BY PETER BOYLE
Helen Jarvis, then a student at the Australian National University (ANU), was one of the Canberra protesters who turned out to protest against the October 1966 visit of US President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ).
"It was at night, outside the Canberra Rex Hotel on Northbourne Avenue. The feeling was electric, as it was probably the biggest demo ever held in Canberra", Jarvis remembered.
"Everyone was jostling on and off the footpaths onto the road. There were spirited shouts and waving of placards. This was the protest at which my close friend Megan Stoyles was photographed in a tight T-shirt, saying 'Make love not war', which I think made it onto the cover of Time magazine. It has been widely reproduced as an icon from the period. Megan was in my political science class, and went on to be one of the team that worked with the Labor government to introduce Medibank.
"Many of the academics from ANU were among the protesters and organisers. Des Ball climbed up on the statute of King George on his horse outside Parliament House and someone dropped a banner from the top of the phallic Australian-American War Memorial."
Today, Jarvis lives and works in Cambodia, a country that is still recovering from the ravages of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. She wasn't able to make it to the October 22-23 protests against the visit of US President George Bush, but she was there in spirit.
"In 1966, Prime Minister Harold Holt said Australia was 'All the way with LBJ'. We decided to make it clear to both of them that Holt did not speak for us — a radicalising generation who wanted our country to play a positive and supportive role in South-east Asia, and not to go around acting as the junior cop on the local beat", Jarvis explained.
"In those days, it was an unusual and slightly daring thing to go into the streets and confront a visiting dignitary, but thousands of us did it — and we were joined by some of our parents and grandparents, and by militant workers too.
"Now, nearly 40 years later, another Australian prime minister is going 'all the way with the USA'. Again Australia is out of step with the world — it is one of the very few countries prepared to send soldiers to carry the bags for US forces as they invade another country.
Jon Jacobs (now 71) was a wharfie at the time of the LBJ visit. He told Green Left Weekly (he is a long-time subscriber) that he was involved, with other militant wharfies, in an abortive plan to stage a mock cavalcade on the day:
"A Maltese chap who hired cars for weddings got hold of a couple of beautiful Buicks and a black Packard. We put American flags on them. Inside them we had one wharfie, a very tall fellow, who side-on was identical to LBJ. The caretaker from the union rooms looked like NSW Premier Robert Askin. We had about eight people in suits, one was the driver and two fellows to stand at the side of the main car. The two other cars had a couple of people in suits in them.
"We parked in the street behind what was then the Paris picture show, just around the corner, and we were listening to the radio about the official motorcade. The plan was to drive in ahead and have our 'LBJ' thumb his nose at the crowd...
"But in the lane with us there was a covered truck. We didn't realise it had 20 police in it. Suddenly, a bus came up behind our cars and the cops said: 'Righty-oh, you fella's, you're not moving anywhere.'"
Jacobs reports that the wharfies said that they were just off to a wedding. "They didn't arrest us, but kept us there for about 15 minutes, then said: 'OK, you can go to your wedding now.'"
Jacobs, now retired, is active in the Peace Squadron, an activist group that specialises in sea-borne protests.
From Green Left Weekly, October 29, 2003.
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