Manning Clark wrote that the 1950s in Australia were “years of Unleavened Bread.” Robert Menzies was in the Lodge, and the Queen was in the Palace. Australia was quiet and well-manicured. The “Sydney Push” emerged from this climate of conformity, pushing against the tide of normality. In the history and theory of the Push, one finds a distinct moment of anti-establishment experience juxtaposed against conventionality. The Push helped initiate a longer Australian tradition of activism and intellectual political debate.
The Push was disparate, but can be basically surmised as a loose confederation of students, writers, musicians, and hangers-on who concerned themselves with a life of what A.J. Baker termed “permanent protest.” It was a breakaway from the “freethought” of philosopher John Anderson. These activists were inspired by Descartes’ claim that “we must doubt everything,” and a devotion to Wilhelm Reich and the French Situationists. Socrates had famously spoken against the unexamined life. Here was a group of people very keen to examine life. They were anarchic and resented institutions. As member George Molnar put it, the Push, at its heart, advocated an “anarchic protest against those in power.”
It is in this spirit that the basic tenets of the Push emerged: a desire to protest everything, everywhere. The historical implications of this Bohemian bonhomie is obvious. The Push, in their commitment to questioning authority, and especially their opposition to South African apartheid, marked themselves out as an early example of explicitly anti-racist and anti-colonial debate in Australia.
In another way, they helped lay a foundation for much of the activism of the 1960s and 1970s. In a later incarnation, Push associates were involved in the green-ban campaign that preserved much of Sydney’s historic architecture. Similarly, their philosophical objection to established authority informed the anti-Vietnam War movement of the ‘60s. It also spurred the development of the satirical magazine Oz, which would become a countercultural touchstone of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and the subject of an infamous libel trial, illustrating how the Push was something of an intellectual influence on the social change of the 1970s.
However, as Andrew Moore’s obituary of Push leader Darcy Waters suggests, the Push believed that “fundamental change was impossible.” This presented an issue: the group’s concern with permanent protest seemed at odds with their resignation to the impossibility of change. So, they accepted fate with gin-sodden pessimism. The Push’s praxis was drinking, promiscuous sex, and intellectual debate. Such evenings spent in a haze of smoke at the Royal George Hotel, were dubbed by AJ Baker as “critical drinking.” Members would argue into the early hours of the morning about philosophy and politics.
The most glaringly obvious issue with the Push was the clear gulf between their claimed ideals and the reality of their circumstances. As much as the Push claimed to be in favour of anarchism, free love, Cartesian skepticism and political activism, they were far more content to drink and argue than actually do anything. Despite the “anarchic protest” that Molnar and others claimed underlay the Push was really, as Frank Moorehouse wrote “a club for talking, drinking, and fornicating.” Therefore, the Push was not a political group as much as it was a social circle who liked philosophy.
The longstanding juxtaposition between Push theory and Push practice, along with the disparity of the group, made dissolution inevitable. Elizabeth Farelly highlighted how the Push was a predominantly male group. Despite their protestations of “permanent protest,” and “free love,” the Push was still wedded to the patriarchal and sexist gender conventions of the 1950s. Farrelly observes how many male push members treated women as “sexual conveniences.” The writer James Franklin was more blunt, admitting that, “Push men were beasts.”
Their attachment to freedom and liberty was only true when it suited the blatant misogyny of its male participants. Philosopher David Armstrong argued that the Push’s apparent defence of polyamory didn’t derive from a principled philosophy, but rather from a desire to “justify their exploitation of women.”
In the view of Anne Coombs, the Push fizzled out for two reasons. Firstly, young people by the late ‘60s and early ‘70s “believed in many of the things that the Push had been advocating.” Similarly, the 1972 election of Gough Whitlam meant that the conventional Push opposition to established politics dwindled as a more progressive administration entered government. The pubs they frequented closed and old Sydney was built over. The decade and a half of Bohemian anarchism, beer-soaked sexuality, and philosophical debate came to a close as society changed. No longer was protest or debate the exclusive, coffee-house right of an intellectual vanguard.
So what, if anything, can one take from the Push?
There is value in Bohemia. In the Push’s anti-racism, and their commitment to intellectualism and debate, it marked itself out as a group of unique non-conformists that are central to a larger tradition of Australian radicalism. Their staunch opposition to authoritarianism and racism in all their vile forms meant that the early Push protests gave voice to a tradition of modern social activism and consciousness that remains today. In a way, the Push’s greatest continued relevance is as an historical force, a barometer of the ways Australian thought changed through the 1960s.
