1968: Victorian anti-war movement gets an injection

Abstract

When the 'baby-boomers' had reached university age, their understandings, habits and behaviours often collided with the political discourse of their parents' generation. By 1968, the Monash University Labor Club, fresh from its campaign to raise money for the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF), had discarded the mantle of Labor reformism and set itself on a path of a radical communist activism that scorned the efforts of the Communist Party (CPA) to contain its enthusiasm. In concert with similarly leaning student clubs at the other two Victorian universities it turned its attention to the protest movement outside the university, against conscription and the Vietnam Wm: That brought the inevitable clash with the older established anti war movement led by a loose blend of ALP, CPA, church groups and unions. This process led, in Scalmer's classification of protest actions, to the mode of political demonstrations leaping radically from 'staging' to 'disruption.'