my arm — not my bad arm, thank goodness — and that was quite sore. Then there was the tear gas bomb. Nobody knew who threw that, but there was all this tear gas and my eyes started streaming. I was rubbing them, and some young girl said, "Don't rub them, you'll make them worse". Then when I saw this horse's hoof coming towards me, I thought, "I'm going to get out of this". I'm afraid I wasn't very brave. It seemed to me that discretion was the better part of valour.
So I left the march and stood on the street opposite watching all this fighting and people being put in paddy wagons and taken away. There was a whole lot of older school kids: it was about the time when kids left school, and they were all standing there watching and saying, "Oh, is this happening in Adelaide!".
I thought, "I shouldn't have left it; I should go back again", and I thought, "No. I'm not going back again into that". Then I walked half-heartedly up King William Street and I thought, "I should have gone and seen what happened to Doug", and then I thought, "I should even go to the police station, shouldn't I?" Whether it was my other self that isn't very brave or what, I don't know, but I was sort of being pushed away from it, and I went up to the bus stop and I got on the bus and came home, all the time feeling guilty and wondering what had happened to Doug.
I went home, and of course my husband came home and wanted to know where Doug was, and I said, "Well, obviously he's been arrested". So I rang the police station and this sergeant answered and said, "Oh yes, they're all here. You'll have to come and bail him out in the morning."
That night I didn't sleep very well. It was as though something was telling me that I really did the right thing because he had been getting involved in this political thing and I thought, "Well, if he's going to be serious about it, he might as well realise that it's not just a game — that the police aren't playing games. So actually it might be a good thing in a way for him to learn what it's like to be arrested." And then I thought, "Oh, that's terrible; how can I think like that?". So there was this going on in my mind all night, and I didn't sleep a wink.
I couldn't wait till the morning came and I could get down to that police station, all the time thinking, "Oh what I coward I was leaving that march". All the other mothers obviously had gone straight to the police station — they hadn't gone home.
I went into the police station and I had to show the bank book and all the particulars, and then these boys filed out. Of course the first thing that Doug said to me was, "Where were you?", and I felt terrible. He looked very bedraggled.
Apparently they ran out of cells because there were so many people arrested, and they'd put these seven schoolboys, including Doug, into this one tiny room. It was so small that they couldn't even lie down flat. They didn't have any bed or anything — they didn't even have a blanket, and it was very cold. They'd gone there in their summer things because it was warm in the day and it went cold at night. They didn't have anything to eat, not even a cup of tea, the whole time. This was from four o'clock.
I thought, "Well, that in a way is what I expect". Doug said he heard the person that led the march being beaten up, because he wasn't very far away in a cell. I wasn't going to do anything about it. Doug was very shook up about it all, particularly I felt at the way his mother had behaved.
We had some friends over that Sunday for tea, the usual sort of suburban people, a bloke and his wife. When I told them what Doug had told me, the mother said, "Oh, if that was my son I'd be contacting my MP about that". I thought, "Yes, I suppose I should". So I wrote a letter to Don Hopgood, who was my local MP then, and thought nothing of it. Then the next morning I'm in the kitchen and I put the radio on and I hear my letter being read out. Apparently he had read it out in parliament.
Later that day Don Hopgood phoned me to say that he had no sooner sat down than a reporter from the Advertiser, who was listening, wanted to know if he could interview this woman. Hopgood said that of course he'd have to ask the woman's permission first, so that was what he wanted. I said, "Well what do you think?"
"I'm trying to get some legislation pushed through about the way juvenile offenders are treated, so this could help. So if you would, I'd be quite pleased."
So I said OK and it might have been that night or the night after, a reporter came along with a photographer. I think Doug was having second thoughts about all this because it was getting near school leaving time and I think he thought he might not get a good report from the school about it all.
They started asking questions. Then they asked my husband what he thought, did he approve of what his son had done. I can't remember the exact wording, but he said, "Well I don't agree with so-and-so and so-and-so, but I do agree with him marching against the war", or something like that. Well, when it was in the paper next morning, including a photograph of me with Doug, it was reported as his father said he didn't agree with him. They'd chopped off all the second part of the sentence so it just looked as though he was against everything that had happened. I thought, "Well, that's the press for you".
There was another instance when it really hit me about the press. There was another moratorium, and by this time the Labor Party was coming out marching for it. There were these Maoists who, like lots of people, didn't think much of this. They didn't take part in the march this time, but they had set up a van with a lot of loudspeakers in Victoria Square where Whitlam was going to speak after the march, and out of these loudspeakers came nothing but loud boos.
When we got to Victoria Square, there were crowds and crowds there, and of course lots and lots of Labor Party people who were all cheering Whitlam, and I think [Don] Dunstan was there. When I saw it on TV that night, one of the commercial stations had taken a shot of Whitlam looking up at him, and they had screened out all the cheering, so all you could hear was boos. It looked as though he was in the middle of a completely hostile crowd, and I was absolutely flabbergasted. I said, "That's not true. It wasn't like that". Douglas said to me, "Oh Mum, you are naive". I said, "Yes I am aren't I?" So of course this altered my whole attitude.
Life went on, and Doug joined his Socialist Youth Alliance [former name of Resistance] and started going to the meetings. I talked to a lot of the people who were socialists. I remember coming home after the first moratorium when nothing happened — I wasn't hurt or anything, I didn't come home bleeding — and I remember looking out of the window and thinking, "I really feel as though for the first time in my life — or at least for a long, long time — I've really lived today". It was because I had been plucked out of my boring life I suppose as a housewife, into a different scene.
I was struck the same as so many people. So many people that took part in the Gulf War demonstrations who'd never been in a demonstration before all said exactly the same thing — "But they're such nice people". I really felt that they were nicer than usual. You didn't have to sort of feel, "I'd better watch my bag — someone might pinch it", and everybody was — was all one. There were no real divisions amongst us. It did make people nice — it made me nicer. Of course feeling that way, how could I not go in all the rest of them?