All Along the Watchtower: Memoir of a Sixties Revolutionary
By Michael Hyde
The Vulgar Press, 2010
272 pages, $32.95 (pb)
Red Silk: The Life of Elliott Johnston QC
By Penelope Debelle
Wakefield Press, 2011
212 pages, $32.95 (pb)
Phillip Adams: The Ideas Man — A Life Revealed
By Philip Luker
JoJo Publishing, 2011
337 pages, $34.99 (pb)
“We were young, we felt invincible and we weren’t about to budge,” writes Michael Hyde of the occupation of the administration building of Melbourne’s Monash University that had banned him for life in 1969.
The sit-in resulted in the university board rescinding all penalties against Hyde and the other expelled radicals for the campaign they had lead against the university’s role in the Vietnam War.
All Along the Watchtower is Hyde’s spirited memoir of his youth. It includes his time in “the most notorious left-wing student organisation in Australia” — the Monash University Labor Club — where student activists and revolutionaries debated and prepared for confrontation with the war machine and the capitalist system that spawned it.
Hyde’s political journey took in the burning of his draft registration card, defiance of the law to collect money for the Vietnamese resistance, protests at the US Consulate on July 4 (the day the United States ironically “celebrates its own independence from a colonial master”), the “eagerness and fear” of illegal paste-ups, the exhilarating mass anti-Vietnam War rallies, and hair-raising chases in his Austin A40 that doubled as a get-away car for draft resisters facing arrest.
The political often became physical. There were threatening visits by police Special Branch, violent assaults by police and staring down the barrel of a mystery gunman’s rifle in his bedroom.
Hyde’s militancy caught the eye of Australia’s Maoists, the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), and his membership of the party rounded out his coming of political rage.
Although unreflective of his choice of Maoist politics with its ultra-left tactics of smoke bombs and rocks through windows, Hyde’s proud rebel spirit is fit for emulating.
Elliott Johnston, a member of the less militant party the Maoists’ split from (the Communist Party of Australia, CPA), may well have been a “revisionist” (“piss weak bastards who might as well be in the pay of capitalism” as Hyde wryly translates the term), but Johnston was a good bloke to have on your side if, like Hyde, you were in trouble with the law.
Calm in a crisis, Johnston, who died on August 25 aged 93, was a top-notch lawyer. But, as a communist, he didn’t sell his principles to the highest bidder or owe his allegiance to his privileged social set.
Penelope Debelle’s Red Silk looks at the life of this terrific South Australian, appointed Queen’s Counsel in 1970 (Australia’s first “Communist silk”).
He was made a judge on the Supreme Court of South Australia in 1983 (the only communist in any Australian superior court), and served on the 1987 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (surely the only Marxist Royal Commissioner ever).
Johnston had spurned an academic and professional life of middle class comfort for pioneering student unionism and then communism, becoming a five-decade-long leading member of the CPA from 1941.
He placed himself at the “professional service of working men and women” by setting up a left-wing law practice, taking on workplace injury compensation, sex discrimination, industrial democracy, women’s rights, Medicare fraud by doctors and Indigenous rights.
Johnston believed legal fees were not relevant to justice and he regularly overlooked sending a bill or would accept a bottle of whisky in lieu of payment.
He was so financially self-deprived that ASIO noted on his file the protruding sofa springs and other poor-quality furnishings in his house.
Political discrimination scandalously delayed the QC and Supreme Court promotions of the supremely qualified Johnston, whose only technical “weakness” turned out to be a difficulty in handing down jail sentences, especially for those for whom prison would be no help.
Johnston’s increasing acceptance by the legal and political system may, as Debelle argues, have reflected the growing moderation of the CPA (Johnston was instrumental in having ASIO recognise in law that the CPA had ceased to become a “subversive” organisation).
His party membership came to be seen, by all but “Pavlovian anti-communists”, as a harmless eccentricity “like his flowing silver hair, the quaint sense of humour and a taste for pork pie hats”.
Such a view does Johnston a disservice — he was indeed an outstanding practitioner of the law but he was an even better advocate of justice precisely because of, not despite, his communist principles.
Inveterate communist-haters (Australia’s neo-Nazi National Front, former Prime Minister John Howard and the massed bigots of conservative talk-back radio) have never forgiven Phillip Adams for his left-wing political sins.
But 350,000 other people, who prefer ideas to cliche, civility to abuse, and compassion to prejudice, regularly listen to Adams’ conversational interviews on ABC Radio’s Late Night Live as a respite from the narrow, superficial, and sometimes ugly, commentary that passes for intellectual sustenance in the commercial, and much of the state, media.
Philip Luker’s biography of Adams shows a child atheist and teenage communist in Victoria, surviving a “miserable childhood of neglect, hardship and abuse by a hated stepfather”, leaving school at age fifteen to occupy a 35-year niche in the advertising industry.
It is an industry he now despises as “despicable, irritating, shallow”, but which financially allowed Adams to indulge his taste for expensive cars and Australia’s largest collection of antiquities and artifacts.
After helping to revive the Australian film industry in the 1970s, Adams unhappily inhabited the right-wing Sydney radio station, 2UE, until the ABC came to his moral rescue in 1990 with Late Night Live, which Adams has made into the third highest-rating of all ABC radio programs.
Late Night Live’s success comes from his interviewing style (“inquisitive rather than interrogative”) in giving exposure to a wide range of informed critics whose dissent from political, military and social orthodoxy resonates with Adams’ own, and his listeners’, dislike of prejudice, inequality and ignorance.
Adams is unrepentantly left-wing, although, despite the tireless 71-year-old tearing up his ALP membership card (and voting Green) in 2010, he has not completely abandoned the dead carcass of the ALP that he had lugged around for decades.
Luker, alas, unfairly convicts Adams of other shortcomings.
Luker mistakes, for example, Adams’ justifiable self-confidence for the egotism of a “smartarse” and denigrates the core socialist values (“no one seriously believes socialism will return”, Luker lectures) that guide Adams’ nightly “journey of the mind”.
Hyde, Johnston and Adams, three men from out of the (proudly communist) left, have passionately applied their lives to the world’s troubles that the respectable conservatives and pragmatic realists have created in their worship of the dull religion of capitalism.