Despite a last-minute quasi-lockdown, a big mob of Sixties radicals and a bunch of their younger friends and supporters met at the Cypress Club on 6 May to celebrate RADICALS: Remembering the Sixties by Meredith Burgmann and Nadia Wheatley.
The book was launched by ‘Stompin at Maroubra’ Sixties icon Little Patty who said ‘The book is a mixed bag of great people – the best and the bravest – and they still have the fire in their bellies’.
That could also have described the assembled party-goers, who included three members of the 1965 Freedom Ride, four 78ers and many angry second wave feminists.
As well, there was Australia's first draft card burner Wayne Haylen QC (now a judge), the first woman elected to Federal Parliament from New South Wales, Jeannette McHugh, former Deputy Premier Carmel Tebbutt, and the first woman President of the Communist Party of Australia (in fact, first woman president of any political party in Australia) Judy Mundey. Also present was Jim Boyce, one of the seven Wallabies who refused to play the all-white, racially selected South African Springboks in 1971.
And let’s not forget Robbie Swan, Gary Williams, Jozefa Sobski, Bronwyn Penrith, Helen Voysey and John Derum, whose stories are told in the book.
Ps: If you wonder why I am wearing a weird hat — it is the ceremonial headgear of Sydney University’s Yeoman Bedell, liberated as a battle trophy in the famous 1966 Fisher Library sit-in. Thanks to Brian Aarons, who lent it to me for the occasion.
