Interview Interview with Tim Anderson, Redfern, Sydney, 1993with Tim Anderson, Redfern, Sydney, 1993
Born in 1951 in New South Wales, Gary is one of the best known Aboriginal activists in this country. Having worked for many years in Aboriginal health, in film and various forms of community organisation, and having served for two years as Director of the Aboriginal Arts Board, he now mainly works in Aboriginal education in Melbourne and Sydney. Just before this interview, in Redfern in late 1993, he and his son Bruce won a legal action in the Equal Opportunity Board against the Victorian state government’s closure of Northlands secondary school. The government later won an appeal in the Supreme Court. Some history here: https://yumi-sabe.aiatsis.gov.au/project/1862 and here: https://kooriweb.org/foley/great/northlands.htm
It’s rather unusual to find you, I suppose, working through the courts, but obviously it’s worked in a tactical sense. Do you have any reluctance to go to the courts in battles like this [Northlands]?
Most definitely, because unless you’re really strong, unless you’re really careful, you find yourself being subject to the decisions of others – namely members of the legal profession. Which is why normally the avenue through the courts is not one I would consider. But in this instance, because of the circumstances, we thought it was worth a try, and it worked. And we’ve trapped the Victorian Premier into a situation where, a few months ago, when the Equal Opportunity Board handed down its decision on Richmond [College], the Premier was widely reported as publicly calling on the Richmond people to accept the verdict of the umpire, of the independent tribunal. Now suddenly the independent tribunal has gone against him, he’s been trapped in his own rhetoric. That’s why he’s been a bit perplexed.
So you think if he loses his appeal, that he’s going to comply and reopen Northlands?
Not necessarily, but that’s all part of the educative process. I mean one of the best things about the whole Northlands issue has been, I reckon, the way in which both at Northlands and at Richmond, there’s been a politically educative process occur, where ordinary people in the community, being suddenly confronted with a situation where they felt compelled to act, they had a very sharp learning curve in the process of politics – the realities. And as part of that, the whole manner in which they – the usual stuff – they know what’s been going on and they see what gets reported on television, after the TV cameras have been there. They see the difference between what actually goes on, and what the media reports, and why. So it’s been good all round.
You had about twelve months keeping it open as a free school, and at the end a lot of people obviously had dropped out – you had more people at the start than at the end – what sort of effect will the winning in court have on the people who were involved and the people who’ve dropped out? Do you have any sense of that?
Well that – Northlands must also be looked at in terms of an interesting comparative analysis of the way in which the so-called left and the organised trade union movement have treated the two different schools [Richmond and Northlands]. I mean it strikes me that Richmond has received extensive financial support and organisational assistance, and resources and facilities have been made available to them to help them in their battle. The same thing has not been forthcoming from the same union leaders [for Northlands] …
Did you approach them?
Oh shit yeah. In fact at one meeting the head of the VSTA, the Victorian secondary teachers association, Brian Henderson, stood up in a fuckin meeting where I’d been invited to Richmond, to speak in support of this press conference at the school, which I was quite happy to do, but when I got there I found the President of VSTA making an announcement to the cameras that his union had just made a $1500 donation to the coffers of Richmond. So whilst he was still saying this to the TV cameras, I piped up and said “Well you know, Northlands will expect their cheque tomorrow – right?”. And he turned around in front of the TV cameras and said “Well you’ll have to ask”, which we then did; and we never got it.
Why was that you think?
Racism. Pure and simple.
Why would they want to support Richmond and not Northlands?
Because they’re white and we’re black.
The organisers were white, you mean?
The issues. They were white, the Northlands issue is a black issue, with Koori kids.
You don’t think they expected you to grovel a little bit more, or take a little more time to cultivate them, something like that?
Possibly, but I mean that’s not an isolated thing. My experience from Northlands simply confirms the experience of twenty years in Melbourne, and trying to get support and assistance from …
The trade unions.
Trade unions, people in general.
So the court case was an educative process for a lot of people, do you think it would have politicised a lot of people?
It did. But it also, in the long run, gave people a good lesson in the law as well. It seems to me that the law ultimately will protect the interests of the rich and powerful. This hasn’t been what we’ve seen up to this point, but at the end of the day when the dust settles that’s where we going to be at.
Well for instance you had a lot of freedom in determining how the classes were run in the free school, last year, do you anticipate that a lot of those things when the Department’s once again appointing people to the school and running the school. How much autonomy do you think you’ll keep?
I don’t know, because the style and manner of what we’ve done in the last twelve months in the rebel school is pretty much consistent with what we were doing before anyway. I mean the irony was that the Education Department considered our school in Northlands as a dumping ground for kids who they considered to be useless and uneducable, or not worth wasting their time on. We turned that round in the sort of programs that we developed for them kids. And so it was the programs that we were actually running that were what made Northlands a success.
What sort of programs were they?
Well you should read all the bullshit – they were essentially programs aimed at raising the personal self-esteem of the kids involved, Kooris and non-Koories. Because a lot of these kids had serious problems of self-esteem.
What was the percentage of Koori kids there, or how many Koori kids were in the whole school?
Ten percent. Sixty kids out of six hundred. But nevertheless it was the biggest enrolment of Aboriginal secondary students at any secondary college in Victoria. Not only Victoria, I think south-eastern Australia.
So let’s assume that the school gets on its feet, it’s got some decent people working there and so on, what will be your continuing involvement after that? I mean obviously your son’s been involved and you got involved because Bruce was there also, but what will you see your role as, once that school’s on its feet again?
I’d actually done some limited teaching at the school, involvement in the Koori program before Bruce started going there, a couple of years before that, and if we saved the school – I mean there’s a year that’s been taken out of the education of all the kids that’re going to be going there, specially our students who didn’t go to any other school in the intervening twelve months. It’s going to take a lot of work to restore what we had at Northlands. It is something I’d like to do because I know most of the kids involved. I’ve known them while Bruce has been going to the school. I know a lot of the parents anyway. It’s actually quite interesting because a significant proportion of the Northlands students, who are amongst my son’s mob, are actually the children of the students that me and Bruce Mac [Bruce MacInnes – former head of Koori Kollij] had at Swinburne in the 1970s, in fact, at a guess, a minimum of a dozen of the kids in Northlands that we’re talking about, of the Koori kids, are the children of the Swinburne [students]. Well that impressed [Gary’s son] Bruce, because he was born as part of that same group.
So how important is it to you, as a political activist, to work as an educator? I mean what part of your activity do you see as being an educator, is it a big part?
It’s the central thing in what I do, I guess. The whole, everything I do is essentially an educational process, trying to raise people’s awareness, throughout society, as to the fuckin hypocrisy, the duplicity, the lies that they’re told as part of their normal day to day lives, in increasingly sophisticated ways. I mean to listen to the lies that are being imposed on all Australian people today about Aboriginal affairs – about ATSIC – about the fuckin Mabo legislation.
What you’re saying is that working politically is educative work. How important is the institution though? You said you started at Swinburne [the Aboriginal Unit at Melbourne’s Swinburne College], you worked at Koori Kollij [in Melbourne], you work at Tranby [Sydney’s Tranby Aboriginal College] now, you’ve worked at Northlands …
Yeah, but all of those places that we’re talking about, all the places you mentioned, were all closed down by governments in their day; because once you went beyond a certain point, once you seemed to achieve a certain degree of effectiveness in what you’re doing, what you’re trying to do with these young people, ah the system felt threatened, and the system in every instance reacted by zappin us. When Swinburne was going, for the three years that I was there, we were called by the head of Swinburne College, Dr Roy Longley – we were at first called the Aboriginal Community Organisation course, which was sort of an annex to Swinburne College of Technology – but the head of Swinburne used to refer to us as the “wart on the orange”!
This was in the seventies?
This was 75 to 79. And every year that I was there – cause it was set up by [Bruce] MacInnes and John Morrison – I actually got involved when MacInnes invited me down to do a talk on the course, and I flew down and after doing one talk and seeing what they were doing there, I flew back to Sydney and resigned my job over at the Medical Service [Sydney’s Aboriginal Medical Service in Redfern] and went straight back to Melbourne and worked on that, cause I thought it was …
You were working in the medical service before that?
I was working in the Medical Service at the time, yeah, and I just dropped everything and went to Melbourne, and worked on that. Because it was so fuckin brilliant, what I thought was going on there. And so I’ve always have problems with institutions, in terms of the sort of work we do, Koori Kollij got knocked off by Dawkins, Northlands got knocked off by Kennett. I mean it seems to me that every progressive, innovative attempt in Koori education in Victoria since the mid 1970s has been zapped.
What’s different about Tranby in Sydney?
Tranby’s got a completely different history for a start. I mean, I lived in Tranby in 1966, when it was run the most unbelievably paternalistically racist bunch of people who I have ever met in my entire life. Tranby’s got, not an obsession, a preoccupation with accreditation and formal qualification, that I think is a hangover from when the Gubs used to run it. I don’t believe, I mean I really don’t believe that education is about getting a bit of paper that says you know this. Because most people that get those bits of paper that say they know that, don’t know that at all. That’s not what education is to me. There’s a philosophical difference. To me education is people growing and learning. You know that’s not a process that starts in February and finishes in November, and you get your certificate then. I mean it’s a life long process.
So the philosophy of Koori Kollij was different, in that way?
Much different. I mean Koori Kollij began, in certain part, as an extension of what the old Swinburne course used to be.
After Swinburne closed down?
Yeah. There was this sequence: Swinburne got knocked off, then gradually the remnants of Swinburne mob came together and created Koori Kollij, and then Koori Kollij got zapped; and at the time Northlands got zapped, not only were our kids the predominant group in the Northlands entourage, but a lot of the ex-students of Swinburne and Koori Kollij were involved both as parents and as educators and workers at the school. The difference between us and Tranby is that Tranby to me is very much a mainstream, conservative educational institution which places a fair emphasis and accent on gaining formal qualifications.
At the same time it’s been a base for the community, and you’ve worked there and taught there yourself.
It’s not a community controlled resource though, and that’s an important, fundamental difference. I’m not having a go at Tranby. I mean, like you say, I do lots of work at Tranby and I enjoy the work I do there and I think it’s a challenge. I enjoy it. But what Tranby is ultimately conceptually and philosophically all about is not necessarily what I am. I’m not going to not teach or lecture in a place like Tranby just because I’ve got certain philosophical objections to it, whereas I would refuse to lecture in the fuckin History Department of Melbourne University at the moment, for example. But I see Tranby as essentially a sort of Koori controlled sort of outfit, which is distinct from a Koori community controlled sort of outfit, which I think is the ultimate ideal. Because the more real local community control you’ve got over things …
Are you going to have that in a big city, like Melbourne or Sydney?
Well I mean that’s where these fuckin things began. I mean there was once a strong, cohesive, Koori, clearly discernible, distinctly Koori community, in these two places.
But the sense of Aboriginal community in the city is always different to what it is out of the city, isn’t it?
No that’s not true. That was not the case in the mid seventies in Sydney, and till the late seventies in Melbourne, most definitely. I think that you can trace the slow but sure disintegration of a lot of the strong community links and values; you can trace that to the gradual increase in the spending – all this thousand million dollars a year. In the late sixties mate, when I first got involved in Koori politics, everybody used to go to Canberra every year at Easter for the FCAATSI [the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people] conference. But there was not one cent of subsidies in those days to get them conferences. People went to them conferences under their own steam. There was no TA [travel allowance], there were no mobile phones, no flash cars. People got there however they could, and there was a genuine commitment. People who went there were fuckin fair dinkum. They weren’t there because they’re going to get six days of TA at $120 a day, and all the shit that these people go to meetings for nowadays. There was a real strong, strong sense of and spirit of community, around here, and in Fitzroy in Melbourne in those days. And I believe that part of the twenty thousand million dollars that’s been spent since Whitlam, a significant part of that has been …
How much since Whitlam?
Twenty thousand million dollars. And that’s a conservative estimate.
Twenty billion?
That’s right. We’re talking twenty years and for at least the last five or six years it’s been running in excess of a thousand million a year. The first year’s funding, from memory, was around about a hundred and thirty-five million, in seventy-three.
This is the whole DAA [Department of Aboriginal Affairs], or now ATSIC [Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission], budget we’re talking about?
Well in seventy-three, at a hundred and thirty-five million, I think it was just the newly formed Department of Aboriginal Affairs budget. But today, if you combine DEET [the Aboriginal Education section of the Department of Education, Employment and Training], ATSIC and all of the Aboriginal expenditure, you’re talking probably closer to two billion. Although I’d say it’s somewhere in the middle – fifteen hundred million, minimum. But I mean, in 1974 Nugget Coombs, who was the Governor of the Reserve Bank, said that seventy-five percent of all Commonwealth moneys allocated to Aboriginal affairs went straight into Gub pockets. And it’s the same today mate. I mean how else can you explain the Royal Commission that, despite twenty years of fuckin massive expenditure, the vast majority of blackfellas are essentially, socioeconomically in the same boat they were twenty years ago.
And the irony is – I suppose, today, or this week – that your son just got locked up for some petty fines from when he was twelve years old?
Yeah; and the ultimate irony of that is that, at the same time that the coppers picked him up in Campbelltown, my son’s QC was arguing against the Kennett government in the Supreme Court of Victoria, in the appeal over Northlands case, which my son [had] won. But, you know, there seems to me to be a dramatic difference in perceptions amongst the new black elite, who go and work in their ivory tower offices, and their nine to five jobs. They don’t seem to have any comprehension, a lot of these people. Of what it’s like to be on the dole, or to be on a sickness benefit, or to you be dependent on that fuckin mingy welfare handout that’s society gives you. But then, the bureaucratic harassment that society puts you through to establish your eligibility for what, a mingy hundred and thirty-five fuckin dollars a week? You have to fill in forms that are this thick; and be harassed at regular intervals by morons and bullshit artist public servants, coming peeping through your windows; which is what happens to some single mums on single parent pensions and that.
With all that [Aboriginal affairs] money, is it possible for those institutions which are community based, like the AMS [Aboriginal Medical Service] for instance, and the ALS [Aboriginal Legal Service] let’s say, to survive, to keep their community base?
We always argued, what the founders of these organisations should have always remembered was what we said in the first place. We called these organisations, like medical services and legal services, at the time, we called them ‘community survival programs’. And what that meant was, we said then, these organisations are not capable or designed to solve all of the Aboriginal legal, or all of the Aboriginal health problems. Because the problems are all interconnected, and all of these organisations do is simply, in the short term, alleviate a specific problem in the community; thereby at least ensuring that the community may ultimately survive, until such time as the ultimate all embracing answer were to become reality. So hence the name ‘community survival program’. That’s what people should always remember that they were. Instead, some people now believe that these are permanent institutions in the Koori community. That’s never what they were supposed to be. The all encompassing answer always involved land rights, or to be more precise, economic independence. Economic independence for communities of Koories, so that they, once having achieved economic independence through whatever non-contradictory means were possible in the sort of society that surrounds us now, then those people will be in maximum decentralised decision making things, where they’ve got local community control over their own affairs. People who live in their local communities determine for themselves what their niche, as a community, is in the Australia of tomorrow. And you can’t have people external to those communities speaking on behalf of those communities, or pretending to represent their views and interests, because that’s not possible. And that’s what fucked with the Mabo debate. Pearson and none of those characters: Noel Pearson and Marcia Langton can’t talk on behalf of anyone except the Cape York Land Council. And yet, they have been speaking on behalf of all of us, and being betrayed in the media as being our representatives, along with [ATSIC Chairperson] Lois O’Donohue.
What does Mabo hold for Aboriginal people in New South Wales?
It holds sweet fuck all for people south of the Brisbane line. It’s the validation of dispossession! That’s what they’re fuckin on about, they talk about validation of title. I don’t need to see [the bill] to know that it’s a fuckin sell-out. Any lump of legislation that they reckon is going to resolve two hundred years of fuckin history in three weeks and one bit of paper, necessarily lacks credibility. You know, how can it be done? How can you resolve something that is ultimately, necessarily going to involve, or need, each and every Aboriginal community in Australia, each distinct community, and in some instances broken down even further into maybe clans or extended family groups, whatever the appropriate situation; everyone of those mobs has to be negotiated with, and has to have resolved, to their satisfaction, some sort of resolution. That’s the only way you’re going to solve this two hundred year old dispute. You can’t solve it with one bit of paper which purports to be able to take care of everybody; it ain’t possible.
Is that your overriding political aim, to do things towards that end?
Oh yeah, maximum decentralisation of power, mate. Destroy governments, all governments. I mean, we’ve already got one tier of superfluous government, you know, you’ve heard all this.
The states.
The states. I mean what a waste of fuckin resources, both in terms of the money we spend on the politicians and their bureaucracies, their bureaucratic structures. And all that extra tier of bureaucratic procedure and that. I mean we could save billions of dollars in this country by removing them. And the only reason you need a federal government is to represent us internationally. Maximum decentralisation of decision making and power in society seems to me a good way for everybody to go.
Distinctly as a black activist, uniquely almost, you’ve often made the point that the gains of black communities, in terms of community control, are something that can be passed on to the non-Aboriginal community in Australia, too. Has that been important to you?
Oh shit yeah. Because I mean I first started pursuing that line because, it seemed to me when I was young and stupid and I was thinking about: “well what might be the case: the land rights post-economic independence scenario for Koories?” And I realised that okay, say in the ideal situation we all got our land rights, we all managed to magically achieve our economic independence overnight, and so we’re all living in these economically self-sustaining communities; but what we’re surrounded by is a society that is fundamentally incompatible with ours. And so it seemed to me that instead of the old philosophy that fuckin white assimilationists had, whereby they used to argue that “oh we’ve gotta, we should give up on the older generation because they’re set in their ways, and we should get at the young Aboriginals” – this is why they took the kids away – “let’s get at the younger generation and educate their black ways out of them, and make them think like us”. But I’ve turned that totally around on white society. I say just the same thing. I say “Let’s give up on the older generation; let’s focus on this younger generation of white Australians, and make them more like us!” Instead of them, instead of your society making us more like you, I reckon we’ve been here longer, that our way of doing things has been established as a fairly good way of doing it for this landscape and this part of the world, and I reckon that the rest of Australia should become more like us. And if Australians did ultimately want some more genuinely egalitarian, genuinely compassionate, genuinely humanitarian sort of society here, then, not only is it possible, but I think that the starting point for the creation of that is to build on basic Aboriginal values – use them as the foundations and the building blocks for that ultimate society. That could be distinct. We don’t have to become like any other society in the world, external to this landscape.
Well there’ve already been some precedents for that, haven’t there, with the institutions?
Oh, and you’re just talking the twenty five years I’ve been around mate. I reckon this society today is radically different to what it was. Twenty five years ago me and you couldn’t have sat here; (laughter) in this part of town, like this.
Why is it that ATSIC has not changed things greatly? I mean, that’s your attitude isn’t it; it hasn’t changed things greatly from DAA?
It was designed not to. You’ve got to face up the reality that ATSIC is an imposed, externally imposed institution on the Koori community. It’s not something that was thought up by Koories. It’s not something that was approved by Koories after consultation. It’s not something that the Koori community really, in any way shape or form, had any say in the creation of. The actual administration of ATSIC, which is comprised of virtually all of the old hated, notorious Department of Aboriginal Affairs officers, officials – who were after all the ones who’ve spent and wasted this twenty thousand million dollars in the past twenty years – they were all given their brand new, gleaming contracts – signed, sealed and delivered – before any Aboriginal representative was ever elected. So I mean it can’t be said that this is Aboriginal self-determination in action. It can’t be said, despite the myth – what they are saying – that this represents any sort of Aboriginal expression. It’s a farce, it’s a joke and it’s a fraud.
Do you respect any of the Aboriginal people that have gone on in state departments of Aboriginal affairs, or ATSIC and so on, that work inside those structures?
I can think of (pause) I can think of one, Gwen Brook, who works in the DSS in Melbourne. Gwen Brook is what I think an Aboriginal public servant ought to be: a person who’s within the system, who is not there to serve the needs and the interests of the system, but rather there to give Koori people, especially in DSS, some sort of greater access to what they have rights to have access to anyway. Gwen sees her role as acting in the interests of the community, giving the community greater access to the system, rather than serving the interests of the system and making sure that Koories, you know, are kept under the thumb by the fuckin system. It seems to me that, as long as Koories who go into the public service keep a clear idea in mind as to who their ultimate allegiances are to, then there’s not a problem. But like I say, after twenty-five years of that happening, I thought of one Koori who does the right thing, Gwen Brook.
I’ll never forget also, that in 1973 you could count, I could tell you the names of all the Koories in the federal public service. They were Charlie Perkins, Reg Saunders and Margaret Lorrie. Now today you’d be pushing shit uphill to count five Aboriginal people who are not in the pay of the Commonwealth Government. Now that’s the way in which the Commonwealth Government has subverted, manipulated and undermined the really strong Koori political movement that created all of this in the first place.
You’ve also said that you’ve got respect for some people, such as Pat O’Shane. Now Pat’s been head of a government department, a magistrate and so on; how do you see what she’s done as different?
I respect Pat O’Shane because I know the shit that Pat O’Shane went through to get where she is. I know that she was treated very badly. I know the battle and the difficulty that she went through in getting her law degree, and I know the shit that got put on her after she came out and offered to work for the Aboriginal Legal Service, and I know all of the obstacles that were placed in her path. And despite all of that, she can still be as forthright and as strong as what she is. I admire somebody like that, because she don’t fuckin conform. I mean ninety-nine point nine-nine percent of all Koories, who work in the scene, nationally will conform before they do anything else. I’m not interested in people who conform. I mean fuckin conformists are of no use to me. Conformists are boring. I’ve always been more interested in people who refuse to conform to other peoples’, or society’s, expectations.
What’s the main way you see of effective change coming about in Australia, for economic self-determination for Aboriginal people? What are the main ways in which that change comes about?
I think a lot more of the Australian middle class needs to be touched by deprivation, before society itself will make any move. I mean people like me can keep chipping away, but you know, how are people like me regarded in Australian society? They regard us as ‘quaint’, and people like me are talked of condescendingly even amongst the Aboriginal movement. They say “Oh well, you know, he’s terribly radical”. They use all these fuckin patronising terms, and they’re smug to the extent that a lot of the power brokers in the Aboriginal bureaucracy know that they really don’t have to take any notice of people like me. Ah but! The pen is mightier than the sword I reckon, and I reckon that most Koories are deprived of information about the truth, you know or a more truthful analysis of what has gone on in the last twenty years. I mean all of these Noel Pearsons, these characters, these educated elite; where have they learned most of their Aboriginal affairs stuff? Out of books written by fuckin white academics. I mean that’s the extent of their knowledge of what it’s all about. I mean how do people who’ve learned from the shit that’s written by gub academics, how can you develop an Aboriginality … I mean I can’t understand a person, who claims to be an Aboriginal leader, citing Phillip Toyne as a career role model! I mean that just blows apart all of the carefully contrived and cultivated image.
Who were your role models, when you were young?
Malcolm X, Malcolm X. [Bruce] McGuiness and Dennis Walker, to me, spoke the truth and didn’t give a fuck what people thought about it. I liked that, because I could see what they were saying, at the time, was the truth. I mean you didn’t have to be fuckin Einstein to figure that out. But to see people who were prepared to state it, no matter what the consequences, at a time when FCAATSI was the premier organisation. FCAATSI, as the name implies, it was the Australian version of the NAACP [the USA’s National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People], and just as tame. So when you come across people who are speaking the truth and saying it in a non-compromising sort of way, and challenging the established myths of the day.
Those two were on the outside of FCAATSI and critics of FCAATSI?
Well McGuiness and Walker were the ones who led the push to Aboriginalise FCAATSI. I mean the irony was, when I first went to FCAATSI – at the time FCAATSI mounted and conducted and ran a campaign to bring about the sixty-seven referendum – it was a white controlled organisation. They wouldn’t let Aboriginal people get the numbers on the exec. to run the organisation. And they fought a battle against the so-called radicals, the black power radicals – the Walkers and the McGuinesses and the rest of them – and I got dragged in on an issue by Kenny Brindle, as one of the fuckin pro-white group! (laughter) When I realised what had been done to me I made a very rapid transition to the other side!
How old were you then?
I was seventeen or something, that was the first conference I’d ever been to. Cause Kenny Brindle, who was the king of Redfern at the time, said to “Come down and ..”, cause he was trying to recruit numbers; they were fighting against the Aboriginalisation of FCAATSI; which I didn’t realise till I got there, and I found myself arguing against these fuckin radicals, then I started talking to these radicals and I realised what they was talking about, “hang on”, I said, I should be with you!
Do you have a sense of achievements made, despite the fact that in institutional terms, or what a lot of people say, in real power terms, not a lot has changed. What’s important to you are the cultural changes?
It’s more or less that resistance lives. I mean it’s really important that each generation produces sufficient of those who are able to analyse and understand in their own minds clearly, you know, the contradictions, and of that which abound out there. I mean, if I were to look at it in terms of our younger generation I’d almost be tempted to say that they’re winning, because they’ve got the hearts and minds – our kids, it seems to me.
And yet you’ve still got corporate power, probably more concentrated than ever before, you’ve got the most right-wing Labor government we’ve probably ever had; where do you see the light through all that, as an activist, as a socialist?
Well other people have stood on that precipice before, in the fifties with Menzies, where you were looking at a thirty year reign by him. But I don’t know, it’s a different world today, and I think that the ‘forces of evil’ are probably winning; but I also know that there’s enough people around who are potentially the resistance, to carry it through. It’s fuckin hard, I mean that’s probably one of the reasons why I concentrated on education a bit in the last ten or fifteen years.
And you’ve been to a lot of schools, some on the north shore of Sydney, too?
Yeah, black and white kids. I mean I always like talking to young people, because in most instances I find they’re more receptive; well they’re more open minded. I mean they haven’t been got yet, got at yet! They’re still sort of curious and sharp enough; and they’re receptive, they’re not as fuckin hard in their ways, they’re more open to ideas and they’re more thoughtful than their parents. All that generation of kids I’ve talked to have been like that. And I mean if it wasn’t for them I’d fuckin give up, I mean they really give me a lot of hope, just talking to kids.
