Our 2018 History Seminar Series commences tomorrow with Dr Sally Percival Wood:

‘Dissent: The Student Press in 1960s Australia’ 

Dr Sally Percival Wood

The student press in the 1960s was populated with the people, politics and, increasingly, the power, to cause alarm in federal and parliaments. Through their newspapers, university students tackled the government over indigenous rights, gay liberation, abortion law reform, access to contraception, conscription and the Vietnam War. Moving within the currents of all of those issues was censorship. In 1964, Humphrey McQueen, editor of Semper Floreat at the University of Queensland, appalled students with his ridicule of Christianity, while artist Martin Sharp’s controversial cartoons ‘The Gas Lash’ published in the University of NSW’s Tharunka, and ‘The Word Flashed Around the Arms’ in Oz landed students in court on obscenity charges. In Melbourne, the Vice Squad frequently arrived at the printers to censor Lot’s Wife or Farrago just before the papers went to print.

This paper looks at the battle against censorship waged by university students through their newspapers in the 1960s. It then contemplates the student publications of the twenty-first century in search of the passion that once fired the student presses. It asks: What has happened to campus life to so dilute the camaraderie and shared sense of purposes found in the 1960s papers?

Details:

Wednesday 14 March 2018

Time: 11am-12pm

Room Numbers:

Burwood C.205; Waurn Ponds ic3.108

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