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Society for Democratic Action |
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World-wide events supported a sense of change. The ‘Suez crisis’ in 1956 had 30,000 demonstrating in Trafalgar Square, London against the British invasion of Egypt. In 1959, 50,000 marched for the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The numbers grew to 100,000 by 1962. One of the very earliest local signs of revivified political action was the formation in 1962 of the Brisbane Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
The American civil rights movement, with a new non-violent militancy, came to prominence in the 1955-6 Montgomery Alabama bus boycott. By 1963, 250,000 were marching on Washington. In Australia, Student Action campaigned against the bipartisan White Australia policy at the time of the 1961 federal election. Locally Student Action protested against some deportations and in 1962 picketed a hotel over a colour ban. |
Students rally to march from St Lucia campus to Brisbane City, 8 September 1967.
Images courtesy of Garry Redlich |
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The cultural revolution of the sixties hit before the more explicit and organised political revolution. The fifties were undermined from within by a challenging tide of satire, literature, philosophy, political writing and music. 10 In 1962 the Cuban missile crisis 11 passed without catastrophe. The lessening of the nuclear threat liberated the movements into action by lifting a pall of doom.
The 1963 atmospheric test ban treaty and the beginning of non-proliferation negotiations (not concluded until 1968) took the heat out of the nuclear disarmament movement, especially as the Vietnam War commitments and conscription began.
Changes in communications technology and the development of current affairs TV meant that the events of the time were more rapidly broadcast than in the past. Protest actions around the world, including the anti-colonial struggles in the developing world, fed off each other. Local efforts were given gravity and hope by a sense of shared effort, and the apparent possibility of a world-wide breakthrough. |
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Society for Democratic Action
Talking - a free form democracy
