We watched the Sixties in Ballarat. Everyone had observer status but few locals participated directly in that carnival of challenge and change. Of course the town passed, in rote numerical order, through the years of the 1960s during which I entered my teens. But the Sixties happened elsewhere. Their Australian geography was mostly bound to inner suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney which housed enclaves of very loosely affiliated cultural change agents who gave the Sixties a generatively dissident form. There was, too, a smattering of communitarian outposts in mountain valleys. These isolated havens were home for those who had extracted a set of liveable ideas from the messy ferment of ideals and counter-propositions the Sixties generously spawned. In the cities the Sixties were more untidy and disruptive, as befits a period of cultural flux. The muddle extended to the designation of years. Despite the unequivocal reference to a single decade, the Sixties is shorthand term bestowed in retrospect – the writ of the Sixties ran roughly from the late 1950s to the mid 1970s.

Bridge Street, Ballarat, 1969. Photo: John Ward. Via Flickr.

During this long decade, some predominantly Anglo-European cities were buffeted by gales of protest - Paris more than Melbourne, New York more than Sydney. In provincial Ballarat the sunny 1960s simply followed the sunny 1950s – more of the same, perhaps sunnier. There was grumbling among adults about London’s silly Carnaby Street clothes, and reports of dreadful music in often raucous clubs. Raised eyebrows and pursed lips conveyed confusion: was this the way for the capital of the Commonwealth to comport herself? These departures from expectations were outward signs of more disconcerting shifts that were harder to grasp. They prompted a diffuse uneasiness, a perception of disorder creeping through unplumbed gaps in the established order.

Anxiety and buoyancy were trapped together one morning in 1964 when The Beatles came to Melbourne. I was silently enthralled by the TV broadcast of a throng in central Melbourne clogging aptly named Exhibition Street, with gazes, screams and cries channelled to the hotel balcony on which the Fab Four clowned around. I had no idea why that band’s commercial tour of duty mattered to me as much as it did, but I was frequently alerted to the irritation and bewilderment of adults to whom this unseemly behaviour was an unbidden snub to decorum. The irritation was long-lasting. Later in the 1960s I stood in school cadet ranks while a Christian Brother, dressed as a soldier, declaimed the termites hollowing out all the good won by our fathers and uncles from the Second World War. I think I remember this rant simply for the amusing phylogenetic link between termites and Beatles. I was silent during this god-fearing rave, as I customarily was at school. I didn’t know what that teacher dressed as a soldier was afraid of losing, other than his short temper. His spittle-flecked diatribe bemused me then, amuses me now.

I didn’t share the sorrows of that captain of cadets, but I didn’t really know much about my side of the ledger until I went to university in the mid 1970s. That’s when my Sixties began. I grew into them quickly. Happily, the first gush of the new spring hadn’t slowed for us latecomers. There was debate aplenty on campuses and in the media, and among students who lived a walk or a bus ride from like minds. Physical and intellectual spaces invited challenge and challengers. The dissent was ecumenical – make trouble about whatever troubles you. It was a French approach to social dispute – don’t sit there complaining: get on the street and burn something. And at every turn in our endless debates there was music. The Beatles had disbanded in 1970 but still bothered the establishment gods when I finished uni in 1978, as did the Stones and The Eagles, chilled locals like AC-DC and The Masters Apprentices, and colourful bands like Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd and Deep Purple. We protested often, sometimes in self-interest: the Tertiary Education Assistance Scheme was a choice target for the few of us who lucked a university place.

The Sixties had petered out by the 1980s: the music had settled down, and the harbingers of social change now rocked up in well-cut frocks and suits, rather than smocks and platform shoes. The 1980s put the Sixties to good use as the huge task of reframing social settlements got underway. In politics, in policy, in workplaces, in families, in relationships, in health services, in education, a new commonsense was defined, and order eked from disorder. Iconic legacies of the Sixties were separated from the clutter which was, progressively, binned. It can take a long time. We are underway still on matters like reconciliation with First Australians, recognition of the rights of (and the right to be any one of) LGBTIQ+ people, and gender equality. During the Sixties a platform for these concerns was sketched out. It was enough to attract a combination of believers that luckily turned out to have in its contingent a cohort of adherents with a long view and persistence. Time and again they made a point of openly welcome those wanting to nudge the nation towards habits and conventions they believed more generous. There were any number of the Sixties cohort who started out proselytising for change, and gradually saw social and personal benefits in resisting it.

My 60s guides: Kurt Andersen’s True Believers and Lauren Groff’s Arcadia

About five years ago I had a happy accident from which I do not intend to recover. In the space of a few weeks I read two novels that led me on two unplanned trips to the Sixties. The first tour was via the good graces of Kurt Andersen’s True believers, and the second by courtesy of Lauren Groff’s Arcadia, both published in 2012. These writings on the Sixties wall led me to dwell in my experiences of that time.

Quicksilver Times Mayday Supplement:,1971. From Washington Area Spark via Flickr.

Both novels are steeped in the pursuit of ideals. Both investigate the exploratory mores that informed youth culture and counter-culture. Both record the ways in which those who seek change are captive to ways of thinking and doing that reflect what they reject. Yet each book approaches the summit of the Sixties from different base camps.

Andersen’s protagonist, Karen Hollander, revisits the circumstances around her decision to embrace political violence as a compelling means by which to force the United States to quit the war in Vietnam – a foray that remains known only to her fellow conspirators, her well placed lover and Andersen’s readers. This was protest fired with determination to impose a worldview by hacking away the stubborn resolve of the Johnson Administration and its supporters. These and later years were also serious times in the real world of American democracy. The Mayday Tribe, comprised of disparate groups and individuals who shared anti-war sentiments, came together during Nixon’s presidency. Tribe members were frustrated at the lack of impact achieved by previous anti-war protests. With considered planning, and under the slogan ‘If the government won’t stop the war, we’ll stop the government,’ from May 3 to 5 1971 May Day protestors crowded onto Washington DC’s bridges and major thoroughfares, rendering them inaccessible to traffic. More than 12,000 protestors were arrested. I don’t know if Andersen borrowed insights from the May Day protests when writing True believers. His plot could in some ways be borrowed into a more recent narrative that also puts democracy in the USA on notice: there are parallels between Hollander’s story, the May Day protests, and the June 6 2020 insurrection on Capitol Hill precipitated by a mob of Trump crusaders. The parallels run all the way to the Supreme Court, though the May Day Tribe and Trump’s supporters raged on different sides of America’s political divide.

In youth, Hollander is a committed, if accidental, activist. The unintended outcomes of her activism lead her to decades of pragmatism – getting things done with flair and method, making realistic, purposeful decisions about relationships and career. She reflects that ‘now as then, true believers loathe the moderates in their midst.’ Activists grab headlines; they don’t tog up for board meetings, or draft and redraft policy and protocols. You need something like the Sixties now and then: times when activists rattle the verities. But 90 years out of 100, it’s moderates who get things done and pragmatists who change the world through inclusive leadership and practical compromise.

Karen Hollander is a capable insider. She looks back forty-six years from a place of influence and privilege. She is touted as a Supreme Court nominee but does not pursue the possibility, fearing her long held secret will be revealed through White House prying and the political sweatshop of Congressional nomination hearings. The novel hangs on to the secret for a long time too, constantly edging towards and away from disclosure; a transparent novelist’s trick that works a treat.

Ellis, R. (1970). [Hippy family group in a bush house] [picture] / Rennie Ellis. Via State Library of Victoria.

True believers is steeped in the drama of protests. By contrast, Lauren Groff’s characters exempt themselves from the fray. Their protest is to walk away from a broken worldview and to create instead the self-sufficient commune of Arcadia – a community apart from the nation, if inconveniently within its borders. The Arcadians did not actively seek to convert others. The logic of the commune is to exclude those who do not subscribe to its ways of thinking and doing. Communes demand a different and narrower conformity than the more open but failed society they shun. But the Arcadians were too unguarded. They permitted others to join them without vetting their allegiance to the commune’s core values. Their self-righteousness also left them without an awareness of their own inconsistencies. To the eventual detriment of Arcadia, the commune’s founders unwittingly created a second and disgruntled class by granting limited rights of participation to newcomers.

It has to be said Arcadia relied on pragmatists too. The new world was literally built by Abe, who led refurbishment of the old mansion on the communal farm – a huge task that is completed in three months. It is a job the Arcadians had been getting around to for years, and was only achieved when the commune’s leader – self-indulgent, self-regarding Handy – took leave of absence to raise operating funds for the commune through a concert tour. Later, when Arcadia ran short of funds and food, it was Abe and his partner Hannah who planted a marijuana crop they planned to sell into the wider world in a bid to refill the coffers and larders. This was pragmatism at odds with the ideals of the community, yet essential to its survival.

In the midst of Arcadia’s strife and joys grows Abe’s and Hannah’s child, Bit – ‘a little bit of a hippy.’ Bit is our constant companion through both halves of the story. The first half records the rise and fall of Arcadia, and its multitude of contradictions. The second half skips forward to find Bit working in New York as a photography teacher, loving and caring for his young daughter, and grieving for his missing partner – Helle of Arcadia who fell from Bit’s desperate grasp into the featureless sea of the city. Bit has more loving, caring and grieving to do as he tends to his dying mother. In the midst of these trials and joys, Bit remains a natural pragmatist – he has adapted to, rather than embraced, the world he lives in. Its contradictions are those of Arcadia; only the emphasis differs. For Bit, Arcadia’s ideals ring true, but he understands they can be shaped only and unreliably through personal relationships. The space between individual lives and organised social systems is the gap between trust and protective selfishness that devalues ideals.

During the Sixties I danced between these two alternatives – to opt in and protest, or to opt out and start again. Given my ambivalence about which track to follow, I was mightily relieved during the 1970s to discover a middle way: dogged pragmatism guided by principles. It’s no freeway. It’s a circuitous, slow road, but it’s grounded. I haven’t been the most talented or strategic pragmatist. At times I have lost balance. But pragmatists darting after principles I endorsed in the Sixties will still find me a willing pillion passenger.

Something was bound to happen, soon

It was like that in the Sixties. Something was bound to happen soon. No-one knew what, so there was no way of knowing what to prepare for. The blend of good and bad in any event was a judgement for the moment, and for individual palates. A riot in Notting Hill, Bobby Kennedy felled, the Springbok tour protests across Australia, sudden turns of battle in Vietnam, the 1969 election that set up Whitlam’s Labor Party for its 1972 win (and set it up three scant years later for vice-regal deception and ejection from office). The Sixties inkling was that somehow all this was connected, but I struggled to link events into a narrative that explained what was going on. I’m not sure I can do any better now, other than to say the turbulence resulted from a confluence of eclectic, uncoordinated events – many narratives roiled together, plots overlapped. Something was bound to happen, soon.

I hope I am mostly innocent of participant bias. It’s not easy to avoid. I resist the familiar claim of every generation that my generation lived through the most turbulent, testing or progressive times. Every year is a marvel and a disappointment. Nonetheless, I may have stumbled into that self-aggrandising cul-de-sac more often than I discern. Let me excuse my blunders by saying it is an error to believe the Sixties were more decisive or more important than other passages of recent history. The Twentieth Century can lay claim to many turning points and too many tumults. The Great Depression and its bookends, the First and Second World Wars, touched all Australians. The Sixties didn’t reach into every suburb or rural township with such intrusive devastation. The Twenty-First Century can already claim world- and nation-changing events like the devastation that still flows from 9/11, increasing frequency of extreme weather events, Covid. What I observe about the Sixties is that this handful of years was caught in a swirling current. It seemed the stabilisers in Anglo-European cultures might not hold against the undertow. Yet despite the manifest uncertainty there was a sustaining sense of opportunity to make change rather to make protest alone.

It is sometimes said of protestors then and now that they are certain only of what they are against and have no idea about what they are for. I think it’s true that those who led and followed in various protest movements during the Sixties were more certain about what they were against. This was handy politically (though I don’t believe it was a deliberate strategy for many) because there was no need to negotiate next steps – a sure way to delay a timetable of action and to split and lose supporters. I disagree that they had no idea about what they were for. There were hazy, even incoherent, notions about what should replace the status quo. World peace, to take a stereotypical example, is actually a very good idea. Who in their right minds would not endorse it as a worthy objective? What protest leaders and followers were most often missing was the important section of the route between the status quo and the ideal – the bridge. There were too few engineers among us. (At university the engineers were mostly at the pub.)

There’s a wry truth in observing that those few who opted out to start communes were more practical than most of those on the streets. They had a plan, even if it was not one likely to attract the population at large. It didn’t matter. It was not their aim to appeal to the throng. The throng was wrong and energy was better spent doing what was right. And yet there are fewer communes now. It is not the practical separatists who made good on the Sixties. It is the pragmatists amid the throng who kept the flags flying into and beyond the 1970s. They have done what they could with that agenda. Now we need new ideas. We need another long decade of invigorated protest and experimentation. I think that decade has begun with increasing clamour for action, notably in Australia on sluggish national responses to gender equity, climate change, and respect for First Nations. I expect something to happen soon. I expect protests to swell in number, participants, fervour, scope and objectives. Let’s nurture a new generation of pragmatists who will build bridges to new settlements.

In my nearly seven decades it was the Sixties alone that held so many incongruities in teetering balance for so long. For me, the Sixties were precarious, precious years. In retrospect, I am especially thankful to the pragmatists – old school and new breed – who got to grips with coordinating a miscellany of interests to operate the national policy pump in unison. Disruption, exploration and divergent paths get us riverside; optimism, realism and persistence get us to the other side. Soon, if never soon enough.

Moving Books

Visiting the Sixties

My 60s guides: Kurt Andersen’s True Believers and Lauren Groff’s Arcadia

Something was bound to happen, soon