I have written many book reviews before, but this is the first time I have ever reviewed a memoir, Rowan Cahill’s Cold War Kid: Resisting the Vietnam War. There is an added layer of responsibility that comes with the job – it is one thing to attack an academic text for theoretical or empirical shortcomings, but quite another to pass judgment on a person’s account of their own life. This is doubly so when that person is a friend and mentor. In the spirit of the radical history Rowan calls for in the book, this review makes no pretences about cold, dispassionate objectivity. There will no doubt be reviews aplenty in that vein down the road. No, I have approached the text as the colourful story of a devoted activist, a text which, in detailing the possibilities, limitations and costs of radical politics in the 1960s and 1970s, speaks powerfully to the contemporary scene.
As anyone within the academy would know, a run-of-the-mill book review of a scholarly text largely follows a formula; foreground the text, recount for the reader the material covered in the various chapters, highlight some strengths and weaknesses, before coming to an instrumental conclusion as to its future prospects. It took all of about five minutes to realise that a similar approach in writing this review was a non-starter. Rowan crafts a wonderful historical tapestry in this text, guiding the reader through the back block forests and watercourses of Sydney’s upper North Shore that he trod as a young boy with his father; standing at attention in the school yard listening to the militaristic stylings of the principal; over the seas on a 50-foot motor sailer from Broken Bay to Newcastle with a group of young men on the cusp of adulthood; on the top of a police Mini-Minor commandeered by protesting students in the fevered atmosphere of the University of Sydney in the late 1960s; inside the office of the Communist Party of Australia, meeting both fellow leftists and the malevolent figure of Fred Longbottom, the head of NSW Police Special Branch; to a small, ramshackle but happy abode south of Sydney with his new wife Pam. To try and retell this history here is sure to be but a pale imitation of the original, so I am not even going to attempt it. It is a history that must be read directly, in the words of the person who lived it.
What I do intend on doing in this review is to pull out the themes that made a particular impression on me, both personally and as frames through which we can draw broader political and ethical conclusions. One of the most critical of these themes pertains to the nature of activism and how it can be best pressed in the pursuit of meaningful social change. Early in the text, Rowan describes the path to leftism he embarked upon, spurred by his national service call-up in 1965, but one he had perhaps inadvertently already been walking: ‘In my case, a cultural newcomer to the Left and not part of any family leftism, I was unencumbered politically, free to graze and draw on many sources, creating a leftist coat of many colours’ (p. 82). Slightly later, he adds ‘my leftist politics were multi-sourced, not rigidly ideological, and I worked with anyone or any outfit prepared to accept me and my skills on that basis’ (p. 95). Such a cosmopolitan ideological outlook sees Rowan variously join the Australian Labor Party (admittedly at the behest of left wing colleagues in an effort to drag the party to the left), become part of the editorial board of the Communist Party periodical Australian Left Review, work with progressive religious figures such as Professor Charles Birch, and rub shoulders with the progressive lawyers who would help him register as a conscientious objector. I have no doubt that to more doctrinaire thinkers, both of the time and contemporaneously, such intellectual latitude might appear promiscuous, a function of not following some predetermined ideological line. I equally have no doubt that such objections are as damaging today as they must have been back then (a reality Rowan alludes to at various points in the book). The Left today still has its schisms and sectarianism, manifested in a willingness to stifle debate and impugn motives in the face of disagreement. The far more preferable form of activism Rowan engaged in seeks ‘commonalities within…diversity…if we avoid the quick leap to judgment, the quick resort to labels, we can detect nuances and common values’ (p. 202). It actually provides the critical mass of forces needed to change the world.
Relatedly, I found Rowan’s discussion of the scope of activism inclusive and heartening. One of the most powerful conclusions he comes to is that activism is not an “all-or-nothing” game; rather,
‘[b]eing individuals, some will be able to do more than others, and some will be able to do what others cannot. Activism is not a contest, and one size does not fit all.
Activism can be done individually, or collectively. Some will work on small canvasses, others on large ones; and there will be many ways of going about it, understanding that contexts, opportunities, and circumstances are factors shaping activist responses’ (p. 199).
These lines were manna for me personally. Like many I’m sure, I often find myself feeling guilty that I am not activist enough. Sure, I go on strike, contribute to union affairs, do research informed by a desire to advance the interests of the working class etc, but at the same time, I have a wife and two young children, love going surfing and try to enjoy life as much as I can. There is thus a sense of imposter syndrome, a sense that unless you are sacrificing everything for your activism you are not a “true” activist. If anyone is entitled to this view, it is Rowan, given the steep costs he paid in the course of his activism (including numerous arrests, a conviction under the Obscene and Indecent Publications Act related to some frankly PG images in honi soit, and interactions with thuggish cops and ASIO spooks). The fact that he doesn’t, that he sees activism instead as a broad mosaic of individuals’ interests, needs and capacities, is a powerfully affective vision. I was left heartened by this acknowledgement that, whilst everyone can of course do more, what they do is still enough.
Another theme which stands out in the book is Rowan’s inspiring account of agency. Whilst this subject comes into its own in the epilogue, it actually functions as a thread binding the entire text together. Again, at risk of seeming self-focussed, this account spoke directly to an internal theoretical debate I have been engaged in regarding the concept of class. In particular, coming from the stable of structural Marxism, I’ve been tussling with different, and sometimes competing, ways of plotting the class structure. Are classes defined purely economically, or do political and ideological determinations enter into that definition? Where does one draw the boundaries between the working class and the middle classes? What do we make of workers in political and ideological apparatuses, like the police or government bureaucrats? I think these are important questions to ask, even though I am increasingly of the view there is no definitive answer. However, there is a danger in getting bogged down in structural categories, particularly where they are divorced from the heat and coarseness of the concrete class struggle. Rowan’s work is a potent antidote to such an abstract mode of thinking. It is clear that, underneath the practical eclecticism of Rowan’s politics, there is a hard core of solid materialist thinking (evinced, for example, in the diagnosis that the Labor party under Whitlam had to be supported due to its anti-conscriptionist and anti-Vietnam War stance). Nevertheless, this theoretical matrix is always a tool of understanding pressed into the service of actual social change, rather than an end in itself. Rowan’s notion of agency is critical here. He notes, ‘individuals have agency; what counts is their compliance/complicity or otherwise. The greatest evils and abnormalities in history come down, in the end, to the decisions individuals make, or do not make’ (p. 200). Seen through this lens, perhaps the question is less what class position someone occupies, as important as this may be; rather, it is the question of how the agents occupying those positions exploit the contradictions, obscurities and choices that are intrinsic to those positions. The whole book attests to reading history through such a lens. Certainly, given Rowan’s background, complete as it is with a father who served in the fascist New Guard movement, there were powerful forces pushing him to either a reactionary or broadly disengaged political perspective. The intervening of historical circumstances, namely the dreaded “death lottery” through which Rowan faced conscription and service in the Vietnam War, obviously represents a structural force of great power. However, what followed subsequently was the result of real, active historical agency – a refusal to play the role of soldier and executor of imperialism seemingly ordained by history. In today’s conjuncture, what with the re-emergence of fascism, militarism and the deployment of increasingly sophisticated technologies of surveillance and control, it can be easy to despair of this capacity for agency. Rowan’s story is a testament to the fact that such circumstances are neither total nor totally determining – the capacity for action/inaction can never be wholly removed from the individual.
The last theme I wish to explore is one which many might be tempted to disregard as ephemeral, but which I view as critical – the role of literature as an active political and ethical force in the book. The text is replete with lessons drawn from a legion of authors, including Thomas Paine, Frank Hardy, Bertrand Russell, Walt Whitman and Joshua Slocum, to name but a few. Rowan’s is not a world of arid Marxist-Leninist scholasticism or the cloying cultural cringe of post-World War II Australia, but one animated by the original and creative power of the writer. No simple cultural superstructure reproducing an economic base here – rather, works of literature provided a framework through which Rowan developed his ethical sense of the world and his taste for actively intervening to change it. One example will suffice. In a touching vignette related early in the text, Rowan revisits his old copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, noting that the only mark he had made in the text pertained to the poem To the States:
‘To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States
Resist much, obey little.
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city, of this
earth, ever afterward resumes its liberty’ (p. 70, italics in original).
‘Rest much, obey little’ – in a sense, the text reads as a flower germinating from this literary seed, embedding a kind of ethical and political sensibility at the core of the memoir.
Taking this lead from Rowan, I will conclude here by drawing upon John Steinbeck, an author not mentioned in the text but one whose literature is very much in keeping with its spirit. In his magisterial East of Eden, Steinbeck notes how the entirety of our lives are wrapped up in a single story, the clash of good and evil. At the end of our lives, we are called to account: ‘A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well – or ill?’ As I mentioned at the start of this review, I make no claim to cold, dispassionate objectivity here, but I believe that the audience likely to reach for and read this book will agree with me that it is the recollections of a man who can lay claim to truly having done well.
Set image courtesy of the Fisher Library, Digital Collections repository.
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