“The only lottery I’ve ever won” quips Rowan Cahill about turning twenty — the date of his birthday being his number in the “lottery of death” or “blood lottery” run by the Australian government for conscription for the Vietnam War in 1965.

Rowan was a “Cold War Kid”, and this is the title of his latest book.

As an adolescent, his father was a member of the fascist New Guard of the1930s, while his mother was a pious Methodist wary of foreigners. Yet it was the US war in Vietnam that defined and radicalised his baby-boomer generation leftward and broke up the stultifying Western conservatism of the 1950s into a myriad pieces.

The Vietnamese call it the “American War”. They had seen off their previous colonial “masters”, the French, in the 1950s.

Rowan, an Australian kid from the northern suburbs of Sydney, had a choice to make at twenty years of age, because of Australia’s involvement in that American war. He had come of age in the era of bitter Cold War rivalry between the USA and the USSR, which began in haste after the end of WWII but dragged on for decades.

As for so many young people of his generation, the war in Vietnam was Rowan’s “political awakening” having grown up “in the sun of the North Shore and the shadows of the Cold War”. But, unlike so many, he became a lifelong rebel, an activist (as well as a fellow contributor to Overland).

Now eighty-five, Rowan subtitles his new work “Resisting the Vietnam War”.

In it, he outlines how he tried to make sense of the world after that fateful day in April 1965, when Australia’s Liberal PM Menzies publicly announced Australia would send combat troops to fight alongside the US, in an attempt to prop up the tottering South Vietnamese dictatorship. To feed the industrial-strength meat grinder of modern warfare, then seventy-year-old Menzies was happy to introduce conscription of twenty-year-olds in the National Service Act of November 1964.

On 17 December 1964, a meeting of Menzies’ Defence and Foreign Affairs Sub-Committee of Cabinet took five minutes to decide to send combat troops to South Vietnam, in order to enmesh the US empire into Australia’s “sphere of influence”[1]. This, despite Australian military Chiefs of Staff recommending against it and the fact the Americans had not requested those troops[2].

The government kept its decision secret until April 1965 and then scrambled for the US to obtain a last-minute South Vietnamese “invitation” for Australia to send troops. Rowan’s cohort then did not have the right to vote and yet were expected to submit to this life-or-death government policy.

In his seminal work “The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After” Analysing the Cold War, the British Marxist Chris Harman wrote:

There are periods which seem calm beyond belief to those who look back on them. Such were the years that ended so dramatically in the [northern] spring of 1968.

That spring was marked by the Tet Offensive and the beginning of the visible US defeat in Vietnam. The drama for Rowan started in the September of 1965, in the second ballot, and reached a crescendo in 1968-72.

His story is of how a would-be poet and beachcomber solo-sailor was conscripted, and his choice to defy the order, thereby joining the smaller, prominent cohort publicly opposing Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

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Growing up in the back-blocks of Sydney’s North Shore remnant orchards, dairies, and bushland was idyllic for a dreamer like Rowan. He writes: “Menzies and martial enthusiasts end[ed] my maritime dreaming”.

The Liberal government didn’t realise it couldn’t win the hearts and minds of the youth and a fair few of their parents. Rowan recalls: “Of our Cross Country [runners’] cohort, two of us became Conscientious Objectors”. It was 62-year-old Victorian Liberal MP E Dan MacKinnon who, in March of 1965, drew the first ninety-six wooden marbles out of the 181 marked with dates for the first six months of the year. Fittingly, he did so in a Melbourne lottery company office.

You can ponder how a few of his ex-military buddies in the Liberal Party might have been somewhat envious of this “honour” bestowed upon him by Menzies.

MacKinnon drew the marbles for the first eleven lottery ballots in secrecy, while one was drawn in front of press photographers. There was no public announcement of the numbers drawn, either, such was the cowardice of the members of the government of the day.

Later, to avoid these accusations and give the appearance of transparency, the lottery was televised. Now the ghoulish spectacle, which could change your life or even end it, became almost unavoidable, beamed as it was to every lounge room.

But the birthdates drawn by the government were not made public until 1970.

Not for no reason did Labor Party leader Arthur Calwell taunt the Liberal government in the late 1966 Federal election campaign about their desire to plunge their “arthritic hands wrist deep in the blood of Australian youth”. 

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After his selection in the second ballot of September 1965, Rowan made a choice that would shape the rest of his life. He chose to become a Conscientious Objector, and became prominent in Sydney’s anti-war and New Left movements of the 1960s and early 1970s.

For his troubles he would garner a large ASIO file, as almost all members of the New Left would later discover they did (a section of the book is entitled “ASIO & Me”).

Now Rowan laughs all of this off, writing:

My story is about the power of joining with others to rebel, keep hope alive and how a good book can change your life.

In his own book, Harman explains:

The apparently impregnable political edifices of the 1950s and early 1960s owed their stability to the unprecedented economic boom. But the boom wrought enormous, cumulative molecular changes in the social substructure on which the political edifices were built.

The Liberal Party had been in government in Australia since December 1949, under the single prime ministership of Robert Menzies. He personified that apparently impregnable political edifice, and his government fully expected to not have any meaningful opposition to the new war in Vietnam, having successfully intimidated the Communist Party of Australia and the Left of the Labor Party throughout the 1950s and early ’60s.

Indeed, King’s book notes less than 1 per cent of those twenty-year-olds required failed to register in the first ballot of the 1964 scheme, held in March 1965, compared to the 50 per cent of eligible youth who did not register in the first years of the 1911 “military training” scheme, and the 33 per cent who did not respond to the 1916 Government Proclamation to register for conscription.

As Mark Dapin says in the three-part ABC TV series Our Vietnam War:

The government didn’t anticipate an anti-war movement. And the government wanted to fight a war, not an anti-war movement.

It would end up trying to do both in the midst of a capitalist boom, which had changed how the ruled could be governed. 

The post-war boom demanded a more educated workforce, so the Menzies’ government built new universities and channelled more young people of different classes into universities, which had previously been the preserve of the wealthy elite.

The boom demanded more labour, so women entered the workforce in greater numbers. Ideas about women’s role in society as the “unpaid nurturers” of the next generation of workers were pushed back against by politically active women.

Migrants, especially from non-English speaking backgrounds, were welcomed to do the heavy labour in heavy industries of Australia, which had not yet jettisoned the White Australia Policy. The racism that came with that, at work and in society, produced an anger that found its expression in a series of strikes.

But the most ingrained racism was against Indigenous people. In February 1965, Charles Perkins led white students on a bus tour of apartheid-like conditions in western NSW. As the Aboriginal Welfare Board regime collapsed on Indigenous “Reserves”, mass migration from the impoverished country areas began.

The Indigenous community in Sydney numbered about 2000 people before 1967. Within a year, it rose to 35,000, mostly concentrated in the poorest suburbs.

In time-honoured Australian fashion, NSW Police responded with a campaign of intimidation and harassment. Partly as a result of this, Young Indigenous activists made common cause with white students.

These changes, however small, had a cumulative effect on social structures based on the old relations. The fault-lines of change were magnified more by the life-or-death question of conscription into a filthy war, which the government had a hard time explaining away.

Rowan’s book is not a theoretical explanation of this process, but supplies anecdotal and empirical evidence for Harman’s work, which only covers Europe and the US.

Although Rowan wrote for the Communist Party paper Tribune, he acknowledges Russia Eastern bloc was similar to Western capitalism in its denial of human rights, as well in how it victimised its own anti-war dissidents in universities and workplaces.

The book ends in 1972 with what Rowan calls

a rural bolt hole, the author criminalised, the threat of imprisonment constant, and experimenting with writing history from below.

That year finally saw the end of the Liberal Government, after twenty-three consecutive years. In the final seven, after the start of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, there had been three PMs, following Menzies’ retirement in 1966. The Liberal government simply could not “sell” the war to the younger generation Rowan was a part of.

From that time on, Rowan would dissect Australia’s long history of militarism.

As historian Hannah Forsyth wrote in the book’s foreword:

Rowan sees the militaristic thread through Australia’s history, the violence this history imposes on us all, and our individual and collective spiritual struggle to overcome it.

(Indeed, this magazine published one such essay on the history of Australian militarism.)

My own introduction to Rowan’s writing and extensive knowledge of Australian history came late, with an article in Solidarity about the 1911 Labor government’s policy of compulsory military training for boys aged 12-26 in the lead-up to the First World War. Euphemistically, the Labor government called it “universal training” and it would fine parents if they failed to register their boys for the scheme or if the boys failed to attend training days. Rowan aptly titled his article “Groomed for War”, an apt title in more ways than one — as the career of the posthumously disgraced Field Marshall, Sir William Slim,1st Viscount Slim, Australia’s thirteenth Governor-General of Australia (1953-60) attests to.

From late 1965, Rowan, and so many others like him, refused to be groomed for war. This is a book about that generation’s resistance to a capitalist war bequeathed to today’s anti-war generation.

As he writes in the book’s Epilogue, when he was asked “why it took so long for the large events … to eventuate”, he replies:

As one who was on the ground and helped build the movement, I explain that the building took a lot of time and effort.

[1] Peter King (ed), Australia’s Vietnam: Australia in the Second Indo-China War (1983). See also episode 1 of the documentary Our Vietnam War.

[2] Gregory Pemberton, All the Way: Australia’s Road to Vietnam (1987).

Image: a detail from the cover of the book