While student protests in the 2020s have become no less frequent in recent years, their methods for voicing dissent have been vastly limited, particularly due to the Campus Access Policy and NSW protest laws. However, the use of the Quadrangle as an activism homeground has remained constant. During the late 1960s through to the 1980s, several less conventional forms of protest took place in and around the Quad, giving the impression our students were unhinged “louts,” who were “utterly unsuited for tertiary education” and should be “exprelled [sic].”
1: War of the Flours
In May 1969, Governor of NSW Arthur Roden Cutler came to USyd for a Ceremony of Conferring of Degrees, at which he was supposed to give an address. The Sydney University Regiment, a unit of the Australian Army Reserve which still exists today, had provided a ‘guard of honour’ for this ceremony. The President of the SRC at the time, and later High Court judge, Jim Spigelman, detailed how the SRC were planning a benign, pacifist protest: “the protestor group intended to sit down in the path of the Regiment allowing it to avoid the demonstrators or to march into them.”
However, on May 1, a group of counter-protesters consisting of the Labor Club and Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S) escalated the tension. A student called Ross Clark dressed as a military officer mimicking the Governor. Suddenly he was pelted with “a barrage of fruit, milk cartons and flour bombs etc.” The ammunition that missed Clark sailed past him to hit the protesters, who promptly threw it back at the anti-protesters. Soon afterwards, a student named Mike Jones, who was from the protester group, started to make another speech. He was ambushed from behind by two students armed with a rubbish bin which was half-filled with water and drenched him. Violence broke out: the protesters bitterly fought against the anti-protesters, and the scuffle was so intense that it drew widespread public attention. Spigelman reported that “The Governor became the centre of the continuing storm…Neither of the two contestant groups is wholly to blame and both must bear the responsibility for a series of events which has brought discredit to the entire student body.”
The public response was resoundingly sceptical. One ‘J Marshall’ wrote to the university saying, “In view of the events of last week, I suggest you institute a chair in thuggery. It would appear that a large number of your students would have no difficulty in passing with first class honours”. On May 5, the Senate approved a message to be sent to Cutler “expressing the very great regret” about the unfortunate incident, with an optimistic message that “the Senate anticipated with pleasure his next visit.”
2: Reaching New Heights
The below image show a bonfire constructed in 1975 on the Quad lawns specifically so that students could dance around a burning effigy representing “professorial power.” This was part of a movement centering around political economy, which involved protests, disputes & scuffles from the late 1960s through to the early 1980s.
However, a bonfire was the least of the administration’s worries. In 1983 student activists treated the sky as the limit, when a series of protesters took to the clock tower to protest against an administrative move to end the separate streaming of political economy within undergraduate degrees. Professor Frank Stilwell and Professor Ted Wheelwright had been fighting for years to establish a unique department of political economy, which eventually succeeded in 2008. Bizarrely, this gang of gung-ho students included Anthony Albanese, alongside several other students including David Re, Adam Rorris, Tony Westmore, Daniel Luscombe and Chris Gration. Re is pictured leaning over to bend the hands of the clock, while another photo shows the group of protesters perched on top of the clock tower. A caravan was brought onto campus to provide a place to sleep, and after a tense three weeks the NSW police moved in, charging eight students with a breach of discipline, arresting all six of the aforementioned students and temporarily banning some students from campus, including Albanese, who was fined $100.
3: Tear-inducing SRC Meeting
An SRC meeting in early March 1970 saw students whose creative limits were not bound to relentless heckling, and who decided on a much less judicious alternative: tear gas. At 10:30 pm, a can of tear-gas was opened beneath a table in the “confined and poorly-ventilated” Gosper Room, where the meeting was taking place. The meeting immediately broke up, and the fifty students present were forced to evacuate. One student, Martin Johnston, was affected by the tear gas to the extent that he “collapsed in the Quadrangle” and experienced “temporary blindness.” That student had to be taken to hospital, while many other students “complained of difficulty in breathing and facial neuralgia.” The meeting relocated to the Italian Department, after several students experienced nausea and other side effects of the tear gas.
It was later found that six students were responsible, and that all of them were current or former members of the S.D.S. The tear gas in question was made by a student doing Honours in Engineering. The motivation appeared to be that “the S.R.C. performs no genuine function for the Student Body as a whole and that the members of the S.R.C. seek election purely for their own advancement.” Thank goodness those times are behind us. The then-editor of Honi, Mel Bloom, invited “those persons responsible for the tear-gas[…] to submit an explanation of their behaviour. Should a SIGNED reply be not forthcoming, they must stand condemned by their actions.” No such reply was made. Bloom repeated the invitation the following week, but the offer was not accepted.
4: Maths Mischief
However, at the same time another conflict was brewing. Victoria Lee was a student originally studying at Macquarie University, who in 1970 was refused transferral to USyd on account of her not having studied Maths or Science when she applied to study Honours in Archaeology and Anthropology. She was told that “if she had sat for the HSC Maths paper and merely written her name on it she would have matriculated” and thus been eligible to transfer. Her application was mishandled in several ways, but Lee was still firmly rejected multiple times by the administration.
This led to an outpouring of student support and public outrage to the effect of some 200 people, who in a General Meeting of the Student Body called by the SRC had assembled to march on the administration and occupy the offices. Forcing their way into the Quadrangle and the Vice-Chancellor’s office, they insisted on staying put until the VC met their demands, primarily that Lee was admitted into the university. Some casualties of the conflict included windows, a folding iron door and panels of a wooden door. The students had climbed in through the window and broken in the front door with the help of a smoke bomb. “At the time of [Honi] writing”, there were “100 militants lodged in the corridor.”
The culmination of these events was a move in early April from the administration “against every student on this campus” with orders not to damage buildings, interfere with staff or incite other students to do likewise. Bloom wrote, “Let nobody underestimate the gravity of this application. The wide provisions of the injunction sought could be used to quash most forms of dissent on this campus now and in the future.” The SRC was against the violence used by militants to gain access to the building and raised a motion to this effect in a meeting attended by 700 students in the Wallace Theatre (with a further 300 outside), which was rejected by students. Alas, Victoria Lee’s application never succeeded. Student sentiment against the injunctions was widely felt, but despite several stepping forward to say that they would use militant protests again, the meeting ended without coming to blows. For once.
