Which protests belong to 1967
Sydney’s protests against the Vietnam War are often remembered as a single wave, but they came in stages, and the best-known events did not take place in 1967. The loud street confrontation during President Lyndon Johnson’s visit was in October 1966. The large Moratorium rallies were in 1970 and 1971. Several draft-resister cases belong to the mid-1960s. In between, 1967 appears to have been a year of steady organising on campuses and in churches and unions, without one famous set-piece demonstration that can be dated with confidence. This article separates what belongs to each period and does not invent events to fill the gap.
Why conscription mattered
Australia sent military advisers to Vietnam from 1962. As the American Vietnam War escalation of 1965 deepened, in April 1965 the government of Robert Menzies announced it would send a battalion of combat troops. It had already introduced selective conscription in the National Service Act of 1964: young men turning twenty were chosen for two years of service by a ballot based on birth dates, and from 1965 those called up could be sent to Vietnam. Like the American Selective Service draft, it fell on the young but, unlike it, it was a lottery from the start.
That made the war a domestic issue for families and students in a way that the earlier commitment of regular troops had not been. The Labor opposition, led first by Arthur Calwell and from February 1967 by Gough Whitlam, opposed the war and conscription to different degrees and at different times, and the Liberal-Country Party government, which Harold Holt had led since January 1966, defended both. The size of the Australian force grew through the later 1960s, peaking at roughly 8,000 in 1968, and more than 500 Australians died in the war.
Johnson’s visit, October 1966
When Johnson toured Australian cities in October 1966, Sydney was where the protest was most heated. Crowds lined the route; some supporters of the war cheered, and many protesters shouted and sat in the road. New South Wales Premier Robert Askin was reported to have told the driver of the official car, in a remark that became famous, to “ride over the bastards”. Many accounts give this version, but the exact words have been debated.
The visit mattered because it brought the war to the streets of a major city, caused argument about the police and the right to demonstrate, and made protest seem acceptable to people who had not previously joined. It also meant that Sydney entered 1967 with protest groups already experienced and an established opposition to the government’s policy.
Draft resisters
From 1965, a small number of young men refused to register for national service or to submit to induction. Some were conscientious objectors on religious or moral grounds, and others opposed the war specifically. Cases were heard in courts in several cities, Sydney among them. A few were fined or imprisoned, and a number went into hiding. The cases were publicised in the press and by supporters, including the Save Our Sons groups of women who had formed in several cities from 1965 and who vigorously defended the resisters. The Australian anti-conscription movement that grew from these cases later included public acts of defiance during the early 1970s. In Sydney the resisters’ trials gave the movement something concrete to rally around, particularly among students.
Universities
The University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales had active student councils, and student newspapers, debates and meetings were an important part of political life. Teach-ins, petitions and pickets were typical antiwar tactics of the period in Australia as elsewhere. Student opposition to the war was visible by 1966, and by 1967 it was part of a wider student activism about university conditions and politics that reflected changes overseas.
It is worth remembering that opinion was divided. Polling and election results in the mid-1960s generally showed the government’s war policy had considerable support, and the Liberal-Country Party coalition won the November 1966 federal election by a large margin. Student activists were a minority of students, and students as a whole were a small part of the population.
What can and cannot be said about 1967
Several points about 1967 are reasonably safe:
- Protest continued in Sydney at a local level, through meetings, vigils, leafleting and smaller marches, and organisations that had been established in 1965 and 1966 kept going.
- The war’s politics were changing. Whitlam became Labor leader in February 1967, and the party gradually moved toward a firmer stance against conscription.
- Australian forces were fighting in Phuoc Tuy province, and casualties made the war more visible at home.
- In December 1967 Prime Minister Holt disappeared while swimming near Melbourne, which dominated the news at the end of the year and led to John Gorton becoming prime minister in January 1968.
What cannot be said is that 1967 saw a single mass Sydney rally comparable to the 1966 street confrontation or the 1970 Moratorium. Some sources attach 1970-style imagery to 1967, and it is better to be wary of that.
The Moratorium era, 1970-71
The Vietnam Moratorium campaign organised the largest demonstrations of the war. The first, on 8 May 1970, drew large crowds in the capital cities. Estimates for Melbourne were around 70,000, and Sydney’s crowd was also reported in the tens of thousands. Further Moratorium days were held in June and September 1970 and in June 1971. They were more mainstream than earlier protests, with church leaders, unionists and politicians taking part alongside students. Their tactics and coalition-building reflected what the earlier movement had learned, as with the international antiwar protests elsewhere.
Australian troop numbers fell from 1970 and Australian involvement ended in 1972. Whitlam’s Labor government, elected in December 1972, ended conscription and released those imprisoned for resisting it.
Reading the sources
Because Sydney’s protest history is spread across a decade, accounts often blur dates. When a source says “the 1967 Sydney protests” it usually means the movement in general. For specific claims, check whether the event belongs to 1966, 1967 or 1970-71, and treat figures for crowd sizes as approximate.