Podcast Transcript
Meredith Burgmann and Nadia Wheatley “Radicals”
SPEAKERS
Nicole Abadee, Meredith and Nadia, Nadia Wheatley, Meredith Burgmann
Nicole Abadee 00:05
Hello, I'm Nicole Abadee and I write about books for good weekend. Welcome to the Books, Books, Books podcast in which I interview the best writers from Australia and overseas about their latest book. Thank you for joining me. Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge the country where I live and work and from where I'm joining this conversation, the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. I pay my respects to their elders past and present to the elders of all communities and cultures across Australia, and to leaders of the future. You can listen to this podcast all of the episodes at nicoleabadee.com.au or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Today I'm delighted to welcome two books, books books to great Australian social activists. Dr. Meredith Burgmann a feminist and academic and award winning writer Nadia Wheatley, to talk about the book that they've written together "Radicals: Remembering the 60s," published earlier this year by New South Publishing. To give you a bit of an introduction to my two guests. I'll start with talking about Dr. Burgmann. Meredith started her career lecturing in Industrial Relations at Macquarie University, and was a political science academic for 20 years. Then, in 1991, she was elected to the New South Wales upper house, and in 1999, she became the first Labour woman president. Since leaving politics, she has been president of the Australian Council for International Development, and a consultant to the UN Development Programme. She's also a patron and a board member of a number of organisations. Meredith has edited and co authored three books on misogyny, green bans, and asio. She was an early member of the women's liberation movement and very active in land rights, anti apartheid and green bans campaign, some of which we'll be hearing about today. In 2020, Meredith was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia, in the Australia Day honours list for significant service to the people and parliament of New South Wales. Meredith has been arrested on many occasions. Meredith, welcome to Books, Books, Books.
Meredith Burgmann 02:14
Thank you, Nicole.
Nicole Abadee 02:16
Now Nadia Wheatley. Nadia is a very well known Australian writer. She's written novels biography, history and memoir, as well as a number of significant children's books. She's won many literary awards, including in 2002, the New South Wales premiere's history award for the life and myth of Charmaine Clift, the only biography to win the history award and I need to interrupt at this stage to say I read that book when it came out and it remains one of my favorite books ever. So for those of you listening, I really highly recommend that beautiful book to you. From 1998 to 2001. Nadia was invited to work at the School of Papunya an Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory. She works together with students staff and Elders, helping them to tell the story of the history of the community, and the multi award winning book, The Papunya School Book of Country and History. In 2014, Sydney University awarded her an Honorary Doctorate of Letters. Her most recent book before this one is her memoir called "Her Mother's Daughter," which was out in 2018. And in the 1960s, she was nearly expelled from Sydney University for throwing a tomato. We're going to hear a bit more about that later on as well. Now to welcome to Books, Books, Books.
Nadia Wheatley 03:30
Thank you, Nicole.
Nicole Abadee 03:31
So I'm going to start with some questions for both of you before I move to individual questions. And I'm going to start by asking you Nadia, what does the word radical mean to you?
Nadia Wheatley 03:40
Well, I'm a bit of a word parent, so I go back to the Latin which in Italian, I would pronounce radice. So it just like the word radish, it just means root, not in the sexual sense, but in the vegetable sense. So it's any idea or movement that goes back to the roots. So another way of saying it, bit of a scary way would be to connect it with the idea of going back to the beginnings or the fundamentals of something. But I always stress that in the 60s, we were into fun rather than fundamentalism. So the kind of radicalism we were into, was a new left version of the left. So we got away from the old Soviet style communism, and we're the younger Marx and went back to the idea of grassroots community organisation, so our radical words were very much grassroots.
Nicole Abadee 04:37
Meredith is there anything you'd like to add to that?
Meredith Burgmann 04:40
Ah, yes, except that Nadia might have been reading the younger Marx, but I didn't read very much at all. I just listened a lot to the people around me and you know, sang the songs and got involved in the Zeitgeist,
Nicole Abadee 04:54
I'd like to set the scene as you have in each of your your personal chapters in this book by asking each of you a little bit about your background prior to when you started both of you at Sydney Uni in 1966. Meredith, I'll start with you. Tell us a little bit about your childhood and your background.
Meredith Burgmann 05:12
Well, I always claimed that I was born and bred in the most boring suburb in Sydney, Beecroft. And then, about halfway through my childhood, we move to the second most boring place in Sydney, which is Cheltenham, the close suburb. It's basically, it wasn't the North Shore certainly wasn't the eastern suburbs. It was incredibly respectable, unbelievably boring and in fact, absolutely monocultural. I did not meet, I did not even talk to a Catholic, until I got to university because there were only Protestants in Cheltenham, no Catholic Church in Bancroft or Cheltenham. And so, to me, getting to university was an extraordinary liberation. Because I met, I remember coming home from university and saying to mum "there are all these Catholics at university" and she said. "Oh yes there's a lot of Catholics in the world dear." And strangely, it was the young Catholics that I met at university, from the Newman society, which I suppose I should go back and say, I came from a very religious upbringing, a high church Anglican upbringing. My grandfather was the sort of, I suppose, Christian socialist Bishop of Canberra, and Goulburn, and was very political, and very left wing. But of course, I didn't know that at the time, because in Beecroft you certainly wouldn't talk about your left wing, ancestor.
Nicole Abadee 06:51
And Meredith your mother's politics were quite conservative, weren't they?
Meredith Burgmann 06:54
Mum was a Country Party girl, of course, coming from Traralga in Western New South Wales. And so I just assumed my father's politics were the same because he didn't say much, he was a very reserved, very kind, lovely person. But I grew up believing that Sir Robert Menzies was a great man and that Arthur Cornwall was a little bit common, I think, was the expression that was used. So and really, I arrived at university with quite conservative views. And my mother later, of course, she was, became horrified by Vietnam, horrified by apartheid, and ended up being a convinced Whitlamite and her politics really changed during that whole period. And of course, I never had a rebellion, that the idea that the 60s was about young people rebelling against their parents in, in many of our cases, we dragged our parents along with us, or there was just a comfortable love. I mean, there was real love in my family so of course, we didn't really even argue, Thinking about these things I remember my mother saying, "Dear I really don't want you to be arrested for bad language." So I promised and in fact, the limit on that I was never arrested for bad language. So as I say, I came out of a comfortable but conservative background. My father was a secret labour voter, but very secret because you'd certainly not talk about it in Beecroft and Cheltenham. I was head girl of Abbotsleigh but more importantly, I was captain of cricket, which to me was very important. I was at sports nut, I played cricket, hockey and tennis, and really didn't think about much else.
Nicole Abadee 08:38
I'm going to cut to you now Nadia and ask you about your childhood, which was very different from Meredith, I know. Tell us a bit about your childhood.
Nadia Wheatley 08:46
Well, in one way, it might be seen as similar to Meredith because I too, came from a white Anglo Saxon Protestant, indeed, Anglican upbringing. And I too, went to a single sex, private school. But my family was very different from Meredith. So actually, I knew Meredith's parents quite well, and I loved them. They were wonderful people. I had a wonderful mother, but unfortunately, she was very ill from the time when I was six until I was nine. And when I was nine, she died and I ended up in the kind of informal fostering arrangement in a foster family. Meanwhile, my father, who was a cold, sadistic and bullying man had disappeared and in the foster family, I was very unhappy. I felt bullied, and also abused, very much controlled, silenced and disempowered. And that was partly the mindset of the fifties. So I was not allowed to know what my mother died of, the date of her death, and I was not allowed to express any grief or anger. So when I arrived at university, and I was only 16, I was like a dog that's been let off on leash. I ran wild for a couple of years but that was just general wildness, going to the pub and drinking too much. It wasn't until 1968 when I went on my first demonstration that I found an ou tlet.
Nicole Abadee 10:19
Meredith and Nadia, how did you first meet each other? Tell us about that?
Meredith Burgmann 10:25
Well, well I went into women's college in my second year at university because I hadn't done terribly well in my first year because I didn't get too involved in, I was in the drama society and I was playing table tennis and having a good time. So I ended up in women's college, to discover a very different society to what I would have been having at university. It was the women, the girls there were nice, but they were very interested in clothes and fashion and the the college boys around them and I found the college boys around them, well, you know, they still are to this day, there's a very misogynistic culture in, in those colleges. So I was, I used to stay up all night, thinking I was working. I wasn't, I was doing English honours and I wasn't very good at it. I never really understood poetry. I love the books, but I really was terrible at poetry and I was struggling with John Dunn, all the romantics in fact. One night, about four o'clock in the morning, when we used to, I used to stay up until we heard the, a garbage truck come around, and then go to bed. And I heard this clump clump clump outside my door, and I opened the door and it was Nadia wearing a long, red, nightie and gumboots. And I was so pleased that it wasn't one of the college boys, you know, attacking my room that I invited her in, and she was looking for toast might I say, which is what you tended to do late at night. And I invited her in, and she started helping me with the romantics and was very helpful with my English honours progress from then on.
Nicole Abadee 12:25
I'd like to ask you about the time when you each of you became radicalised. Nadia, can I ask you can you pinpoint a particular date or particular event that for you was really a turning point in that way?
Nadia Wheatley 12:38
So we'll fast forward from that, first get together, the toast eating experience of 1967, and we'll go to Wednesday, the 19th of June 1968. And my world was very much the world of English literature. I didn't read the newspaper. I didn't watch television. I think I was in escape and retreat from the world. So I was vaguely aware of some place called Vietnam, and there was something going on there but I wasn't involved in politics at all. I was at lunch on a diet no doubt nibbling on a lettuce leaf and Meredith came in and she had been at a front lawn meeting and there was going to be a vigil downtown outside the office of the Minister for Labour and National Service, who was the minister in charge of conscription. And Meredith mentioned this and said, would anyone like to go along and without any thought I actually heard my voice saying "I'll come" To be fair, if Meredith had suggested going to the pub, I would have also said "I'll come" So very soon we were down at the bus stop in City Road catching a bus to Martin Place and on the way down Meredith hastily filled me in. I think we're up, the French were still in, Indochina by the time we got to the Marin Place. And then we found, I did, didn't really know what a vigil, vigil was but it was decided that we would all go up to the office of the Minister for Labour and National Service. So 92 of us I know from the newspaper reports, sat in, in the foyer, outside the minister's office, of course, the Minister wasn't there but the and the office staff got an early mark and went home early. So we just all sat around and saying we shall not be moved until the police arrived. Yeah, yeah. Again, I hadn't put any thought into this. I it was very easy to understand that I was against conscription. I didn't really know enough to be against the war in Vietnam at that stage. So within a couple of days, I'd read Gevilman on Vietnam and I was. The policeman read the Crimes Act, whereby it was illegal to oppose basically to take an act against conscription and the patriarchal authority ficgure of the police told us that if we remain sitting in this office, we will be liable under the Crimes Act to two years jail.
Nicole Abadee 15:08
Now how did that make you feel? Did that fill you with fear the thought that the jail was actually a prospect?
Nadia Wheatley 15:14
It triggered resistance. Because in my foster family, I'd been constantly getting into trouble for things like leaving a sock under the bed, and I was just sick of being controlled, and told what to do. And to sit on, to be sent to jail for sitting on a floor, in a public office, in the afternoon, before five o'clock was ridiculous. And so I had no question in my mind. I didn't believe that I could go to jail for two years. But that didn't bother me. I was just so sick of being told what to do. Of course, once the police dragged us out, and in the lift and threw me like a minnow into, a fat minnow, into Martin Place, I realised that we weren't going to be arrested but the sense of liberation I got actually, from making that decision, taking an act, utterly changed my life.
Nicole Abadee 16:07
Meredith, what was the galvanising moment for you? Can you put your finger on one particular activity, one particular moment that put you on your path to radicalism?
Meredith Burgmann 16:15
I can put my finger on a moment but unlike Nadia, who has this amazing chronological mind, I'm not quite sure when it was. But I had become increasingly worried about the war in Vietnam. Strangely, I wasn't so angry about conscription. To me, it was about we were sending young men off to a country to kill and be killed. And they would, the government was doing this in my name, and I was very distraught about the the deaths and the bombings. And I mean, Vietnam was an all consuming, passionate, takes, it really rides over the whole of the 60s and into the 70s, the war in Vietnam. So I was getting increasingly upset by this and not quite knowing how to fit it into my, the way in which I thought about the world, where you had, you know, Robert Menzies at the top, the all seeing, all wonderful, patriarchal, Robert Menzies. But I was I was obviously sifting through my brain because I remember waking up one morning, when I was still living in Bancroft, and thinking, "Oh my gosh, I'm a socialist." And I took the train into uni a nd I remember racing down the corridor in the old McCallum building, and saying, my friend, Jeff, Jeff Robertson, now later of, you know, hypotheticals, etc. And I said, "Jeff, Jeff, oh, I'm a socialist." And he just said, "Oh, don't be silly, Meredith. We're all socialists." And I was totally flattened by this, but it was it had obviously been seething away underneath but it really was a one day moment.
Nicole Abadee 18:00
I'd like to ask you a little bit then about the decision to write this book. Nadia, Whose idea was it? How did the idea come to you?
Nadia Wheatley 18:09
Well, again, I'm going to give you places and dates, it was January 2016, Meredith came over to my place for dinner, we were actually talking about radicalism. And the way the word, word was being used. Now quite often for right wing radical movements, which the word does apply to them, if they're going back to the roots, but we wanted to keep that sense of the word as a left wing word and maybe I, maybe Meredith, put the idea of, let's do a book about the 60s. But from the start, it was always going to be about comrades, it was always going to be about other people, not just to be about us. And I can remember when, you know, I was maybe getting cold feet, because I know how much work there is in any book. And I had a couple of other projects on and said suggested, should we do a book about the 60s and Meredith saying, "Well, if we don't, someone else will." And that was very much an inspiration to do it. And so we quite quickly mapped out the terms which would be that we would together, interview people, but we would separately write up the story. So it's not oral history on the page and it's not an edited book. It's a series of stories about people's radicalisation experiences with our own stories woven through.
Nicole Abadee 19:38
So Meredith with you two included there are 20, you two are the writers, there are 18 other participants who between you, you interviewed, and I know that you are very careful to select people from a broad range of occupations and a relatively broad political spectrum. Would you like to talk a little bit about that? How you chose the participants?
Meredith Burgmann 19:59
Well, some of them chose themselves. What we wanted though was to look at the radicalisation experience and so we needed to choose participants from conservative backgrounds. Otherwise, if they, they were, from their parents were well known Communist or something like that it really wasn't such an interesting exercise. And we wanted a good geographic spread, we want we wanted to have a number of First Nations people because we, we both had been very involved with land rights issues and things like that. So we and we want to, you know, obviously we needed people with a migrant experience. We wanted as many women as possible, and that's good. We've got eight of the 20 are women. And as I said, a geographic spread. So we've got them from Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Townsville, Canberra, quite a few from Sydney. And as we went along, we recognised that there were gaps in what we were doing. And we made a decision about halfway through which I thought was really important, which we didn't want it to just to be political radicalism, we wanted to look at what was happening in the 60s what we call from time to time the Zeitgeist because it's really hard to describe it otherwise. So that's when we looked at the cultural radicalism and we went down to Canberra and interviewed Vivian beans, the very exciting, radical feminist artist still is in righties, we interviewed John Durham, who was an actor and was very much radicalised by the English playwrights, the anti war playwrights of the 60s you know, John Osborne, John, and even Spike Milligan. And of course, the Emerald Hill Theatre in in Melbourne, which was bringing those plays to Australia. And, and we interviewed and I had to write up, we interviewed LSD fog, the well, I always thought he was just a lighter mist machine, but he was actually a person called Roger Farley, who was into that, the sort of happening experience so and he wanted to talk about the murmuration of starlings and string theory and some Japanese philosopher that I've never heard of it. I found that chapter very challenging to write about, but we thought we really had to look at those experiences. We, we interviewed, Robby Swan, who when we asked him, Well, what was your radicalising experience, and he said, "oh drugs" So then, and he of course, was into transcendental meditation and that sort of stuff. Interestingly, they all had a political bent. Because in the 60s, you really couldn't get away from you were either for or against Vietnam and that decided you. But I did find the cultural participants, quite demanding, but really exhilarating to talk to.
Nicole Abadee 23:15
Let's talk now about each of your individual chapters on on incidents in your own life. Meredith, I'm going to come back to you on this. So you started at Sydney Uni doing a degree in English honours, you ended up changing that we'll talk a little bit about that later on. You said we mentioned before that you had attended the exclusive private girls school Abbotsleigh you were head girl there in 1964. But you say that you never really fitted in. Why not? And I was wondering where the seeds of rebellion always there within you. And then they were, I'm going to mix my metaphors here now, but they were then realised or released once you got to university in the 60s.
Meredith Burgmann 23:59
Look, I've often thought about that, too. I had, we'd had, I'd had a year off. Well, my father was working in Europe, so what would have been my first year at high school. I spent in Europe with my family. And my parents didn't send me to school, so, goodness knows why, so I just spent the year thinking about things, reading a lot of George Bernard Shaw I remember, going to see the plays and Drury Lane you could get in for a shilling I remember and sit up in the bleachers. So I was I was a bit of quite a thoughtful kid but also very sport insist and why I felt I didn't fit in at Abbotsleigh was strangely because I lived on the main line and not on the North Shore line and I've discussed this with my school friends since and they've seen that as between except for the ones that lived on the main line. There were about a dozen of us and we all said yes we always felt we didn't fit in. The main line is goes from the city through Strathfield up to Hornsby. It's not very fashionable. Also, I was I just always looked terrible as a school kid. I had no bad skin, fizzy hair and was obviously never going to be the swish sort of Abbotsleigh girl that went out with the King School boys and if they couldn't get a King School boy and a Barker boy and I just didn't fit into that sort of social milieu. Whether I was an incipient renegade, look, I'd like to think so but I'm not sure I just knew I didn't fit in. The interesting thing is that it was Betty Archdale, the famous, herself a renegade, Headmistress of Abbotsleigh. She was captain of the of the English women's cricket team and that was what everyone knew her for but what you find out when you read her biography is that she was the daughter of a very well known suffragette. Her tutors were Adele and the other Pankhurst, the other daughter Pankhurst, I can't remember. So she came to Abbotsleigh with a suffragette background, and no one ever talked about it because you know, for North Shore school in the 1960s, that would be considered a bit a bit awful. So Archie must have seen something in me, which I didn't see in myself at the time.
Nicole Abadee 26:39
When you started at Sydney University in 1966, you've described that as a huge liberation for you. I'd like you to talk a little bit about some of the people that you met and the organszations that you became involved with.
Meredith Burgmann 26:50
Well, I think I've always been a fairly busy girl and I was able to be sort of busy writ large. I became very involved with sons, that drama society and I remember being shocked because they used swear words, that I as a good anglican for Beecroft had not really even heard. So that's great fun. I was playing table tennis for the university very seriously. I got involved with the student representative Council. I'm not even I think because my sister had been involved with them but she'd already really left by this stage because she left to go to Papua New Guinea and it was those it was the folk on these students council that I realised that they're still my friends,. They were people like Geoffrey Robertson, Jim Spiegelman who later became Chief Justice. Alan Cameron, Ritchie Welsh. Even liberals like Nick Greiner and Peter Collins, Michael Kirby, of course, he was our student senator. I've kept good friends with those and the people I also got involved with Oni Swar I, I became, I think I used to write sports entries for Oni Swar. So I was called into a millieu that was obviously thinking about political things, probably before even I was, but the crew that actually ended up I think, changing my mind on Vietnam were the young Catholics. I was a little bit involved with the SCM, the student Christian movement, which is sort of the Protestant bunch, I might add that I'm now an atheist. But at the time, I was struggling with all that and the young men from the Newman society were and it was mainly men. were somehow the people who influenced my thinking about Vietnam. And I always thought that was very funny. The young Protestant girl from Beecroft ending up being radicalised by a bunch of young Catholics.
Nicole Abadee 29:06
And it was through that interest, you became obviously increasingly opposed to Australia's involvement in that war. And in 1968, you took part in your first anti war demonstrations. I'd like you to talk a little bit about that, including reference to your first arrest.
Meredith Burgmann 29:21
I've always said that 1968 was the high point of my life and it's been a downhill run ever since
Nicole Abadee 29:27
You're probably not the only one that says that.
Meredith Burgmann 29:29
Absolutely. Whenever I say that to someone of a certain age, they all go "Oh, yes, 1968 that was my year too." But when you look at everything that was happening internationally, and in Australia in 1968, so much happened. And by 1968, I was totally opposed to the war, but I still haven't made that, that step of going down to a demonstration. But in the middle, towards the middle of the year, I realised I had, I was so opposed to Vietnam, every night, we'd come home and see it on our boxy little televisions. That the death and destruction and the horribleness, we were shown dead bodies on television, which for the, for the first time, I think it was the first time that this happened. And it was quite horrible. So I think I was just compelled by the issue that I had to go down and be at the demonstration. And I remember asking them Did anyone want to come with me and that was when Nadia, and we've been great friends ever since really.
Nicole Abadee 30:38
Another cause that you were passionately involved with is the anti apartheid movement and in fact, in 1971, 50 years ago, now, you spent time in prison for running onto the Sydney Cricket Ground during the Springboks tour. Could you tell us about that experience please?
Meredith Burgmann 30:54
Yes well, in 19, I'd been always been very interested in South Africa and about apartheid. As a teen I'd read Ellen Payton "Cry the Beloved Country" and I'd read out Lutulu and Trevor Huddleston, I'd read all the classics about apartheid and, and racism had always been something that I'd grown up being very opposed to, and so in 1969, I was elected co convener of the anti apartheid movement, especially a campaign called Stop the Tools campaign. I was the CO convener, and so but we started demonstrating against various all white racially selected teams from South Africa that were coming to Australia. And we always knew that our target was the Springboks, who were the rugby Union team that was coming in the middle of 1971. So I was pretty well known by the police at this stage, and I can tell from my eyes so far, that they were following me. They were, they were sitting in cars outside my house, waiting to follow me. So I was being arrested, I got arrested when we demonstrated against The surf lifesavers and the basketballers and so on. So I knew that I'd have to be pretty canny to get anywhere near the footballers. So we, for the first match in Sydney I, we dressed up as what we thought middle aged Afrikaners would wear, this is probably the photograph they'll show on my obituary when I die
Nicole Abadee 32:43
On the ground with the curly wig
Meredith Burgmann 32:45
And with the dreadful clothes because I was wearing a long knitted cardigan, and I had to wear a, I wore a red curly wig so that I looked different. And a group of us went in, we borrowed members tickets and went in to the members area because there were 20,000 demonstrators at the ground. But most of them were in the non members area where there were huge high 10 foot high barbed wire fences to stop any incursion onto the ground. But we sat there pretending to be Afrikaners, or what we thought was an Afrikaner accent. And we actually, just after half time, said to the police standing in front of us because there were police every yard or so in front of us, and we asked them to step stand aside because we couldn't se the game properly. And these police did stand aside. So just after half time, I and my sister Verity and two friends jumped over the fence and ran onto the ground and we were the only demonstrators to actually stop the game during the Australian tour. And when we got into the middle, we were so surprised that we got into the middle of the ground because it never occurred to us that this would, the police were obviously shocked at these middle aged Afrikaners running under the ground. So Verity actually grabbed the ball and kicked it and the Bulletin called it the best kick of the season. I didn't know what to do, so I just lay down in front of the scrum. And Ralph, Ralph Pierce just ran around like a frightened rabbit. And the police, the police eventually got into the, it seemed like, hours before they arrived but it was obviously a couple of minutes they arrived, in the centre of the ground and they dragged me off. And there's lots of newspaper photographs of me being dragged off the ground. And strangely, it's a very funny story, one of the policemen who dragged me off was so proud of that moment and the photograph that appeared in The front page of the papers that he actually had it on the front page of his funeral program, in Goulburn many, many years later. My cousin came in holding these things saying, "hey, have you seen the front page Senior Constable Lex's funeral program?"
Nicole Abadee 35:18
Thank you, Nadia. I'll go to you now and ask you a bit about those early years for you. So you were doing an honours in history, Sydney University.
Nadia Wheatley 35:27
No, I was doing initially English honours, but I switched to history honours after the crucial year of 1968. Yes.
Nicole Abadee 35:34
And I have to ask you something that you've included in this book in your biography but I just have to ask you about is that you were once charged with malicious damage to salmon vol au vents, and that landed you in prison for 12 days. Tell us that story.
Nadia Wheatley 35:48
Well, this is, that was actually a little bit out of the 60s. But it doesn't matter that it's beyond our timeframe, because of course, radicalisation, hopefully is a lifelong project. So in the early 1980s, I was unemployed during a period when Malcolm Fraser was Prime Minister, and the unemployed was suffering greatly under this man who said, life wasn't meant to be easy. And I was a member of a group, small group called the Unemployed People's Union, which had very, very inventive pro, pro demonstrations. So we didn't have the numbers but we'd always do something quite exciting, like run a dole bludgers picnic, or run a soup kitchen and throw soup at the Liberal Party. So this was the 21st birthday of the Liberal Party was being held at the Roundhouse, New South Wales. And someone had announced that we were going to get in and disrupt the dinner and I said, "blow, you know, I'm gonna have to do this because no one's going to do it." And you can't promise to do something like this and then not deliver. So I knew that it's like Meredith with the anti apartheid thing. I knew there'd be a big police presence. So I dressed up as a waitress, not as an Afrikaans but a waitress. Men don't look at women who look plain, so I made my hair scrunched back. I put on an old shirt. I didn't have a black skirt, but I cut up a black petticoat, made myself a black and white waitress uniform and got through the police circle of quite a few hundred police completely surrounded the Roundhouse, got in and I attached myself to a couple of other young waitresses and said, "you know, my supervisors put me on and I'm new on the shift and what do I do?" and, and then I got into trouble from the supervisor for being late. I had with me, a comrade called Paddy Dawson had gone to the manly magic shop, and he bought a product called Strong Pong, which smells terrible and also had a couple of flairs. And so as I was walking around, offering the guests the Liberal Party, the hors d'oeuvres, I was sprinkling just openly onto their lapels from this little bottle this stuff called Strong Pong, which doesn't instantly smell but after a while it does have a strong aroma.
Nicole Abadee 38:05
What does it smell like?
Nadia Wheatley 38:07
Oh poo but they thought I was just sort of like a Thai hostess putting a nice scent on them or something. So I wandered around for a while with my Strong Pong, you're always wondering how long you gonna last before you get grabbed on this sort of occasion and, as Meredith says explained, time goes very strange and it seems to go for a very long time. And I thought I would have to do something before the speeches because I wouldn't last that long. I was looking, they were getting a bit suspicious. So the guests have taken their seats and the waiters has came out with big trolleys with salmon vol au vents on them and each all the salmon vol au vents wants were on trays. So it was very easy to actually just grab a trolley and then start moving my hand along and have salmon vol au vents flying everywhere and of course they're rather messy because there's all this salmon mornay in the centre. And you could just go swish, swish, swish and have 500 salmon vol au vents floating through the air. It took a long time for the police to arrest me because they had to come in from outside. I ran around inside the Roundhouse for quite a while. I was taken to the kitchen,
Nicole Abadee 39:22
Were you the only activist there on that occasion?
Nadia Wheatley 39:24
Yeah totally alone, and the chef was nearly crying. And he said to me, "I've taken all day to make those seven vol au vents" and I couldn't resist that there was a whole lot of trays on the counter and I just went swish swish again and sent all the rest of the salmon vol au vents flying. So when I was in court, I was
Nicole Abadee 39:44
charged with malicious damages
Nadia Wheatley 39:46
To salmon vol au vents and my barrister who is a senior academic or became a senior academic at New South Wales uni doing it pro bono as our mates always did, argued that it was an illegal charge because you can't be malicious to a salmon vol au vent but he lost the case and I got 12 days jail in Mueller, women's prison, yes for salmon. So I didn't dare tell the other prisoners because you know people are in there even for things like murder and drugs and things. So I said I was in there for parking fines.
Nicole Abadee 40:19
Nadia let's go back to the precursor of that the tomato throwing incident, may 1969. Tell us about that.
Nadia Wheatley 40:25
Well, I have a bit of a track record here foe throwing food. In brief, the Sydney University regiment was coming onto campus for what was a graduation ceremony and the person speaking at the graduation ceremony was going to be the person called the Capital V visitor to the university who was the governor of New South Wales that VC winning sir Roden Kappler. But though he was coming in civilian dress, he was not coming in a military format or way, he was going to inspect the Sydney University regiment. So those of us who were against the war were also against the idea of having a military presence on campus. That same regiment earlier in that same year, had attacked demonstrators and had in fact bayonetted one member of the Sydney left so we felt pretty tense about the regimen. So on the day I was with the boy who'd been bayonetted and a very mischievous gay companion. It was the day after my birthday and I think I was still a bit drunk from the night before. We went back to the pub early. And outside the shop near the pub, they were, there were cooking tomatoes on special. So the boys bought them, because they knew that engineers and college boys were going to be throwing a lot of food at the left during the meeting. Boys never have bags to put things in so they put these tomatoes, four of them rather squashy in my shoulder bag. So we get there, the demonstration against the regiment unfurls. The rightwing, we're throwing things like full garbage bins full of water at the left that day, the governor arrived, I couldn't see him, though he was a very tall governor. over the heads of all the crowd, I couldn't see him I could barely see the regiment. Unlike Meredith, I'm completely not a sporting person. I couldn't throw a cricket ball to save my life. But the tomatoes were getting very soggy in my bag. So eventually, I did throw one and then another into the air and not really seeing at all where they went. Later, it was reported that the governor had been hit by a tomato and stupidly in the pub showing off with an agent provocateur friend egging me on, I told the journalist Mungo McCallum who wrote a comical column for the Australian under the name of Martin Collins, but I knew Mungo was a mate. I confessed to being the girl who threw the tomato just as a funny thing for him to put in his column and of course, the heavens unfolded and soon I found myself pulled up before a thing, a star chamber.
Nicole Abadee 43:19
And you also were hauled up before the Vice Chancellor and and he asked you if you had thrown the tomato at the governor to which you said no, because quite truly, you hadn't been aiming at the governor at all, you had just thrown it. And then you in addition got charged with lying to the Deputy Vice Chancellor.
Nadia Wheatley 43:35
So it was the charge of lying that actually upset me more than the charge of the tomato throwing because I pride myself on not telling lies. And I hadn't. He'd asked me he said it. He phrased it "Did you or did you not throw the tomato at the governor?" And I said "no," because I didn't throw it at anybody in particular. But I had claimed that I had done it and it was possibly my tomato though, as I say, there was a lot of fruit going through the year on that occasion.
Nicole Abadee 44:08
Meredith and Nadia, both of you, you start the book, by writing about your experience last year, you're both now in your 70s. And you start the book by writing about attending a Black Lives Matter rally in June or July of last year. And I was wondering, what is your advice for young protesters today? There's a lot of things to protest about climate change, Black Lives Matter, refugees, there's a whole raft of issues, what have you learned over the years and what advice would you give to a young activist today, Meredith?
Meredith Burgmann 44:40
Oh, I am in awe of the young activists today. It is very hard to do what they're doing. The issues are not as stark as they were in our day. We're not in the middle of a war where 400 Australians are killed or we're not hosting all white racially selected teams. With things like climate change in particular, it is such a difficult subject to even talk about actually, it's it's very complex. So I just, my advice to young protesters today is keep it up. Don't be downhearted. Try to be creative in in what you do, continually putting up graffiti and having sit downs won't necessarily get the media attention that you need to do. You need to be thoughtful about how you're presenting your cause. But really, as I say, keep it up and also try to have some fun along the way. If you get too serious and too distressed by what you're doing, you won't last, you'll burn out. So you really do need to have some fun along the way.
Nicole Abadee 46:09
To close, I've got a couple of questions which I'd like each of you to answer. I'll start with you, Nadia, you two have chosen different paths for your activism. And I know when you write in the book about the enormous impact that those activities in the 1960s that radicalism has had on both of you for the rest of your lives. As I say you've chosen different paths for your activist careers. Meredith, for you, academia, and then politics, Nadia, for you. It's been writing starting with you, Nadia, has your chosen path enabled you to achieve social change in the way that you hoped to as that idealistic student back in the 1960s?
Nadia Wheatley 46:47
To a degree, I would hope so particularly perhaps in my children's books. So I don't go out looking for issues to put into books, I don't insert my politics into my books, but because of you who I am, I've ended up writing "The House that was Eureka," which was about an anti eviction battle. I've written "The Blooding," which is about environmental causes. I've written history books that hopefully present the invasion in a truthful fashion. I've always believed that if you're going to try to change someone's mind, it's better to try to change the mind of a young person than an old person, because old people are set in their ways. So I would hope that through my writing, and even the biography of Charmiane Clift because she was a transformative radical of the 60s, I hope that I've been able to express some of those views and get them out to a wider audience for people to make their own minds up.
Nicole Abadee 47:48
Meredith, what about you? You've chosen, you've chosen academia, and then obviously a life in politics. Has that enabled you to do what you set out to do in the 60s, what you hope to do with your life?
Meredith Burgmann 48:00
Look I am just always amazed when I listen to Nadia, we are such very, very different people. She's a bit of an introvert, she loves nothing more than sitting at home writing a book. I'm very much more out there in the community and we've chosen these very different paths in life, but are still, very, very close friends, after 50 years. Mind you we've had our differences. But, in fact, writing the book was really interesting, we had no argument at all except about what font to use, because Nadia is unfortunately Times New Roman, and I'm not. But we are such different people. I ended up leaving academia and going into parliament because I was an activist and wanted to be able to change people's lives through the parliamentary process and do have, you know, succeed. Yes, so you can look at a whole lot of little things that you managed to get done and sometimes you'll see a bit of legislation and you'll remember the six months that it took you to badger people about getting that bit in there and things. So you do lower your you do allow in your your aims as you get older, and you recognise that you're not going to be able to make a huge difference but a small difference along the way, is really what I hope I've been able to do. And in the book, actually one of our well, Jeff Robertson when he's thinking about his life, too, he says, "Well, we were on the right, we were on the right side of history" and I do like to think that I've always been on the right side of history.
Nicole Abadee 49:54
Congratulations to both of you for lives well lived. Thank you for this wonderful book and I wish you all the very best with getting out there and getting that message out there and thank you both so much for speaking to me today on Books, Books, Books.
Meredith and Nadia 50:07
Thank you Nicole it was it was great fun.
Nicole Abadee 50:14
Thank you for listening to Books, Books, Books. If you liked what you heard in this episode, please go to my website, nicoleabadee.com.au. To listen to all the episodes and find out more about the podcast you can also find me Nicole Abadee on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and look for my reviews in Good Weekend. You can subscribe to Books, Books, Books at Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google and all the usual places. It would be lovely if you could go to any of these platforms and give a rating or review. Thank you. I look forward to talking books with you again soon.