Almost all present invocations of the Sydney Push, from the Herald to the paper I write this in, conclude with the same resounding message: we must remember the Push. To remember, to historicise, of course, seems an innocuous, even morally upright act which is also tied up in the left-wing politics supposedly belonging to the Sydney Push. Yet if there is anything we can learn from Australian historiography, it is that history, mythology, and remembering are often the most violent and effective tools of the colony.
Even just after the establishment of the NSW penal colony, Australia was a place of remembering, of nostalgia. English painters arrived to paint pastoral scenes reminiscent of a pre-industrial Europe. Settlers arrived to seek a fortune free from the servitude and gloom of the modern city. The mythologies and histories coined by these early colonists were the same used to carry out the most brutal colonial atrocities, largely committed by middle-class strivers and the petit-bourgeois who were enthused to pursue a greater lot by means of violent settlement.
When we remember the Sydney Push, a similar undertaking is at hand.
Obviously, it’s nothing groundbreaking to remark on its general flaws — sexist, bohemian, utter middle-class debauchery — as almost all annalists of the Sydney Push have made such observations already. Yet no matter how much it’s shown for these spiritually ugly qualities, its mythos always ends up accepted and affirmed as an integral part of Australian identity. What I’m much more interested in is this persisting memory of the Push: its motivations and its consequences.
Much is written and commented about the Sydney Push. A late 2000s Herald article describes their efforts as a “50s phenomenon” that “the world could use a lot more of right now.” Only very recently, within a ‘pub and politics’ history, the ABC regarded the period as a notable epoch that “sometimes led to political action”. Little is mentioned of its feeble egalitarianism or transactional culture of women’s involvement. Interestingly, The Push positioned themselves in opposition to moralism, as a movement supposedly founded on anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian and anti-bigotry ideologies despite their blind eye to First Nations issues and shallow second wave-feminist bolstering. But for all that, contemporary political history analysis still uses their movements and ‘pub rendezvous’ as a moral benchmark.
Yet the group remains a relatively obscure subject in larger society. More akin to Radio Birdman than INXS, the mythology of the Sydney Push is a niche of Australian identity, that like all niches of national identities, is as equally significant as its corresponding mainstream. When we imagine the people who think about, talk about, and identify with the Push, we think more of Sydney University and the ABC than Southern Cross tats and Bintang singlets. Though the former are repelled and disgusted by the latter as signifiers of vulgar nationalism, they too seek out their fix of Australian identity where they can find it; in bowling club beers and Labour party history, in Winton and Paterson. The Sydney Push is just one more example.
Though I’m not one to deny anyone their comforts, I think we ought to be clear-eyed about them.
Take ‘critical drinking’, for one; the Push pastime of intellectual discussion over booze. Little was critical about the Push’s drinking. While Jim Baker and John Anderson wrote numerous treatises and essays on libertarianism and freedom of thought, the White Australia Policy was in full swing and the traditional owners of the land they wrote, drank, and slept on lacked the right to vote in state or federal elections. No mention of these clear encroachments on freedom are found in these writings of “permanent protest” towards egalitarian realisation. Though we’d be fools of retrospect to claim superiority to these writers and academics, we certainly need not bestow them the title of ‘critical’.
Beyond this, there is an implicit assertion in the phrase ‘critical drinking’, that drinking culture and the public bar, a predominantly working class institution, was somehow inherently unintellectual. Since the Push’s gentrification of the Australian pub as a gathering spot, it has transformed a markedly more upper-middle class location (though of course this also has its roots in much larger socio-economic shifts) belonging to clerks and consultants rather than longshoremen and labourers.
Even in the desolate Wikipedia articles, the grounds of gender representation are eye-brow raising at best and depressing at most times. Of the 20 “key associates”, three were women. And in that those ‘Push Women’ who according to James Franklin’s ‘Corrupting the Youth: A history of Australian Philosophy’ were described as “loose”, “pluck[ing] at sleeves” and subject to an “obsessional attitude towards sex”.
The movement’s culture created a breeding ground of academic discourse mixed in with the normalised objectification and problematic sexual treatment of Push Women; a history previously critiqued by Honi Soit.
One of the Push’s most attractive qualities to contemporary admirers is its political nihilism. In the political situation we find ourselves in, one can easily find sympathy in the belief that “Labor and Liberal parties were both committed to destroying freedom”, as James Franklin states. Yet this was not a principled rejection of electoral politics as we see today in the protests and demonstrations that typically replace voting drives and campaign volunteering. To members of the Sydney Push, “demonstrating in the streets or organising for political action was regarded as succumbing to illusions.”
It should come as no surprise, then, to find prominent Push member, Padraic McGuinness, ended his career editing the conservative journal Quadrant. Such is the fate of many who “teetered towards anarchism but joined the ALP”.
Even in the 1969 federal election — which saw on the ballot the issues of free university education, universal health insurance, and the comprehensive abandonment of the White Australia Policy — Push activists engaged in poster campaigns encouraging informal voting. The Push’s so-called “political action” held the sinking weight of a pint. This is not to say the politicisation of pub culture was the downfall of the Push’s intestinal fortitude imagery, but rather the glorification of their inaccessible gossip session that mostly relied on elitist and inaccessible academic theory painted as precedent. Take the aforementioned enthusiastic historical analysis by the ABC or the consistent trend of nostalgia discourse in even this paper itself: a fabrication against the movement’s evident ethos.
Despite this, we hear endlessly of the Push’s radically progressive underpinnings. Often invoked is Jim Baker’s assertion of the Push containing “a few anarchists who wouldn’t hesitate to drop a bomb on the Sydney Harbour Bridge”, what surely anyone could identify as a contrived bluff masking the at best, idle, and at worst, deeply conservative politics of the Sydney Push. Such a superficial flirtation with anarchism may well be a pillar of middle-class White Australian identity; from Ned Kelly fanboyism to the Eureka tower.
The Sydney Push characterises itself and continues to be characterised as a social and philosophical movement beyond nation and race, yet even at a cursory glance one can see it is anything but. Beyond views on sex and drugs, the Push is an overwhelmingly white, reactionary, and nationalist movement. Not in spite of but for these very traits, thousands of high-minded Australians, clutching their Saturday papers and holiday house keys, subscribe devotedly to the mythology of the Sydney Push. Though the movement allegedly disintegrated in the early Whitlam 70s, its now sunken memory acts as hyperbolised dinner table chatter shared by a select audience over a glass of red.
So as I pick up a paper and see one more article, one more history, one more reflection, one more invocation that I remember the Push for all its worth … “God”, I think, “there’s nothing I’d rather do less.”
