The Digger No.46 October 1975

Talking onWOMEN &POLITICS: Aborigines, Juliet Mitchell ISSUE N0.46

OCTOBER 6 - NOVEMBER 3,1975

40 CENTS

A SKYHOOK REVEALS ALMOST

All

RED SYMONS INTERVIEW ED pages 4 &5

Uranium in Arnhem Land Aborigines & Friends o f the Earth vs. C.R.A. Page 17.

Two Diggers in

P0RTHGA1 report on NATO,

Walker, Garcia, & Lacey: how Q ueensland set them up :

Page 3

the devil, m ilitary men, 13 political parties, and the people

The Lenny Bruce revival Tim Pigott reckons Dustin Hoffman makes a lousy Lenny - Page 11

T he battle for women’s health in Newcasde

Pages 7,8,9 & 10.

and in Tim or

mureowns Grant Evans on Indonesia’s plans to takeover - Page 6

women’s radio in Brisbane Wendy Bacon on Newcastle & Rosalind lnnes on radio 4BM - Page 16

October 6—November 3

THE DIGGER

Page 2

Published by High Times Pty. Ltd. 444 Station Street, North Carlton, Victoria 3054.

Telephone: 384831 Postal Address: PO Box 77 Carltón, Victoria, 3053.

Cover price is recommended ret­ ail maximum.

D IG G E R C O LL E C T IV E : M E LB O U R N E: Terry Cleary, Bob Daly, Neils Hutchison, Phillip Frazer, Reece Lamshed, Grant Evans, Isabelle Rosemberg, Jean Frankel. Sandra Zurbo.

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D EM O N STR A TIO N S A N D M EETIN G S

U R A N IU M — Who Needs It? Sympo­ sium on 'Uranium, Nuclear Power and the Environment'. Sunday, November 9, 1pm-5pm. Public Lecture Theatre, Mel­ bourne University. Speakers include Cheryl Buchanan (Black Resource Centre!, Dr. Jim Falk (Aust. Conservat­ ion Foundation). Chairperson: Dr. Geoff Mosely. For further info: Campaign Against Nuclear Power, 59 MacArthur Place, Carlton, 3053. Phone: 347-6630.

M A G A ZIN ES, ETC.

M O V IE S /M E D IA

WOMEN

H ECATE. A Women's Interdisciplinary Journal. Published twice Yearly. Sub­ scription Rate: $2.50p.a. $1.50 single issue. Write GPO, Box 99, St. Lucia, Queensland, 4067.

C IN E A C T IO N screenings. Moo. Octo­ ber 20: Dream Life/B o ff; Tues.21: Made In U S A /ln The Name o f the Father; Wed.22: Le Petit Soldat/Antonia Das Mortes; Thur.23: Days A nd Nights In The Froest/Distant Thunder, Sat.23: Rocket Ship (Flash Gordon)/Lion's Love..Screenings at Melb.Uni. Union at 7.30pm . Price: $2.20 ($ 1.70 students).

Further info: 329-5422.

TH E W O R K IN G W OMEN'S C E N T R E 53 Hardware Street, Melbourne, will house a library, a referral service for unions and women with industrial en­ quiries and a welfare service fo r all working women, particularly migrants.

Further enquiries: Sylvie ShaW 67-2016 (after hours 844-3266) of Mary Owen 67-2016 (after hours: 69-2404).

R E F R A C T O R Y G IR L. A Women's Stu­ dies Journal. Four issues per year. Sub­ scription rate: $3.50 (Aust.) for four issues. Write C/- 25 Alberta Street, Sydney, 2000.

Subscribe to S C A R L E T W OMAN, Femi­ nist/Socialist Quarterly. $3 .50 for four issues. Send subscriptions to S C AR LET W OM AN, 50 Little LaTrobe Street, Melbourne, 3000 OR S C A R L E T WO­ M A N , 25 Alberta Street, Sydney, 2000.

U R A N IU M A N D TH E N U C LE A R TH R E A T. Meeting called by the Burwood Peace Group. Speakers: Dr. Jim Cairns & Dr. Alan Roberts. To be held at Burwood Methodist Hall, Warrigul Road, Burwood. Further Info: Phone 663-3677 or 288-2472.

If you subscribe to W OMANSPEAK, 2E Albertá Street, Sydney, 2000, you will have a life full of surprises and ideas.

D ROP TH E CHARGES. Demonstrate in support of Walker, Garcia and Lacey outside the Queensland Government Tourist Bureau, MLC Building, Cnr. Collins & Elizabeth Streets, Melbourne on October 13 at 5.00pm (see story page 17).

F IN \s a feminist magazine. It is distribu­ ted through bookshops (e.g. Source, Space Age, Readings) and through the Women's Centre, 50 Little LaTrobe Street, Melbourne, 3000. Enquiries, subs, donations and contributions (with S.A.E. for return of manuscript) should be sent to F IN , P.O. Box 230, Kew, Victoria, 3101.

M ELBOURNE P R IN T E R S ' STR IK E .

The fast of the charges against those arrested in the Age/Herald-Sun pickets will be heard at 9.30am on November 11 at the City Court, Russell Street, Melbourne.

Be there to picket the court.

A U S T R A L IA N S TU D IE S B O O K LIS T N o.2 1974-75. A journal and booklist which aims to provide a focus " fo r a new approach to studying Australian society in all its aspects". Write ASB, Box 51, Wentworth Building, University of Sydney, 2000.

WEL F O R U M — "Do The Unions Serve Women Well?" Wednesday, October 15 at 7.45pm , Assembly Hall, 156 Collins Street, City. Donation $1.50 (students $1).

Speakers include Gail Wilenski (W EL Canberra), John Halfpenny (AMW U). Tickets from 16 Tiverton Drive, Mulgrave, 317Q. Phone 560-2851. Gene­ ral info. WEL: Phone 819-1161.

A CALL FO R -T H E R E V O L U T IO N A R Y R E G R O U P M E N T O F TH E A U S T R A ­ L IA N LE FT. This pamphlet discusses the development of the Australian revo­ lutionary left since the mid '60s and proposals for achieving a principled unity of revolutionary forces. Send 10 cents plus 20 cents postage for a copy to P.O. Box 48 , Burwood, 3125.

Talk and discussion on VD A N D GAYS, Tuesday, October 2 1 ,8.00pm at Wayside Chapel, Kings Gross. For further info: Phone 231-5619.

IN T E R V E N T IO N , a Marxist journal of Australian studies. Latest issue has ex­ tensive articles on Tim or, anthropology and ecology, and industrialization anc capitalism. Available at left bookshops and university bookrooms. For subs send $6 to Box 105, Carlton P.O., 3053.

Sydney-wide W OMEN'S COM M ISSIO N to be held Saturday and Sunday, Oc­ tober 25 & 26. Theme: Has International Women's Year Changed Women's Lives and A fte r International Women's Year What Next? Contact either Pamela Wade on 969-3973 or 61-7325 OR Joyce Stevens on 660-2988 for further info.

Contributions fo r gay edition of the poetry magazine F IT Z R O T are invited and appreciated. Please send gay (rele­ vant?) poetry, short prose, b/w drawings or photographs to C/- William, 61 Coppir Street, Richmond, 3121. T H A N K Y O U .

N A T IO N A L G A Y L IB E R A T IO N TEA ­ C H ER S' GROUP. For further informa­ tion phone 41-4926.

See ad. for details of S Y D N E Y F IL M M A K E R S ' CO-OP screenings for Octob­ er and early November.

TIM E S T R E A M M E D IA C E N TR E. 41 Phillip Street, Sydney, Tues. nights at 7.00pm — Poetry Workshop. Wedii 7.00pm — Poetry Workshop. Wed. nights at 7.00pm — Film Workshop. Also space is available at the Centre fo r groups to meet in, and there are facilities there for printing roneo broadsheet and a media library of cuttings and cassettes.

W OMEN'S LE G A L S E R V IC E operates 6.30-8.30pm , Tuesday & Thursday even­ ings at North Richmond Family Care Centre, Lennox Street, Richmond, opp.

All Nations Hotel.

Ph.42-3964 or 42-3965.

W OMEN'S TH E A T R E GROUP will be performing a season of new plays by women in the Back Theatrie of the Pram Factory from October 14-November 9.

Advance bookings (concessions for groups, students & pensioners) open now. Bookings & enquiries: 347-7641.

Wednesday night is set aside for women only with a discussion afterwards.

SHOPPING

CICD F A IR , October 9, Lower Melb.

Town Hall,"T1 am—5pm. Trash, Treasure, Books. .Further info: 663-3677.

T R IB U N E F A IR . Books, clothes, jams, food, etc. November 8 at North Melb.

Town Hall from 9.00am.

TH E C O M IN G O U T R E A D Y OR N O T SHOW is a programme to give a voice to women within the ABC and can be heard on ABC Radio 2, Saturdays at 5.05pm and on ABC Radio 3, Mondays at 8.00pm . Contacts: Kate Miller, Julie Rigg and Fairlie Arnold C/-_AWBC, 164 William Street, Sydney 2011. Phone 31-0211,e xtn .203 9.

Are you holding a public meeting? Are you organising a demonstration?

Any of these things, the Digger Directory of Events would like to hear about. Entertainment, dances, concerts and films, new pamphlets and journals, significant events, court hearings. We'll give them all a mention in this section. A lj you have to do is send your information to PO Box 77, Carlton, Vic. 3053 or phone 384831 (Melbourne). But make sure you do it before it before October 25, when copy closes for this section fo r the next issue.

R A D IO ST A T IO N 4 Z Z W ANTS AN ANNO UNC ER 4ZZ

FM will be a community orientated station offering rock music, alternative

news, politics, humour, information & limited access.

Long hours, miserable salary ($100 a week, before tax), open to female and male applicants, and you have to do your own typing.

Send tape and written details of interests and experience in position. Position avail­ able from November 3. Applications close October 25.

4 Z Z FM , PO BOX 379 TOOW ONG, 4006.

travel

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October 6—November 3

Page 3

THE DIGGER

Facing 14 years in gaol.*.

U p against the racist state o f Q ueensland On August 7,1974, John Garcia and Lionel Fogarty (Lacey) were charged in Brisbane with conspiring to obtain monies by threats and menaces from the President of the Queensland University Students’ Union, Jim Varghese. This charge carries a prison sentence of 14 years. The money allegedly was to be used to set up an Abo­ riginal Community School on the Palm Is­ land Reserve.

On September 12, Denis Walker was arrested in Sydney on the charge of attempt­ ing to demand monies by threats and men­ aces.

Walker and Lacey, black militants, and Garcia, a white militant, have been invol­ ved in the Black movement for many years.

Walker has been a key figure in issues such as Land Rights. Anti-Racism and the Act Confrontation Campaign to abolish the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Acts which control all blacks in Queensland. He has also been a key figure in the Black Com­ munity Services in various cities in Queens­ land.

Garcia was President of the Black Com­ munity Housing Service (Qld.) Ltd., and a councillor on other service councils.

Lacey was a field officer for the Housing Service and a councillor on other service councils. All three were actively engaged on the Act Confrontation Committee.

The reserves in Queensland are the most extreme example of that state’s racism.

Under the guise of paternalism they main­

tain Australian Aborigines in oppressive and sub-human conditions.

Palm Island, accessible only by boat and plane, and consequently easily isolated from progressive developments on the mainland, has been a continuing focus of attention for black militants. The struggle to expose Palm Island took on a new drive with the election of Fred Clay onto the Island Coun­ cil as chairman and a consequent member of Bjelke-Petersen’s token Advisory Council.

He and the chairman of the Yarraba Reserve, near Cairns, made it clear from the start that they opposed Queensland’s racist poli­ cies and that they were prepared to expose at any given opportunity the conditions of the reserves.

Some militants from the Brisbane Services visited Palm Island twice to prepare reports," make submissipns, and discuss the possibili­ ties of mobilizing support. With the announ­ cement that the state government proposed to place the Island under the municipal con­ trol of the Townsville City Council, Palm Island was again in the headlines.

In July, 19J4, Walker and Garcia had dis­ cussions with the Palm Island people and the proposals were to organize a seminar and prepare submissions to be sent to the Department of Aboriginal Affairs (DAA) in

Canberra to make the Island Council totally independent of the state Department of Aboriginal and Island Affairs and to prove that it was capable of running a municipality as any other freely elected council.

Op Monday, August 6, Denis Walker made an appointment to see Jim Varghese to discuss with him the possibilities of rais­ ing $10,000 to set up a Black Community School programme on Palm Island. On Mon­ day, Varghese was not present for the ap­ pointment, apparently because police had told him that a kidnap attempt would be made on him. On Tuesday, August 7, they finally met, but unknown to anyone present Varghese had witnesses within earshot and a tape recorder. It was during this conversation that the police allege that Walker threatened Varghese by suggesting that unless the money was raised he would place a price of $200 on his head. The meeting ended on a rational and cordial note, and Varghese would see what facilities would be made available to raise money .

On Wednesday at about 4.00am, some 15 plainclothes and uniformed police broke into Garcia’s house and took him, Lionel Lacey and another black militant to police headquarters. In the following hours they raided several houses where other activists

lived. That evening Garcia and Lacey were charged with conspiracy. The third militant was allowed to leave. During the next few weeks most militant blacks in Brisbane were repeatedly questioned by the police.

Not one of these charges has yet been sub­ stantiated. The intimidation of black rights activists which accompanied the arrests of Walker, Garcia and Fogarty has had the effect of curbing the work of the Queens­ land Act Confrontation Committee and generally hindering the development of the movement. All this has occurred without the police haying substantiated their charges.

What is at stake here is the right of blacks to organize without fear of harassment from police and the government. The defence of these victims of Queensland racism is a matter which must concern the whole working class movemeht in this country.

More information is available in the book­ let, Conspiracy by the State. Send 50 cents to: A d Hoc Committee for the Defence, 19 Fortescue Street, Spring Hill, 4000.

All proceeds will go to Defence o f the Three Campaign. Donations towards the Defence Campaign can be sent to the address above.

Builders Labourers. B new accusations and a death Last year, Norm Gallagher led the federal BLF in a successful take-over of the NSW Branch of the BLF which had put the heat on Sydney developers and builders by Green Banning many sites.

Micky Thorpe and Jim Leavy were two of several Melbourne builders’ labourers who agreed to fly to Sydney to work with the building company, E.A. Watts. When they arrived in Sydney, the jobs they were being given were strike breaking jobs. They also saw federal builders’ labourers who had temporary residence in various expensive Sydney motels and wardrobes in those motels filled with guns. They also saw evi­ dence of direct collusion with E.A.Watts and Gallagher to smash the local BLF. Thorpe and Leavy both swore affidavits about what they saw in Sydney —evidence that is damaging to the Federal BLF. Thorpe had this to say: “I . . . approached the Union and told them I was after a job as a dogman. Norm Wallace, the Assistant Secretary of the Victorian Branch in company with Mick Lewis, a temporary Victorian organizer, said to me ‘Would you mind going to Sydney’.

He told me to go down to E.A.Watts’ job in Collins Place, city, and told me to see Reg McDonald who is a foreman rigger. I went to the job and saw McDonald. McDonald asked

me when could I go to Sydney and I told him tomorrow. He told me to come up to the job and I would be able to pick up my airline ticket at 4.00pm that day.’r Jim Leavy swore in his affidavit that he was told: “We’ve got no worries on this score, Watts are backing us, they gave us $10,000 yesterday.”

But Leavy had been in Sydney only a few days and, as he stated in his affidavit: j “ I was pissed off with the whole issue. I went to Kings Cross as I knew some Irish­ men who drank in that area. I met some of them and told them why I was up in Sydney.

They told me that the whole set up was wrong and I should not be taking part in it.

I met some other friends of mine, some of whom were out of work in Sydney because of the Gallagher issue. I got a full and clear view of what was happening in Sydney. One Irishman said to me, ‘How would you like, it Jimmy, if we came to Melbourne to take your job?’ ” Thorpe and Leavy returned home with­ out taking the,Sydney jobs. Back in Mel­ bourne they found that they couldn’t get BL’s jobs because they had bucked the union leadership — Gallagher. They then got jobs with Melbourne’s underground loop and became members of the Australian

Workers’ Union. Another reason they found it difficult to find jobs as BLs was because of their active involvement in the BLF Rank and File Committee.

Jimmy Leavy dies Last month Jimmy Leavy died after a brawl at the Dover Hotel, Melbourne.

The circumstances surrounding Leavy’s death are puzzling. Precise information is scanty. Apparently he had been warned not to drink at the Dover, the pub next door to the BLF office, and where, as we reported in. the last Digger, two underground loop wor­ kers had been bashed.

On Saturday night, September 5, Leavy drank there and was involved in an argu­ ment which led to a fight. At 2.30am, he died in a police cell. The coroner’s report said he died of a cerebral haemorrhage.

What happened in between times is unclear. The police first stated that he died in hospital, then they said that he had been taken to hospital for a check-up and was later cleared. A taxi was supposedly involved: he was picked up and taken to the police

station by this taxi, though it’s not known at what time. There are many theories on the reasons for his death, but no substantial evidence has been found. Leavy’s work­ mates and friends have raised $5,000 to pay for a proper enquiry into his death, which is what they’re demanding.

Apology Mick Thorpe and Bryce Allen were pic­ tured in a poster reproduced in the last Digger. It was a poster printed by the Federal body of the Builders’ Labourers’ Federation, run by Norm Gallagher, and it called Thorpe and Allen scabs. We ran the poster to illu­ strate Gallagher and Co.’s perfidy, not to en­ dorse their slur on Thorpe and Allen — and we apologize vigoròusly for not making this clear (see Digger No.45, p.5).

Thorpe and Allen work on thè Melbourne underground railway, aboveground, supply­ ing the underground workers. Underground workers belong to the Australian Workers’ Union; aboveground workers to the BLF. Gallagher wants all these underground rail­ way workers in his union and has persecuted Thorpe and Allen because they work in between the two unions’ current territories.

\

THE DIGGER

Page 4

OK THE GHVT R U N

HEDDA HOPPER

«

On Thursday, September 1 8 ,1 called at the home of Red Symons, gui­ tarist with Australia’s super-group, Skyhooks. That evening a very private train was leaving Flinders Street Station, Melbourne, to carry us notables from the press and the music industry to a “ grandoise banquet, Skyhooks style” , arranged by Mushroom Records, to a place unknonw. The invitation promised an “historic announcement . Qradu_ ally the other members of the band deifted in - Greg, Fred and Bongo - but not Shirley who was still in England. Things got noisy. Michael Kandinski (A.K.A. Gudinski), manager of Skyhooks and of Mushroom Records, arrived and tore around the living hands Finally he ushered myself and Seona and Jenny (who share a house with Red), out to his car A 90m.p.h. dash to Flinders Street, him talking aU the way. I interrupt: What s thls ru™our * , Ross Wilson is replacing Shirley in the band?” “ Yeah, what about that one? Wilson probably started it himself.” “ Yeah, that’s a thought. Well, here you are kids . . . ’ Dump, slam.

There’« a sparse crowd on the platform. Some eager-eyed children squeal S in Mollv Meldrum host of ABC’s Countdown, steps out drenched m Eau Savage. He gets 10 leet betore swamDedbv ecstatic 12 year old autograph hounds. During this diversion the invited guests sneakonboard i r r 0ne spotted t o bandTnd gave out a piercing scream. The crowd plunged, solid-body, towards the far end of the platform where a grey wall of security men was depositing the band safely on board. The screams^di m s m m and l ^ l as the welded mass offans tried to an opening and follow the flight of .. . well, who knows? J he^rd later that a girl had been pushed through a shut window. Those versed in such events told me it was nothing compared to a Skyhooks’ concert.

The journey was a delight - a private compartment form e, Seona and Jenny, not too many visitors and four bottles of champagne. But then a crammed, noisy bus ride surrounded by the music industry “I m so old, I knew Prue when she was a virgin, har-har-har!! . banquet was at the Braon of Beef, a mock-Tudor mansion somewhere in the hills. I settled in with a row of liquers to watch the proceedings. Michael read the press release very weU. He thanked all the right people and announced a^Skyhooks five w IiafT tap" and fO albums to American Phonogram Records. Finally he said: I know you re all wondering what s p pened to Shirley, over there in England and married and all, but I would like to take this black curPdeny any rumours that Ross Wilson is replacing him as Skyhooks lead singer , at ^ h the black cur tain behind him dropped and Skyhooks, complete with Shirley leapt forth singing Ego Is Not A Dirty Word’. Fine trick, Michael, if predictable. Well> the band played their number and then broke up; the lads_moved off to mingle with Important People, j think a martini like turpen’ tine finally did me in, plus the repeated “har-har-har” of the man who knew Prue as a virgin. So I teetered off down the road, over a couple of hills, to the cottage of a good friend and the balm of sleep.

Three days later I sent my office boy, Jeffrey Dutton, to the Fitz, roy home of Jenny Keath and Red Symons to talk about the rumour that Red is leaving the band to join the Divine Light Mission.

—

m g m ■

October 6—November 3

October 6—November 3 Jeff: Actually, I’d rather talk about money.

Red: I’ve got enough to buy four medium priced new cars. But it won’t last forever, you know. Who knows? Tomorrow . . .

Jenny: Skid Row. Jeff: Are you really going to buy a house?

Red: It only seems a question of deploy­ ing my interest-bearing deposits to appre­ ciate at the best possible rate, a tax dodge, something like that.

Jeff: Can you think of nothing to do with it all, just for yourself?

Red: The most reasonable thing is to use the money to keep myself occupied, and the band doesn’t need it —it’s self-supporting. I really haven’t got time to think about it. I 'have bought two good guitars, one acoustic and one electric.

Jeff: Bongo has six.

■Red: Bongo’s attitude is that guitars app­ reciate just the same as anything else, so you might as well use those as investments as Eersian carpets (Freddy), private hospitals (Shirley) or trust funds for your auntie (Greg). None of us are on any big fur-coated superstar trip. I don’t even feel like being dressy around the house anymore; I’ve sub­ limated it all into my performance. Maybe there were times in the past when I’d dress up just for the sake of it. One night, I walked into the' pub around the corner in my costume, just to freak them out. They suddenly had to think of something to say.

All the functional cliches like “Can I help you, sir?” were stuffed.

Jenny: So, what did they say?

Red: Nothing. Jocks down the back of the pub would go “arrggh” , negating what they would see as “the homosexual” . Theold derros, well it’s funny, it doesn’t make any difference to them. They can see what you’re doing; you’re dressed up and you’ve got make-up on.

Jenny: They probably think you’re out to do the run up Brunswick Street, hitting people for 20 cents.

Jeff: What’s your future with this band?

Red: The complete extreme is that we don’t stop and 10 years from now we’re still slogging around —that’s unlikely or the band’s fucking King of the World. What seems to happen in that situation is that the band members spend the rest of their lives piss-farting around, and other people in­ dulge them, and even their trivia becomes interesting.

Jeff: Would you like to be indulged?

Red: I’d like to have that —to have an audience That was interested in what I Was doing, in what would ordinarily be unaccep­ table. I wouldn’t mind collecting weird things on tape, like this particular fan that brought this song round the other day: He sails it like a hot rod, He rides the waves with style, His ship’s a Lamborghini, , He loves it mile for mile.

They call him Captain Courageous,' A home he doesn’t deserve, He’s drunk, an addict, a sex fiend, His girls have all got curves. . . . and so on all in D and E. I wouldn’t mind getting the derros down the road to sing; a collection of interesting things. If the public would get interested in the sort of things that interest me, it would be great. Like getting guys out of an aud­ ience just to be a madman, to get them up on stage to do absurd little tricks, like cross­ ing their eyes.

Jenny: What about that school kid?

Red: Yeah, that guy. Wouldn’t get off the stage until he’d got an autograph. It’s dangerous: some guysjreak out, but others . . . once they’re there, they’re there to stay.

Jeff: How do you write a song?

Red: In many ways, it doesn’t involve anything. All it means is writing out three minutes of music 10 times for an album, and then recording it. In one sense there’s nothing to think about. Things just pop out.

It’s a bit difficult now because suddenly things I do have this incredible value. If it’s just me sitting by myself, trying to think of something, it’s hard. But when I’m playing with the others, it’s easy. You pick up frag­ ments of what each other is playing, repeat it and embellish it.

Jeff: Is that how you do it?

Red: Pretty much.

Jeff: Do you ever try writing something just for yourself, that won’t be turned into a Skyhooks’ number?

Red: I’m disinclined to think about those sorts of things now. I’m even disinclined to try to work out songs. When it goes to the band, it’s going to change anyway.

THE DIGGER Jeff: Does the commercialism worry you?Red: I’ve internalized that process pretty much. The sort of music I’ve always listened to is commercial music, and that’s what I’ve always been interested in —commercial in the sense that there are particular, essential things that are always going to work. I mean, we’re not setting out to be musicians as virtuosos, but rather to be virtuosos at being a band, which is a particular kind of field. We have to put ourselves in a maxi­ mum appeal b rack ets maximum, universal, all-encompassing total appeal!!! Maximum return wasn’t something we planned for.

I’ve always assumed that’s what pop music is all about. You have to try to appeal to everyone, otherwise you fall back on your­ self and say, “I want an audience like me” Jeff: You seem to have opted for one extreme.

Red: Well, how else can you do it? You can do it for ‘art’, but that’s part qf the process anyway and it isn’t worth thinking about. It’s inherent in it. For example, I dress up to be weird and interesting because it’s commercially viable. After that, deciding what sort of costume to wear is . . . art, you know? Because I’ve no more reason to do it other than what I feel like. That’s my idea of art.

Jenny: But a lot of people would say that commercialism undermines the art side.

Red: I think that would be misunder­ standing the media.

Jeff: It’s a pretty narrow medium, musi­ cally.

Red: The basic limitation is that if I think of music, I certainly don’t think of putting in violins or brass, except if they’re recorded in. Take ‘Horror Movie’, our big hit single.

It goes together easily live and that’s one reason it’s popular, and it’s there, no strings, no violins. If it’s sufficient for the band to play, it’s sufficient for people to hear. Radio eliminates all the subtlety and gives just the basic thread. With ‘Horror Movie’, its television motif, there’s a consistency with the lyric and the visual content.

Jeff: A horror movie is what they’re actu­ ally watching.

Red: Yeah, it fits. Maybe that’s subliminally significant.

Jeff: What does that mean?

Red: Well, I don’t know if we put out anything which has a subliminal effect on the audience. It’s hard tq know what it is.

Jeff: It seems that so much of what an audience reacts to is just hype or a by­ product of hype, and only say one per cent is of the stuff that really grabs an audience.

Perhaps this is what differentiates between pop bands, whether or not they’re capable of producing that one per cent, that electric high energy thing where you don’t notice the words or even the melody, it’s just th is . . .

Red: Er, overdrive?

Jeff: At the dinner party, when the Sky­ hooks were playing, the audience was affected strangely. Many of theser‘grown-ups’ from the music industry screamed when you started to play, and guys yelled out “On yar, ocker!” to Shirley, giving him the thumbs up. Quite hysterical. The other popular comment of course was “Predic­ table!”.'

Red: Excuse me. The subliminal thing works the best when even the performers don’t realize what they’re giving off. The Rolling Stones . .. they’re so contemptuous —particularly towards screaming girls so blase and that strikes a real strong chord.

People don’t like it but it has a strong draw­ ing power. The egocentricness. They do put out a lot of hate, whereas the Beatles are the opposite and put out complete mindless affirmation. Not that they think of it that way: “We will now write a song that com­ pletely affirms the listener . . . “ She Loves You, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes . . . ” .

Jeff: How does all that fit in with your own performances?

Red: They’re pretty carefully dynamized in this way: immediate acceleration; slow down a bit; virtually stop at the drum solo and insert something completely different and then incline-to the last song, ‘Carlton’; then whip off the stage as quickly as possible creating that space . .. it’s not complete, it’s •not complete . . . so you do an encore which suggests completeness in a way but it’s not really complete. And that’s the whole thing.

When I finish playing, I don’t feel like I’ve finished it. I’ve still got all that energy that I haven’t expended.

Once at Festival Hall, this girl ran up to me and I just kept playing and she just kept coming and coming and coming. Maybe I thought she wouldn’t get to me —usually they get within 10 feet and someone will grab them —but. this girl ran up and actually

grabbed me. And while she kissed and grabbed, I kept playing. I felt really strange.

I felt really confused. I didn’t know how come I did not react in any way. I felt trapped, even though I knew someone would drag her off. You almost have to be passive if you want people to be actively involved in you. You’re not there to-be in­ volved in dialogue, you’re just projecting.

Jeff: What image do you try to project?

Red: It has to be something that’s com­ patible with me, though it’s important to provide information that is unresolved. Janis Joplin destroyed herself by having virtually ho separation between her role and herself.

The reason she was so good at singing songs about misery and oppression was because she was miserable afid oppressed; and then she had to be miserable and oppressed to maintain what she was doing.

Jeff: Do you ever wish to direct the power you have over your audience.

Red: Directing the audience? You could provide some basically musical sort of event that was integrated with the-performance, something more than just clapping along.

Jenny: The implications of that questionborder on the Hitlerian. It’s similar to divid­ ing the audience up into 40 teams and fight­ ing them against each other, or telling an audience at that fever pitch to vote in a cer­ tain way.

Red: We’ve always had great debates about that and I’ve always said it’s really shithouse if you get up and say, “ Do this, do that” , because it’s basically a dictatorial situation.

Jeff: Yes, it is, isn’t it?

Red: No. We get up there and they are free to accept or reject us. In the early days they certainly did have that freedom, be­ cause they did reject us, often. That compe­ tition thing —once Shirley tried it in Ade­ laide. I think he was just desperate. Anyway, he said, “ All those on this side of the au­ dience are on my side” , and I immediately twigged and said, “And all the ones on the other side are also on Shirley’s side” , and that thwarted that.

Jeff: Thé Hitlerian situation is there now —a lot of people getting hysterical and pin­ pointing that energy on to the band. In all pop music, the audience/performer gap is used as a tease so people will keep paying.

The management knows that sort of power is there; they find and harness it in the big­ gest way . ..

Red: You’re boring me.

Jeff: O h ...

Red: In Australia, people have an overinflated idea of how manipulative manage­ ments are. I mean, the bands have enough trouble getting an audience going, let alone the management.

Jenny: Management has more to do with just marketing. When you’re up there it’s different.

Jeff: What about the dinner party?

Red: Look, there’s all these bloody killer sharks swimming around in the sea, and you harness yourself to your own killer shark to deal with all the other killer sharks. That’s why Michael is good —like, I’d hate to be on the wrong side of him when it comes down to it. We’ve had a reasonable deal right along. Aside from any question of the blood} morality of the capitalist system, there is no way I can sell a record without using the . capitalist system unless I get in a station-, wagon and drive all over the country distri­ buting to. record shops. Take venues —there are only two or three in capital cities that we can use that are big enough. We can?t really argue with those guys, they’re going to make it feasible for us. I mean, it’s a monopoly.

They call thé terms.

Jeff: And what about that dinner party?

Red: If I really wanted to identify myself by what sort of party I’d like to throw, it wouldn’t be like that. I’d like to go to a place which would have a less predic­ table effect on people, like put them in a factory in boiler suits . . .

Jeff: And get them to work? .

Red: . . . I mean give them a whole lot of jelly to throw at each other or something.

Jeff: It’s all entertainment. I figure if you’re having a press reception, you entertain the press; if it’s a concert, you entertain the audience §| just titillate them, feed ’em with bloody booze.

Jeff: How do you titillate an audience?

Red: A classic, or a beaûtiful cameo.

Once when we were playing in Adelaide . . . we’d often go out the back of the theatre after the gig and listen to the recordings in a mobile van. Beyond that is a big cyclone wire fence with 50 or so girls behind it,,peer­ ing in. Well, one day after sneaking out the side door of the theatre, we drove round behind them, and Bongo stuck his head out

Page 5

the window and yelled, “Shirley! Shirley!” , so they all about faced and ran at the cars.

So we wound up the windows and Wilson said, “Thé Untouchables” , and I said, “Yeah, it’s amazing; the more inaccessible you are the more they chase after you”.

Jeff: Are you always so untouchable?

Red: At Chelsea one night there was this girl in the audience at my feet just mouthing “fuck-me, fuck-me” . I suppose some of them envisage going through the whole bit. I suppose they just want to be loved. Grou­ pies? Few and far between, actually. Pro- ; bably a dozen or 20 in each capital city who visit the band, any band, after the show, and I suppose, afterwards they fuck them.

With guys, it’s completely on the level, of them projecting themselves into my position I hope.

Jeff: Do you get pissed off at being the hero of so many people’s wet dreams?

Red: I only concern myself with what they think about me when I’m there, in front of them.

Jeff: I could make out an argument though, that you put yourself there, in their minds, with records and ads and pin-ups that get into bedrooms all ovêr the country..»

Red: Sure. We’re all keenly interested in our ads, we do all.the radio stuff ourselves, and we always say something about our­ selves, which is the real relevant information.

I-dress myself up in a way that I hope they’ll think I’m sexually attractive. That’s inesca­ pable. I donlt know what to do with it after that. I’m not an athletç.

Jeff:' How do yoU cope with the fans that come to your front door?

Red: With schoolgirls, if I just hide my­ self away and they get occasional glimpses of me, it’s much more satisfying to them than if I exhaust their interest in me. If I sit here and they ask me what they want to know and I tell them, they’d be demys­ tified.

Jenny: When fans come to the door, they can’t confront Red; they just giggle or run away.

Jeff: Do people treat you differently now in the street around this neighbourhood?

Red: Today I went out, and I didn’t have a conversation with anybody that didn’t start with a comment about, “This is what you are, you signed a bloody.contract for $1,500,000 and that’s really good. How 'soon will you go?”. It’s a kind of groupieism. I’m disinclined now to seek people out unless they are sophisticated enough to know others who are engaged in similar en­ deavours. Around here, there’s actors, for example.

Jeff: How do you deal with fans on the phone?

Jenny: John Lennon said it all: “Those freaks on the phone won’t leave me alone . . ¡jS Red: I leave them with something, some mystery to tantalize them ..

Jenny: They just keep coming back.

Red: Oh, mot immediately.

Jenny: Soon enough . . . I want to move.

I’m bailing out. Visiting friends’ places, miles away, they discover us. Schoolgirls on street corners in obscure areas stand there waving.

They know the car and come and knock on the door. It just gives me the shits.

Red: Sometimes I wonder if I’ll spend the rest of my life standing on street corners explaining myself to people because they recognize me.

At 2.00am on Friday, ^September 19, two buses were seen leaving the Baron of Beef in Sherbrooke. They were carrying revellers vomiting Mandrax and booze from the Sky­ hooks reception to a waiting train at Ferntree Gully station.

At 3.20, the passengers disembarked on­ to platform No.l At 4.45am on Friday, September, the badly mutilated body of Jeffrey Dutton was dragged from the Yarra at Prince’s Bridge.

On the forehead was a mark, clearly branded there by a red-hot iron. It looked like this:

October 6—November 3

THE DIGGER

Page 6

‘Javanese wisdom’ still means invading Timor

by Grant Evans Sitting listening to Jose Ramos-Horta of F R E T IL IN talk about what was happening in Tim or I realised what he was describing was the emergence of a socialist society — whether he knew it yet or not. Whatever the numerous dictators in Asia tell you what's going on isn't because o f plots by Chinese generals.

-/ The Portuguese colonial state disintegrated and its Governor retreated to an offshore island to watch the final demise of Portugese colonialism through binoculars.

Onshore the people were getting their first taste o f running their own lives — with one eye on the skies fo r Indonesian bombs.

Almost a ybar ago I interviewed the Portu­ guese Minister for the Coordination of Over­ seas Territories, Almeida Sambos, in Dili, the capital of East Timor. He said then: “FRETILIN are demanding immediate de ,facto independence and yet they’ve only been in existence for six months. FRELIMQ in Mozambique fought for twelve yeaYs and won their right to independence. FRETILIN can’t claim the same rights.”

One year later, after a brief and fierce civil war, FRETILIN has won complete control of East Timor. They are now the government and have the support of the majority of the people there. Will they be allowed to keep their control of the country?

Over the same period East Timor’s neighbour. Indonesia, has played a cat and mouse game with the small ex-colony. When you’re in Timor you continually have the uneasy feeling that s@me untangible force is breathing down your neck. A few weeks back it materialized when Indonesian troops first came across the border separating East Timor from the Indonesian held section of the island.

Many writers have praised Suharto’s ‘Javanese wisdom’, his restraint, as the poli­ tical developments in East Timor unfolded.

What this means is that if Suharto crushes the Liberation forces in the east, then at least you can be sure he’ll do it like a gentle­ man who has been dragged to the end of his tether.

In fact Suharto’s ‘Javanese wisdom’ has been carefully engineering the take-over of East Timor.

The first threats came from Indonesia in September last year when they began calling FRETILIN communist and started peddling fairy-tales about Chinese generals being active in East Timor. The threats stopped for a brief period over Christmas —‘Javanese discretion’, presumably —and then moved into higher gear in early February of this year. During March an Indonesian invasion seemed certain (See ‘Timor: “ 3000 Indon­ esian troops are at our border” ’, Digger, No.42).

Once again the threats stopped suddenly in April, but only to prepare for the next round.

During February FRETILIN and the con­ servative party in Timor, UDT, formed an alliance based on opposition to integration with Indonesia, By April the Indonesian diplomatic machine had got to work and in­ vited both of these parties to Indonesia for

talks —separately. When the UDT delegation arrived in Djakarta the UDT.President, Lopez de Cruz, said over radio: “ Growing commu­ nist activities in Portugal have no bearing on developments in Timor because most of the population of Portuguese Timor are reli­ gious”. The next day, April 19, the same radio reported: “Two leaders of Portuguese Timor’s Democratic Union Party ended their visit to Indonesia today after reassessing their anti-communist platform and pledging to cooperate with the colony’s pro-Indone­ sian APODETI party.” « When the UDT leaders got back to Timor they broke their coalition with FRETILIN, and began anti-communist propaganda aga against them.

1 Final preparations for a showdown began on August 2 when ttvo leaders of the UDT, Mario Carrascalau and Domingos Olivera arrived in Djakarta for talks. Two days-later they flew in President de Cruz too. They returned four days before UDT’s attempted coup in East Timor on August 10. Did the Indonesians help plan the coup or did they just give their assent? Either way, it seemed they couldn’t lose. What was said was not made public.

While this was going on, the main leaders within FRETILIN were out of the country.

They got wind of the coup plans though, and only President, Xavier do Amaral and Vice-President, Nicolaù Lobato, managed to get back —four days before the coup attempt. It was the first foul up in UDT’s (and Indonesia’s?) plans.

The events during the civil war are now well known. Within three weeks FRETILIN had effectively crushed UDT forces, bar a few isolated pockets on the border with Indonesia.

The swiftness of FRETILIN’s victory ob­ viously took everyone by surprise. I’m sure neither UDT nor Indonesia expected the 3,000 Timorese troops in the Portuguese army to revolt and side with FRETILIN. They had banked on the Portuguese Gover­ nor, Lemos Pires, being able to keep the army, at thè very least, neutralised.

If the Indonesians assented to the coup then they hoped the warring parties would have carved each other up so badly by the time they were ‘forced’ to step in to ‘restore order’ that there would be little resistance.

If they invade now they face the possibi­ lity of a long guerrilla war —FRETILIN has more than 3,000 well armed troops, many more armed people, and have had the time iWÊÊBÊSÊ ìMÈIÈÈIÈKm

I

' 5L ■ UP1■ » W i

But, “the morale of the people is ex­ tremely high” said FRETILIN’s President of its political committee, Ramos-Horta, when he arrived in Melbourne from Timor on ' September 28. He also said that all ranks had been abolished in the. Timorese army and it had become a people’s army; “It is helping the people organise the harvest and is re­ distributing food across the country”.

“The situation there is extremely calm,' we are in complete control of the country” , he said. “We have problems with about 2,000 orphans from former UDT areas, and we are very short of medical supplies and facilities.”

He was understandably cautious when commenting on the threat from Indonesia.

He put it down to “over zealous Indonesian officers” . “What we want now is a peace­ keeping force from a neutral country along the border to stop any tension.” Indonesia’s response —troop attacks across the border.

Indonesian threats on East Timor began last year after Gough had given Suharto the nod on a visit to Djakarta. And any moment now you can expect Gough’s head to nod * right off, he’s been so*vigorously passive in his encouragement of Indonesian interven­ tion. His response to FRETILIN’s call for a buffer zone along the border was not even a silent nod, just silence.

The Labor government’s foreign policy in Asia is to stick With the military dictators, not liberation groups.

Malaysia and Singapore have given the goahead for an Indonesian invasion of Timor, and you can be sure other Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) mem­ bers will soon follow.

FRETILIN has asked China, amongst others, for diplomatic support, but it seems they’re more interested in ping pong.

All the big capitalists (and there weren’t many of them) fled Timor during the civil war and so their coffee plantations and com­ panies have been taken over. Australia now has a fledgling, de facto, socialist country 400 km. from its shoreline, and it’s doing everything it can to make sure it doesn’t stay there long.

October 1st, 1975 marks the tenth anniversary of Suharto's military dictatorship in Indonesia. Suharto Came to power on a wave of anti-communist massacres which may have cost up to a million lives. And tens of thousands of political prisoners are still held in concentration camps in Indonesia. For more information write to : Committee for Indonesian Political Prisoners, 99 Burnley Street, Richmond, 3121.

The§e two poems were written by Sugiarti Siswadi, an Indonesian woman who has been in prison since 1966. Sugiarti comes from Cental Java. Her husband is also in prison and her two sons and daughter have been looked after by relatives during the ten years of the parents’ de-" tention. Sugiarti is about 48 years old.

Sugiarti established herself as a well-known writer and poet in Indonesia in the early 1950’s.

She was particularly well known for her short story ‘Paradise on Earth’ and for her contribut­ ion to the Communist Party newspaper, Hariari Rakyat, until the paper was banned in 1965.

Sugiarti was also a leader of the left-wing cultural organisation, GERWANI. Both these organisations were banned after the abortive coupin 1965 and many of the people assoc­ iated with these organisations were arrested in the aftermath of the coup, Sugiarti was co-editor of the Gerwani magazine, Api Kartini. This paper was 'named after In donesia’s most outstanding women’s emancipationist and educationalist, Kartini, who died in 1901 when she was in her early twenties, Along with hundreds of others, Sugiarti’Siswadi is still in prison in Indonesia - most of thém will never receive a trial, will not know what they are accused of or when they will be set free. ' .

FREEDOM Freedom has changed the face o f the world it rules the mind, the heart and the person it dispels the mist hanging over th'e mountains, the valleys, the shores, the fields, the factories and the cities and the hearts o f us, women.

»

*

to prepare guerrilla bases.

It seems then that Suharto’s ‘Javanese wisdom’ gave but on him. The most favour­ able time for intervention was at the height of the civil war while the world .was being flooded with refugee horror stories.

But now there are new-fairy (ales. They have claimed that FRETILIN is being helped by North Vietnamese advisers and that three mysterious submarines have been tracked by the Indonesian navy off the Timor coast, j Asked about other troops for an inter­ national ‘peace-keeping’ force, Acting Indonesian Foreign Minister, Professor Mochtar replied: “ Other troops? Where from? Mars?” So I guess we can rule out Martian advisers to FRETILIN. The Indonesians say that they wilLonly accept Portuguese authority in East Timor, that FRETILIÑ controls only a few towns and that FRETILIN has invaded Indonesian territory. Indonesia wants Portugal to abide by the de-colonisation agreement they had made for Timor in July, which involves-all three parties.

What is the reality? The UDT and APO­ DETI parties, now both based in Indonesian Timor, support integration with Indonesia.

On September 30 they said they no longer recognised Portuguese authority in the east­ ern half, which indicates Indonesia no longer recognises it, and that the stuff about the de-colonisation programme is rhetoric.

Indonesian troops crossed into East Timor on September 21 and were repulsed. One of the soldiers captured is now held in jail in Dili by FRETILIN. On October 1, 30 Indo­ nesian troops, crossed the border and claimed to have wiped out a FRETILIN base; and then withdrew.

Indonesia Obviously has planned a steady escalation of border clashes, both to justify final invasion and to waste FRETILIN’s ammunition.

Indonesia can afford to bide its time.

They have blockaded Timor and FRETILIN forces will not be able to be resupplied with ammunition. The civil war also disrupted the harvest and food is short.

a ll

-i-W ' ' in

now we are no longer just giving birth to worker soldiers. we too are worker soldiers. no longer, just wives o f people’s heroes, we too are people’s heroes.

-J— .

'

and when the fortresses o f obsolete time are smashed and workers’ power stands proudly on our land we shall no longer tend the graves read the prayers and weep for the dead we shall be part o f the foremost ranks.

WOMEN No longer are we gilded posies engaging when compliant exquisite when yielding enchanting when submissive, to hell it is our duty to go to heaven permitted to follow. and no longer are we blossoms cast aside downtrodden selling our sweat for next to nothing workers at half price no security no equality only duty we have cried out from behind the walls o f segregation from the clutches o f the spiteful bed from the nightly business in the gutters' from the revenge o f unwilling wedlock “we are human beings!”

Jose Fernando Osorio Soares, . general secretary of the pro-Indonesian party. APODETI.

October 6—November 3

Page 7

THE DIGGER

Two Diggers in Portugal

The sixth government in search of a general

by David Uren in Lisbon The right wing Cheered. The left was thunderstruck. No one called for encores when the drama of Portugal’s 5th provisional government drew to a close.

It was performed by the Armed Forces for the benefit of the Portuguese people.

What was allegedly at stake was the revolut­ ionary alliance between the armed forces and the people.

Whilst the soldier is the symbol of the revolution and. remains a popular hero, it , was a cathartic performance with many key scenes played backstage. Official statements were out. Journalists played detective work counting who went in and out of the Preside ential palace and fitting the bare facts to the various rumours.

The stars? General Vasco Goncalves., Prime Minister ’of two of Portugal’s govern­ ments, is a man convinced of his historical necessity in the revolution. He has a linear view of history - you can go forwards to the socialist state or backwards to the fascist state. There are no other alternatives. He is i seen as the Communist Party’s man and like I the C.P. thinks a strong and authoritarian I state is essential.

“If people think that the fights between the Socialist Party and the Communist Party are fights between ‘Benificia’ and ‘Sporting’,

(rival footy teams) then there is no doubt whatsoever that we are sinking and headed for the depths.

“If we think these fights are much more profound - are fights in which are manifest the struggle of the classes and the final objectives of their social strata - then we can see them with far.greater lucidity.

“I should say th at I am convinced that social democracy is a transitional phase for fascism in Portugal.”

General Costa Gomes, President of the Republic, is remarkable for his political longevity.. He was Chief of Staff under Caetano and Spinola’s immediate superior.

He is a nice kindly gentleman, a moderate with an almost paternalistic air. He is often

accused of being weak, a puppet of the prevailing winds. But he is, still, President of the Republic.

“All Portuguese should feel themselves tolerant brothers. You cannot build any society based on hate and vengeance. All societies, in order to survive, have to be based on humanity and on love for the fellow man.”

Commander of COPCON, General Otelo Saraiva de Cavalho had a youthful ambit­ ion to become an actor. His grandfather, also Otelo, is a legend in Portuguese theatre.

General Canvalho directed the 25th April coup and a critical figure in this drama as the only one, besides Coata Gomes, with power to match Goncalves. He was often

Down and out in Lisbon David Uren's cover letter to Digger: “As you can see I’m down to my last scraps of paper; Portugal is once again, blissfully without a nasty communist government to lead the country to anarchy. For over a week now they’ve been telling us there’ll be a new govern­ ment tomorrow. At five in the morning the streets are nice and peaceful but I’m feeling a bit natty. Perhaps it was the wine - it was aggressive. I’m out of fags.

“I hope you like the story - I enjoyed writing it. I am sorry to lumber you with my handwriting. Until yesterday morning I had access to a typewriter. I also had a job. The bastard who owned the company - an Australian who thought Bolte a bit too pink for his liking - split for Spain without paying employees, rent on office, apartment or the hire car that he ditched in Madrid. He remembered to take his typewriter.”

Beware o f people with typewriters. . '

Portugal 1975: the street has been renamed, after the 25 April coup

regarded as extreme left. He backed popular power, based on workers’ and residents’ cpmmittees over the ballot box. He was extremely impressed with Cuba and not too impressed with the C.P. But of himself he says: “I’m a man of the left, but I don’t think you could call me extreme left. I only know that I have the confidence of the extreme left. I also have the confidence of many elements of the Socialist Party.”

He could say that five weeks ago but he has been re-classified by the left as a Judas.

Leading the forces against Goncalves were the “nine” from the Revolutionary Council.

These were all men considered Marxists in under Spinola but nowadays put in the Social-democrat camp. Major MeloAntunes was the best known of the group. He was foreign affairs minister in governments three and four. He says he withdrew his support from Goncalves.

“When I acquired the conviction that, for reasons that still escape me, the Prime Minister turned deliberately, into the instrument of a communist strategy contrary to the interests of our revolution and the Portuguese people. It is a strategy aimed at the end of fascism, a bureaucratic collection controlled solely by the communist leaders.

“This process that they call revolutionary raises us directly to a totalitarianism that no-one could say, after the event, if it was

Red Saunders

of the right or the left.”

There are a host of other characters. Oo the side of Goncalves there is Ramiro Conneria, head of the 5th Division, the milit­ ary pròpoganda division, Conneia Jesuino, minister of the media Brigadier Corvacho commander of the norther region of tne army.

The moderates had many backers - the head of the air force »General Morrais de Silva and the head of the army, Gen. Fabiao, the man who was chosen to replace Goncalves, but declined the offer.

The drama was set in a quite complex power structure. At the base, each military unit has popular assemblies which nominate delegates for the respective assemblies of the army, airforce and navy. These debate issues and send off delegates of all ranks to the assembly of the Armed Forces Movement (MFA). In theory the MFA assembly is the most powerful body in Portugal, it can change thè president if it wants.

The next level is the Revolutionary Council. It is composed of leading figures nominated by the assemblies of the different branches of the armed forces, and then notified by the Assembly of the MFA and the President. In recent times it has itself appointed new members. The President, Prime Minister and Commander of COPCON and chiefs of staff are always members.

It has the power to issue decree/laws although only “normally” , that is when there is a ministry, and it decides questions of general policy and directs the Ministry to pass laws enforcing it.

The Ministry is presided over by the Prime Minister and is what is referred to when people talk about thè ‘government’.

The Prime Minister has considerable power over who goes in the ministry although sel­ ection is a rather mystifying process involving the President and the Revolution­ ary Council.

The Prime Minister is nominated by the President and notified by the Assembly of the MFA and the Revolutionary Council although there is in theory nothing to stop it happening the other way around.

An addition between the fourth arid fifth governments was the Directorate composed of the President, Prime Minister and Commander of COPCON. This had power to suspend or appoint members of thè Revolut­ ionary Council and to issue decrees. No-one is really sure if it still exists. It hasn’t been officially dissolved but tìien it hasn’t officially done anything for about three weeks.

Somewhere out of the way, the Constit­ uent Assembly which is what the people voted for in the elections - draws up a Constitution. There are no guarantees that the final product will be accepted.

Alongside these specifically political bodies is the military hierarchy. There you have the Chief of Staff of the armed forces, at present the President, the chiefs of staff of the army, navy and airforce^ and the commander of COPCON. So in any army, the chiefs of staff have the power to prom­ ote or demote anyone they like.

Attached to this group is the (mis) infor­ mation unit, the 5th division. This used to run TV and radio programmes, put out a news letters and was official voice of the M.F.A. It made statements on its own behalf from time to time.

COPCON is the internal security force.

Its commander (Cavalho) also leads the Lisbon division of the army. The best armed units in Portugal have been placed under COPCON’s control.

Individual units, depending on whether they are politicized and well armed can also be a power to be reckoned with.

The power structure in Portugal is hidden behind a maze of political ^maneuvering, but it is there.

At the inauguration of the 5th provisional Government, Costa Gomes affirmed that this was to be a government in transition, a government in passing but expressed the hope that it might be a pause in the political strife allowing something more durable to be created.

Said Goncalves: “Never have the* Portuguese people had a govemmerit so revolutionary and so cohesive as this 5th Provisional Government. Never have the Portuguese people had a govemmènt such as this, that is so devoted to the revolution and to the high ideals that it seeks to serve and attain.”

The government was launched amidst an uproar. The night before its arinouncement, nine senior officers from the Revolutionary Council, including erinobled names of the April 25th coup, made public a document passionately critical of the direction the Portuguese revolution was taking.

October 6—November 3

THE DIGGER

Page 8

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A Portuguese stamp — the Armed Forces Movement and the people

“The country finds itself deeply shaken and relatively defrauded of the big hopes that were born with the M.F.A. The most acute moment approaches of an extremely serious economic crisis, the consequences of which cannot be anything but a complete rupture between the M.F.A. and the people.

The open fissure widens day by day between a small minority social group who propose a certain revolutionary project and practically the rest of the country who react violently to the théories that a certain “revolutionary vanguard” would impose without taking note of the. historical social and cultural reality of the Portuguese people.”

They were not new criticisms but it was the first time they had been brought into the open by senior members of the armed forces.

The fourth government collapsed in mid July, a few days after Costa Gomes had publicly denied that there were any divisions whatsoever in the armed forces.

The socialists walked out of the govern­ ment after the Revolutionary Council backed the takeover of their newspaper, República by armed printers and typesetters.

The PPD, the avowedly “social democrat” party followed them a few days later.

It was announced that the government would be formed in a few days but two and a half weeks went by with nothing but rumours and the odd statement to sustain the people.

Meló Antunes flew home to the crisis from talks with common market leaders saying, “The solution to the governmental crisis -cannot be a coalition of the military and the Communist Party. I don’t know what the solution will be, but a coalition would include a larger conjunction of political forces. Personally, I think’theSocialist Party and the P.P.D. will participate in this govern­ ment and that we will arrive at a minimal agreement over the political-social system to be followed. We deny completely any kind of dictatorship. We want a socialist and democratic society that safeguards political pluralism.”

A spokesperson for the Revolutionary Council dismissed as absurd the suggestion that a triumvurate of Costa Gomes, Cavalho and Goncalves would take over as ah interim measure. The next day, this was what the assembly of the M.F.A. voted. The absence of Melo Antunes and four other officers of the Revolutionary Council at that meeting was noted.

Otelo Saraiva de Cavalho flew home from exchanging revolutionary greetings with Fidel Castro and fiery words about rounding up the reactionaries in the bull ring. He also said, " , “After all I’ve seen, I think it is worth the trouble building a socialist society.”

It was interesting that he alone amongst senior officers ^declared himself unperturbed by the indiscipline in the army. “The disorder and a certain indiscipline doesn’t frighten me. I am interested in the spirit of the Armed Forces - they are animated with the spirit of politics.”

Not half. The tension during this period was building up throughout the country and Otelo virtually had a mutiny on his hands in one of his units. There had been complairits that the unit commander was refusing to carry out decisions reached at unit assemblies. A left wing soldier was myster­ iously killed. Workers from a nearby factory picketed the barracks in support of the privates and sergeants, who held a meeting where they” drew up a list of ‘reactionary officers they wanted withdrawn.

Cavalho complied with their request but a few days later presided over a unit assembly that agreed to re-integrate the officers.

Violence broke out in the south with the sacking of Gommunist Party headquarters.

Some of these were destroyed by small groups late at night, but others were burnt down after catholic demonstrations protest­ ing at the occupation' of the Catholic radio station by workers. On several occasions, communists retaliated -with shot guns, rifles and molotov cocktails causing many injuries and some deaths.

Of the many rumours over the possible form of the new government, the strongest was of Goncalves presiding over four vice prime ministers including Cavalho and a ministry made up of non-party technocrats.

But Cavalho was reported to be having arg­ uments with Goncalves and not prepared to serve under him.

There were reports that a letter described as “very hard on the Vasco Goncalves line” written by Melo Antunes was circulating in the armed forces. When the government was finally announced, it was a clean victory for.

Goncalves, including no moderates and several C.P. line officers.

The official reaction to the “document of the nine” was as follows: “The Directorate, Goncalves, Cavalho and Costa Gomes ' taking" note of the incorrect form, attention to discipline and military etiquette that is evident in the circulation of a document directed to the President of the Republic and now-turned public in some organs of social communication, firmly condemn this attitude which they consider seriously disturbing to the course of the Revolutionary process and aimed at prol­ onging the present political crisis on the eve of the establishment of the new government.

It definitely supports the reactionary escalation which exploits the present situation to the detriment of the Portuguese

people.”

The nine officers were suspended from the Revolutionary Council. But one of the nine insisted that Costa Gomes supported the document and that Cavalho supported the tenor of it. Cavalho published an angry denial that he supported its publication, which did not exactly answer the accusation.

Goncalves made no immediate answer.

His minister for the media, Commandante Comeia Jesuino said, “The position of these officers demands a counter pronouncement that could take diverse forms. One is to let fall in the vacuum the inglorious attitude of these officers, another is mobilization of the masses and another still, military action.”

The 5th Division also published a bitter attack on the nine calling for strict exemp­ lary -disciplining of reactionary elements in the army. It was published in several news­ papers next to a fairly moderate statement

by General “Fabiao, head of the army.

Fabiao was furious and asked Costa Gomes to suspend the 5th Division.

Cavalho arid Fabiao were at the timé attending the assembly of the northern reg­ ion of the army. Cavalho had re-affirmed his confidence in the commanders of the south and central regions who had signed the document but the situation in the north was more complicated as the troops were fairly moderate and disliked their commander, CorvachQ, who was one of Goncalves’ supp­ orters. The assembly called for the re-structuring of the MFA assembly which they thought was gerrymandered, in favour of the left.

On leaving a restaurant outside the assembly, Cavalho was abused by a crowd.

“They don’t know who I really am” , he said. “But in many cases the people have reason. The people are not reactionary and this is something fundamental. It is a mistake to try to identify the people with the C.P. as many people would like to believe and as the C.P. itself sometimes seems interested - in believing. The people have ideas to defend and they defend them.

But it is not admissable that Portuguese destroy Portuguese only because they have different ideas. Violence in a pacific people is motiviated by some strong cause. That which is important is to detect the causé.

“The counter-revolution has a broader social base than the revolution. The revol­ ution must have a social base.”

It was here that Cavalho parted company with Vasco Goncalves. A few days later, Goncalves held a public meeting to rally support in which he said.

“There has never been a revolution that in a determined phase of history, did not have a restricted base of support.”

He said this, shortage could be overcome with a strong and authoritarian government.

The first signs of the authoritarian government were becoming evident. The Minister for the Media was setting up a censorship commission empowered to suspend from six mdnths any papers that had said anything reactionary dating back to the days of Spinola.

The moderates have no great love for the press and are not opposed to censorship per se. The trouble was that this would close the moderate (and maoist) papers and not the C.P. line ones that they would like to close.

It is as well to remémber that throughout this drama, the 5th Provisional Government was working hard - as late as six in the morn­ ing on occasions. In their thirty five days of existence they issued more decree/laws than the previous two governments combined.

Almost without exception the moderates made no mention of its activities. It was more the idea of its not being, a “pluralist” organization they objected to. Also, the violence in the south continued to escalate and Goncalves refused to recognize it as anything but fascism.

The reply to the “Document of the Nine” came not from Goncalves on the C.P. but from radical left officers within COPCON who produced another document.

This also ciritcized the C.P. and the prevailing trends in government. But where the “document of the nine” criticized the anarchy and the nationalizations and called for strong central government and renewel links with the Common Market, the COPCON document criticized the inevitable regression to capitalism implicit in the moderates position and the elections. The universal vote in a bourgeois structure could only produce bourgeois results. It called for the realization of popular power through workers and residents committees, local and regional assemblies and a national assembly on similar lines to the assembly organization in the armed forces.

October 6—November 3

THE DIGGER

The document was first presented to an a pamphlet denouncing the conspiritors they assembly of mostly radical officers inc­ claimed were planning one. luding Cavalho and one of the “nine”, Another batch of rumours was dispersed Vasco Counereo. After twelve hours of dis­ when the guard on the presidential palace cussion, it was made public. was reinforced and armed with bazookas.

The news creeped out that Cavalho saw The rumours spoke of a left wing unit plan­ possibilities of reconcilliation between this ning Jto march on the palace and demand at document and the document of the nine. He gunpoint that Costa Gomes and the reaction­ immediately received a death threat from aries lay off Goncalves. Unit spokesmen dis­ the Japanese Red Terrorists. Exactly what missed the rumours but there was no an­ this reconcilliation was, he never publicly an­ nouncement about the palace guard. nounced, but he travelled extensively around the country with General Fabiao holding in­ formal discussions with army units on the « P * subject.

M g P ® Fabiao’s public statements are usually limited to angry denouncements of lies pub­ lished in the press and calls for discipline and unity. The left judged him a reactionary after he said of workers and residents com­ mittees: “At present there are lots of things in the political game in Portugal. So far as I ’m con­ cerned, base organizations should be looked at overall as responding to immediate prob­ lems. A residents committee should look after its suburb, fight crime where it exists, intensify the building of houses, green spaces etc.”

“They should not concern themselves with functions that are properly the govern­ ments.”

But the residents and workers committees were getting organized. In conjunction with revolutionary left groups they held the larg­ est demonstration in over a year in support of the COPCON document, condemming the fascists and imperialists, both American and Soviet. At the last minute, the C.P. is­ sued a statement saving that although it didn’t support the demonstration, it advised its militants to go along.

On the eve of the 25th, the C.P., another The demonstration was proof that Cav­ soviet line group and six trotskyist and rad­ alho had lost the support of thé left. But ical left parties formed a United Revolutgiven the detatchment of army politics, it tionary Front. It called for joint revolut­ did nothing to weaken what was by then the moderates determination to get rid of Gon­ ionary action in the face of the rise of react­ calves. ionary forces.

It was announced that the President had It was an idea that had been around for asked Goncalves to resign and Fabiao to over a month, but it was only after the dem­ form a new government. Cavalho had also as­ onstration in support of file COPCON doc­ ked Goncalves to go and his letter was leak­ ument when the moderate’s position ed to the press. strengthened and when the C.P. realized the “I ask you to rest, relax, be serene, med­ extent to which the radical left could itate and read. You truly need a long rest mobilize the masses that negotiations mid well deserve one for that which this mar­ seriously began. athon of a revolution has demanded of you I Left wing offers from the 5th Division, up until today. For your patriotism, your COPCON and other units were present at the abnegation, your spirit of sacrifice and rev­ signing of the pact. olution.”

On the 26th, President Costa Gomes an­ In the same letter Cavalho forbade Gon­ nounced that the nine moderates were ret­ calves to enter the grounds of any unit un­ urning to the Revolutionary Council, Covder his jurisdiction. alho and he in favour and Goncalves ag­ Vasco Goncalves wasn’t about to turn ainst. Fabiao announced that, in such con­ yogic and denied reports that hé was about ditions of disunity, he refused to form a to resign saying the fifth Provisional Gov­ Government. Costa Gomes also ordered the ernment would continue to be headed by ^suspension of all activity of"' the 5th Div­ General Vasco Goncalves. It was a bit beside ision. All its members were to report to the point really as it was the sixth not the their Chiefs of Staff. The 5th Division fifth government that was at stake, but he ignored the order. got across the point that he was determined There were more notices of irregular arms ' to continue. movements and a demonstration, by the At this stage, in the fourth week of Aug­ United Revolutionary Front, was marked for ust, things started to go a bit strange. the next day.

On the 22nd there were lots of rumours At 6.30, on the morning of the 27th, about a right wing coup. Costa Gomes had light tanks and troops from COPCON under withdrawn support from Cavalho, Spinola the command of the right wing; officer that was back, Goncalves was seeking refuge in Cavalho had previously suspended then re­ his fort. These were all officially denied al­ instated, rolled up outside the offices of the though left wing units took up defensive 5th Division. They were cleared of perpositions. ssonel. The presence of civilians in the buil­ On the 24th, the same day Cavalho’s ding at that hour was noted. Members of the letter was “released”, five men were seen 5th Division were again told to report to transferring rifles and machine guns from a their superiors. black Mercedes to two other cars. A resi­ COPCON command issued a brief state­ dent, thinking they were fascists, called the ment saying that it acted to defend military national guard. installations from a threatened attack.

The men at first refused to identify them­ Attack by whom and with what ends was selves. It was later revealed that they were not said. from a committee attached to the 5th Divi­ The only, and unofficial, explanation is sion. The Mercedes belonged to Goncalves’ that the united revolutionary front was to office and two days before had evaded a become a militia force along side radical and police block.

C.P. line troops to mount a coup on the pre­ That evening there was a. big armed rob­ text of defending the nation from a myth­ bery and the next morning, another car was ical (?) right wing coup, thus disposing of caught transferring arms, including exp­ Costa Gomes and the moderates and vind­ losives and machine guns of a type not used icating Vasco Goncalves. by the Portuguese army. The occupants this In a count of guns they wouldn’t have time were three soldiers from a left wing stood a chance. Although amongst radical unit and five members of a trotskyist left and C.P. militants there are many arm­ party. ed militia groups, these would not be an eff­ The Communist Party resussitated ru­ ective force in a coup. m o u r of a right wing coup by distributing

That day Socialist Party leader, Mario Soares invented the verb “to Angolize”.

In the evening the United Revolut­ ionary Front held their demonstration.

There were 100,000 and they marched on the palace. They were addressed by Vasco Goncalves who was cheered and Costa Gomes who was boohed.

But the following day C.P. leader Alvaro Cunhal, held a press conference in which he

torpedoed the front by calling for negotiat­ ions with the socialist party in the face of threat of civil war. Talking to the socialists was obvious heresy for the radical left. He also withdrew his support from Goncalves saying with wonderful dexterity: “We cannot see, because it just cannot be considered, a solution that is not to be solved by the continuation of Vasco Gon­ calves as head of the government. Revol­ utionaries do not defend positions. They are always collaborating in solutions most convenient for the advance of the revol­ ution.”

Soares accused him of performing pol­ itical “zigue zagues”. Why did he do it?

He gave the press conference after meet­ ing with President Costa Gomes. The followday Costa Gomes announced that Goncalves was to become Chief of Staff of the armed forces and Admiral Pinheiro de Azevido was to be the new prime minister.

Although no-one was really sure, Azevido was thought to be a man of the left. (His press biographies gave his military record and his hobbies — he’s a keen swimmer which is handy for an Admiral, captain of the ship of state etc.) The position of Chief of Staff everyone recognized, was a pro­ motion, for Goncalves. Otelo Cavalho would be subject to his orders as would all the moderates. The C.P. acknowledged it as a wonderful solution, For the first time in weeks, Goncalves was photographed smiling.

It ¡makes a cogent argument, although noone knows whether Costa Gomes told Gunhal this solution before the press confer­ ence. If the communists were going to have representation in the sixth government alongside the socialists, it would not do them any good to be stuck out on a limb with the crazy radicals.

More intriguing is the question, did Costa Gomes seriously mean to give Goncalves the position of Chief of Staff. If it was a ploy to get the communists to renounce their rath­ er dangerous alliance with the extreme left and their support for the fifth government; thus disposing of the problem of Goncalves then he is a genius. If he thought the armed forces would accept Goncalves as Cheif of Staff, if he thought it would in any way re­ solve the crisis, he is a buffoon.

The mumblings were immediate. Cavalho refused to be made subordinate to Goncalves so Costa Gomes announced that COPCON would be the president’s and not the chief of staff’s jurisdiction.

Otelo Cavalho asked if a chief of staff didn’t have control over half the army, was he a chief of staff. Would he have the power to change the regional commanders, two of whom were moderates? The heads of the

Page 9

army and the airforce were both moderates.

What would be their future?

The “nine” reported that they thought it was unconstitutional (sic) as the Revolution­ ary Council meeting that endorsed the ap­ pointment had been held in their absence, but then there were also reports that the “nine” were refusing to attend meetings until Goncalves was removed.

Costa Gomes announced that the ap­ pointment would not be ratified until there was an assembly of the MFA and that in the mean time Goncalves would remain Prime Minister of the V Provisional Government.

The democratic processes of the Portu­ gese Armed Forces started working. The unit meetings and then the army, airforce and navy assemblies. Each accepted Azevido but the army and the airforce rejected Goncalves as chief of staff.

Moreover, the army voted not to send any delegates to the assembly of the MFA until it was restructured with a greater num­ ber of army delegates. The airforce said that it wouldn’t go if the army didn’t. Within the army and the airforce, the left was a minor­ ity. But in an MFA assembly the left minor­ ity combined with the left majority in the navy might have out-voted the right.

So the hour of the meeting arrived and only the navy had turned up. There clearly wasn’t going to be a quorum. Fabiao arriv­ ed with a couple of other army officers.

“Yes” he said “There is an assembly of the MFA without the army and the airforce.

I will be at the assembly as representative of the army. I will take one hundred and twen­ ty votes with me. I will present the posit­ ions expressed in the army assembly.”

Ramino Correia, head of the officially ex­ tinct but still operative' 5th Division arriv­ ed saying: “I didn’t know the army weren’t coming — I’m going to the game as an onlooker.”

Costa Gomes, Cavalho and Goncalves tur­ ned up. Correia’s offsider, Colonel Vanela Gomes said, “This will be a Pirandello* play. There are various authors in search of one character.

But let us talk of other things. The political situation changes thrice in three minutes and I can’t make statements about it I’m the only progressive in the country who smokes a cigar.”

The press reports were wonderful. Costa Gomes and Cavalho had a long discussion next to the window, they said. With a tele­ photo lens they produced pictures to prove it. Vasco Goncalves spoke for 40 minutes and received loud applause. He had de­ clined the offer of chief of staff.

They voted 5 of the 9 moderates back into the Revolutionary Council and let the council decide about three others. It brought them back. Only one, from the navy, was withdrawn. They voted out of the council, Goncalves and his supporter, Corvacho. At the end of the assembly a left wing officer said: “This is more or less the end of the Por­ tugese revolution. We will have a government of the centre left, A social democracy is the end of any chance whatsoever of a total rev­ olution, at least in the short term.”

It is hard to be optimistic about Por-, tugal’s sixth provisional government. Aze­ vido only wanted the socialists and some of­ ficers in it. But the socialists wanted plu­ ralism. They wouldn’t go in the government unless the CP and PPD were also there. But the PPD wouldn’t share government with the commies and the CP wouldn’t share govern­ ment with the fascists.

The PPD assured the President that they had 40,000 militants ready to take up arms to defend the liberty of the country and could easily scrape up 50,000 more.

Azevido gave everyone a start when he said he wanted representatives from all four political tendencies in the armed forces in government. The radical left, one; the Gohcalves line, two; the moderates three ~ what was the fourth? Are there really some real fascists in the army?

As Cavalho said as he left the MFA as­ sembly: “The crisis is a fact. The way out of the crisis is an enigma. The future is unknown.

One cannot forsee more unity or disunity in the Armed Forces.”

In its last dying gasps, Portugal’s 5 Prov­ isional Government approved a pyrites min­ ing scheme, approved grants to its old colon­ ies, set constituent assembly representative’s salaries at $71 a week, established a co-ordi­ nating committee to deal with economic problems in the north, nationalized two wire companies, organized the World Bank into studying the financing of a hydro electric scheme, granted to workers the right to con­ trol over the organization of production and established an open university.

THE DIGGER

October 6—November 3

The exorcists o f m anagers, landlords ____ and priests in Portugal

by Philip Brooks in Lisbon The lazy hazy days of suinmer inPortugal have gone. The tourist hotels are now tun by the workers and are no longer frequented by the Parisien bourgeois - the tourists are radi­ cals flocking in from all over Europe. As an old peasant at a demonstration for agrarian reform out east of Lisbon said: “It’s fan­ tastic. Before the tourists never used to cometo demonstrations, now they all do. This is socialist tourism.”

It is a view from “the base”, as they say in Europe' which can begin to make sense of the political developments in Portugal since the elections in April of this year when the Social­ ist Party won more votes than any other party.

With talk of popular assemblies and the parties squabbling, a large number of people now say they are “ without a party”. So a large amount of political expression and act­ ivity goes on outside the arena of the state and the established parties. This move is counter to the state and parties, pointing to a new form of Popular political power.

Across the Tagus River, past the 1150 foot ' high statue of Christ on the cross which hangs over Lisbon, are the industrial suburbs, the huge Lisnave shipyards and the shanty towns.

On February 28 of this year LUAR militants occupied a large empty house in one of these suburbs to use as a popular free health clinic for women and children. Health care in this suburb consisted of eight beds for 200,000 people, and that’s Lisbon; in the country the­ re is next to nothing. Portugal has the highest infant mortality rate in Europe.

“This clinic is only a small thing”, the LUAR militants who work in the clinic told me. “We don’t see it changing medical practice in Port­ ugal but as an attempt to show that there can be a new medicine. We are a preventative medical centre and hope to explain things adequately to people, to demystify medicine so that they can go and tell their friends and neighbours how to do things. We publicise what we are doing and make information available about infant care as well as going round talking to people about their problems.

If a woman comes in who has been beaten by her husband we go round and talk to him and warn him about his behavior.”

“When the clinic first opened we did abort­ ions, even though it still carries a sentence of twenty years. But no-one has been prosecuted

recently. However we’ve stopped performing them now because people in the community working with us fear the reaction of people coming from other areas and hearing that we are a clinic for abortions. We will still do them at home for people, but we want to con­ centrate on contraceptive information. It is a very difficult question and needs much more political discussion. Men in Portugal are ex­ tremely reactionary about women and the law reinforces it. A husband can still divorce his wife if she is not a virgin, he can shoot her if she commits adultery, and if a father finds his daughter with her lover he can kill them both and get away with it.”

“At the moment we are the only free clin­ ic in Portugal. A lot of money was raised at I the Lisnave shipyards and the workers gave us equipment out of the medical centre for the bosses. We get drugs from sympathetic doctors and workers, in the pharmeceutical industry. Another way we try to save waste on drugs we hand out is by asking people to return any pills or ointments they don’t use A lot of doctors have wanted to work here but it’s important that they are not only good doctors but also good revolutionaries.” “ The important part of our work is to explain things clearly and simply and not be paternalistic and hide behind specialist know­ ledge.”

Portugal however, is still predominantly an agrarian country of peasants who work on the large southern latifuridias, and the villag­ ers who live in the semi-feudal conditions in the mountainous north. In the north,the two powers who control the peasants political views are the priest and the local landlord.

I visited a friend in the far northeast where she was staying with her grandfather.

It was a village of two tiered mud brick houses with the animals living on the bottom floor. Few people over twenty in the village’s population of 300 could read or write.

It is here in the north that fascism had its deepest roots. . Since April 25 pamphlets have been pass­ ed around warning against the evils of land redistribution, with portraits of the commun­ ist leader Cunhal talking with the devil. Last year my friend had been part of a literacy drive organized by the national union of students . . . but when the groups got their assigned villages the local priest had already received a letter from an underground church organization saying that all the students were

communist. The students were able to hold classes in only two of the hundred or more ■ villages they had planned to teach in.

It was in the north that anti-communist violence reached fever pitch in late August this year.

Conditions in the south, on the large latifundias, are different because here the/work­ ers are closer to what you-could call rural proletarians. Huge tracts of land are owned by absentee capitalist landlords, so the par­ ochial insularity of the village has been brok­ en down and class differences are more ‘Visible’.

Out east from Lisbon, toward the Atlan­ tic coast, lies the Alentejo region. It’s PCP country. A red faced old peasant told me how he’d secretly joined the party in 1938.

Early this August I joined a work brig­ ade to help the newly formed co-ops in this region. For miles the earth in Alentejo is scoured and dry. The only trees are cork trees, the traditional crop here. At every waterhole there is a roughly hewn cork cup for drinking out of. But now the bottom is dropping out of the cork market as European countries in NATO refuse to buy from Port­ ugal.

We travelled to the cooperative now cal­ led ‘Pedro Soares’. The owners aren’t there anymore but inside the main house along the top of the wall is a line of beautiful old crockery with the sideboard still full of silver cutlery.

Josario looks like many of the peasants with his twirled thin moustache and the black homburg of the Alentejo.

“After 25 April nothing really changed except the directors. Life in fact became worse as frightened landowners no longer wanted to cultivate land as they hopefully waited for things to return to normal.

“This cooperatives land was owned by Torralto, the largest Portuguese tourist org­ anization, who hoped to make it into a saf­ ari resort. They’d grown big on the specul­ ative stockwave in 1970 and become the lar­ gest hotel-owner on trie south tourist coast, butrthis year it has lost every hotel to work­ ers’ control.”

By Aprii 10 the peasants at Pedro Soares decided not to wait any longer for the Agrar­ ian Reform Law. ■ “Thirty of us held a meeting where we de­ cided to occupy the land next morning. Forty more joined us and we sent a telegram to the

MFA telling them our plans . . . just so they would know to keep out. Before nine the next morning we arrived at the directors house and told them they weren’t needed anymore. A bit shocked they tried to com­ promise but we sent them packing with only their clothes. One returned later for an ad­ ding machine, typewriter and other things he said he’d borrowed. All the better, I said, if they’re not yours then you don’t lose out.”

The occupation completed, 106 people began to work on the 2500 acres of tomat­ oes, built a dam on the water course, have 50 acres of rice irrigated and growing, other vegetables, cows, pigs and chickens.

Waiting one day for the haycart to return from dumping its load we met an old cow­ herd by the side of a fresh water drinking spring. Between cajoling the bulls from stray­ ing and sending his dog off to get the beasts back, he told how he’d finally made the big decision. He was nearly sixty and the herd belonged to a German who still owned the land next to Pedro Soares. This German lived in Hamburg but had another German to maage it: “All he ever does is eat, sleep and fornicate, so next week I’m off to join a cooperative,” said the old man.

PA R TY RO UND-UP PCP — Portuguese Communist Party. These are "the communists" the daily papers talk about j and were the comirtant party in the fecent (fifth ) government.

PSP — Portuguese Socialist Party. A t the recent April elections it won 38 per cent of the votes.

PDF — Popular Democratic Party. Both the PSP and the PPD áre reported to have received C IA channeled dollars — in the millions.

The PCP would be getting Soviet packing.

FSP — Popular Socialist Front and MES — Movement o f L e ft Socialists. These are two breakaway groups from the PSP formed after that party's congress this year.

L C I — International Communist League. Trotsky­ ist party affiliated to the Fourth InterThree Maoist Groups: UDP — Popular Democratic Union.

PCPML — Communist Party o f Portugal (M-L).

MRPP — Movement for the Reconstruction o f the Proletariat Party.

* * *

M D P / — Movement for a Democratic-Portugal.

CDE Won 5 per cent of votes at the last election.

PRP Br. — Portuguese Revolutionary Party Bri­ gade and L U A R — League o f United Revolution. Tw o armed brigades in Portugal. LUAR sup­ ports community actions and land oc­ cupations. PRP Br. pushes workers' coun­ cils and soldiers' councils.

I

October 6—November 3

THE DIGGER

Page 11

Lenny* th e greatest si «indili» com edian since Freud byTim Pigott AN ALBUM COVER: In the background is that well-known seated statue of Abraham Lincoln; in front of that, grouped in a quarter circle, are five hooded and robed Ku Klux Klan figures —but with black hands extending from the robes . . . And then in front of the black KKK quintet stands a black woman, Lenny Bruce and an Asian woman. Lenny holds a placard chesthigh that reads “TOGETHERNESS” . This is the cover of a Lenny Bruce recording I Am Not A N ut - Elect Me!'

Town . .. That’s how Lenny Bruce sawjiis America.

But not so Bob Fosse, hot Hollywood property, fresh from making such hard-hit­ ting triumphs like . . . uh . . . Sweet Charity and Cabaret and . .. um . . . Liza With A Zee. But Bob Fosse gets the job. Lenny is his movie. ‘'LENNY” : A MOVIE: O.K. That’s what Lenny Bruce was really about, but this isn’t ‘really’, this is a movie and besides, Dustin Hoffman can’t be Lenny Bruce because he always ‘plays’ Dustin Hoffman and we all * * * understand that. Movies, you know. Terrific way to escape Reality. But then it begins: Lenny Bruce was a seminal influence on first in words, written on the screen; then in underground culture —what became known a voice-over as well: “The authentic story as the counterculture —an influence on most (authentic: and don’t we come into the American underground comix writers, on movies to escape all that phoney authenti­ Frank Zappa and on the lyrics of lots of the city outside) of a man who became known 11 San Francisco rock bands, and on the new as the conscience of America . . . ” language used by almost everybody under All in all, according to American folk­ 30 after 1968. Lenny’s language was a mix­ lore and popular culture, America’s had ture of hipster jargon picked up from black enough “ consciences” to be the all-time jazz musicians that he was hanging out with greatest hang-out for moralists since Jerusa­ in the late fifties and early sixties; and from lem. But that’s another story, or the same Yiddish. Lenny’s free-form raves were full story, or it isn’t even a story any more at all of words like far out, hip, jam, groovy, and we’re so sick of hearing about how twisted, cool, into, own thing, bread, funky, America has lots of consciences and they joint, wow, grass, pot, weed, shit, smoke tell their story and they get killed or jailed. dope, get down, busted, freak, to burn, head, outa sight, mellow, get next to, dig, cat, man, We know that now.

But Bob Fosse has to tell us this. The gig, make it with, paying dues, bugged, and movie starts out in ‘dpcumentary style’ So on, and Lenny lit up language again from with Dustin Hoffman as Lenny and Valerie the very sterile spoken word of the late fif­ Perrine as Honey Harlowe being interviewed ties: a real dull time. by the moviemaker about Lenny, cut in And Lenny’s scenario of the great Ame­ with some of Lenny Bruce’s real routines. rican dreamscape was so weird and so beau­ It flashes from his nightclub routines to tifully twisted: the Masked Man alias the their life . . . Oh, yeah. I get it: life feeds Lone Ranger performing ‘unnatural acts’ on art, or art feeds on life . . . uh . . . it’s with faithful Indian Tonto; the ten-year old real deep anyway and something feeds on kid assembling a model aeroplane kit who something (Hollywood feeding on Lenny sniffs the glue screaming “I’m stoned out of Bruce, maybe? No?) And the documentary my head for a dime . . . I’m the Louis Pas­ device: well, that means it’s one of those teur of Junkiedom” ; two German talent Slice-Of-Real-Life-Movies with a touch of scouts looking for a dictator and auditioning Hollywood necrophilia. (Remember when a crazy house-painter, “Man, did you see dot Marilyn Monroe died? All those titles like crazy vave? Give us dat salute again, Adolf.

The True Life Tragedy O f A Real Life Dot’s a lulu. A vave like dot only comes Venus, The Rise And Fall O f An American once in a thousand years. Adolf, baby, you Sex Goddess, We Are All Guilty, and so on, ever get stuck for words, just give ’em dat with Norman Mailer in there for the kill, crazy wave . . . ” ; Jesus and Moses flying . picking up some death crumbs.) And maybe into New York from Chicago to “ check out that necrophilia makes some sense. Holly­ what’s playing at St.Pat’s” , and their effect wood has had some terrific decades of on the two hysterical cardinals . . . “ It’s movies. And some of the old stars really THEM!!!” “What do ya mean, them. Have shone in a way that Dustin Hoffman, that you been drinking again . . . ” “I tell ya, it’s them. Moses is a ringer for Charlton Heston.” nice clean cute middle-class boy-next-door (how did he get the job doing Lenny Bruce?), Lots more, too, but basically: The World doesn’t.

As An American B-Grade Movie Script as told by The Most Bad-Mouthing Beatnik In But back to the movie. Fosse has made

the perfect movie for liberal trendies who like their culture heroes as deas as those posters on the bedroom wall. This way they can come out of the two hour darkness saying: “He was just ahead of his time, man, that’s all” . Nothing in the movie would threaten their values because that’s all Lenny is presented as: the man who said ‘cocksucker’ so that it came to be boomed forth from the Academy Twin Cinema, Padding­ to n ,to the Collaroy Classic, to the Randwick Ritz, to the Kogarah Mecca, to the Padstow Plaza. (Sydney is full of movie houses with terrific names.) And so that everytime Bruce/Hoffman says ‘cocksucker’, in 1975 United Artists or whoever clean out the box-offices again and Hollywood gets an A-plus for seriousness and relevance. And .

Art. It’s true that Lenny Bruce injected sexual­ ity back into casual spoken language, which was very liberating them But that was be­ fore Bob Dylan sang “Obscenity: Who Really Cares ....” And most of all, before the much more radical critique of sexuality introduced via the women’s movement especially in rela­ tion to male/female sex roles. The movie sells a one-dimensional view of Lenny Bruce as Sexual Revolutionary And Very Nice Guy. Lenny Bruce was a brilliant comic, with a very savage intellect, but like most other pepple then he was ensnared in a very; sexist ideology. Liberating for that decade, but appearing as much more limited now.

The other many funny and significant aspects of Lenny are simply missing from this movie. It isn’t a very funny movie.

Rather a movie for those who like their martyrs very tragic, very dead and resurrect­ ed as a middle-class icon for the seventies.

Perhaps feature films just aren’t a very good medium for biography —especially when disguised as ‘documentary’.

Obviously a lot of things about this movie aren’t mentioned here. This isn’t essentially a film review but more like a letter begin­ ning “ Dear Mr Hot Shot Hollywood Director/ Producer” and ending “ Signed: Outraged Lenny Bruce Fan” . If you haven’t heard Lenny Bruce before, it’s possibly a good movie. It’s quite well done: some good camera work and tight, pacey editing; ter­ rific performances from Valerie Perrine as Honey Harlowe and Jan Miner as Lenny’s mother; and gritty atmospheric stuff on seedy, small-time, American nightclubs. And if you liked the little of Lenny Bruce’s routines in the script a list follows of some books and records to follow-up.

THE ‘AUTHENTIC’ LENNY BRUCE: Lenny Bruce was the greatest Jewish standup nightclub comic since Sigmund Freud, who is introduced here in totally arbitrary fashion because he once said something like “Behind every good joke stands a subversive idea” , (and if you stand for that, you’ll stand for anything, as Groucho Marx said) and for his book Jokes And Their Relation To The Unconscious which is really interest­ ing reading for anybody interested in under­ standing humour and the very dark, very tricky human mind.

Most book shops stock 77ie Essential Lenny Bruce edited by John Cohen. Anoth­ er interesting essay is Lenny Bruce: The Comedian As Social Critic And Secular Moralist by Frank Kofsky in Pathfinder Paperbacks. Both worth reading.

Lenny Bruce made a lot of recordings but some of the best for listening are: Lenny Bruce: I Am Not A N ut - Elect Me!, The Sick Humour O f Lenny Bruce, Lenny Bruce Is Out Again, Lenny Bruce: Thank You Masked Man and Lenny Bruce: The Berkeley Concert which is a two-record al­ bum produced by Frank Zappa.

If you want to follow up all his record­ ings, complete listings can be found through the two books mentioned above. If you can’t find those lists just get your hands on any of tfye above records. *

*

*

Meanwhile, back at the movies, the road of excess still leads to the Palace of Celluloid.

What is movie qpl-ture all about?

Throw away your copies of Screen and Cineaste and check out this: One of the alltime greatest-ever movie ads for the last month: BRRRRRM . . . BRRRRM .. .

DOUBLE RUBBER BURNING BLOCKBUS­ TER. The excitement double of the year!

FUNNY CAR SUMMER. See the ‘funny’ car zap from 0 to 230 MPH in a quarter mile! PLUS! Bone-Busting-Excitement. See 1000 bikes dash in the desert ! See the spills .. I catch the action as you catch your breath! Makes a stampede of buffalo look tame! ON THE LINE. Starts Tomorrow at Metro Twin Drive-In Chullora.

Almost as good as the Melbourne cinema which is showing one of those apocalyptic disaster movies with two simple painted words up outside: REALISTIC! UNBELIEV­ ABLE! Lenny: where are ya now that we need you so b a d ...

Page 12

THE DIGGER

T he hidden tyranny of k ith and k in

October 6—

W h o 's «A i

JU L IE T M ITC H E LL is a British freelance writer and lecturer. She became well-known in Australia when her article "Women, the Longest Revolution was published in New Left Review (a marxist journal of which she is an editorial board member). She has published other articles and two books — Women's Estate and Psychoanalysis and Feminism.

On feminism’ A feminist is a person who believes —I don’t mean believes as an act of faith, but understands analytically —that women, be­ cause of their sex, form a distinct social group within history, that their sex deter­ mines their position within history . . . and that nothing that they can do in their lives within our kind of society enables them to escape that definition. [It] may not be the most important, it may be much worse to have one leg and be starving —nevertheless it makes it different if you have one leg and are starving and are a woman, or if you have one leg and are starving and are a man. It always makes a difference, throughout history. OK, given that, and given then that I think that we see that women have not got the deal that our type of political society even offers us — our society pretends to have the values of freedom, equality and choice —women have not got that, then our politics has to be a critical politics.

The sort of society I would like to see is a society in which our individual differences were recognized, to the point at which if somebody has something that makes them unequal in a particular way, you remedy that by moving their situation upwards. For example, the person who has five children has more needs than the person who has one or none. So you give that person more, you give less hours of work, privilege people who are underprivileged in a way you cannot avoid.

On action: Now I think that we have to as feminists realize the historical conditions that have produced us, that we could only aim for the highest values that our society offers us — values of freedom and equality, and that while doing that we have to realize we have to go beyond them. It is better to get what we can from the society now, because his­ torical development is always greater if you can achieve the most within the [set] historical condition. The next stage of society, the next sort of society we have, will be that much better than we can get within our own.

On theory: I don’t think it’s useful to start speculat­ ing about the origins of women’s oppression.

I think that methodologically what one has to do is to try and understand the oppression in our particular society, or particular social groups within our society, and then work backwards from that to see, for example, if women are oppressed in our capitalist society, in what similar ways were we opp­ ressed under feudalism, in what similar ways under tribal society, whatever it might be, but not to start by speculating about matri­ archy, patriarchy, etc.

Juliet Mitchell - feminist and author On freedom of choice: v. . as feminists, it seems only a most elementary logic of the justice we can ask of our society that we choose the conditions for our reproduction. But of course, having said that, we do not have the possibility to choose whether we give birth in conditions of poverty or in conditions of wealth, whether we give birth to a child with certain intelli­ gence or certain lack of intelligence. We do not have the possibility of choosing whether the child has a physical handicap or not, we do not have the capacity to choose very many social or biological factors. Choice is always limited . . .So even asking for the freedom of choice, we must see that we have to go beyond that. . . . That doesn’t mean that we dispense with that demand, but we go beyond it.

On equality : . . . once you remove one veil and give women equal pay then you realize they haven’t had equal education and you try to remove that, then you realize they’re born into a sexist society with sexist attitudes ancf you do something about that. It’s a question of the veils that go on and on and on, and each one you pull off you just get another layer, so first of all we are not going to get equality. That doesn’t mean we don’t fight for it, but let’s realize we are not going to get it within our society.

What does equality mean? Equality, like freedom of choice, was a concept that arose with capitalism in the 17th century and what it essentially means is only equality under the law. People are not equal. They cannot be equal; as individuals we are all different.

On understanding sexual social relationships: The illustration I want to give . . . is ex­ tremely simplified —it may even have certain elements that aren’t quite correct —but I’m using it as an exemplary instance to illustrate what I have been saying at a rather abstract theoretical level. Now, in China, as most people probably know, women have an enormous number of the things that women’s movements in the west are demanding. For example, Chinese women have . . . free access to child care, they have equal oppor­ tunity for work, for education, free access to contraception and all forms of control of their own reproduction. Almost everything that all the organized women’s movements of the west have asked for, and are going on asking for, and are fighting for and struggling for. Well, I was listening to an American woman anthropologist talking about some visits that she made to some communes in China, where she was studying the position of women in the Chinese commune. She found, to nobody’s surprise, that women did not have the same important political jobs in the communes as men. Now, she asked two questions and I think that the double nature of her question is a credit to the women’s movement and to feminism it­ self, because firstly she asked the academic question —which is “Why don’t they?” , and then, because she was a feminist . . . she asked “What do the few women who do have in common?” . Because there were obviously one or two women who had improtant political positions and were important poli­ tical cadres . . .

Now one of the things she discovered was that the communes were organized around old kinship groups, because you had already, from the old, pre-liberation structure of China, large extended kinship networks.

Now, they were strengths in terms of soli­ darity between people. They eradicated all the obvious weaknesses such as the fact that the father had rights of life and death over the other members of the family. They eradi­ cated inheritance and all the principles of

property, unequal division of land, the gerintocracy thing - the old had power over the young —etc. . . All the things that they could see were wrong with the old kinship system were completely removed. But still some of the communes were named after the clan and it was as a basic structure of form­ ing communes.

Now she discovered that the women, the few women who had got equal positions of political importance with men, had some or one particular thing in common.

The marriage system is a system of ex­ change of women, out of the commune of origins —like out of the family of origins — into another commune. On marrying, you move if you are a woman. Now, this meant that women were either expected to leave the commune where they grew up, and therefore were not the most suitable people to have important positions, or they had just married into the commune and were new to it and therefore, of course, did not have the same influence and the same ways of getting im­ portant political positions as the men who had been there all their lives. And what the few women who had got these important positions had in common was that they had for one reason or another stayed in the commune in which they had grown up. They had stayed there either because they had married youths who, during the period of the cultural revolution, had come out from the towns to the countryside in the move to merge city and countryside more —so some young men had stayed and married into the com­ mune, or because they had decided not to marry. That all had that feature in common —that they had stayed where they were.

Now you see nobody had seen the ex­ change of women out from one commune into another commune as in any way opp­ ressive, because nobody had analyzed the actual meaning of kinship relationships in that sense. They had only seen the_ obvious abuses which had been understood by social­ ist theory.

And one of the things I think we need in feminist theory is not simply what we have all along understood, which is an under­ standing of women’s place in the family, because after all that is the primary location of women as a social group and one of the definitions is that whatever else a woman does she is always seen to be in a family — either the daughter of her father, or the wife of her husband so to speak, or the mother of her children.

What we need if you like, is an anthro­ pology of kinship structures within our own society so that we understand exactly in what ways kinship itself can act in the forms of alliance, the forms of exchange of women, that can themselves be oppressive.

On psychoanalysis and feminism: My interest in feminism, my interest in psychoanalysis, is an interest in understand­ ing what femininity is . . . what interests me in psychoanalysis is that I think it’s about how we think of ourselves as human beings, and . . . it is about sexual differences as one of the most important thought distinctions we make, and I don’t mean conscious, rational thought distinctions, which is what sociology would concern itself with, but the unconscious distinctions whereby before we even are born so to speak, and at least as we are born, men and women have to find themselves as sexually different. In a cul­ ture that is precisely . . . it is almost a cul­ ture because of that distinction, and Pm using culture not in the sense of refined civilization but in the sense that even the most ‘primitive’ social unit of human beings has a culture, and that always distinguishes between men and women, always as a primary thought thing, if you see what I mean . . .

Most people think of psychoanalysis being about biology determining how we become.

THE LAST T H IN G THE PRESS H E L D IN C A N B E

WOMEN WHO WENT SAY IT WA RACISM, W OMEN IN GOVERNIV UNIONS, WOMEf

MOST OF THE CONFERENCE W

Women march on the Canberra Times to dema, It’s not about that, it’s about the way and how we conceive our biology; it’s not how our biology conceives us, it’s how we as human beings can conceive our biology and [thus] conceive our culture. . . . The whole principle of psychoanalysis is the possibility of changing oneself . . . That you can, if you understand yourself, bring to consciousness what is unconscious . . .

While fantasies are unconscious you can’t do anything with them, because you don’t know about them. If you bring them to consciousness then you can do something with them and so an absolutely fundamental principle of psychoanalysis is the possibility of change. . . . The unconscious is the ideas we do not know we have . . . So the way we “ think” our­ selves in society, and I have to use that term in quotes because it’s not conscious thought . . . the way we live without thinking, but nevertheless [have] our unconscious assump­ tions . . . if we can understand some of those then we will actually understand some of the primary ways in which we “think” ourselves as human beings. So that the unconscious in the largest sense of the word is the very ideology by which we live, without knowing it. . .

I think Freud was only descriptive of this rather than - actually there is no theory of change of that structure within Freud be­ cause, . . . as a Marxist I think that uncon­ scious ideas come from the basic society that one has. Now that doesn’t mean to say that the basic society and the economic structure that one has just automatically produces a certain set of ideas, and that once you change that base then those ideas topple

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Page 13

-November 3

i o p p re s s in g to m , h o w , /h a t to d o b o u t it W ANTED TO W RITE ABOUT THE WOMEN A N D POLITICS CONFERENCE RRA LAST M O NTH WAS THE PO LITICS DISCUSSED THERE. kS A KNOCKOUT.

PAPERS RANG ED OVER WOMEN A N D THE M E D IA ,

TENT, LESBIANISM, FEM IN ISM A N D SO CIALISM, WOMEN AND TRAD E

SI IN PRISONS, RAPE. AND REFO RM ISM OR R EV O L U T IO N .

AS TAPED, A N D THESE ARE SELECTIONS FROM SEVER AL SESSIONS

nd equal space to reply to that paper’s trivializing editorial on the Conference. They got it.

yer as well. There’s always a time lag, so iat ideas are often way behind the change in >ciety. So I think that as a Marxist who is terested in psychoanalysis, what one ould have to work out is what is different om one type of society in producing fferent unconscious fantasies from another pe of society.

But some fantasies are also the same. Now ’s particularly important for sexism this restion, because certainly the oppression of omen under capitalism is different from e oppression of women under feudalism.

0 doubt about it. But the oppression of □men is always there. So that there are cerin thought processes, certain ideologies hich, though they change, go across changg modes of production as well. Do you see bat I mean? So that Freud wasn’t entirely rong to say that these patriarchal fantasies ive always been there . . . If women have ways been oppressed then in some sense ey always have [been there]. They’re both you like, permanent and changeable.

1 rape: There is a group of women in Paris ’sychanalyse et Politique] who are actually □rking on precisely that question - on rape being one of the primary fantasies of xual relationships. And if you know anying about the concept of the Oedipus mplex, which is the psychoanalytic myth how we enter into society and how we stinguish as boys and girls in our crossmtification relationship with our parents, :11 this group in Paris think that what ppens to the little girl at the Oedipal stage that in order to become feminine she has a

fantasy of her father’s rape of her. It’s not seduction as previously psychoanalytic theory has seen it, but it’s actually rape. And so it’s the rape of the small pre-Oedipal girl that makes her into a girl essentially.

So that rape is an absolutely primary fantasy for both sexes. We were talking about this in one of the group discussions earlier this week, when it was brought up that rape —pack rape as you call it here —is really just coming to people’s attention, and we were thinking how really one of the reasons why it hasn’t been seen for what it is before . . . it is so close to normal sexual practice for one thing —I mean a lot of sexual intercourse is rape essentially in the way that it happens. But it’s also so close to primary fantasies about one’s own sexuality, and this is why —when this horror thing in which one’s told the women “wants it” , you know, the priests say or the judge says “Well I mean, the woman really asked for it, she really wanted it” —it’s no good answering “that’s just not true” . And it’s more prob­ lematic than that, because what we are really saying there is that the woman wants to be an oppressed human being, and in one sense in order to be a woman, she has to have that desire for oppression, if you see [what] I mean that it is a part of femininity. That’s why that argument has such a horrible force to it in a sense.

On conclusions I certainly don’t think everybody should go and get psychoanalyzed. One thing, let me tell you, it’s bloody hard to do anything else if you do . . .

O ur struggle is, first, as blacks NAOMI M YERS is secretary of the Aboriginal Medical Service in Redfern, Sydney. She made the first statement printed below at the end of a plenary session of the Canberra Conference. The other remarks are by a number of black women who took part in the Black Women's Talkout.

Now. Just this minute outside the door there, I’ve been told . . . that we have been putting you people down. I just told her [Liz Reid] —and this is from every black in this country - that it is not us that is putting you down, you’ve been putting us down for 200 years, and it’s about time you woke up to it.

Now I don’t know whether you have noticed it or not here today, and I’m very wild at this moment, well here you are, you look like a lot of middle class people. Now I went as far as sixth grade and I’m not edu­ cated and I’m not a speaker, but I’m that wild that every overseas speaker that spoke mentioned racism. And not one bloody white Australian woman got up here today and said that there was racism in this country.

Now I haven’t got very much to say but I want to tell you why we demonstrated last night. We’ve got a person, representing us on International Women’s Year committee that wasn’t picked by us, and if we had a chance to pick somebody we’d have picked somebody that’d have put across our message and not somebody that couldn’t get up and speak.

She came to the Health Conference [in Bris­ bane in August] and we asked her questions about the International Women’s Year com­ mittee because we were interested, and a white woman that, was sitting up at the back of her got up and answered the questions for her. That’s the type of people that they put on this committee to represent us.

They send them overseas to speak on our behalf but they don’t say nothing about the racism in this country and how blacks are re­ pressed in this country.

Now you people would freak out if you went up to Wilcannia and saw how the blacks were living around in tents and car bodies and living on the banks of the river, with scabies and everything else because they have got no hot water to bath in or wash their clothes or do anything else. Now you people you want to take a visit to Wilcannia and to the outback of Australia where every­ thing is hidden . . .

We’re not asking you to be ashamed . . .

We’re asking you do something about it.

On black women’s priorities: To put our fight as a separate fight from the men and from our children, is ridiculous.

For instance the white woman is a higher scale in the ladder than the black man, so for us to jump above our man and fight with the white women is a bit ridiculous. You know, our fight is a black fight. It’s not a male or a female fight —it’s a black fight. And before we can join the Women’s Liberation Move­ ment —if they ever learn enough to take it back to the working class —we have to win our struggle on a race basis.

At times when things are really, really bad, you are hassling money, somebody is hassling you because you haven’t got this, that or the othef; the answer seems to me to go underground and become guerrillas. That’s the only way we are going to get any action.

We seem to be worse off now than before when there was less money around, mainly because we know the problems and we feel that we know some of the answers. To us our main problems are that everything leads from health and housing and we feel that as far as the medical service is concerned we know the health problem and because of our connections with all the aboriginal housing companies we feel that we know the answers to the housing problems too. But nobody seems to want to take any notice of us.

Despite saying that their policy is that they want self-determination for blacks and that they are going to listen to what the blacks have to say. They are not listening. AndT don’t think they have any intentions of listening.

On the Department of Aboriginal Affairs: We want to have control over our own lives and the DAA is the body that obstructs our self-determination. That may seem con­ tradictory but that is true. The DAA is set up to supervise our affairs.

Aboriginals throughout Australia prefer to have their affairs in their own hands, prefer to have their own Council and their own national committee. If every land claim was given to the Aboriginals of Australia that would be half way to solving our problems.

The problem of uneprployment would not be such a great problem because we would be able to organize our own philosophies and our own survival services.

Marcia Langton - at the Black speak-out

On education: In Taree for instance, Aboriginal children were being bussed to school separately from white children.

There was constant fighting and the at­ mosphere of racism was very intense.

Black children were being forced to sit in front of the class rooms and comb the lice out of their hair and were being ridiculed by students and teachers alike, and the number of children that were making it to senior high school, or even into high school, was only about four, and there are over 100 white kids in the school. There [are] some­ thing like 53 black kids in the primary school, but only four made it to high school.

Very, very high drop-out rate in schools amongst Aboriginal children. It’s a very serious problem. Now the government has provided Aboriginal study grants but these only apply to secondary and tertiary level of education.

We think the solution to this [drop-out problem] is to provide non-racist text books, non-racist curriculum and to train the teachers in Aboriginal culture —past and future —so that Aboriginals’ children will have a sense of identity; so that they will not feel so isolated and alienated within the school system.

On anthropologists: Aborigines don’t want and don’t like anthropologists and other academics coming into the communities and taking information from our culture. That is a violation of our code. [Some] are fairly responsible about this and don’t expose the more sacred cere­ monies, but a lot of them do. It upsets the tribal people so much.

Page 14

THE DIGGER

October 6—November 3

More from the Women and Politics Conference:

Two union w om en describe a m any-sided b attle 'Edith Turnevitsch: AMWUshop steward from Everhot, Bayswater, Victoria until early this year when sacked along with 16 other women. After a picket lasting two months, only three women were re-employ­ ed: Edith was not. The plant has now closed down completely.

On striking: I believe women should be in the union.

If you’re not in a union and there are a lot of women that.are very nervous of unions, they’re frightened of strikes, they go out because the husband may be on some more money, they get a job as a bit of extra money, and they’re frightened they’re going to loose their job if they go out on strike.

Now, you should never be frightened to go out on strike because if a boss made a quarter of a million dollars profit which you read in the paper sometime, he never calls his workers together and says “well workers, we’ve made a quarter of a million or half a million, and we’re going to give you all a five dollar increase”. You’ve got to fight for that increase. They don’t give it to you.

On becoming a shop steward: What made me a shop steward is what I saw in a factory, a very big factory that I was retrenched [from] I’d say 15 months after.

I took a Greek man’s two hands out of the machine. I saw the accident happen, I gave the alarm. I took his hands off: a 22 year old boy. Now nobody knew how to open that machine. The supervisor had to ask the dye setters and five dye setters got called over. Three collapsed. He had to say “turn off the machine, reverse the cycle and start her up” . That lad didn’t know he had . . . he knew he’d had an accident, but he didn’t know that it was the two hands. I had to put his head over my shoulder and hold his head like that so that he couldn’t see that the dye had fallen down on his hands and say,“You Georgey, you’ve had a slight acci­ dent, but I’ll look after you, I’ve got a boy your age”. Now if it hadn’t have been my 20 years’ nursing experience, I wouldn’t have known what to do. There would have been

nobody in that factory, who would have known what to do. We had women from his own nationality gone hysterical, I had to bring them out of hysterics after. When the man was on the floor for half an hour, after he went, we started a union up. The men in the toolroom which was a closed shop, startl­ ed a union. Nobody would become a shop steward. I didn’t even know what a union was, because I had done nursing all my life.

And the thing that got me was, after this accident, where I read books when I started going to the union school, is where I got books on the [Department of Labour and Industry safety regulations] where it states that you must have a safety officer and you must have this and yon must have that, and it is not in here. They haven’t got it. *

He

He

Spanish migrant, Maria Posos, was, un­ til recently and active militant member o f ' Keith Mitchell’s branch o f the Hospial Em­ ployees Federation. She was a key organ­ izer o f the rank and file group in that union. She is currently on the National Advisory Committee o f International Wo­ men’s Year and works helping migrant women with their day to day hassles.

On migrants’ dignity: In the time I have worked, I never work very long in any [one] factory. This is the truth because always somebody gives me the sack because with my little English I will never tolerate to [be] put my dignity on the floor because I know I was a worker, I know I was a woman, but I got my dignity; like the work, like the person, like a human being. This is what I think at least we have to have. We have to have a dignity. We want to work, we earn our money. But they don’t give us the money for nothing, they don’t bring us to Australia because they want to bring us, they bring us because they need us, they need the people in the factory. This is why they bring the migrants here, and we want to come, we want to start a new life here, and nobody gives us any facilities.

As difficult as it is to tell really hip,creative and aware sons and daughters of the R.S.L about a record shop when they already know what it’s all about, let me say ‘IF YOU DONT WANT IT WE WONT HAVE IT’ 283 GLENEERRIE ROAD MALVERN. PHONE 5091952

On language difficulties: When I started in the factories I said to the workers, “We must do something to­ gether. If we don’t do it from inside nobody is going to do for us” . But how you get the women together in the factories if you get one who speaks Yugoslav, the other speaks Greek, another couple Italian, two are Span­ ish, how can you communicate with those people? You can’t because they do not speak your language. So if the Italian has been given the sack, how can we help her, because I don’t even know what she is given the sack for. The management will tell me, , “Oh, she was a trouble-maker, you know” .

On speed-ups: They put you on the machine to do a job, and they say “Well, you show me how you can do it and then you do it and this is the speed” , and you try to do your best because you want to do the job, and.you want to get the job, this job is important for you, is the bread for your children, so you do your best and from this time you have to do the same amount o f production every day. The time keeper come every two weeks or three weeks and control you [to see] how many minutes you can do it in.

The cotton is breaking in thè machine, the machine sometimes is broken, something is wrong, you have to go to the toilet, but that doesn’t count, because you have to do this production in eight hours in the seat. If you don’t do it, he will call you into the office [and say] “You’re not good enough, you don’t do the production” .

I put this to the union when I start to speak a little bit of the language, I said to the union, “This is wrong, you should do something about” . The union come to the shop floor. Sometimes they just come to collect the dues, or sometimes, if there is big trouble he will come, and say, “What’s wrong, is anything'wrong?” , and of course, if the Italian or the Yugoslav have something >to say, she can’t say because this man, who comes to the factory, he’s only, going to speak English.

On racist union leaders: I worked for the Hospital Employees, and then I can tell you I have more fights with my union secretary, than with my bosà.

I try to go to every meeting I can, and I said to our secretary —then was Mitchell — “You should put things in other languages than English, because we are 22,000 mem­ bers and 70 per cent of these members don’t know English to speak in, so all the bulletins that you do in English, half of them they go into the rubbish tin, so it is wasted anyhow” And he said, “No, we cannot afford it” . I said to them give me a bulletin in English and I will translate into Spanish, without charge, I will do for free and the Italians will do the same, and the. Greeks will do the same if you think the unionists haven’t got enough money.

And he say “No, you have to realize that you are in Australia. You have to learn .

English” . This is what my union secretary said —he wasn’t my boss.On joining the union: I never discourage our members, I know how bad the union was, but I never say we don’t have to belong to the union. We must stick to the union. We have to change [the leaders] . We have to get rid of them and get somebody else.

I see there should be more migrants in the union. I mean the union organizers, courses for us to teach us, even if we can’t understand English, why they don’t teach us in our own language? You know, the people come in and they say they are migrants, they don’t want to know anything about the union, why you bother to explain to them?

I come from the country [where] to be in the union or to have a union in there you have to fight with the police and with the government in the street to have the union implemented in Spain. You have to fight.

Send letters to PÒ Box 77, Carlton. 3053.

Bridging conference Women like Isabelle Rosemberg perched high on their platform of lofty condescen­ sion regarding middle-class, women give me the the shits. I am sick to death of the media coverage given to a damn good conference and Isabelle’s self-congratulatory attitude was just the last straw.

There are many middle class women in Australia, old dear, and it’s about time we developed a bit of sisterhood and try to understand the sorts of problems all our sisters face, not sneer all the time and pat ourselves on our ‘liberated’ backs because we’ve ‘seen the message’ and we’re not the despised middle-class.

Isabelle completely failed to realize, coming from lovely central Sydney, what it means to so many women from outly­ ing areas like WA and QLD to go and get together with so many women of differing viewpoints. OK, the husband’s income might be high, but does that necessarily mean that the wife has the ability, choice or independent means to attend inter­ state conferences? If that’s her attitude, then Isabelle has failed to understand the politics of marriage.

I also notice that she has very carefully jumped on the bandwagon of ‘black rights’ against ‘middle-class opportunity’, but surely she realized that the conference was highly successful in one area — and that was the circumvention of the media oft the issue of black affairs. Most of the wo­ men there had no idea of what conditions are like for black people because of the brilliant whitewashing job by the media.

The conference started the basis of a br­ idge, between black and white women, shaky maybe, but it’s a better basis than at the beginning of the conference, and dragging up derogatory remarks from some of the women there does not, I feel, ad­ equately portray the attitudes of the maj­ ority of the women at the end.

Did she really fail to be inspired by the march on and occupation of the Canberra Times? Or by the sheer emotional solidar­ ity on the final day? Or by Liz Reid’s sensitivity and understanding?

She should start considering the ramif­ ications of the conference in distant states where scores of women have come back changed and determined to continue the work started at the conference. How about giving women like us, who feel in­ spired by such a conference, a bit of sup­ port, instead of depressing male-type knocks all the time?

Maureen Davies, Melville, WA.

A reply Unfortunately, I forgot to say explicitly that I was only at the Women and Politics Conference for two days because I had to go back to my job. So I certainly didn’t give a good coverage to the Conference — I gave my scattered and mixed impres­ sions and also tried briefly to raise some questions about the dangers o f the harn­ essing o f the women’s movement by the political establishment o f this country.

Obviously the Conference was exciting and very important for the women who went and I wish I ’d been able to be in on the whole thing. It certainly wasn’t my intention to sneer and in fact I didn’t.

But . . . it does strike me as dicey to ig­ nore what separates women from each other in this society (race, class) under a catch-cry o f sisterhood. All o f which is not to shit on the Conference itself but to recognize that it was contained within these boundaries.

Anyway, as you can see, in this issue we’re publishing extracts from papers given at the conference so that maybe some o f the people who couldn’t make it (like all the women who can’t get time o ff work, for example) can get a chance to read about it.

Isabelle Rosemberg.

October 6—November 3

THE DIGGER

Page 15

FINGER ACUPRESSURE Over the last few years acupuncture, a Chinese method o f healing that inserts needles into specific points of the body, has become quite well-known in Australia. But while it is now taken seriously it is still not widely practised here and remains out of the reach of most people.

There is, however, an associated technique known as "finger acupressure" — an effective, simple and harmless method of treatment which stimulates acupuncture points with finger massage, as opposed to needles. Anyone can do it.

In this issue we publish acupressing treatment for lower back pain and constipation. Other problems (for example, asthma, stomach aches, toothaches and so on) will be dealt with in future issues of The Digger.

W HFN YO U USE FIN G ER ACUPRESSURE KEEP THE FOLLOW ING

IN M IN D :

CO NSTIPATIO N

Posture The necessary posture is explained in each instance. It is important that the subject be relaxed.

Point Chang-chiang

|

Location In between the tip of the tailbone and the anus.

Finger Pressure The degree of pressure varies with the condition and physique of the subject.

Generally, light pressure is applied on subjects in the following categories: — First-time subject — When there is acute pain .-j Where there is swelling — When the muscles are weak or loose — When there are complications such as high blood pressure, sever anemia, or heart trouble.

Hard pressure is applied on subjects who: — Have a chronic problem — Have no other complications — Are not overly tired

Technique Subject should lie down on stomach.

Use index finger to press downward, then massage upward.

*

Manipulation Press against the designated point on the skin surface (shown by a black dot on the diagrams). Massage in a small circular movement, about two or three cycles per second.

It is preferable to apply pressure bilaterally. Start with one point at a time, and when you master this technique, you can work bilaterally and simultaneously with your two hands.

Period of Treatment This can range from one minute to five minutes for each point per treatment. Treat­ ment can be once a day, whenever you have the problem, or whenever you wish to do it.

Caution — Cut your nails if they’re long or you’ll hurt the subject.

— Never work on a subject who has a full stomach.

— The treatment is not to be applied on pregnant women or serious cardiac patients.

— Avoid working on skin surface whiere there is contusion, scar, or infection.

— Stop treatment if the symptom is getting worse and no relief comes.

LOWER BACK PAIN

CO NSTIPATIO N

Point Shen-shu

Point Chung-chi

#

Location About 1.5 inches lateral to the lower end of the 2nd lumbar disk.

Location About 4 inches below the navel, along the midline of the abdominal surface.

Technique Subject should lie down on stomach.

Use thumb to press hard toward the spine.

Technique Subject should lie down.

Use thumb or palm to press hard.

THE DIGGER

Page 16 In Newcastle:

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October 6—November 3

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Health service women ask whose health and who’s boss

by Wendy Bacon Women of the Hunter Valley Working Women’s Health Centre are on strike,.

The surprised response of many feminists is: “But collectives can’t go on strike!

Differences have to be settled internally.”

The strikers’ reply: “Neither do workers on collectives get sacked. That’s why we’re on strike —because it’s not a collective!”

The four health workers on strike have two demands: that Barbara Curthoys, coun­ sellor, be reinstated following her sacking; and that Mary Callcott, the administrator, go.

While other women’s health centres and collectives have been struggling with the vagaries of funding all year (and that’s another story), the Hunter Valley Centre, situated in an industrial area of Newcastle, has had it good with money, at least.

The group formed itself into a limited company (The Hunter Region Working Women’s Group Ltd.), so that it could re­ ceive funding which came from four or five government departments, including the Hospitals Commission., This funding is pro­ bably in excess of half a million dollars.

The project, (housed in a building bought by the government) will comprise a women’s health centre, child care, legal services and special facilities for migrant women. The Health Centre opened in April.

Now the company has control over the affairs of the centre, legally that is. This company has six directors (two of whom, Barbara and Ruth, are Mary Callcott’s

daughters), and a company secretary —Mary Callcott. Mary Callcott was appointed, by the company, as administrator of the entire project. But the strikers..^ Carol and Chris (nurses), Liz (the doctoi) and Barbara (the sacked counsellor) —had expected the staff to operate as a collective with joint decision­ making power and responsibility, as is the case at the Leichardt and Liverpool centres.

For them, providing an alternative health service included changing these conventional roles of health worker/consumer (patient).

And this very difference, this question of , power-sharing, created tension from the beginning. Mary “always ‘chaired’ staff meet­ ings. That’s if you could call them meetings.

It was a matter of putting up our ideas to have them knocked down” . “She had her own private line and access to STD, which the rest of us didn’t.” “Every letter sent out had to be inspected by Mary, even letters of referral.”

And whereas at other centres all staff except doctors share wages, the Newcastle women are paid on Public Service Award rates. Which means that Mary gets over $400 a fortnight —twice what the nurses get.

Other political differences soon surfaced.

All the women were agreed that providing resources for working women was really im­ portant, but their definition of what a work­ ing woman was was a bit broader than Mary’s.

When they wanted to start self-help groups for housewives, Mary went along with it only grudgingly —“They have plenty of facilities of their own”. And when Carol contacted factory women through union friends, Mary

disagreed S she wanted to work through fac­ tory managements. When she went to one factory with Liz, who was doing Pap smears (cervical cancer tests) there, the response from women workers was hostile. Liz ex­ plains: “It was partly Mary’s patronizing attitude S ‘Now tell us your problems’! . . .

But it was also because they were suspicious of a medical service sent in by management.”

When Liz and Carol went out another time, Mary said to Liz, “ Make sure Carol sticks to nursing and doesn’t bring her politics in” .

There were smaller incidents too, like when Barbara (Curthoys) was asked to speak about women’s health centres at the Women and Politics Conference, and got there to find that she had been replaced following a phone call from Mary, reportedly to Liz Reid.

Now if the collective had really been a collective, a lot of this could have been talked out and maybe resolved. But Mary had the muscle and the key to the filing cabinet where the original submission and all financial and administrative details were kept tight, and she wasn’t showing them. So the women went to see a friend in the State Health Commission, which administers the federal funds, and asked him to show them the submission. No go, and for the sake of openness, he asked them to tell Mary they had spoken to him. When she heard this, Mary asked to see Barbara Curthoys alone.

Barbara said no, not alone, and was promptly sacked. , At this point, as Carol says,- the issue be­ came clearly a class one: “We had asked Mary several times if what she wanted was a

boss/worker relationship. She never answered. The moment she sacked Barbara she defined herself as the boss and us as workers, and any hope of there being a collective vanished. As workers we went on strike to support Barbara.”

Before writing this article, I rang Mary Callcott and the Committee to ask why Barbara was sacked. Since they “ doubted my impartiality” , they could make no state­ ment. Others were told it wàs “an internal matter” ; “ the whole collective had'sacked Barbara” (they wouldn’t say who the collec­ tive was); and that they would only discuss it with Barbara and no-one else.

The political issues here are important — the relationship of the women’s movement to employer and working class interests, professionalism versus self-help, and collec­ tivity —.the sharing of power.

The unproductiveness of the centre under Mary’s management is clear: in five months only 90 women have used it, as against the 700 women seen by the comparable Liver­ pool Centre in the same tjme. At this rate the centre provides the most costly public health service in Australia.

Talks between the staff and the State Health Commission have decided to press Mary to accept all the women, including Barbara, back, and to ask the company to re­ organize itself into a broadly based commit­ tee including staff, union women and any other interested Newcastle women.

The decision, again, is Mary Callcott’s.

If she doesn’t agree then the centre will probably close at least temporarily.

Saving the family from feminism

InQ ueensland: forces to the right o f Genghis K han take over radio

by Rosalind Innes Three hundred women heard diatribes against Women’s Liberation, the Labor government, Liz Reid and the Women and Politics Conference when they attended- the opening of the Women’s Action Alliance in Brisbane recently.

WAA is a national organization that calls itself politically “non-aligned” .

The meeting \yas officially opened by none other than the Right Honourable Johannes Bjelke-Petersen. His address in­ cluded wistful trips into the past: “Where is that old slogan that used to be everywhere, the cornerstone of our society, ‘the family that prays together stays together’?” ■ —and continual exhortations that we do not want change —“I am quite sure Lam right in saying you do not want to change the sys­ tem” ; “You, ladies and I, we do not want to change our way of thinking.”

The meeting heard speakers regaling the virtues of the family, motherhood, the role of homemaker and “the need to inculcate a t . an early age the idea of god as the loving, father” . WAA then announced jubilantly that Dr. Raymond Moore is coming to Australia as their guest in February —he was described as “carrying on where the great Bowlby left o f f ’. Lee Comer in The Myth o f Motherhood comments on what Bowlby’s about: “The most effective way of saving the state’s money, of keeping children at home with mothers till they are five, is to emphasize over and over again the exclusivity and significance of the mother/child relation­ ship.”

WAA’s long term aim is allowances for mothers | | i.e. wages for housework. Judy McCormack, who organized the feminismwithout-socialism workshops at the Women and Politics Conference, was the Trade Union delegate responsible for the mother’s allowance motion at the recent ACTU Congress. She is also the national secretary of WAA. [Wages for housework is the economic backer for keeping women isolated at home, houseworking. That’s Judy McCormack’s

‘feminism’.]

But WAA is just one of several.organiza­ tions fighting feminism in Brisbane recently.

Several ultra-conservative groups have moved in on the proposal to set up a women’s radio station in Brisbane^ 4BW, an AM station which would extend to the Darling Downs, notably Toowoomba, which is already a hotbed of the League of Rights.

The Women’s Electoral Lobby initiated the project with the aim of establishing a station which would represent'the views of womeft and aid in ending discrimination against women.

The women who have taken over 4BW’s interim committee represent, as one stunned observer put it, “ political forces'to the right of Qenghis Khan” ., Dubious about the Liberal Party because of its leftist tendencies, they certainly are not potential Labor voters.

The implications of such a station, if it comes off (the intention of this article is to influence anyone who can to prevent this happening), are however much more serious than the loss of possible Labor votes. Radio 4BW, controlled by Right to Life, WAA, WAG, ‘moral pollution’ experts and lunatic Christians, would be an extremely powerful propaganda weapon for all those groups with an interest in promoting women’s role as housewife and mother . . . these women are the handmaidens of patriarchal religion.

One of the stated aims and objectives of the station now is “the upholding of the in­ stitution of the family” . It is always nece­ ssary for the women’s movement to be highly critical of the glorification of mother­ hood and especially so in a society which confines women to this social role. However, in the present period of capitalist crisis, when women are being thrown out of the workforce and into the home in greater numY bers, it is even more pertinent to fight people whb not only justify this situation, but promote it.

In the preliminary discussions about 4BW in Canberra, Malcolm Fraser wholeheartedly supported the scheme and affirmed that a Liberal government would continue the

funds.

Although the various fascistic elements now in control òf 4BW are united in their dedication to the family, they’re not all lunatics. Barbara Bowers represents probably the most sophisticated and potentially powerful influence. Young, articulate and politically very similar to Ariana Stassinopolous, she is the organizing force of Women’s Action Group. With the objective of ‘reaching’ women in the home, groups like WAG attract women who may be questioning the basis of their social existence but feel threatened by the women’s move­ ment. They get validation of themselves as wives and mothers. Their ‘choice’ of this social existence is not questioned.

Thè women’s movement in Queensland is up against heavier reactionary forces than

those of other states. For example, the Rape Crisis Centre has had a barrage of criticism from the right on the grounds (arrived at by a logic peculiar to the deep north) that it will destroy the family.

WAA also want to get into high schools, particularly in sex education courses —which they call ‘Family Life Education’ —stressing the need for sexuality to be considered only within the framework of the nuclear family.

A woman at the 4BW meeting had a clause crossed out of one of the aims. The clause read: “Women are to be seen as positive and self accepting” —she lept up and said that at the Health Conference she had been appalled to discover that “self accepting” was in fact a euphemism for the social disease ‘female homosexuality’ and she wanted no part of it.

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Specialists in feminist, radical and socialist literature send for free book/list

October 6—November 3

Page 17

THE DIGGER

Right: A woman at Oenpelli

The legend o f Gako Djang

O enpelli m eet Friends o f the Earth

"Gabo came south from the top of Arnhem Land. He sat down and became one with the hills at a site that became known as the Gako Djang — Green A nt Dream­ ing. It is the dreaming site o f the people o f the green ant totem. The area o f trad­ itional significance includes three small hills and the surrounding area. On the sides of these hills are large boulders which are green ant eggs still containing green ants. The legend says that if the eggs are broken or damaged the green ants will hatch, causing misfortune and havoc to all peoples o f the earth." * The Green A nt Dreaming site is situated on land belonging to the Oenpelli people.

Queensland Mines Ltd, (a company 51 per-cent owned by Kathleen Investments, which in turn is 51 percent owned by Conzinc Riotinto Australia), has uranium leases, known as the Narbalek prospect, on this land. Already costeans (assess­ ment pits) dug close to the eggs, by Queensland Mines, have disturbed the eggs.

Beware Queensland Mines! Further desecration and the Green Ants may get you (and us).

This is verbatim from a conversation between FRANK GUNNUNGA of the Oenpelli Aboriginal Community Tribal Council and a Friends of the Earth representative at the "Border Staw" in Cahills Crossing cm the Arnhem Land border —July 8, 1975: F G : You stop it on that other side of the world, (long pause) you can't stop it here.

Well I'll tell you. Yes we can do this.

You stop this side of the w orld, but where it's already spread . .'. Hong Kong, Russia, in America . . . how you • going to get that there, they still got the weapons, they build up. You stop | it here, we can stop it here. They've . already spread,

F G : This is the first time you came here, [to] our Aborigine people. You going to go back to centre, Alice Springs, go to any other settlement, talk to Abo­ rigine people, and mention about these dangers, and then Aborigine people will wake up, they know what is danger, they will all pull together, we will all pull together . . .

FOE: One of the things is that if Australia stops it, If the Australian Government stops it, and they say we won't sell it to anyone, we won't mine it because it's too dangerous, if the Government says that, then a lot of governments might hear, they might listen to that * well, if it's too dangerous for them, perhaps it's too dangerous for us.

FG:

Someone's got to start, haven't they?

FG:

j

We quite agree when you stop in Australia. You can stop it. But in over­ seas, it has already been spread. Who. started with this atom b o m b -- Russia?

[FOE: America] America ^ that's the one that threw one on Christmas Island and Japan — alright now, Japan don't like that much; so we don't like it too.

We all agree, we Aborigines agree with you people, all you (word inaudible) groups like you, yoú know, number of people, there are so many thousand of people you got, working pull together.

We Aborigine people, we can build up this, and get Aborigine people from all over (word inaudible) to join together.

After more than a decade of inaction, Mary Kathleen Uranium (M KU ) is intending to be back in the uranium export business by January, 1976. Already it is mining the, material which is.currently the most serious threat to life on earth. t Prior to Labor's comihg to power in 1972, the Liberal-Country Party Government ap­ proved contracts with overseas buyers for around 12,000 tonnes of uranium oxide.

M KU has contracts now falling due for over 5.000 tonnes, and Ranger Uranium has con­ tracts for 3,300 tonnes.* Because M KU is an old mine it is not affected by the Environment Impact State­ ment (EIS) legislation. Ranger, a new mine, is affected, and the Ranger EIS Public In­ quiry is now underway. The Commissioners' recommendation may be available by February/March 1975,‘and this recommendation doesn't have to be accepted by Cabinet.

So Mary Kathleen Uraniunrrwill probably be mining and exporting whil&the Ranger Inquiry is still in progress, and environmental inquiries here and overseas usually accept the status quo. Will Ranger be any different? In any case, with a mine already in operation, the CoYinor-Whitlam-Atomic Energy Commis­ sion unholy trinity will have a lever for sup*M K U has reserves of 10,000 tonnes and Ranger has 110.000 tonnes.

FOE: It's got to be everyone trying, it's the numbers of people who will stop it.

Yes, because, when you was on the march, we said there was one hundred bicycles rode to Canberra from . . .

[FOE: all over Australia], Now if you want to stop make a big talk there . . . and we start marching here too, we can get every man, he can walk from here to Darwin, walk, without gun, with spear always, w ith­ out gun.

You start in there . . . make big talk, we'll make a big talk here too.

*. * * I heard in the language that people talking here, my colour, my Aborigine people talking it very dangerous for our kids, they're afraid of kids. Same for sacred ceremony, sacred place . . .

O h ,w e'll stop I t alright. Don't worry, because I can puslTand push and push and push before! die..

An' when I die I got my youngsters to push and push, I got my six children, three boys, three girls, they can push and push. And when they die, when my kids die, we got my grandchildren to push and push.

* From an article b y Sreten Bozic, an anthropologist who lived with the Oenpelli people during 1973/1974.

The fight for Arnhem Land It has been almost a year now since the people of Arnhem Land were~persuaded to let Queensland Mines Ltd to dig uranium from their land.

After rhore than four years of deceit, false propaganda and misinformation both to the public and to the local Aborigines, Queens­ land Mines finally succeeded in getting its way in September 1974, or so it seemed.

Following agreement by the Aboriginal Tribal Council to the conditions of mining, ' as laid down by the Woodward Report on Land Rights Released in June 1974, Queens­ land Mines is "all set to go" with its uranium mine at 'Narbalek' (Oenpelli), Northern Territory.

Amongst the conditions of this agreement, Queensland Mines must guarantee no damage vyill be done to any sacred tribal sites as de­ fined by the local Oenpelli people.

Queensland Mines must also wait until September 1976 (at the earliest) before be­ ginning mining operations.

We are now in the middle of the two year delay agreed to by the Aborigines and Queensland Mines. The federal government's Public Inquiry into the Environmental Impact of Uranium Mining at Ranger in the Northern Territory has begun hearings in Sydney and Inquiry members left for the Northern Terri­ tory on September 23. They are due to meet with the local people in Arnhem Land as this article goes to press, and to return to Sydney about October 9.

Queensland Mines announced in September,

settlement is east of Darwin, seven kilometres inside <he Arnhem Land border.

rtjent of shallow-minded technocrats, its dominant characteristics.

The Australian Labor Government has a 43 per cent shareholding in MKU and is therefore effectively in partnership with CRA arid R T Z . And even more intriguing is that the Beafel o f M KU comprises not only Sir Lennox Hewitt (appointed when he was head power is an unsafe energy source. of the Department of Minerals and Energy) Friends of the Earth has put the Ikata and Professor Harry Messel (Minister Connor's people in contact with the Oenpelli Abori­ advisor), but also Jack Edgerton, President of gines in the Northern Territory. The Oenpelli the Queensland Trades and Labour Council. tribe owns the land which another company, Edgerton pleaded with delegates to the ALP's Queensland Mines Ltd, wishes to exploit in Federal Conference atTerrigal in February order to fu lfil contracts made for the Ikata this year to support uranium exports: he reactor. didn't tell them that he was soon to be Mary Kathleen is controlled by the appointed to the M KU Board. multinational mining firm , Rio Tinto Zinc, Despite Edgerton's influence, a substantial through Conzinc Riotinto of Australia. number of trade unions in Queensland are in (R T Z owns 80 per cent plus of CR A, which favour of a ban on Mary Kathleen. Recently, owns 51 per cent of M KU.) R TZ is also in­ the Queensland Trade Union Congress voted volved in uranium in a big way in Canada, overwhelmingly to recommend a ban. But the South Africa and Namibia (South West Trades and Labour Council, by a narrow Africa). In South West Africa, it works in majority, rejected this motion and decided to with an illegal occupying power: South Africa defer a decision until,the Ranger Inquiry is occupies and exploits Namibia in defiance of o v e r.. . by which time Mary Kathleen will be the UN Security Council and the UN Council working. on Namibia. R TZ is an international steam­ During the week ended September 26> an roller prepared to squash anything and any­ average of six people occupied the front plaza body in its path; profit is its driving force, of the CRA.building in Collins Street, Mel­ smooth PR, financial muscle and the employ- bourne, in a day and night vigil.

T he uranium con Conzinc to Connor port to approve the Ranger iwoject, what­ ever the Inquiry recommends.

MKLI has contracts with the U.S., West Germany and Japan. In fact, all of Aust­ ralia's uranium contracts made so far (and likely to be made) are with the overdeveloped countries. Only these countries have the money and the specialists for nuclear power.

Eleven hundred tonnes from M KU are to go to the Ikata reactor in Japan. Nuclear power stations in over-crowded, heavilypolluted Japan are fought by local residents wherever they are proposed — so successfully that only 27 per cent of industry's nuclear construction plans h^ve obtained preliminary approval in the last three years.

The Ikata reactor has been delayed for several years by a we 11-organised, determined protest movement of local residents and anti­ nuclear scientists. The Ikata Lawsuit group say that the site is dangerously close to a major earthquake,fault line, the Fossa Magna, and that even without earthquakes nuclear

1974 that it would employ some of the local black people to supervise Queensland Mines' mining operation to ensure the preservation of the sacred sites. Things looked-good for Queensland Mines then, but not anymore.

The Oenpelli people have begun to realise what they let themselves in for. They realise th atfh e preservation of their sacred sites is not the whole issue in uranium mining . . . 'the Oenpelli people want to stop uranium mining.

Page 18

THE DIGGER

October 6—November 3

*

Dope to burn

No more cheap muscle in the Caribbean

by Suzanne Jonas Five hundred of Puerto Rico’s highest paid workers are entering the eighth month of a strike that is threatending the traditional image of Puerto Rico as a source of cheap labor and a tax haven for U.S. industries.

The strikers, from the island’s major cement plants of the Puerto Rican Cement Company, are the success stories of the island’s poor.

In a region where unemployment runs over 30 per cent, prices are skyrocketing and 90 per cent o f all families qualify for food stamps, these seasoned workers, mainly middle-aged or older, are the last one would expect to find involved in picket lines, let alone mass rallies, truck interceptions and police skirmishes.

The AFL-CIO, the largest U.S. made union federation, affiliated International Seafarers Union (SIU) which had successfully .broken a number Of Puerto Rican strikes in the 1960’s, is now attempting to form a parallel union within the plant and is recruiting strikebearers from the masses of unemployed workers in and around Ponce.

While initially a strike for higher wages and benefits, the struggle has now become a fight to organize and keep the union. The strikers' are

All-women’s union COPENHAGEN, DENMARK - “I like men in my private life, but as union negotiators they are not all that hot.”

That’s what the negotiator for the women’s union at the TuborgCarlsberg Breweries in Copenhagen said after their recent strike. The 800 women employed by the brewery are represented by their all-women’s union, while the 4,000 men have their own all-men’s union.

Women at the plant had tried for years to gain equal pay with the male employees. They finally form­ ed a women’s union and went on strike. When the battle was over, the women found themselves with a brand new contract — and higher pay than their male counterparts.

The men at the Tuborg-Carlsberg Breweries are now on strike. They are demanding equal pay with the women.

—Earth News

National salvation The Portuguese Catholic Church is a CIA agent, according to former CIA agent Philip Agee, author of CIA Diary. Agee claims the CIA is largely responsible for the political chaos in Portugal.

He explains that the CIA is channelling large amounts of money from the U.S. government to the conservative Catholic Church

part of a growing movement among Puerto Rican workers to organize independent Puerto' Ricobased unions free from the dom­ ination of AFL-CIO leaders, whom they have long regarded as corrupt, pro-management and subservient to the interests of mainland workers.

The movement is gaining strength at a time when light industries are leaving Puerto Rico in search of cheap labor havens in the Caribb­ ean, and several heavy industries have closed down, throwing thous­ ands into unemployment.

The owners of the cement plant are the Ferre family - who control the single most powerful financial and political empire on the island.

Luis Ferre was governor of Puerto Rico from 1968 - 72, and is a staunch advocate of statehood for Puerto Rico. His brother is mayor of Miami. His son administrates official development projects on the island. And the family’s finance ial holdings, worth $200 million, extend from South America to Europe and the U.S., ranging from cement to glass, clay, iron, asbestos, drydocks, tourism and the media.

The strike is located in Ponce, the industrial heartland of the island that supplies most of Puerto Rico’s cement and electricity and where billions of U.S.' investment

dollars are concentrated in heavy industry, especially petrochemicals.

Ponce is* crucial to. maintaining Puerto Rico’s image of a stable work force.

The Ferres React The management announced that pension payments would be cut in half and sick pay eliminated, and insisted on a no-strike clause.

After a brief attempt at negotiat­ ions in early May, the Ferres broke them off and turned to‘ classic strike-breaking tactics. They hired a U.S.-owned security firm (Security Associates) to provide scab labor and toughs to harass and intimidate the strikers (ex-employ­ ees of the firm claim they have been contracted to vandalize the strikers). And they secured access to FBI and police files on the strikers.

The Ferre family has alos spent thousands of dollars on newspaper ads, charging strike leaders with being Communist agitators bent on destroying Puerto Rico’s econom y..

The family clearly has had the backing of the FBI and the local police. A special police security force has threatened strikers and their families, and tried to bribe them to get information on the sources of their funds.

in Portugal, in order to combat the communists. Of the , 280 persons employed in the U.S. mission in Lisbon; at least 20 are CIA opera­ tives.

Agee says their purpose is the same as his was during his tenure with the agency in South America The agents have infiltrated the gov­ erning Armed Forces Movement, conducted false document and rumour campaigns, and encouraged conflict and jealousies among the Communist party leaders.

He says the CIA will intensify its Portuguese operations in the same manner it did in Chile as the only remaining way to “save” the nation.

East,” Bfig. General Franklin Tief told me, in his gruff^no-nonsense style.

But the average 19-year-old trooper of the 2nd Battalion of the 2nd ^Division — out here in the desert for the first time from Camp Lejeune, N.C. — was well aware that next January his entire bat­ talion was going on the “Med Float” joining the Navy’s Sixth Fleet for six months in the Mediter­ ranean Sea Bringing the Atlantic-based 2nd Marine Division here for its first desert warfare training is part of a strategy shift by the Corps, away from its old Pacific orientation to' wards a new emphasis on trouble spots in the oil-rich Middle East, ; ^ Georgia Straight North Africa and Persian Gulf.

A look at the Alkalai Canyon operation reveals just what the Marines’ military planners expect in an actual combat situation. The operation is a classic example of the latest in-and-out strategy: “quick deployment” for limited objectives to avoid another quagmire o f “pro­ tracted warfare” like Vietnam.

by Howard Dratch In a barren isolated corner of California lies the largest U.S. Marine Corps base in the world. Its 932 square miles gives the Corps plenty of room to shoot their big­ gest artillery, .tank guns, missiles and jet aircraft support. In.jshort, it’s a perfect place to refine the new high-technology integrated battle In Angola east and south — site concepts that U.S. Marine Corps of Krupp’s huge iron mines — planners have learned, from the quick-striking tactics of the Israeli UNITA, the predominant liberation army in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. movement - in the area, is negotiat­ But, unlike that conflict, the ing with the Konrad Adenauer Marines are refining and rearming Foundation of West Germany’s themselves to act as a amphibious Christian Democratic Party for aid. force of shock troops ready to land Lonrho, a large British mining com­ pany also active in the region, has with maximum speed from ships.

“Whatever you da, don’t report donated a private jet to UNITA’s that we’re planning to invade Libya leader Jonas Savimbi.

—Pacific News Service or preparing for war in the Middle

US “Med Float”

Jet-set guerilla

Soldiers in Colombia^ Latin America, have found a marijuana plantation 2P miles long. The sol­ diers arrested 40 peasants who said they got paid $1 a day to grow the, shit Now the soldiers will firebomb the fields from helicopters because, they say^, it’s cheaper than sending in a whole battalion for a month to clear i t

H ip-pocket news

*Army agents spied on Demo­ cratic Party and anti-war demon­ strators at the 1968 Democratic Convention. . *Secret Service men supposedly protecting Democratic candidate George McGovern spied on McGovern, workers and passed in­ formation to John Dean at Nixon’s White House. *Nixon used law PL 90-331 to employ hoards of spies and dirty tricksters without having to declare their new status.

PL 90-331 is still law, despite Senate committees that investigated Army spying scandals in 1970 and Watergate; Its deliberately vague language could still allow the U.S. government to use any federal agencies to spy on and attack Americans doesn’t like. Last one exposed was the Army — next could be the Post Office.

—Pacific Ne ws .Service

In Chile the Resistance, mainly organised by the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), has now set up tens of thousands of resist­ ance committees, each of about five members. They engage in acts of sabotage such as organised ‘sick­ You’ve heard of Disneyland; ness’, taking innacurate inventories well, how , about “Vietnamesein factories and leading windows land”? open at night for saboteurs to The Reverend Carl Mclntire, the enter. Each committee also picks archconservative fundamentalist one b an k er, industrialist or preacher, is planning a new tourist politician to harrass with letters, attraction for his complex in Cape phone calls, etc.

Canaveral, Florida.

MIR has resumed publications of Newsweek magazine reports that The Rebel, its banned paper, in Mclntire has brought about 40 ordinary and two inch square Vietnamese refugees to the sight to editions — the latter to be read with live in a re-created “Vietnamese a magnifier. village”. According to Mclntire, the —People's News Service village will be “like our boys went into during the war”.

The Reverend expalins that in addition to becoming a tourist at­ traction, the villagers will make porcelain elephants, vasers and other items “that Americans loved so well”.

As if the Vietnamese village wasn’t enough of a project, Mc­ An obscure law that made possible lntire says he also plans for another major U.S. government scandals — refugee ham let. . . for Cambodians. from massive Army spying at the 1968 and 1972 Democratic con­ — Georgia Straight ventions to the secret White House slush fund of Richard Nixon — is still' on the books. It’s called PL 90-331.

Passed as an emergency resolution within hours of the death of Robert F. Kennedy on June 6, 1968, PL 90-331 immediately authorized the Secret Service to protect all presid­ ential candidates — and paid for security arrangements at t the Kennedy funeral. . Stephen Wei, a dentist from The resolution also empowered the Secret Service to Command the Iowa USA, claims acidic foods can resources of other departments and rot your teeth as much as sugary agencies of the federal government treats do. He says the enamel pro­ in the performance of these duties. tection on teeth is damaged by too In theory, PL 90-331 put much of much citrus fruit, and by acidic the federal apparatus at the beck fumes from factories. And before and call of a relatively tiny govern­ she was caught, Patti Hearst had her teeth exposed to every American ment agency.

As a result,' the following dentist who reads the American Dental Association journal. At the happened: *A full-time war room called the FBI’s request, the journal ran two Directorate of Military support was pages on-how to identify Patti’s teeth. set up.

Napalm springs

Catch

P L 90-331

Dental detectives

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October 6—November 3

Page 19

THE DIGGER

Commie Ky

Pacific), who had originally ordered the inspection tour in preparation for a visit by top civilian Defense Department official Dr Carl Walske, then in charge of inventory, supply and control of all atomic weapons

by G. Guy Gibson deployed by the U.S. Beach then The U.S. Defence Department conspired with Bonesteel and Ltd. has hushed up a six-month investi­ Gen. Harry H. Critz, commander of gation into charges that the Army I Corps in South Korea, to hide the dan g ero u sly mishandled U.S. deficiencies from Walske. The nuclear warheads in South Korea cover-up included doctoring books, and th a t th re e high-ranking juggling warhead serial numbers and American officers conspired to hide tem porarily stationing infantry it from their superiors. troops around certain nuclear sites.

The probe was originally A p p a re n tly , these stop-gap triggered by a letter of inquiry measures proved effective. When Dr o u tlin in g these charges ' from Walski conducted his tour, all MSAs Wisconsin Congressman Les Aspin were able to show a full and proper to Assistant to the Secretary of inventory of weapons. If a site was Defense for Atomic Energy D.R. Short of nuclear warheads they Cotter in 1973. would be trucked in by convoy Aspin’s letter charged that Gen. during the night while Walske slept.

Charles H. Bonesteel III, Com­ Warheads no longer carried on in­ mander of, the 8th Army, had un­ ventory sheets were removed and covered startling breaches in stored elsewhere with little or no nuclear weapons security and in­ security. At one MSA that lacked a ventory control while inspecting permanent military garrison, in­ South Korea’s nuclear storage sites fantry men were camped in tents.

(M aximum Security Areas or Although officials told Dr Walske a MSAs) in 1968. Some of the MSAs permanent barrack was planned, it were missing warheads listed on the was never built. Once Walski left inventory control sheets. Others th ese stop-gap measures were contained warheads no longer in­ removed!, and the precarious cluded in the U.S. Army nuclear security arrangements remained un­ arsenal. And at many of the MSAs, changed.

South Korean troops outnumbered A copy of the findings was, American troops by eight to one — however, sent to a House Armed raising the possiblity that anther Services Subcommittee and placed power could seize U.S. nuclear in a secret file.' weapons.

Congressman Les Aspin’s office Bonesteel reported these find­ now says he may move to seek ings to Gen. Dwight Beach, com­ declassification of the report. mander of USARPAC (U.S. Army Pacific News Service

W here’s the bomb?

Ex-President Ky of South Vietnam is planning to start a collective farm, with the help of John Wayne, in Arizona. He claims that collec­ tive farming is the only chance Vietnamese refugees have to estab­ lish themselves in America. Strange words from the very man who opposed collectivisation in his own country. John Wayne starred in the ill-fa te d movie, “The Green Berets”, about the heroic role of the American special forces.in Viet­ nam. | —Release Newsletter

How do you rate US corporations on keeping profits at a reasonable level?

How do you rate US corporations on keeping down the cost of living?

How do you rate US corporations on pre­ venting unemploy­ ment and economic recession?

negative —84%

negative — 69%

negative —75%

positive —12% ’

positive — I

not sure -7%

^ ^ _ n o t sure

□ Would worker-owned com-' parties improve the economy or make things worse?

Profits are the major goal of US corpora­ tions, even if it means unemploy­ ment and inflation.

What kind of corporation would you prefer to work for?

RL.ov top mission PHNOM PENH, CAMBODIA - The new Cambodian government is re­ opening its country by inviting Thirtf World nations to set up diplo­ matic missions. The Palestinian Lib­ eration Organisation heads the list of missions invited.

The P.L.O. have been told they can move into the old Israeli Em­ bassy building.

•' —Georgia Straight

Both the Democrat and Republican par­ ties favor big corpo­ rations rather than the average worker.

Would consumer representation on corporate boards do more harm or more good?

To improve the economy, do you favor major changes, mi­ nor adjustments or no chang­ es in the economic system?

minor adjustments —37%

no change — 17% not sure 5%

Bikeways “A workbook for community planners” is how the publishers describe th e Urban Bikeway Design Atlas, a 120'page collection of ideas on bikes put together in Washing­ ton DC. Topics include bicycle s a f e ty , b ic y c list co m m u ter facilities, a bibliography and questionnaires. For copies write to Urban Bikeway Design Atlas, W20-002, MIT, Cambridge, Mass.

02139, USA.

People poll to revolution WASHINGTON —A recently released poll, commissioned by the People’s Bicentennial Commission, focussed on issues relating to the country’s economic system and possible alternatives. The nationwide telephone sur­ vey of 1,209 Americans was conducted the week of July 25,1975.

The PBC commented: “The poll indicates that a hidden constituency — a new majority in favor of bold and sweeping economic changes —has quietly emerged in America and our nation’s leaders are totally unaware of its existence.”

Interpol’s nasty nazi links

by Peter Holden Top ex-Nazis, leaders of the German Gestapo arid the Nazi SS, have held key jobs in Interpol as recently as 1973.

Interpol, pictured as a master sleuth of international organized crime, is actually not a detective agency but a kind of super-sophisti­ cated electronic intelligence net­ work linking some 120 member nations — including the U.S. — that cooperate in tracking down persons wanted by police.

Interpql today regularly receives confidential information on U.S. citizens from U.S. law enforcement agencies.

U.S. State Department docu­ ments about Interpol (International Criminal Police Organization) —de­ classified earlier this year — reveals that: % * Interpol’s president from 1968 to 1971 (and German representa­ tive until 1973) was Paul Dickopf, who until he fled Germany before the end of the war, was SS officer 337259. Dickopf died September 19,1973. * Contrary to Interpol testimony before Congress that the agency closed down during World War II, Interpol — founded in Vienna in 1923 — was taken over by the Third Reich in 1938, and function­ ed throughout the war as part of its intelligence and police apparatus.

Its presidents during these years were Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS intelligence service, and Dr Ernst Kaltenbrunner,a Gestapo chief who was later hanged at Nurenburg for war crimes. * Interpol’s war-time headquarters in Wannsee, just outside Berlin,

hosted a conference, called by Hey­ drich in June 1942, for 15 top Nazis where the “final solution to the Jewish problem” —mass execu­ tion —was worked out. * Interpol was reconstituted, after the war, by F. E. Louwage, who served on the Nazi Interpol staff under Kaltenbrunner and headed Hitler’s Belgium political police.

Louwage served as Interpol presi­ dent from 1946 to 1950, running the office on funds left over from wartime Interpol activities.

Today, Interpol — recognized by the United Nations as a legitimate, though private, intergovernmental organization — receives direct fund­ ing: from the U.S.‘Treasury Departmerit and has its U.S. offices in the Treasury Building. Its present direc­ tor, Louis Sims, is on loan to the agency from the Secret Service.

Interpol stores copies of all in­ formation it transmits to and from member nations in its world head: quarters in Paris. In 1972, these central records contained over 1.5 million files on individuals, accord­ ing to Interpol chief Louis Sims.

The same records also contain Hitler’s Jewish files, housed at In­ terpol’s Wannsee Headquarters and transferred to Paris after the war.

The first post-war U.S. connec­ tion to Interpol was made by form­ er FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in 1946, without the knowledge of the U.S. government.

Hoover accepted an invitation from Louwage to attend Interpol’s 1946 annual convention secretly, and was elected the agency’s vicepresident Then-Secretary of State Dean Acheson learned of Hoover’s action the next year, when Interpol renewed its invitation to the U.S. and referred to Hoover’s role at the

1946 convention and his status as vice-president.

At this point, both Acheson and Clark appear to have accepted the FBI membership in Interpol as a fait accompli. Hoover continued on as Interpol’s vice-president until 1950, when he angrily withdrew the FBI from Interpol after learning that Czechoslovakia, one of its member nations, was using it, to track down refugees who had fled to West Germany.

The fate of Interpol’s position in the U.S. remained in limbo for the next eight' years until it was trans­ ferred to the Treasury Department at the request of Myles Ambrose.

For years, private groups like the World Jewry Congress have repeat­ edly accused Interpol of refusing to cooperate in any effort to. track down Nazi w ar' criminals. In re­ sponse, the agency cites its charter which prohibits it from pursuing “political prisoners”. At the same time, it has justified the preponder­ ance of Jewish names it has on file by the claim in its official publica­ tion that “Jewish offenders have a preference for offences which re­ quire the use of craftiness”. Critics charge such statements are symp­ tomatic of Interpol’s strongly antiJewish bias, and its long history as a haven for Nazis and Nazi sympa­ thizers.

Peter Holden, an editor of Pacific News Service, researched the Interpol story in part through files provided by the Chur'ch of Scientology's National Commission on Law Enforcement and Social Justice. The Commission was the private group which originally requested, and obtained, declassification of the U.S. State Department documents on Inter­ pol.

NEW THEATRE PRESENTS

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Page 20

October 6—November 3

THE DIGGER

CJ.A.medals so secret yoncant wear them

by Jim Hougan . Ever since I finished second in the East Los Angeles Pre-Teen Duncan Yo-Yo Regionals (1954), an achievement wholly ignored by the working press, I’ve been (mildly) .interested in esoteric awards. I was intrigued, therefore, to learn from apostate spook Victor Marchetti that the CIA bestows secret medals on its Operatives.

Hidden honour , is, after all, a-strange notion. To receive a medal one may not wear—at a ceremony that cannot be .reported—in recognition of achievements that are (in the strictest sense, at least) unspeakable, is, well, damned odd.

Resolving to track down the medals, and perhaps get a glimpse of them, I began with a daring ploy: I called the CIA and asked; “Medals? Of course,” the spokesman said. “ Come on out and we’ll show them to you.”

“Don’t gimme that,” I shot back. “I know you’ve got them!”

The voice on the other end of-the line seemed startled. “Well, yes,” he said, “In fact, I think" we’ve got some photo­ graphs around, if that would help. You could have those.”

“Photos?”

“Mmmmmm. We like to take our own.

Fact of the matter is, some of the boys here are a little goosey about visitors taking pictures inside the building. You understand.” “ Are we talking about the same medals?”

“I think so,” the spokesman said.

“There are five. And a medallion.”

“Right! At least, I think that’s right. In fact, I haven’t any idea. But the point is, it’s my understanding that these medals have never been seen outside the Agency.”

III

“Yes,” the spokesman said. “I suppose that’s true.”

“Well, how come?”

“I don’t know. Now that you mention it, I guess no one ever asked before.”

“Oh.” “If you’d like to come OUT, we’d be happy to show you the medals and med­ allion. And the CIA Book of Honor.” “ Book of Honor?”

“Yes. It’s a book with 31 stars. Beside each star is the name of an officer who demonstrated exceptional courage and, uh, met death.”

“Thirty-one stars, huh?” (I was writing furiously.)

“Yes, but 11 are anonymous.” “ANONYMOUS STARS!?”

“Mmmmmmn. But come on out and we’ll explain all that.” **** One does not, of course, wander the Agency’s corridors looking for someone.

On the contrary, after entering the build­ ing the visitor is immediately directed to a mezzanine area where he or she fills out a pink slip and waits for an escort. In lieu of a photo-ident, visitors are given a large tag for their lapels. It says “VISITOR: MUST,BE ACCOMPANIED AT ALL TIMES.” , My escort (think of David Niven) was apologetic. The Book of Honor had dis­ appeared. Well, not “disappeared”, actually, it had been removed.

“You see, after you called,” the spokes­ man said, “ We were looking at the book and, uh, one of the names in it shouldn’t have been. I mean, it belonged there alright, but it was supposed to have been anonymous: just a star without a name beside it. So we had to take it upstairs and get the name removed. It should be back in a while.” \

The three highest awards—the Except­ ional Service Medallion, the Intelligence Star and the Distinguished Intelligence Cross (all of which involve > heroism, injury and/or death)—are usually presen­ ted by the Director himself and, when presented to a member of the Clandes­ tine Services, are generally returned! to the Director’s safe after the ceremony.

“Sometimes,” the spokesman noted, “the guy’s wife doesn’t even know about the award.”

The Career Intelligence Medal, the Intelligence Medal of Merit and the Distinguished Intelligence Medal are, on the other hand, most often presented to retiring employees in recognition of past services and to analysts of particular brilliance.

“People at the Mint, and here at the Agency, collaborated on the design, but of eourse, we can’t say to whom they’ve been awarded, or why. Some of the men are still alive, and so are some of those who helped them. Actually, I can give you one name. Kelley Johnson, the man who designed the U-2 got a Distinguished Intelligence Medals. He was at Lockheed at the time, I believe.”

I t was time to look at the Bopk of Honor.

The Book was just as the* spokesman said it was. Thirty-one stars, twenty names and eleveri blank spaces beside an equal number of stars. 1961 "was the biggest single year (five stars). The first star (anonymous) was given in 1951.

As I looked at the Book my escort gestured to a colleague, an assistant to the Director. “I see the Book’s back,” said the second man, pausing to look.

“Did they change it?”

The escort looked surprised. “Well, uh, I don’t know. I can’t tell. Can you?”

The second man peered closely at the •Book, “No, I can’t tell. It looks just the same.”

The two men stared at the Book again and .then turned to me. “Can you tell?”

I shook my head.

They looked at the Book again, and then back at me. “ Do you, uh, recognize any of the names?”

“No,” I said, “not one.” “ Good,” the spokesman said. “Now where was I? Oh, yes, the medals „ . . ” -.

-H ARPER'S WEEKLY

G ood o f boys n girl

TR U E STO R Y A D V E R T IS E M E N T

This is a true story - no names have been changed. It's about the pioneer days of The Digger when spades were clubs and diamonds were trumps. They were balmy times on The Digger riverboat with 'Scobie' Cleary at the helm and the smell of salt lentils rising from "Duke" Frazier's kitchen. Every night was party night. Champagne flowed like Murray mud. Deck chairs were stacked, Salads were turned overboard, onions were diced away. Halcyon and bravado, dancing the night away. Ah . . . but those times have gone, departed, left. It's finished. Weeds on the mainsail. They don't need the old rig no more - mechanisat­ ion has won out. No-one wants to know about the old times anymore. The old times sit out on the porch swapping yarns of days of yore, while the new, sleek Digger hydrafoil zooms p ast. . .

Gone, maybe, but not forgotten. You can read about them in a .series of Digger Memoirs, written from the old folkies home in Yass. The General title of the series is 'Earthy Digger Years', and so far there are three volumes.

Volume One, by Jennifer Lois Brown is subtitled Marsupial Wrestling ($1.95 rec) It's the tender story of a young stoat who undergoes transmammalian surgery, and the aftermath - years of struggle as it leads the stoats and larikeets of the forest to eventual victory over the oppressors.

Volume Two is by Colin Talbot titled Massive Road Trauma ($2.50 rec) describes the fall of the stoat to a plague of rats with lasar beam eyes. The parallels with real society are obvious. Central character is the rat called 'Jane' Final in the trilogy is Garrie Hutchinson's Terror Australis ($1.95 rec) a work which takes on where E.A.Poe left off.

A plague of wombats craving for personhood invade the author's garden and desecrate the onion patch.

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Wanted sometimes - Garrie H. occupation poet and person.

Wanted Alive mainly - Jennifer B. Occupation poet arid rocker.

From the Outback Press mug shot file.

Not Wanted at all - Colin T. occupation voyeur.

October 6—November 3

Page 21

THE DIGGER

Krazy Kat first appeared as a member o f “The Dingbat Family”, a cartoon situation comedy, on June 20, 1910. On July 26 o f that year the cat is hit by a rock thrown by a mouse, and there-in was the genesis o f Krazy Kat and Ignatz the Mouse.

The cartoon was drawn and written by George Herriman.

/

Page 22

THE DIGGER

Gayzette

by Martin Smith All gay information (female and male) should be sent to Box 4, Wentworth Build­ ing, University o f Sydney, 2006.

The federal government will not enact a “controversial” ‘draft law code for the A.C.T. which would have liberalised controls on, among other things, male homosexual acts.

Prime Minister Whitlam fold parliament in September that this draft law code was the province of the A.C.T. legislative assemb­ ly and that his government would take the lead of the previous government on the mat­ ter, which was to do nothing.

The ordinance has been strongly opposed by catholic bishops and in the face of this it looks like the Whitlam cabinet didn’t have the guts to go ahead with it.

But not so the S.A. parliament which, on September 17, made homosexual acts be­ tween consenting adults legal. The move was led by Labor MP Peter Duncan. * * * Catherine Johns is compiling a book on lesbianism in Australia and needs contribu­ tions to make this book a success.

All contributions must reach Catherine

by November 1 and should be sent to her c/- PO Box 410, Springvale, 3171. * * * Three recent actions in England have provoked The Guardian newspaper to claim “ It is quite clear that Labor has it in for homosexuals.”

First was a police raid on a London printer where the complete September issue of Him Exclusive magazine was seized. Then two new. common law charges were brought against a contact magazine for homosexuals called Gay Circle. This was followed by a raid on a London bookshop during which 3000 pounds worth of gay publications were taken by police. * * * The second International Gay Rights Congress, planned for 1976 in Puerto. Rico, will not be going ahead.

In the meantime, I’ve been exchanging corréspondance with Robert Osborn in New York, international co-ordinator for the next Congress (whenever it might be held) and he’s interested to know the views of Australian gays on the subject. Well? * * * By the way ... . . . . In case you don’t already know, Senator

Albert Field, the Bjelke-Petersen stooge, believes “ we shouldn’t talk about homo­ sexuals. If you bring them into parliament, and try to legalise them, you’re going to make more people aware of them and pub­ licise them. Before, you never used to hear about homosexuality —I’d prefer it that way.” . . . Apparently we’ve got ourselves another Duncan case, this time in Perth with the bringing in of a “not guilty” verdict against 20-year old Morris Jeisman who ad­ mitted fatally assaulting William John Evans (33) who’d made a pass at him . , . The September 8 issue of Time magazine carried a lengthy feature on gay liberation in the USA. The cover of the U.S. edition was of gay airman Sergeant Leonard Matlovich, while the South Pacific/Australian edition had a non-gay cover. Why?.. . . In Ottowa, Canada, the third National Gay Rights Con­ ference was held late in June.,Over 170 delegates from 30 Canadian gay organisa­ tions attended and set up a National Gay Rights Coalition .. . Due for release later this year is the movie of the gay best-seller The Frontrunner. Actors are Paul Newman and Richard Thomas : . . The Louisiana State Legislature has voted for the death penalty for people convicted of homo­ sexual rape. Apparently the law: was pro­ posed to stop prison rapes . . . The U.S. National Organisation of Women (NOW) and the American Civil Liberties Union have decided to give active support in lobbying Congress for gay rights legislation .. .

Going Down With Janis, by Peggy Caserta, reveals the lesbianism of Janis Joplin .. . The NZ Parliament has thrown out a private member’s bill which sought to legalise homo­ sexual acts in private between men oyer the age of 20 .; Anro Press (new York) pub­ lished in September a collection of 54 books and two periodicals called Homosexuality: Lesbians And Gay Men In Society, History And Literature . . . The American Medical Association has gone on record against criminal laws penalising homosexuality . . .

A Danish parliamentary commission has re­ commended that the age of consent be lowered to 14 for both heterosexuals and homosexuals . .. Polish venerologists, in response to an opinion survey, recommend prison, labour camps, police surveillance and fines for homosexuals. Results of the survey were presented to the World Health Organi­ sation by Jan Kelus of the Institute of Venereology in Warsaw . . . Probably the best novel with a gay theme (what it means to be the parents of a gay) to be published for some time, is Consenting Adult by Laura Z. Hobson (William Heinemann) . . . CAMP members living in Mt Isa have interviewed both their state and federal MPs and have been assured of their support in any homo­ sexual law reform bills which come before Parliament.

October 6—November 3

Jessie W inchester done spoke no fancy riddles - by Dale Brown Around the time that the American West Coast movement went static and blew up at Altamont, young Americans had resettled right across the mid-west whilst they stillhad the opportunity of boom-times to pio­ neer for the Real American earth garden.

They didn’t need the crazy jive beat of city music; they found music and musicians waiting for them in the deep heart of American Country and Western, and the mountain music of folk rock and river blues.

There were people here with a more pass­ ive idealism, like John Fahey (the 12 string transfiguration of Mark Twain), Gordon Lightfoot and Jessie Winchester. Jackson Browne gave birth to the post-B'yrds band, the Eagles, and there was a boom of bands from America to Goose Creek Sypiphony, who’d play for the good times, or for a jug of green liquor.

The music was very beautiful, and it be­ came easy to erase the scars of unsettled scores that had been left behind: the family life, the myth of the great society, the violence of urban alienation. With stars in their eyes like a (Jose of swamp sickness, American youth rested in the valleys and mountain hideaways to lick the wounds of a defeated middle class illusion, whole hori­ zons from San Francisco to New York, from the sounds of banda born in that fever like the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish.

So they found the milk and honey Ameri­ can blues of Jessie Winchester.

I probably wouldn’t have made any point of this, but for the fact that Jessie Win­ chester peat me to it very early in the pro­ ceedings on that magnolia sweet evening with him at Melbourne’s Town Hall. With some crack about “politics ain’t bein’ what we’re here for” , he led into his single politi­ cal statement for the night, some American

Legion anthem about Lester Pearson, Teddy Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy conceivably being friends of the Working people, ap­ parently because of their benign and under­ standing tolerance of ignorance and poverty.

At first I thought he was trying to be satiri­ cal: none such hokum —Jesse done spoke no fancy riddles. I didn’t go there to hear a redneck whistle dixie: instead he made John Denver sound like a Public Enemy.

Jessie Winchester hails from Nashville, Tennessee, not exactly a city of fire and light, race riots and ghetto shooLouts.

Nashville has just lived along, and let things live. That’s its style. The oft spoken of Southern manner of hospitality and openhandedness, lined with the bitterness of white bigotry, is woven sensitively into Winches­ ter’s lyrics and imagery. What you can see is clearer than a country mile. I had expected him to do more of the guitar work, but he was satisfied to leave it to a young Aust­ ralian, whom you could say stole the show with clear and delicate distinction in master­ ing Winchester’s difficult chord work.

A good selection was drawn from his most commerciallysuccessful and available album in Australia, 3rd Down — 110 To Go. These pieces-were chosen to familiarize the audience with the shape of Winchester’s gentle country style and clear open-heartedness. Show business is not his style at all — rather, a very unusual intimacy.

THE RECORD COLLECTOR Anti Inflation Sellout

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Sheet Music to "The Ballad Of Neddie, The Hound o f the Underground" Neddie was a doberman and Hatpin's only friend Together they ranged the halls of power The system for to bend.

And many a devious minister Threw a guilty furtive glance A t the rambling twitching Halpo And the dog in the school boy's pants.

For it was Hatpin's plan to wear disguise False nose made from galoshes While his dog wore tight blue trousers A cinch to fool the bosses.

But this inspired plan proved noble Ned's undoing He gasped a last sagacious breath in Cardigan Street Some say from over wooing..

They said a beast lived in that dark street A politico and pariah Who swilled and cursed at the Albion With journos, pimps and liars.

'Tho Halpin blames the C IA , the KGB and Trotski, But at Annabels, soft Lennie said 'Twas that beast of Cardigan Street That made poor Neddy dead.

Ned's silky pants were ripped and torn Lying next his favourite dolly Dressed like a little choir boy In his hand a boiled lolly.

It was the famous Jack Leadbelly Who lead investigation Helped by his fawning finger-man Whose name means liturgation* They buried Ned before he got to Ford And now we're one Maoist fewer He's gone-to meet the.Canine Lord Buried neath the beasts' manure. * Oblique but safe.

RECORD C O LLECTO R

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Page 23

THE DIGGER

October 6—November 3

AUSTRALIA.S O NLY FEM INIST BOOKSHOP 204 ROSE ST. EASTWOOD. 858 3563.

COMPLETE RANGE OF FEMINIST & ALTERNATIVE LITERA TURE. IMPOR TED FEMINIST RECORDS AND MAGS. Mail -orders supplied, phone or write for free book list.

Gore Vidal's M Y R A .B R E K E N R ID G E plus T H E NOSE and.R EFLEC TIO N S (Austn.).

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pram factory 3 S 5 d r u m m o n d sfc c a r l t o n

The Medical and Legal Mafia

Sat 11th, Sun 12th Oct at 2 pm:

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Catalogues

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Sat 18th and Sun 19th Oct: C H IL D R E N 'S SESSION - JO N O TH A N L IV IN G S T O N E S E A G U L L and SEBASTIAN

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