In the 6o’s everything exploded. It’s amazing how much visual and passionate energy comes through from my artistic images from those days of rebellion in the 60’s.

In the Sixties many of us revolutionary students were primarily doing massive amounts of reading; of Fanon, Sartre, Berger, Williams, Schaff, Wright Mills, de Bourvior,Packard, Lefebvre. Garaudy, Northrop Frye, Marcuse, Brecht, Caudwell, Fisher, and many others. Llya.Ehrenburg’s five vol. Memoirs ‘Men, Year and Life’ became available from 1963 onwards. This work showed a richness of the Great Experiment in culture of the young USSR and also in Europe during the 1920’s. Ehrenburg seemed to have known everyone. From Picasso to Einstein. His portraits of people was fascinating.

Many individuals forget that the sixties was also a great period of translation and it became possible to read in English for the first time the works of Brecht, Mayakovsky, Lucas and the great French, Russian, and German poets and many others. In Anglo Saxon countries it was a period of gestation and of catching up with the culture of Europe .. Powerful literary works from J. Heller to H. Fast (who wrote Spartacus and Peakskill, USA, etc) were available. The former work of Catch 22 went off like a bombshell across world culture. Translations of Kazantzakis became available and especially his new version of ‘The Odyssey’; Modern Man in Search of Freedom. East European Poets Holub and Herbert. Influences were far wider than Uni courses on Joyce or Proust. The experience of one great achievement in art of literature or film, etc, also didn’t cancel out the reception of the next literary or artistic work, but added to it (as in the 20’s). They were not subsumed and negated as they are today. Because of the kenosis of work that follows it; there was time in the 60’s to digest them all. There was time to read all the great classics of literature etc.

Eric Fromm suggested to us radical students and others, new ways of loving and Edward Said showed us the full extent of Western cultural colonisation over so called third world countries.

Culture today is more like a massive traffic jam or vehicle accident at a busy intersection, where every participant who experiences it, then wanders around in an over satiated daze, and cannot focus on one major thing and feels depressed and empty within.

The Vietnam War protests focused attention on a number of cultural and political questions. It offered a centre for analysis and commitment in a world tearing itself to pieces.

New Drama Theory was coming out of the US and elsewhere. Small record companies and tiny publishing houses were leading a new wave of experimental and tradition music and publishing. These were later eaten up by the big businesses a decade or two later. There were new humanistic films being shown at a few selected venues such as those of Satyajit Ray from India, along with films from Japan, Italy, Greece and France, etc.

Access to foreign films played a large part in the radicalism of the sixties. Citizens and students discussed films in depth after they were shown in heated discussions in coffee houses and at parties they continued to analyse them, and didn’t rush off home to put on the next DVD stimulus, which would be forgotten by morning. It was an age of New Left Reviews and new publications across the world and a rethink of the political role of all the arts.

A neo romanticism appeared in the form of the headband conciets and bead dangling Hippies to confront WASP ideology head on. After Woodstock nothing would be exactly the same again.

Foreign music was also a powerful influence such as Theodorakus, Maria Farandoui, (with John Williams), Miriam Makeba, Country Joe and the Fish, and many others. This was later added to by exciting experiments in electric folk from Steeleye Span, Penetangle and Fairport Convention and other important groups.

There a revival of interest in Irish rebel music in Sydney. The folk revival in Sydney was started by Gary Shearston, Alex Hood, Kevin Butcher,Chris Kempster and Hendo and his handsome wife Marian and many others. It was Kevin Butcher who started doing the rounds of coffee houses and uni sites as possible singing venues .In Melbourne, Paul Marks and others sung black protest music across the country and we copied them. In Adelaide, the unfortunate singer Tina Lawson died young and didn’t realise her potential. The Sydney Push was still active in pub land from ‘The George’ to the ‘Fourth and Clyde’ in Balmain (now a real estate office).These centres were a place of radical dissent for rebels coming from all over Australia. Pete Seegar popularly performed and mentioned ‘new, young upcoming singers’ of importance such as Bob Dylan; Tom Paxton and Phil Oaks. Phil Oaks travelled on tour with radical cartoonist Ron Cobb. In Sydney there were radical vibrant groups such as the Radiation Quartet, located in a radical coffee house down near Haymarket near China town that sung powerful protest songs with the assistance of Jeannie Lewis, etc. Together in full voice they would all sing passionately.

Men and women stand together!

Do not heed the men of war!

Make up your minds

Now or never

Ban the bomb forever more…!

So the ideological seeds of a larger protest and ideological movement were being sown from about 1965 onward. This combined all the above features and more that are loosely outlined above.

There was the emergence of Lesbian and Gay movements and their challenge to orthodox gender roles.

Many of my activists friends from this period are now dead. These were heroic days for cartoonist and the film maker Bruce Petty. Many friends and activists died in this next decade from drug overdoses, suicides and car crashes, as they lived their lives at 170 km/hr hour. The sixties gradually lost much of its heroic quality and became more existential. The best energies went into the emerging feminist movement

ll periods of history are different and have their own distinct and various truths and nuances, that are unique to the people who lived through them.

In the early sixties I was deeply involved with political battles starting with the Aldermaster Peace marches and the ‘Ban the Bomb’ movements in Australia. Later, I also joined the campaign against racism of Apartheid in South Africa. It was also the period of Civil Rights and a better deal for Aboriginals. Older protestors in those days wore suits and ties to demonstrations. I became regularly committed to left wing causes and I had an early involvement with the Australian Aboriginal struggles, ‘Hands off Cuba’ campaigns the anti-Vietnam War Moratorium movement. The early seventies saw the beginning of the Green Bans against mindless development across Sydney with Jack Mundey and his wife Judy. I had a passionate interest in the complex Great China experiment (that still continues). I assisted the birth of the contemporary New Left and the feminist movement, the ecological battles, and later the great challenges of Multiculturalism.

It’s been a long and interesting journey .Through all the changes on my life’s adventure I kept sketching and reading the world’s best literature and studying art, culture, and history and was open to many influences. As a participant and chronicler, the unfolding of events of the sixties did not leave me unmoved. The music from the period from singer like Tom Paxton still transports me straight back in time to committed young friends and our ‘demos’. It was also a time of emergence and accessibility of World Music and Visual Art.