Ferret around in the National Archives of Australia and you can turn up NAA A6119, 2749 and 3044, digitised redacted versions of Volumes 1 and 2 of data compiled by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) between 1967 and 1971 regarding Rowan John Cahill. The online presence is due to researchers long ago who sought the data under access regulations of the time. Subsequent Volumes remain in the care of ASIO.
My account of the reasons these files were compiled, including content the spooks missed, is the subject of my latest book Cold War Kid: Resisting the Vietnam War to be launched 29 May 2026, register for free HERE. A long time coming, the book was written in response to a number of factors: questions researchers have asked me during the last couple of decades regarding the Australian era of protest in the 1960s and 1970s; the interest of young activists today in the period when I’ve variously met them in discussions, forums, and protests; and my sense that depictions of the period by historians and commentators, friendly or otherwise, have tended to simplify the activism of the period as though it was relatively simple, a matter of Wordsworthian bliss to be alive and to be young, of imbibing the period’s air with a few deep breaths and hey presto, you were part of the radical bliss.
The book was also written with activist intent, in the hope it might contribute to activism in the present, a time when state and institutional authorities are again trying to close down and prevent dissidence, dissenting critiques, and activism generally. As colleague and fellow radical historian Terry Irving and I have long maintained, knowledge of the radical past is conducive to the encouragement and nourishment of activism in the present.
Asked to summarise the book in a nutshell for a blurb, I wrote:
Cold War Kid is an activist’s account of the period 1945-1972 telling the story of how a would-be poet and beachcomber solo-sailor was conscripted during the first call-up in 1965 and morphed to become prominent in opposing Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War and conscription.
The action begins in the back roads of Sydney’s North Shore amongst remnant orchards, dairies, and bushland, and ends in a rural bolt hole, the author criminalised, the threat of imprisonment constant, and experimenting with writing history from below. In between Sydney University as a site of radicalism features, so too the Sydney waterfront where the author significantly engages with the militant Seamen’s Union of Australia.
The book addresses questions and issues researchers have put to Cahill over the years. Amongst the spooks, protests, arrests, lawyers, courtroom dramas, clandestine activity, and a tsunami of agitational writing, there is material enough to keep the footnote industry chugging along well into the future.
Activists too will find hope and encouragement, the book written as a political act describing agency and the development of a resistance movement against overwhelming odds that helped end Australia’s involvement in an illegal war, ended conscription, and brought an end to twenty-three years of conservative government.
Publisher Kembla Books is a small independent outfit based in Port Kembla, part of a geopolitical area on the South Coast of NSW with a long and rich history of political militancy and social justice activism. Most recently Kembla books published Disaster Communism and Anarchy in the Streets by scholar/activist Nick Southall. The book sold its way through two print runs, aroused a lot of interest, discussion, and comment in the process, and in the tradition of movement literature, that is literature intended to nourish and support dissidence and activism, is now available online for free downloading.
As with Southall’s book, Cold War Kid will be distributed in a movement way, via events and launches, for sale in friendly bookshops, and in lieu of a regular advertising budget via reviews, mention and comment in movement publications, blogs, websites, social media, and by good old word of mouth.
Readers of PPE will find the book’s account of Sydney University’s insurgent political and cultural climate of interest as it is out of this cauldron that the Department of Political Economy eventually emerged. So too the presence in the book of Sydney University economic historian Ken Buckley (1922-2006) a key player in the nurturing of political economic/historical writing. He is present not as the academic he was but as a civil libertarian and former British military intelligence officer and paratrooper trained to operate behind enemy lines during World War II, who variously supported the Sydney University student movement in the 1960s and 1970s and numerously helped save my bacon. For readers interested in spatial history, the book’s account of Sydney’s North Shore in the 1950s is at variance with traditional depictions of the region.
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