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Book Review
| Alan Barcan, Radical Students: the Old Left at Sydney University, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, 2002. pp. xv + 392. $49.95 cloth;G.B. Harrison, Night Train to Granada: fromSydney's Bohemia to Franco's Spain: an Offbeat Memoir, Pluto Press, Annandale, 2002. pp. xii + 385. $27.95 paper.
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| Alan Barcan was a student at Sydney University during the late 1930s, early 1940s, and during the early post-war years, a long undergraduate period broken by war service. A participant in the radical student movement of his time, Barcan was a member of the Communist Party of Australia (1941–46), co-editor of the Sydney University student newspaper Honi Soit (1946), and general secretary of the National Union of Australian University Students (1946–48). |
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In later life, Barcan became an academic (Associate Professor, University of Newcastle) specialising in education history, and until 1975 regarded himself a leftist. But during the 1960s things went awry; as Barcan explains, 'the cultural revolution of 1967–74 [embraced] new gods [of] relativism, relevance, anti-historicism, progressive education'. Quite simply, the western liberal humanist tradition was being destroyed; so he broke with the left and became a cultural warrior of another colour, alongside conservatives like Lauchlan Chipman and Leonie Kramer. |
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All of which needs to be said because Radical Students: the Old Left at Sydney University is stridently polemical in parts. Barcan is contemptuous of student radicalism 1960s style, which he calls 'the student revolt', characterising it essentially as thoughtless extremism that flirted with authoritarianism. Barcan begins his study of student radicalism in the 1920s and ends before things shifted up a few gears, before the post-war baby boomers flooded into Australia's universities, before the Menzies government cynically manipulated Australia into the Vietnam War, before the lottery system of selective Conscription was foisted upon Australia's youth, before radical students found, for a time, a confronting public voice and ways to challenge the power of the state, a time before some of Barcan's former student radicals showed their adult colours as front men for the CIA and American imperialism. |
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Nostalgically Barcan looks back to times when, by his account, student radicals were polite, witty, clever, reasonable, given to voicing radicalism in debates, poetry, tinkling on the piano, creating a revue skit or two; they variously jousted, partied, and ran with leftist and sometimes atheistic ideas, effortlessly passed exams, before graduating and following career paths that led many to prominence as lawyers, judges, journalists, politicians, authors, academics; some remained somewhere on the left, but others significantly went over to the right. |
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Don't get me wrong; Radical Students is a valuable contribution to Australia's social and cultural history. In effect Barcan delivers an account of the formative intellectual development of an encyclopaedic cast of NSW public figures, mainly during the 1940s and 1950s, set against local and international political events. The research is meticulous, drawing on memoirs, interviews, and the mass of published material and records generated by generations of students and their organisations during the period concerned; the documentation comprises 29 pages. |
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Dominating Barcan's account is the charismatic presence and intellectual influence of John Anderson, Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University from 1927 to 1958. Anderson was an atheist, an enemy of censorship, an advocate of sexual freedom, and an outspoken participant in public issues. He was also a Marxist, then Trotskyist, before rejecting both and fomenting a Sydney brand of radicalism that was anti-communist, anti-authoritarian, suspicious of mass and collective actions and solutions, and encouraged an individualist form of personal rebellion, which a critical and tetchy Anderson later realised lent itself to wasteful, hedonistic excesses. |
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Grahame Harrison was one of the students influenced by Anderson at Sydney University. In 1952 he abandoned undergraduate studies and, like many of his student generation, went to London, fleeing 'from the sanctimonious Australia of Robert Gordon Menzies', before moving to the fascist Spain of Francisco Franco. He was drawn to Spain by a job teaching English, and by his attachment to Spanish Civil War left anti-communist movements. In Newcastle during the late 1920s through to 1945, young Harrison had been influenced by his working-class environment, the Depression, the non-party socialism of his father, the left literature and discussions that surrounded his childhood and adolescence, and by the influence at Newcastle Boys' High of some inspirational Communist and Andersonian teachers. |
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The Spanish Civil War figured prominently; Orwell's Homage to Catalonia was influential for Harrison during his adolescence, and he was drawn to Spanish anarchism. At Sydney University from 1945 onwards, Harrison was liberated by the free inquiry, 'realist' approach of John Anderson's philosophy, and relished the anarchist spirit that was part of the milieu of the young people influenced by Anderson. |
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Night Train to Granada: from Sydney's Bohemia to Franco's Spain: an Offbeat Memoir is based on Harrison's seven-year Spanish sojourn, and subsequent revisits after having returned to Sydney, finally graduating, and becoming an academic specialising in Spanish history. The memoir ranges freely backwards and forwards in time and from place to place, variously autobiography, social and political comment, historical analysis, loving and empathetic observation of the Spanish people and culture, laced with humour and pervaded by a sense of hope. The survival of the human spirit of freedom in the context of a police state is an ongoing theme. Social and political historians should find Harrison's account of childhood, education, and life in post-war bohemian Sydney, the latter involving many of the characters met briefly in Barcan's book, enjoyably useful. |
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