The Redacted

In late 2021, as he moved into assisted care, the Australian writer Frank Moorhouse donated his decades-long collection of anthologies of Australian writing to Western Sydney University’s Writing and Society Research Centre. He died not long after in June 2022. The Frank Moorhouse Reading Room was established as a tribute to his lifelong advocacy on behalf of Australian writers and writing: his work towards fair pay and copyright ownership for all Australian writers, and his commitment to diverse voices, progressive thinking, and social justice. In this essay stream, we invite writers to help us unpack this singular archive, spotlighting the intergenerational concerns and affiliations through which Australian literature is constantly being shaped and reshaped.

When I was a child – latch-keyed into an apartment in İzmir, my mother away tending to her own mother who lay dying in a nearby hospital – I often had to find ways to pass the time. One of these was to play with the rifle kept between the side of the couch and a wall. It was an old thing that my great-grandfather had used in the Turkish War of Independence, and that, at age seven, I did not comprehend. When I asked about it, about the war, the responses I received employed the kinds of nationalistic framings that could convince a child, or enrage a propagandised adult: that the other side hated us and beheaded our babies and so we swept them into the sea.

My second ever encounter with a gun came this year. On a hot and bright day in March, my girlfriend and I travelled out to Cecil Park. The expedition was a gift from my girlfriend’s father, who organised for us to try clay shooting after I expressed interest in it. As soon as we pulled up onto the grass outside the layouts, I felt fearful and ill, primed to be so because it had only been about sixteen hours since I watched the film The Zone of Interest, which dramatises the fortunes of the Nazis who lived within earshot of the Auschwitz concentration camp, where approximately one million Jews were murdered. In the film, members of the Höss family stage conversations about clothes and jobs and the weather over the ambient noise of gunfire, barking dogs, and the occasional scream as a prisoner is executed. During the three hours I spend at the shooting centre, the sound of gunfire is unrelenting. Although I try to cram the supplied earplugs as deep into my ears as they will go, I can’t drown it out. One never acclimates.

The Zone of Interest won two Oscars: one for Best Sound, the other for Best International Feature. The film’s director, Jonathan Glazer, used his acceptance speech to decry Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Glazer states: ‘All our choices we made to reflect and confront us in the present. Not to say “look what they did then” – rather, “look what we do now.” Our film shows where dehumanisation leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present.’ Like other vocal artists who oppose Israel’s war on Palestine, Glazer now risks blacklisting.

One of the many anthologies the late Frank Moorhouse owned is the volume We took their orders and are dead: an anti-war anthology. Edited by Shirley Cass, Ros Cheney, David Malouf and Michael Wilding, the book was released in 1971, mere weeks after the McMahon government had announced its intention to draw down its troops in Vietnam. I am attracted to the book firstly because, with the exception of these scant months spent in Turkey when I was seven, I have grown up in Australia, which has entailed formative encounters with war and poetry. I studied the Great War poets in high school, silently moving my lips along to Wilfred Owen, eyes watering at the old Lie: dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. I heard the words of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, a man whose portrait I stared at every morning when I was briefly enrolled in a Turkish public school, translated and re-appropriated into ANZAC memorial services at my Australian public school, repeated annually: there is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. I am also attracted to the book because, as a political philosopher – forgive me – who is interested in mass politics and resistance, I am struck by the idea that Moorhouse, and the artists who produced this anthology, were part of a successful anti-war movement.

The activists who drove this movement were not as popular then as they are now: artists who released anti-war music, like Barry McGuire or Freda Payne, now celebrated, were once censored, barred from play on commercial radio on the basis that their songs aided the enemy. Likewise, conscientious objectors were once called draft dodgers and dragged before courts. We now consider them heroes. This is because the moratoriums succeeded, forcing withdrawal from Vietnam and, in Australia, the abolition of compulsory national service. At its height, around 200,000 people across the country rallied in opposition to Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. In 1970, the Australian population was less than half its current size, and these historic marches represented some of the largest demonstrations the country had ever seen.

It wouldn’t be entirely true to say that demonstrations alone were what achieved policy change. That the ruling class are rarely swayed by the demands of the many has been substantiated by empirical findings, such as those made by two public policy scholars, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, in 2014. Analysing 1,779 American policy issues that were decided between the years 1981 and 2002, they concluded that, compared with economic elites and organised groups representing business interests, ‘mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence’. In the US, which founded the moratorium campaign, President Nixon, a staunch hawk, remained adamant that policy could not be made in the streets. Likewise, the weight of available evidence suggests that Australia withdrew from Vietnam only because the United States intended to.

What is perhaps more important and memorable about this era is that it represents a time when the anti-war movement became a part of mass politics: when everyday life was liable to be interrupted by a banner or flyer or piece of graffiti, a film screening, a teach-in, a closed road, a blockaded bridge, a walk-out. Some of the tactics employed during the anti-Vietnam era may be familiar to you: protesters disrupted infrastructure and commerce, sitting on railway tracks, for example, or chaining themselves to the steps of parliament.

Among the swathes of people involved in this anti-war organising were writers. Almost all of the seventy-seven contributors to We took their orders and are dead are household names in Australian letters, including Thomas Kenneally, Judith Wright, Dorothy Hewett, Judah Waten, Patrick White, Thomas Shapcott, and Peter Skrzynecki. The poem from which the anthology draws its title is by one of Australia’s most famous poets, A.D. Hope.

When I first began writing this essay, I was propelled by two questions. What might it take to achieve another anti-war mass movement in our lifetime? And what enduring role can art play in anti-war movements? These questions are inter-linked: in order to achieve a publication like an anthology, anti-war beliefs must be widespread and held by a significant number of people. This is especially the case if the goal is to amass influence, to bring together nearly one hundred artists who do not occupy the fringe but rather the centre of literary culture. In turn, it takes a robust artistic culture capable of freely articulating anti-war messages that can both reflect and shape popular thinking.

At the time, I imagined that I would be lamenting the decline of the anti-war movement, both as a feature of mass politics as well as a feature of cultural activity. I intended to cast my gaze backward, to 2003, when the Howard government announced that it would participate in the invasion of Iraq, following its participation in the invasion of Afghanistan. This was (formerly) the last time that a significant number of Australians – in the order of half a million – had come together to register their objection to war. Even as mass opposition to war dwindled, the conflicts themselves endured in the background of the entirety of the twenty-first century. I intended to highlight just how much Australia’s role within these conflicts deserved attention as well as censure, in particular in the wake of revelations made by important whistleblowers and the findings of the 2020 Brereton Report. The latter substantiates that Australian Defence Force personnel in Afghanistan committed serious offences, some of them amounting to war crimes. These include the unlawful killing of at least thirty-nine non-combatants or prisoners. Despite being heavily redacted in places, the Brereton Report enumerates some of the brutality visited on civilian men, women and children, who were gunned down from helicopters as they attempted to flee, and details the torture – that sometimes lasted days – and murder of civilians in their teens, who were shot or had their throats slit by Special Forces. For his role in exposing these actions, Australian whistleblower David McBride was sentenced in May to over five years in prison, convicted of releasing material classified by the Commonwealth.

When I first began writing this essay, I intended to go on to register a degree of understanding about the relative decline of mass anti-war politics; to note that the removal of conscription and the escalation of drone campaigns and other forms of unmanned war-waging have made foreign conflicts feel more distant, its costs not wending their way home – in the form of dead bodies, disability, and mental illness – like they used to. I might have also contemplated the changing significance of ANZAC Day in Australia, as fewer and fewer veterans of historic World Wars, and their descendants, are around to temper bellicose politicians who no longer speak about the day through the lens of mourning, grief, and loss. Instead, since 2001, successive governments have used ANZAC Day to muster support for new wars, largely in the Middle East. And in 2021, former Secretary of the Department of Home Affairs Mike Pezzullo issued an ANZAC Day message that advised Australia to prepare for war with China.

Had this essay been published before October 2023, I might have been only slightly wrong, perhaps committing the venial sin of nostalgia. In that way of ageing leftists, I might have mythologised the past as a time when the left was ‘good’ – enlivened, sizeable, and most importantly capable of posing a real challenge to the neoliberal and imperialist status quo. You might have responded that the left was never good, that it has always been mired in the issues besetting it today. I might have agreed, but still stuck to my guns on one thing: that there is a way to look to the past without fetishisation or nostalgia. I might have insisted that mass anti-war politics are indeed ‘good’, and yearned for their revival.

But the declinist argument now seems guilty of a much higher order of wrong: plain wrong, maybe, or laughably wrong. Since October 2023, across the world, traffic has come to a standstill, bridges, roads, and ports have been blocked, corporations boycotted, hundreds arrested, bodies set alight in protest, and church services dedicated to protesting the genocide in Gaza. Perhaps you too have recently stood in a large group, surrounded by tens or hundreds of thousands of people chanting, waving placards, as your government, led by US policy, sells the weapons or drops the bombs that murder children and civilians. Perhaps you watched a television broadcast over the Christmas period, or during the Australian Summer of Tennis™, and heard distant shouts of protest getting snuffed out, quickly, to applause, disdain, or eye-rolling. And perhaps you have observed the way this wave of anti-war momentum has filtered into other causes, bringing new energy to efforts to dismantle the weapons industry more broadly, and to resist US-Australian military ties.

History has started up again, forcing the anti-war movement and mass politics back together. The result is that street demonstrations are the largest they have been for twenty years, and the student encampment movement is historic in scope, rivalling its Civil Rights-era antecedents. A February 2024 poll conducted by YouGov showed that 81% of Australians support a ceasefire in Gaza. Similarly, a January poll by German news broadcaster ZDF found that 61% of the German population consider Israel’s actions in Gaza unjustified, even after the government has exerted considerable energy to ban protests, criminalised slogans associated with Palestinian liberation, and joined seven other countries (including Australia at the time) in suspending funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, responsible for dispensing aid to Palestinian refugees.

I don’t know what else I might still be wrong about – whether our government will respond to demands from these masses, or embroil itself further in a new conflict in the Middle East. Of course, I can make a guess. Australia, following the United States, has taken part in cruise missile and air strike campaigns on Houthi targets in Yemen, designed to deter the Houthi blockade on commercial ships travelling to Israel, and it continues to export millions in weapons to the country. But it is hindsight that helps us adjudicate such things, as well as time: it took six years for Australia to initiate its withdrawal from Vietnam, twenty when it came to Afghanistan. While I can’t tell you what else I would have been wrong about, I can tell you what I am scared of.

In Strange Paths, his 2023 biography of Frank Moorhouse, Matthew Lamb sketches the raucousness of anti-Vietnam protests that commenced in the sixties and lasted until the early seventies. He describes US President Lyndon B. Johnson’s visit to Australia in 1966, where protesters showed up and chanted, ‘Hey, Hey, LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?’ Although Moorhouse was not in attendance at this protest, his contemporaries in the Sydney Push, a group of broadly left-leaning artists and thinkers, anarchists and libertarians who wrote and organised throughout the fifties and sixties, were.

Like many of his friends, Moorhouse opposed the war, albeit with a greater and burgeoning cynicism towards the potential of demonstrations to effect change. Moorhouse’s own contribution to We took their orders and are dead puts this disbelief on show. It is an excerpt from ‘Dell Goes Into Politics’, which opens his short story collection The Americans, Baby. First published in 1972, The Americans, Baby is one of Moorhouse’s best known works, skewering American cultural influence over Australia as much as it pokes fun at left-wing Australian anti-war activism. On both of these counts, albeit not to the same degree, Moorhouse was prescient. I first read ‘Dell Goes Into Politics’ during my undergraduate English degree at the University of Sydney, smiling with recognition at the character of Dell, a young woman who returns to her small town to visit family after experiencing a political awakening (that is, becoming ‘woke’) in the city. In a pub, she shouts an anti-Vietnam war slogan at a Labor party politician, whom she contemptuously deems a ‘right wing social democrat’.

Moorhouse is venting some of the frustration he had developed towards young activists of his era. Back then, as now, it was students across Australian university campuses who drove the peace movement. It’s possible to see Dell’s character echoed in the young people who make up a considerable portion of the demonstrators at the twenty-four-hour picket erected outside Anthony Albanese’s office, or in the students camping on university grounds, on every continent, sleeping in tents until their institutions disclose and divest from military links. While I am at the picket outside of the Prime Minister’s office one day, the majority of cars that pass by honk in solidarity, with the exception of one cat-caller who shouts out his window, ‘Get a job!’ Same trope, different war: back then, as now, these protesters are smeared as out-of-touch, bourgeois, or else lumpen, or simply naïve. It’s amusing, in a way, that they say this, given how thoroughly the Prime Minister has flouted core business during this same timeframe – he neither shows up at his office nor speaks to his constituents, although he is photographed at a Taylor Swift concert one evening. Not everyone who opposed the Vietnam War opposes Israel’s assault on Gaza – Albanese himself has strayed far from his erstwhile support of Palestine. Yet Moorhouse’s observations about American imperialism have remained steadfast.

Moorhouse’s satire of young activists is borderline affectionate. As Lamb attests, Moorhouse was sympathetic to student activists’ beliefs and followed student activism closely. What they often disagreed on was the question of tactics. Lamb postulates that Moorhouse considered literature, specifically fiction, to be a better method of changing minds than demonstrations, because writing represented a ‘less rational, less formal means of communication … more attuned to the imaginative basis of society and the conditions of cultural change’. This reflects Moorhouse’s view, also discussed by Gina Ward, that distance from society is what allows the writer to critique it best. This idea is evidenced by an application Moorhouse made to the Commonwealth Literary Fund in 1969 to travel to war-time Vietnam for two months and conduct interviews with soldiers. Lamb notes that Moorhouse was proposing to travel not as a journalist (he had resigned from the ABC earlier that year), but as a writer of fiction. His application was rejected.

Perhaps it stands to reason that a government agency would opt not to fund work potentially critical of the government’s foreign policy. However, this generates – and potentially escalates – serious limits on art’s role in the anti-war movement. Although Moorhouse was optimistic about the prospects of literature to effect political change, I began this essay as a pessimist about the present, and this is how I mean to conclude. When I think about the present moment, I find it hard to reconcile Moorhouse’s optimism with his own dour predictions about the future.

An ASIO file on Moorhouse was opened when he was only seventeen, the result of his attending a meeting of the University of Sydney’s ‘communist-dominated’ Left Club. According to his biographers, lifelong surveillance sparked Moorhouse’s passionate interest in the issue of censorship and free speech. In 2014, he published Australia Under Surveillance, which canvasses the expansion of the surveillance state from its beginnings in the 1950s until the twenty-first century. This is a prescient work, diagnosing a problem that has only grown worse in the intervening decade. ASIO’s intelligence-gathering capabilities are expansive, and it forms part of the intelligence alliance known as Five Eyes. Within Five Eyes, Australia shares data with, and sometimes executes operations on behalf of, the intelligence agencies of the UK, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. When it commenced operations seventy-five years ago, ASIO employed only two staff. Today it employs nearly 2000, and it has received sustained budgetary increases for the past twenty years (in 2023-24, ASIO’s budget is $594 million). Today, ASIO has extraordinary powers to question minors as young as fourteen, to intercept communications and gather anyone’s metadata, as well as hold onto this information indefinitely.

Moorhouse notes that some of the first targets of ASIO surveillance included not only student activists, unionists and other members of the left, suspected communist sympathisers, but also writers. During the Cold War, artists who applied for grants through the Commonwealth Literary Fund, both the applicant and their referees, were of interest. Moorhouse jokes that, ‘[i]n many ways, as a result, ASIO has the most comprehensive record of Australian writing in the 1950s and 1960s.’ Lamb corroborates that ASIO directed its surveillance towards writers: Moorhouse’s ASIO file includes his attendance at a meeting of the ‘Writers Group of the Australian Congress for International Co-operation and Disarmament’, where Helen Palmer and Frank Hardy were also present. 

Moorhouse was far-sighted about the consequences of artists’ dependence on funding, primarily but not exclusively government funding, for their ability to speak. At times, he considered the solution to the economic vulnerability of the writer to be state funding: Lamb quotes a letter Moorhouse wrote in 1958, describing his satisfaction at having helped to usher in a Labor election win: ‘Labor is back and the arts grants are safe’. However, in Australia Under Surveillance, Moorhouse suggests that, over the fifty years of ASIO’s activity since the 1960s, writers’ access to grants has been curtailed as a result of their views. Perhaps this surmise seems outlandish, but it is not: the editors of the journal Overland, Jonathan Dunk and Evelyn Araluen, have been public about the threats they have faced about their activism for Palestine, which have included complaints to funding bodies. The results of a recent Freedom of Information request about the cancelling of a poetry workshop for teens demonstrate that staff at the State Library of Victoria were sufficiently concerned about the poets’ views to rescind their offer of employment. In Germany, Berlin’s Senate Department of Culture and Social Cohesion recently resolved to remove a funding condition that previously required artists and cultural institutions to declare support for the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which has been criticised for conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. This removal came only after sustained pressure from artists.

It might be tempting to conclude that efforts made by governments to censor artists’ speech is itself testament to the power of artists. This sounds good, but I wonder, in my pessimistic way, if it’s true, given just how extreme the possible censorship of artists may become when the institutions they wish to critique through their art are the same institutions they depend on for their livelihoods. In Australia, artists certainly use government grants to critique the government; however, our structural dependency on the state as a core funding stream shapes what we may risk saying. And, in countries like Australia, one of the ways that the ‘imperial boomerang’ may manifest itself is through the deployment of surveillance technology, honed through use in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank, on our own population, posing further limits on our speech. This is one of my many fears.

Moorhouse’s contribution to that successful Labor campaign in 1958 included delivering a speech to a crowd of 12,000 in the Opera House, the same venue where controversial Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef performed in late 2023. At the show’s conclusion, Youssef introduced a group of dancers and drummers, who performed Dammi Falastini, a song by Palestinian singer Mohammed Asaf. Dammi Falastini landed in headlines in May 2023 after the song was removed from Spotify and other music streaming platforms, allegedly censored. At the Opera House, Youssef joined hands with two men wearing the keffiyeh, and performed a dabke. This is the same Opera House whose sails were in October 2023 lit with the colours of the flag of Israel. And it is the same Opera House that in 2003 two men daringly scaled, successfully painting NO WAR in red on the side of the building. After their sentencing, the men in question, Dave Burgess and Will Saunders, were ordered to pay $151,000 in compensation to the Sydney Opera House fund, bargaining the payment amount down from $166,000, after the two successfully argued that the Opera House is a government body that does not pay GST. Fundraising to pay this bill took the form of art shows and benefit concerts. Today their historic demonstration is featured in the Australian War Memorial, consigned to a history that has not yet ended. In April student activists at Columbia University reported that, after their encampment was violently dispersed, protest materials like signs, banners and artwork had been taken for possible retention in Columbia’s archives – this has yielded speculation that the institution will, as it did after it arrested the student activists of 1968, in due course celebrate these students’ actions as examples of Columbia’s “proud tradition of protest and activism”. 

The same month that Bassem Youssef gave his Sydney performance, three Sydney Theatre Company actors involved in a production of The Seagull, staged just down the road from the Opera House, emerged for their curtain call sporting keffiyehs. Following board resignations and threats of the withdrawal of financial support from patrons, STC issued an apology. When asked to comment about the controversy, arts sector stalwart and current director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, Louise Adler, emphasised that ‘actors, artists, writers have always had political views. There is a long and honourable and important tradition of artists being engaged in the world that they inhabit. Art that is not made of this world, that doesn’t take into account this world, feels to me rather vacuous.’ Adler, whose grandfather was murdered in Birkenau, aptly names the long history of artists taking part in anti-war and civil rights advocacy. Household names like Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave are outspoken activists and celebrated artists; both of them were blacklisted at different points of their careers for their opposition to the Vietnam War and to Zionism, respectively. Perhaps patterns repeat: anti-war activists persecuted in their own time will be vindicated by history, proving the adage that liberals hate all wars except the current war. But what do we do when dissident voices are starved of resources, right now, and their livelihoods threatened, right now?

I wish I knew how to use the past to draw some satisfying conclusions about the present, but history hasn’t ended yet and I don’t want to keep being wrong. What I can say is that We took their orders and are dead: an anti-war anthology is an historical object that can only be read through the temporal lens applied by the reader. Mine is this one. You may wish to assert at this juncture that the Vietnam War was different from the war in Gaza, but I’m going to focus on what is the same. Two things are as true about Vietnam and Gaza as they are even about World War I, which led to the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the establishment of the Turkish Republic, the events of Gallipoli: in short, a few of the ways in which I and you have come to hold a gun in our hands. First, an empire in its death throes must decline with dignity, or pursue violence and destruction on an unprecedented scale, and thus accelerate its own collapse. Australian foreign policy, as Moorhouse and others have predicted, continues to echo the foreign policy of a dying empire. Second, in twenty years, and despite state suppression efforts, there will remain only a small minority, smaller than the one now, who stand by this genocide.

An anthology is an object that by its very nature represents the work of a collective. Unlike sole-authored or even co-authored texts, their purpose is achieved through collection, assemblage, and the accumulation of mass. As Moorhouse anticipated, the role that art plays in anti-war activism may be limited by the extent to which artists are censored. Where masses cannot accumulate, anti-war politics remains consigned to the realm of the radical, baby.