Dot Tumney
I have no idea what triggered the mental processes that caused me to take up political activity in 1971 or why I have kept the habit to one degree or another ever since. I can, however, describe the circumstances the caused me to join the Socialist Youth Alliance [SYA, the name used by Resistance from 1970 to 1979] rather than something else.
On an initial exploratory visit I found the offices unintimidating, the dress requirements suitable and the people welcoming though a tad confused as to how I'd arrived there.
It was pure serendipity.
In 1971, I was 18, freshly escaped from a country town though still bunking with relatives and employed in a small photographic developing company. This establishment was in Collins Street in Melbourne and on an upper floor which afforded windows conveniently placed for staring down on and possibly yelling encouragement to Moratorium marchers. I no longer recall the subtleties of the thing, but one of my fellow employees presented me with a copy of Mao's little red book which for some reason never fathomed by anybody else had the address of SYA among the things written in it.
Had I taken action sooner I might have been in a position to enquire, but as it turns out I was working for CSR in the sugar refinery laboratory and living in the YWCA before I got around to investigating. The relatives hit their limit when I disappeared from the photo place one day to go to the job interview at CSR without telling anyone and thus precipitating minor panic. They arranged things with the YWCA and gave me the boot. First steps to freedom.
I also needed a more decisive shove. This was provided by happening across a very tall, skinny, dark-haired fellow looking unusual among the paper sellers at Flinders Street station waving about a brown covered newspaper called Direct Action which featured an unforgettable if incomprehensible headline reading "Would this man have invited Nixon to Beijing?" over a picture of a bald man with a pointy beard. Curiosity triumphed. I bought it, read it, noticed the SYA contact details were the same as the address in the little red book and sent in a clip off.
I was duly phoned by one John Percy to invite me to a new contacts meeting (or whatever it was called) where I met the tall fellow who turned out to be Dave Holmes, and discovered that the bald man was Lenin — it took a little reading to make this useful information.
I wouldn't actually swear to being able to define "left wing" at the time, leave alone its machinations. I had no idea about campus politics either, not having even set foot on university terrain, never mind about being a student, unlike practically everyone else. However, having no conflicting interests at the time apart from a 9 to 5 job checking on the sugar, I went along to everything suggested and got a feel for political activism.
In mid-1972, I stepped off the sugar refining career path due to a disagreement about the relative importance of working overtime for a factory end-of-financial-year stock-take and attending an anti-war march.
When I began at CSR, I had participated in all the rituals, they introduced me to alcohol, provided a bed after curfew at the YWCA and generally had a responsible attitude to socialising younger colleagues. By the time I left, I only worked there.
Politics having been nothing became everything. It was a very intense environment.
The one unavoidable topic relating to politics in the early '70s was the position of women. The youth of the period spent their developing years in the fifties. Mum might have got out of the house during the war years, but by the time our '70s youth were arriving she was safely caged in suburbia or small town and supposed to be programming the aspirations of the offspring similarly.
My programming was deficient. I did not aspire to be my mother, somewhere along the line I picked up the notion that she didn't really like it. We had no TV till I was 14, way too late for basic conditioning purposes, indeed I fell for Emma Peel and the Star Trek lot.
Having failed to acquire the desire for offspring and mortgage there were no emotional barriers to adopting the early ambitions of the feminist movement or the SYA definition of the role of families as economic structures.
SYA policy decreed early on that women leaders were to be deliberate rather than accidental phenomena. This meant that, unlike in most other outfits at the time, the women were not habitually presumed to be in the kitchen. Many of the male comrades spent the rest of their time in an atmosphere where this was presumed, assuming the presence of women in the first place, and had, as it were, to change habits when in the party context.
SYA was something women could live in assuming they could stand to be around men at all. Lots of very political women couldn't. Lesbian separatism was the only option they could tolerate.
During this period I also began helping out with the practicalities of finances, to wit, collecting, counting, cheque writing and banking and discovered it was fun. Unlike so many other areas of life there is a definite answer to the sums. Besides, (unlike many of my tertiary educated comrades) numbers were familiar territory. An offshoot of analysing sugar for a living.
At the end of 1973, I moved from Melbourne to Sydney. The money minding habit followed me but didn't really assert itself until the early '80s. I discovered the joys of newspaper production before the personal computer. This was mostly an evening occupation as nearly everybody had day jobs. I had left the cleaning when I moved and ended up at Max Factor on the packaging lines.
I celebrated my 21st birthday by leaving the makeup industry and joined several other comrades in the psychiatric nursing business. Unlike most jobs for females it paid at male rates since the workforce was mixed.
Having acquired the Marxist framework I have always used it on everything. Never having acquired wealth, power, offspring or mortgage I had no need to either outgrow or repudiate my youthful aspirations.
From Green Left Weekly, January 14, 2004.
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