Reading as Resistance: A History of the Read-In

Beneath the shade of large arch’s awnings there is a rectangular window through which you can see out onto rubble. ‘A Bold New Campus’ is how a placard below the window describes it. These are the remains of Union Court, a place that for many students was synonymous with the ANU for a time. The sight of it makes me recall something a friend of mine said recently—that as an only child, a member of a family of precisely three, she felt a great responsibility as the sole custodian of her parents’ memories, as the only repository of all their experiences and stories. Does it make sense to speak of a custodian of memories in a place like this? Is there a repository of the past when undergraduate populations are renewed ever ythree or so years? Should someone, stepping for the first time onto this bold new campus, care what once happened in Union Court?

It is here, I believe, that community projects like Demos’ history of student activism have an indispensible role. Any official history, relying as it must upon conventional archival material, will find it difficult to grasp the meaning and character of agitation, rebellion, uprising, and insurrection. This was a consideration for Ranajit Guha, who founded the Subaltern Studies Group at the ANU in 1981 (something seldom noted in accounts of the movement’s history). In his Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983) he asks: how can one represent and reclaim a history which has left behind little, if any, documentation? How can one resist its erasure by official histories? While it would be foolish to compare student protest to anti-colonial uprising, a similar set of historiographical questions emerges in the project of writing activist histories.

It is in this spirit that I have been tasked with revisiting the ‘read-in’—a protest that has left a paper trail longer than some, but which is easily misunderstood now that enough years have passed. One problem in reading about the read-in is that the mainstream media’s sources are at once the most readily available and the the least representative of what the protest meant to the protesters. I would be naïve to think I could offer a corrective here.

My task in this brief account is not to defend the read-in or to indulge in nostalgia, but to offer a narrative that contextualises and reflects upon the atmosphere and events of the time. In this undertaking I will draw mostly on my only published reflection on the read-in from the time, an open letter ‘in admiration and solidarity’ to a fellow student protester, Hannah McCann. My hope is not for a more judicious retrospective assessment, but to provide some thoughts and ingredients that may nourish future protest. Perhaps this is a way to think of the proper stewardship of memory.

The read-in was one of many strategies employed by a broad student moment in its successful opposition to the Abbott government’s 2014 proposal to deregulate university student fees. It is fitting, then, that this protest strategy was born of contingency during another such protest.

On the afternoon of May 21, 2014, I was among the hundreds of students who gathered in Union Court and marched on the Chancelry to demonstrate against the Vice-Chancellor Ian Young’s vocal support for deregulation. Young was the then Chair of the Group of Eight universities and had published his case for deregulation prior even to the Abbott government’s announcement of the plan.

As night fell, hundreds of students surrounded the glass doors of the Chancelry, demanding an audience from Young who was believed to be inside. Next to the Chancelry doors is a statue of the Hindu goddess Saraswati, which is, the ANU website explains, depicted not according to convention as “elaborately dressed and holding a plamleaf manuscript,” but “as a modern young woman holding a book, more thoughtful and contemplative than grand.” I took this as an invitation and waded out across the pool.

It felt powerful sitting beside this goddess of knowledge, as though she herself were in unity with us, reading against Young, against Tony Abbott, against the whole parade of ill-conceived policy decisions that issued from this concrete bastion in my brief time at the ANU—the abolition of tutorials, the dismantling of the School of Music, the routine cuts, humiliations, and contempt for the humanities, the continued investments in fossil fuel companies. And I was surrounded by a crowd bigger than any before, one united by a shared discontent.

The weekend after the protest I had some conversations at the Canberra Croatian Club where some friends were running an event in solidarity with a blockade at a coalmine. What if, combining performance art, the vigil, and the energy of last week’s protest, I continued to read in that very spot for a week? Everyone’s response was the same: “I’ll join you.” At home I wrote up a mission statement that I have since lost, save for a few fragments quoted in the media: “As a performative enactment of exactly what these cuts put into jeopardy and the place in which critical thinking in itself is nurtured, I endeavour to make the simple act of reading a book something subversive.” These words were influenced by a work I was writing about at the time: Judith Butler’s Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (2013). In section 20, “The University, the Humanities, and the Book Bloc”, Butler’s interlocutor Anthena Athanasiou states:

One of the most striking modes of protest was arguably the “book bloc,” in which protesters marched wearing book shields in the streets of Rome, London, and other cities, in defense of public universities and libraries. […] An image that has been circulated among several blogs epitomizes in remarkably eloquent way, I think, the spirit of the spectre of our time: a policeman raises his baton against a protester who carries a book sign of Derrida’s Spectres of Marx. This image of an armed policeman chasing the spectres of Marx reminds us that those recurring spectres still haunt capitalism; it reminds us, above all, that sometimes we have to fight for our books, with our books.