Notebook: Letter From Australia

In Australia no less than in other Western nations, radicalism took a beating from the apathy of the fifties. The rot set in after the fall of Prime Minister Chifley’s Labor Government in 1949. It was stayed briefly by the wave of protest which ultimately overwhelmed the new Menzies Government’s attempts to outlaw the Communist party, then spread throughout the middle years of the decade. The average age of Labor party members climbed rapidly, while their numbers declined. In the universities, the radical and socialist societies saw their influence shrink to a shadow of what it had been during the war years and in the immediate post-war period. Under Menzies, the Security Service insinuated its agents into every area of socie...