Clasificación basada en métodos instrumentales

77 Students who founded university Labour Clubs constituted the left wing of the 'gilded youth' or 'bright young things' - a phenomenon invented by the British press in 1924 and thereafter periodically revived.^ Whether or not they came from affluent backgrounds they were neverthe- less considered a privileged group, spearheading more progressive attitudes to morals and ideas. Don Watson first explored this terrain in Australia,^ illuminating the process whereby a fragment of the student population rejected the university ethos, to embark on what Ian Turner has called their 'guilt-ridden attempt to transform society'.^ In this chapter I intend to update earlier work by incorporating and critically evaluating recent insights by Colin Jory and Michael Cathcart.^ I will also explore the origins of that dichotomy touched on by Robin Gollan when he wrote of student politics in the mid 1940s, that while the Left at Melbourne contributed to the intellec- tual life of the community their contemporaries at Sydney placed their faith in organisation and regarded themselves as tough political operators.^

When students at the University of Sydney decided to form a Labour Club in April 1925 and others at Melbourne followed suit, they drew a good deal of their inspiration from British university life. Liberal and Conservative Clubs were formed at Cambridge in the 1880s and the first

1 J. Springhall, 'Young England, Rise Up and Listen : The Political Dimensions of Youth Protest and Generation Conflict in Britain, 1919- 1939', op.cit, p.l51.

2 See D. Watson, 'The Thirties : An Intellectual Proletariat', op.cit. 3 I. Turner, 'Intellectuals in Australian Life', op.cit.

4 See C. H. Jory, The Campion Society and M. Cathcart, Defending the National Tuckshop.

78

Students Representative Councils appeared in Scottish universities.^ Before the Great War university socialism took its lead from Cambridge, but after- wards Oxford made the running. A University Labour Club formed there in 1919 remained robust enough in 1921 to host the launch of a national University Labour Federation. Student unions and student journalism made their debuts at this time. Cambridge undergraduates launched the magazine Cocoon in March 1921, changing its name shortly afterwards to Y o u t h . Student conferences held in London that year resulted in the National Union of Students, a discreet and respectable organisation in its early days, concerned mainly with student travel and accommodation.^

A trend towards forming similar bodies in Australia during the 1920s reflected the growth of indigenous pressure groups, themselves the product of a developing industrial society. A Public Questions Society (PQS), formed in 1918 at Melbourne University, helped reactivate political debate after the war. Like a similar body founded at Sydney University in 1923, it was run by members of staff and a few ex-servicemen who as students were untypically mature and politically conscious. They sought to bring the universities into contact with the outside world, but their passionate liberalism provided no guarantee against censorship. A 1920 issue of the Melbourne PQS journal Both Sides lamented that alone among university societies it had to submit for the approval of the Professorial Board not only the names of the leaders of its study circles, but a list of subjects also.®

Public Questions Societies provided the main variation in a student outlook still overwhelmingly conservative. By making the declaration of 6 A. Barcan, A Historv of the Sydney University Labour Club, 1925-1945,

p.l.

7 A. Marwick, op.cit., p.39.

79 political ideologies acceptable they helped to bring political clubs a step nearer. But despite the debts they owed them, Labour Clubs symbolised a revolt against this abstract style of debate. Arthur Marwick has talked of an irrevocable 'law of the leftward drift' at work in progressive youth circles in the 1920S.9 Those students who succumbed in Australia sought an organi- sation capable to taking decisions, able to challenge an academic milieu which seemed to foster aloofness and enforced unwritten, allegedly time- honoured codes of 'correct' student b e h a v i o u r . ^ ^

The Labour Club at Sydney had its origins in an informal group of ALP supporters who met at the beginning of 1925 under the auspices of the University Union. In April of that year when Malcolm McDonald, son of the British Labour politician Ramsay McDonald, came to Australia in a debating team from Oxford University, they decided to act. To 'scoop' the official dinner for the Oxford debaters and simultaneously launch a Labour Club, socialist students held a separate function of their own. McDonald presumably co-operated, but an invitation to Labor candidates in the State Parliament election to address them caused the greatest uproar. Angry letters in the student press later insisted that the University stand aloof 'from all political engineering'. This response failed to dampen enthusi- asm. The Labour Club proceeded to enroll its first members from the faculties of Arts, Science and Economics, with a sprinkling of part-time students who attended evening courses."^^

Whereas Melbourne University Labour Club shunned direct party affiliation, in Sydney a close relationship existed with the ALP until 1934. Sydney Labour Club played an active role in the State and Federal elections

9 A. Marwick, op.cit., p.40. 10 C. H. Jory, op.cit., p.29.

80