LAUSR

Did Australia have a 1968? This might at first seem a fairly counterintuitive question. None dispute the year’s significance: a new Prime Minister took the reins after Harold Holt’s disappearance off Cheviot beach, the Vietnamese Tet Offensive shattered myths of American superiority, W. E. H. Stanner’s Boyer Lectures broke the “great Australian silence”, and the nation’s first Women’s Liberation group formed. Yet, for most commentators, the action lies elsewhere. For Robin Gerster and Jan Bassett, 1968 arrived “via airmail subscription” while social commentator Hugh Mackay proffered the year’s late arrival in the form of Gough Whitlam’s triumphant 1972 election. The articles collected here, which sit alongside those collected in the editor’s The Far Left in Australia Since 1945 (Routledge, 2019), challenge such easy assumptions. Russell Marks begins by tying 1968’s “New Left” not to its American and European counterparts but to an engagement with Australian nationalism. While critiques of nationalism were in and of themselves a transnational phenomenon, Marks finds Australia’s New Left engaging in a scholarly and political demolition of the Old Left’s “radical nationalism”. Rather than being inherently progressive—anti-authoritarian, anti-imperial and inclusive—scholar/activists such as Humphrey McQueen revealed deep wellsprings of chauvinism, racism and elitism. Marks then takes an additional step, complicating views of a clean break by revealing the deep ambivalence many New Left thinkers held towards ideas of Australian nationalism and their potential recuperation into a left project. This is not to say that Australia’s 1968 was a purely parochial affair. Simone Battiston finds in the case of Sardinian-born Pietrina (Pierina) Pirisi, who relocated to Sydney in 1970, a fascinating example of truly transnational radicalism in the year’s long wake. Heavily influenced by Italy’s so-called “hot autumn” in 1969, Pirisi joined both the Communist Party of Australia and the Italian Communist Party in Australia in 1972, solidifying links between the two organisations. While serving on the CPA’s Sydney District Committee, Pirisi coordinated migrant rights activism and social events, undertaking long periods of training with the PCI in Italy. As Battiston points out, viewing migration as more than a “one-way street” provides a vital perspective to contextualise both the Australian migrant rights movement and migration studies in general. 1968 usually conjures images of crowded city squares, not seemingly quiet rural centres. But as Kate Murphy argues in her exploration of student activists at the University of New