LAUSR

Abstract This article offers a history of anti-conscription protest during the Vietnam War through an analysis of two Australian protest campaigns between 1964 and 1972. The Youth Campaign Against Conscription attempted to fuse liberal notions of citizenship circulating through an international counterculture with the patriotic myth of anti-conscription protest during the Great War. After the ALP’s loss in the 1966 election, protesters discarded the national myth. The shift from parliamentary to extraparliamentary resistance demonstrates the limits of the utility of patriotic myths for protesters, while the development of Australian Draft Resistance reveals the political potency of liberal individualism in the 1960s.