Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti
Follow your own road, and let the people talk – Marx
It is sad to hear of the death of Peter Wertheim, a friend and comrade of many people involved in the anti-war and democratic rights movements in Magandjin (Brisbane). My first meeting-in-person with Peter was when he gave me a lift from the hitching rail at the University of Queensland in the late 1960s. Peter’s daughters, Christine and Margaret (Pythagoras’ Trousers), were rolling around in the back of Peter’s Holden station wagon with Sigrid, the daughter of feminist, Merle Thornton. We discussed the state of the world as he took me to Toowong to catch the train.
You are invited to a Zoom Live Broadcast of Peter Wertheim’s Memorial Jul 15, 2023 11am – 12:30pm
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In 1977 I remember Peter speaking out against the ban on street marches at the top of King George Square steps only to be arrested by several police. A man of gentle spirit, Peter was committed to nonviolence and implored the police to give up arresting hundreds of people defying the ban on street marches. Senior constable John Watt from Task Force dragged Peter to the police van. As he did so, the Queensland copper looked down at Peter as if to say: “silly old fool“.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s I had heard Peter speak out against the Vietnam war, and in support of civil liberties in the Forum area at the University of Queensland Student Union. Along with Dan O’Neill Peter was a member of the Newman Society, a campus based group of Catholics. A left of centre group formed within the Newman Society, including Dan O’Neill and Peter Wertheim. This radical element began holding forums on the nature of the University. Peter took a radical stance debating the role of the University in the Great Court along with Phil Richardson, Frank Varghese, Bob Wensely and Professor Webb. Peter was still doing this 50 years later when this question was posed: “Should courses in Western Civilization be taught in universities and other institutions of education, and if so, how? ”
The Forum
In 2019 Anne Richards wrote about the forum at the University of Queensland student union complex which was under attack by the university administration planning to demolish the whole site … thus eradicating at least two generations of critical thought and action in the forum area:
“This was where the first speakers – Brian Laver, Ralph Summy, Dan O’Neil and Peter Wertheim – dared to challenge a largely passive audience in 1966. As the audience grew, so did the number of speakers. As a movement developed, the Forums were addressed by socialists, anarchists, radical Christians, feminists, trade unionists and Quakers. There were Vietnam veterans, draft dodgers and mothers of dodgers, comedians, egotists and wizards. The ruling powers were hammered in informed exposes that presented government as an Ionesco-esque circus peopled by clowns.”
In May 1967, Peter along with Mitch Thompson, Brian Laver, Ralph Summy formed an action committee to protect the right to march, so integral to organising against the American war in Vietnam. In June 1967, the Civil Liberties Coordinating Committee (CLCC) began conducting forums and leafleting. Their organisation relied heavily on the oratory of Laver, O’Neil, Wertheim, and Bowen. They challenged the government that was determined to prevent a march for civil liberties. A big march of 4000 people from the University of Queensland entered Roma Street on 8 September 1967. Peter Wertheim was at the head of the march that sat down on the roadway and he was one of the first people arrested by police along with 125 others.
By 1971 Peter Wertheim came up with a theory that the Einsteinian notion of ‘the elasticity of time‘ allowed Queensland to remain in the 19th century. What followed was a University strike against a racist tour of the Springboks supporting apartheid in South Africa. Strike historian, Peter Stuart, reported the following: “During the afternoon of Friday July 23rd (1971), 3,000 students and staff of
the University of Queensland held a mass meeting in the refectory and decided to go on strike for the duration of the Springbok Tour, and to convert the University into a centre of anti-racist activity and propaganda, as the only reasonable response to the Tour, South African and Australian racism, and the State of Emergency in the face of the denial of even limited rights of protest by the large scale systematic police action of that week, and in particular at the Tower Mill on Thursday night.”
Peter taught philosophy at University of Queensland till 1978. I always associate Peter Wertheim with a group of intellectuals, teachers and artists from a bygone era, willing to stand up during an era of political repression in Queensland: Carole Ferrier, Ian Hinckfuss, Ralph Summy, Don Mannison, Derek Fielding, Gay Summy, Dan O’Neill, Barbara Wertheim, Merle Thornton, Di Zetlin, Di Priest, Errol O’Neill, Mary Kelly, Marion Redmond, Mary Mannison, Gary McLennan, Rosemary McBride, Humphrey McQueen, Mitch Thompson, Aunties Lilla Watson & Mary Graham and Frank Varghese. No doubt there are others whom I have missed.
Peters life evolved during radical times where a challenge was made to a system that produced war and racism. This took Peter and his contemporaries into direct engagement with and sometimes into confrontation with both the university authorities and the state. To them a participation in the long march through the institutions was essential.
I hope a new generation emerges to follow in their footsteps.
On the personal side, Peter and I always had good conversations. He was easy to listen to. We lived in the Rosecliffe street, Highgate Hill across the river from the University of Queensland, but at different times. A friend told me he “got to know Peter reasonably well when he was planting trees in Dutton Park.” They would chat on his morning walk. We had friends in common but drifted apart and then would see each other again, for example, most recently at Malcolm Bell’s funeral, where he gave a eulogy despite weariness.
By way of a tribute, I have collected fragments of the times, comments, activities and thoughts by Peter Wertheim and his contemporaries.
My condolences to Janine, his friends, family and comrades,
Ian Curr
29 June 2023
Note: I have used three main archives in compiling these fragments of Peter Wertheim’s life: Radical Times (Peter Gray), Fryer library (UQ) and Semper Floreat (the University of Queensland Student union newspaper).
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On Racism and Sexism
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The Growth of the Radical Movement by Dan O’Neill
South African Springboks Apartheid Tour
Footage of the third demonstration at the Tower Mill Motel on Saturday 24th July 1971. About a thousand protesters gathered at the Tower Mill that evening. Police Commissioner Ray Whitrod was there to command his forces. Whitrod ordered that the roadway be kept clear, but when the lines of police moved forward to clear the street, they broke ranks and charged the demonstrators once again (as they had done two nighs before). Effectively another police riot broke out under the cover of darkness. More injuries, some serious. 9 arrests (6′ 32″).
Footage shot at the Brisbane Exhibition Grounds (Ekka) during the Springboks verses the Wallabys rugby match on Saturday 24th July 1971. There are several shots of the police marching in formation on the football oval. It also shows the rugby players running out onto the field and the game being played with the police surrounding the field in the background. The remainder of the footage mainly focuses on the protesters at the match that day (4′ 56″).
The University
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His friend, Ted D’Urso
I’d been a student here all through the 50s and I was out of the country studying overseas until early 65. So when I came back in 65, I felt that this was a pretty sleepy campus and that the senior staff in particular weren’t very aware, it seemed to me, of what was going on in the world. And a friend of mine from about 1960 who’d been in Melbourne had arrived on campus, and I was pleased to see him here, Peter Wertheim.
And Peter had been the editor of Dissent, which had been recently established, and had been part of a group around people like Vincent Buckley, the Melbourne poet and lecturer, and Bill Ginnane, who was a philosophy lecturer in Sydney. And they’d been part of the Newman Society in Melbourne, and they’d established a magazine called Prospect. And this was exciting new thinking for a lot of young Catholics that had already anticipated the themes of the second Vatican council. – Ted D’Urso @ https://workersbushtelegraph.com.au/2020/05/28/the-brisbane-new-left/
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A better theory for the radical left – Merle Thornton
It’s been said many times and certainly by me quite often that there isn’t a satisfactory deep analysis of women’s position in society, something that carries the kind of conviction, the kind of new clarification that was associated with Marx’s analysis of class last century when it first, when it was first advanced that was a most enlightening theory, all sorts of problems with it now emerge, but to hear it for the first time was certainly to be enlightened and its changed people’s minds permanently.
Now we don’t have that same kind of deep analysis of sex oppression, something that will carry with it obvious implications for the way to proceed against sex oppression. Rather what we have is an agglomeration of different insights without there being a satisfactory link together in one guiding, one overall synthesising analysis.
And I think that the same kind of thing can be said for politics generally, that with problems emerging in the Marxist structure, in or rather in Marx’s’ own structure of class, problems of relating it to Imperialism to racism to sexism, I think that there has been a kind of theoretical and thus practical faltering in Left politics generally and that the initiatives of the time under discussion, late sixties early seventies, couldn’t really be followed through for a fundamental reason that there wasn’t a sufficiently deep analysis of the problem and how to go against it.
Now I think that people like Peter Wertheim have said things directly counter to that, that it’s pretty obvious what the problems are, it’s just that people aren’t willing to tackle them. I think at a certain level that’s true. I mean one can see where the sore itches; one can see where to scratch as it were, but not how to scratch. One can see the location of the problems but not the causation of the problems in a deep way and it’s that deep analysis that I think we’re lacking. – Merle Thornton, @ http://radicaltimes.info/PDF/MerleThornton.pdf
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Anne Richards
I found hope there; the hope that together, this passionate, discordant, and daring group could actually make a difference. This community challenged political powers, social values and educational systems, hoping to rearrange our world and its understanding of what was right and acceptable. Perhaps it was a too bright intensity of hope, but it was palpable.
This was where the first speakers – Brian Laver, Ralph Summy, Dan O’Neil and Peter Wertheim – dared to challenge a largely passive audience in 1966. As the audience grew, so did the number of speakers. – Anne Richards, @ https://workersbushtelegraph.com.au/2019/02/17/the-uq-forum-as-community/
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Christine and Margaret Wertheim
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On philosophy
Peter Wertheim:
One translation of the first verse of Dante’s Divine Comedy which I consigned to memory many years ago runs as follows – Midway in this journey we call our life, I chanced to find myself in a dark wood where the right way was wholly lost and gone. I hope to apply my understanding and love of this verse to the present situation facing European Australia and the crisis which I believe is engulfing it and the rest of the Western world, which is made evident day by day by events. Because in the modern world the west has been materially and militarily dominant, this crisis inevitably continues to involve the rest of the world. I include nature in this.
As an old person now – that is, old in the body and soon no doubt to make the transition to whatever the next realm yields – I am grateful for the opportunity to offer to the group what my friend Dan’s energy and dedication has kept going. I am glad I had a hand in its founding. I hope that the present crisis is once again making it clear to us all that it is not only individual and collective humans that pass away, but also nation states in the various forms they have taken over what we call history. This process when it occurs, as it is reoccurring now, shakes the identity not only of us as individuals but also whatever groups or cultures or nation states we happen to identify with – conscious and often unconsciously. Hence, it is a time when more and more people experience profound insecurity and the fear associated with that insecurity and the development of chaos.
I aim to sketch out, using Dante’s verse, my understanding of some of the causes of the situation we find ourselves in, and especially focussing on Australia and its history. I do this because by destiny I found myself from birth an Australian citizen and as such I regard myself as having obligations to understand what is good in Australian life and what is destructive. I believe a further obligation is to try to conform my individual life to what is good as I see it and try to root out in myself first what is destructive to others not only in interpersonal life but the life of the nation state to which I belong.
To repeat, Part one – I will first apply my understanding of what Dante wrote to the present crisis of the west which we as a western nation share. Here I will consider imperialism in its various forms and argue that it is a major contributor to the chickens that are now coming home to roost. A feature of imperialisms as far as I can tell is that they are great blowers of their own trumpets and equally great deniers of the evils they have done. As regards to Australia and its history, this denial has taken place from the very beginning and has never yet been honestly dealt with either by the British crown that oversaw it or the present Australian European nation. On the contrary, the continual denial adds daily insult to injury.
Part two – I will offer what wisdom I can about how we might move towards a better and more balanced world than what we are now landed with. Believing as I do that each of us has wisdom in us, I reach out to all who attend to help us all understand and begin to move beyond the present crisis. As it happens, for reasons I will outline, despite the above, I am in a more hopeful state of mind than I have ever been in my whole life.
I’d like to thank Pat for his contribution which has been helpful to me. I look forward to the discussion.
Peter Wertheim
at the 17 Group
3rd of April 2019
Peter lectured me in philosophy. His classes were mostly divinity students (one of whom was myself), conservative to a tee, religious and pious, what strange classes he taught, what a strange lot we were, He was my lecturer for Philosophy I, II and III. I later switched to law for a 2nd degree – in order to get a qualification that might earn me a living (I would have quickly been unemployed if I had continued on as a Minister of Religion, all established churches quickly going into decline and only the holy rollies surviving) but my basic Arts degree has always stood me in good stead
Thanks to Janine and her sister for this video of Peter Wertheim’s comemoration.
Big turnout at the Sandgate Town Hall yesterday for Peter Wertheim’s farewell … a funny, sad, witty, angry, despondent, upbeat, lonely person … a complicated human being.
It was like going back in time to the 1960s and 70s, a re-union of sorts. People from the era of the New Left were present. Many had attended the University of Queensland as students, workers or teachers. We revisited the positives and negatives of that period over three hours.
One thing that struck me was the New Left in Brisbane were influenced by liberal academic institutions of the American variety. For example, with notable exceptions police were not allowed on campus at UQ. The University that Zelman Cowan led attempted to regulate and police itself. A number of students and staff were expelled for their activities opposing the American war in Vietnam. The University even had its own military base which was invaded by anti-war activists. The UQ Senate is complicit, then and now, in the making of weapons of mass destruction through its corporate associations with DuPont, Boeing and Lockheed Martin. This needs to stop given the threat of wars in Europe and Asia.
Peter came from a family that owned a shoe manufacturing business employing thousands of people. Both Peter’s parents died when he was young. He contracted tuberculosis as a boy and converted to Catholicism under the care of catholic nuns. Peter attended Australia’s most prestigious private school, Geelong Grammar, and went to the University of Melbourne to study philosophy. He got a job lecturing at the University of Queensland in the early 1960s and was employed there till 1978.
He wrote this to his university colleagues in 1971:
“Tell me, do you really think that evil can be overcome while you and I live the comfortable life? Secure on $10,000 a year, taking the perks of office as our due; this year the second car, next to the swimming pool then the new house …”
He had six children. His former wife, Barbara, sent a statement to the gathering describing Peter’s mid-life crisis where their marriage fell apart in the late 1970s. Barbara’s statement was read out by son Steve in a very dignified manner and revealed Peter’s bouts of depression and anger. Barbara’s epistle was a stark reminder that Peter was neither ‘guru nor saint’. This was a time when depression was often hidden from view especially by people in the public eye.
Peter’s depression was often masked by his use of wit and the absurd. He was expert at ‘taking the mickey’. A somewhat pompous University Vice-Chancellor, Sir Zelman Cowen, was reduced to ‘Zelmo’ by Peter’s satirical mind. He wrote a song about the meaning of life where he says ‘life was meant to be sad … hooray!’
In the 1960s both Peter and his old friend, Dan O’Neill, struggled with Catholicism and embarked on a radical interpretation of society that brought them into the New Left, anti-war activism and attempts at university reform. Dan described how both the English department and the philosophy department were at one stage run by a committee of over 100 people where 50% of those people were students. An early example of worker/student self-management. In those days Peter could be seen on campus wearing a white shirt grey flannel trousers and cardigan but later he always dressed colourfully.
Thanks to Karen Allen for her acknowledgement of country; ‘bomber’ Perrier for his song ‘Everything and Nothing’; Chris Watson for being MC despite poor lighting; Dan O’Neill for taking us back to Socrates and Plato; Mary Graham for her heartfelt tribute to Peter; Loretta Henry for her recitation of the poem by A D hope; for the participation by Janine Quine’s children; to Annie Wertheim in her grief; and to Janine for taking us all on this journey of Peter’s life and looking after him so well.
Vale Peter
Ian Curr
16 July 2023
Peter’s Memorial, which will take place on Saturday the 15th of July at 11 am in the Sandgate Town Hall, corner of Cliff and Seymour Streets, Sandgate, a short walk from Sandgate train station.