People’s park – a moratorium on protest

It is better to sacrifice everything than to live in slavery! – Ho Chi Minh

On 14 September 1970, University of Queensland Vice Chancellor Zelman Cowan and Registrar Sam Rayner personally tore down the tents shown partially erected by radicals at the University of Queensland protesting the American war in Vietnam.

‘Long march through the existing institutions‘
I was doing second year medicine and participated in the moratorium march that followed. This was the second moratorium March having being preceded by one in May where there was an emphasis on Workers Control. Please note the slogan Workers control of industry on one of the tents in the Great Court.

MEDICAL FACULTY. I add this as context because, by my recollection, only three people in the medical faculty (years 1-3)  participated in the third moratorium march of 1971. The participants I recall were Judy Gyamati, John Bardon, Juliette Sweeney (surname?), Tony Delamothe, and myself, Ian Curr. There may have been others like Joe Toscano, but there is no doubting we were a small cohort inside a conservative faculty. Plus Medicine was an extremely tough faculty academically. For example, in 1969, about a third of the first year were failed by examiners. I counted only 12 women students out of about 300 in second year Medicine in 1971. Medicine was not an equal opportunity profession. Very few people from ordinary state schools even made it into medicine. A large number of students were off campus at Herston . However, there were some older students, like radical Christians like Frank Varghese, who participated in the debates in the Great Court.

UQ Great Court September 1970

The move to the great Court was symbolic because, up until that time, most of the debates occurred in the forum area of the University of Queensland Student Union.

Black Friday
On Friday, 4 September 1970, I attended the infamous Quang incident. A couple of days before that students had occupied the on-campus headquarters at the University of Queensland regiment, an army reserve CMF facility. They sprayed anti-imperialist slogans on the building and destroyed a lot of the files. They were decidedly anti-conscription because a number of students were hiding from the federal police. One student David Franken, another radical Christian, was sleeping rough at the University of Queensland because he was afraid to return to his mother’s house in Miskin Street in Taringa for fear of arrest and imprisonment of 2 years for failure to register for conscription.

On black friday university authorities called police onto campus and later suspended a number of students. In finding the students guilty and issuing suspensions to three of them the University committee claimed, weakly, that they too were opposed to the war but wished to allow Quang his right to free speech. Agent provocateurs in the form of the Democratic Club at the University of Queenstown student Union invited the first secretary from the South Vietnamese embassy on campus.

“Pro-War student groups … invited First Secretary Quang … to speak … Unsurprisingly, the visit was met by strong resistance from the far larger number of students …” – Radical Times

Up the right channels. The new left critique went deeper than protest. It it was calling for university reform as part of broader social change. This critique was summarised in an ironically titled document Up the Right Channels produced and distributed on campus in 1969 and 1970. This critique was heavily influenced by Dan O’Neill, who, at that time, was a radical Christian end member of the Newman Society. However the document collected contributions from staff and students from individual departments (from accountancy to zoology) about the state of University administration and curricula arguing that the university reproduced establishment values and should become more participatory and socially engaged.

‘I hear what you say but have you considered …’ – Vice Chancellor, Zelman Cowen.

Zelman Cowen said this before the mass influx of working class students brought about by a Labor government making universities free (the whitlamisation of education). Nevertheless, the scholarship scheme did make tertiary education possible for poorer students. I clearly recollect the university Vice Chancellor Zelman Cowen addressing students during orientation week in 1970 and telling us that we were part of an elite one or two per cent of the population of Queensland. He said that the university had a population roughly the size of Mount Isa.

Protestors, Moratorium March Brisbane, 1970. Courtesy University of Queensland Library. Grahame Garner Collection

Ian Curr
2 Nov 2025