Full-Time Troublemakers: A Conversation with Chris Swinbank

“Full-time troublemakers”. This is how Chris Swinbank describes student activsts he camepaigned with during his time at the ANU from 1968-1971. After reading about Chris and the anti-apartheid campaign in a chapter of The Making of the Australian National University: 1946-1996 (2009) by Stephen Foster and Margaret Varghese, I found Chris on Facebook and met with him one afternoon in Cafe Garema, where he shared with me some of the history of ANU’s activist culture, stories of past campaigns and photo upon photo of rallies and arrests. Meeting with Chris was an important exercise—not only in preserving histories of radical action and dissent, but also in connecting faces with names and understanding what motivated the people who, like my comrades and I, spent their years at university as student activists.

Whilst many of these motivations are the same—socialist roots, a deep commitment to social and environmental justice, and an interest in and concern for human rights—speaking with Chris revealed to me the changing nature of students’ lives and how this has shaped the activism we engage in. Perhaps most starkly, our opening conversation about our backgrounds emphasised the barriers student activists now face fifty years on: not only on campus, but in our everyday lives as people living in an increasingly divided and unequal world.

As a graduate of Melbourne Grammar, one of Australia’s most elite private schools, Chris told me that he and the majority of the student activists he organised with during the late sixties and early seventies came from well-to-do backgrounds. Whilst holding little relevance to Chris, I couldn’t help contrast this to the activists I work with today, many of us publicly educated and coming from working class families. Throughout the great many stories and escapades Chris and I discussed, rarely had wealth acted as a limitation. This is a far cry from the conditions we organise under today, in which many activist groups struggle to retain core members who must spend their time in hospitality or call centres so they can afford to eat the next day.

This, I believe, is worthy of reflection when we write about student activism and consider the organising we participate in today. As inequality continues to grow under austere “budget-saving” measures, students are living below the poverty line on Youth Allowance, moving from one precarious share house to the next and struggling to find casual work (with penalty rate and workplace entitlements on the chance we do find employment). The increasing pressures that neoliberalism is exerting on both young people and social movements answers in part, then, the disparity between the grandeur and energy of the student activism Chris recounted, and the apathetic fragmented student population we now struggle to mobilise.