'A passionate portrayal of Australia's social awakening - the people, the politics, and the power of the student press.
'The 1960s was a decade of profound change, marked by an accumulating tension between political conservatism and social restlessness. During this time, university campuses became sites of dissent, amplified by the proliferation of tertiary institutions, producing the best-educated generation in Australian history.
'Student newspapers began probing the Vietnam War and resisting conscription, challenging racism and the absence of Aborigines at university, stirring gender politics, and testing the limits of obscenity. With erudition, wit, and daring creativity - and enabled by new printing technology - student newspapers played an immensely important role in Australia's social, cultural, and political transformation, the results of which still resonate throughout Australia today.
'In Dissent, historian Sally Percival Wood encapsulates the spirit of the era, delving into the people, the places, and the politics of the time to reveal how this transformation took place. From 1961, when Monash University opened, to 1972, when the Whitlam government came to power, Dissent shows just how profoundly the political conservatism emblematic of post-war Australia struggled to adapt to this new generation, with its new, sometimes alarming, audacity - and goes on to ask- has the student press lost its nerve?' (Publication summary)
Dedication: for Pete
'Australia never proved fertile territory for the notorious “underground” newspapers of the United States and Europe in the “long” 1960s: from Texas’ Rag to the Berkley Barb, London’s Black Dwarf and Paris’ Tout. Instead, Australia’s young radicals appropriated often quite staid campus newspapers and transformed them into means of political and cultural agitation. Sally Percival Wood’s Dissent does a splendid job in bringing these publications to light, demonstrating their roles in pushing envelopes in areas like censorship, sex, the Vietnam war, women’s and Indigenous rights as the nation grappled with a crisis of post‐colonial identity.' (Introduction)
'The Guardian’s Australian bird of the year survey recently had the University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU) council in a flap. The student newspaper Farrago reported that the council had passed a motion condemning The Guardian for its failure to provide a preferential voting system. Farrago‘broke’ the news on Twitter that UMSU president Yan Zhuang had fulfilled the council’s demands to ‘sigh very loudly in the general direction of The Guardian Australia’s offices two times, shaking her head upon the second time’. Zhuang tweeted that she wanted to end her presidency with ‘something as hilarious and ridiculous as this whole year has been’.' (Introduction)
'The Guardian’s Australian bird of the year survey recently had the University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU) council in a flap. The student newspaper Farrago reported that the council had passed a motion condemning The Guardian for its failure to provide a preferential voting system. Farrago‘broke’ the news on Twitter that UMSU president Yan Zhuang had fulfilled the council’s demands to ‘sigh very loudly in the general direction of The Guardian Australia’s offices two times, shaking her head upon the second time’. Zhuang tweeted that she wanted to end her presidency with ‘something as hilarious and ridiculous as this whole year has been’.' (Introduction)
'Australia never proved fertile territory for the notorious “underground” newspapers of the United States and Europe in the “long” 1960s: from Texas’ Rag to the Berkley Barb, London’s Black Dwarf and Paris’ Tout. Instead, Australia’s young radicals appropriated often quite staid campus newspapers and transformed them into means of political and cultural agitation. Sally Percival Wood’s Dissent does a splendid job in bringing these publications to light, demonstrating their roles in pushing envelopes in areas like censorship, sex, the Vietnam war, women’s and Indigenous rights as the nation grappled with a crisis of post‐colonial identity.' (Introduction)
