Imagine a Quadrangle alight with endless raucous and passionate debates over the political questions of the day, all tightly packed resembling a Westminster parliamentary formation in the Professorial Boardroom.
This was the 1978 University of Sydney Union Honeywell Debating Championship, lasting for nine days in July 1978.
Teams flew from across the Anglosphere to duke it out over what the ABC called “the most important debating event ever held in the southern hemisphere” in its own live coverage of the debates.
Held under the presidency of the famously flamboyant late Edward (Ted) Marr (1953 – 2019) who was known for hosting lavish parties in Bella Vista, Macau and Hong Kong following a stint in intellectual property law. Few ex-USU Presidents can claim an entire feature length documentary dedicated to their life and a eulogy from Malcolm Turnbull.
The prize ceremony was a spectacle in its own rights with the victor, the University of Sydney itself, presented a trophy by the late Vice-Chancellor Sir Herman Black and the Presidents of the Oxford and Cambridge Unions.
Yet, underneath all this glamour lies a darker association with American war crimes in Vietnam, specifically, through its namesake sponsor, Honeywell.
Honeywell and Vietnam
Honeywell, with a mammoth revenue of US$36.7 billions in 2023, is a US computer firm with a dual role as a weapons manufacturer during the Vietnam War and other conflicts. According to the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), the company produced a number of cluster munitions — weapons specially designed to cause devastating casualties through countless shrapnel and latent bombs.
“The CBU-24, like the child burned by napalm, became a symbol of the Indochina war,” UNIDIR’s John Borrie explains.
“Honeywell Inc., a leading producer of the CBU-24, was a target of demonstrations, stockholder resolutions, consumer boycotts and other forms of protest in the United States and other countries.”
Similarly, Otfried Nassauer’s Berlin Information Center for Transatlantic Security noted that, aside from cluster bombs, Honeywell manufactured multiple other deadly weapons, including components for Polaris submarine launched nuclear missiles.
The legacy of Honeywell’s weapons can still be seen in the Museum of Đà Nẵng. Over five decades ago, this fragment formed part of a CBU-24 bomb that fell on the city.
The carnage left by cluster bombs eventually led to the Convention on Cluster Munitions (2008), an international treaty aimed at eliminating the use of cluster weapons.
Amnesia and reluctance to acknowledge the USU’s darker legacy
It’s no secret that USU Debating is widely perceived as a clique dominated by wealthy private school alumni.
I reached out to current USU Director of Debates Will Price for his reflection on debating’s legacy given Honeywell. Sadly, his authority was overridden by current USU President Bryson Constable (Liberal) who said that the USU is “proud of the 150th anniversary celebration of student unionism” that was “well received by the community”.
Does that mean being proud of historic ties to a weapon manufacturer who supplied weapons for U.S campaigns in Yugoslavia, Laos, and much more? An answer to that question remains unanswered.
Similarly, a question mark is placed over how USU Archivist Marlow Hurst missed the mark entirely.
However, the USU and Hurst are far from alone in falling into amnesia. Despite being a University famed for its vociferous activism against American involvement in Vietnam, previous generations did not detect Honeywell’s controversial legacy.
A far more illuminating response came from former Honi editor Patricia Lane (1978) who edited the paper the year that the Honeywell Festival took place.
“In terms of the things we wrote editorials about, there were domestic concerns, there weren’t so much concerns about international politics,” Lane explains, listing the significant stories of her year, including a fledgling Redfern Legal Centre, corruption within NSW Police and prisoners’ rights.
That year also marked the dramatic upheavals of the first Mardi Gras (1978) that dominated Honi and national headlines in the month leading up to the Debating Festival. This meant that “domestic preoccupations” overshadowed any controversy that the Honeywell sponsorship may have generated, three years on from the Vietnam War.
The second reason, for Lane, was that debating was never high in Honi’s purview in any capacity. Lane also explained that debating itself was a confined silo in itself that the average student
“A lot of my peers didn’t have a clue what debating was, couldn’t give a shit about it, it didn’t mean anything to them. It’s a private high school-level activity, to put it in those crude terms. It didn’t really speak to the experience of a lot of people who are in my peer group.”
In a sense, the USU and past generations’ lack of attention tells a fascinating story in and of itself. This year’s 150th anniversary represents a powerful chance for the largest student organisation in the nation to take a thorough look into its history.
The USU, as an organ of university life, should engage robustly with intellectual rigour and honesty with its past rather than seeing its 150th anniversary as a superficial exercise in public relations. It is this reflection that is indispensable to the future
Otherwise, amnesia is yet another symptom of a poor university culture.
