The Youth Carnival for Peace and Friendship, March 1952

Abstract

There is a tendency in writing on the Australian peace movement to assume that widespread participation of youth in that movement began with the Vietnam War.1 It is true that the Anti-Vietnam War, Anti-Conscription Movement marked the peace movement's first mobilisation of middle-class youth on a mass scale in Australia.2 Nevertheless, working-class and radical young people had been vitally involved in the anti-war movement in earlier periods, including the anti-conscription campaigns of World War I and the mobilisations against war and fascism of the 1930s.3 This type of involvement extended into the post-war years, and continued to comprise a significant organisational nucleus around which young peace activists could cohere. One manifestation of this was the important coalescence of the youth, peace and labour movements which occurred in 1952, around the Youth Carnival for Peace and Friendship (YCPF). It was, indeed, at this stage that the broad cultural foundations were laid, and crucial links and social networks developed, upon which the later mass movement was built when the historical circumstances made this possible in the period of the Vietnam War. This article examines the struggle by radical youth and peace movements, with the support of the labour movement, to organise what became a massive, broadly-based, counter-hegemonic gathering in the midst of the Cold War and in the face of concerted conservative attacks. The success of this initiative stands