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 Michael
Hyde spent the sixties opposing Australian and US involvement
in the Vietnam War – a conflict at the heart of that turbulent
decade. As opposition
to the war grew exponentially, tens of thousands of young people
took up the fight
against it and the social ills of racism, poverty and inequality.
Michael’s personal journey from Christian pacifist to
student revolutionary was as wild as the sixties itself. Trips
to the Cultural Revolution in China and to Cambodia to meet
the Viet Cong, breaking the law, demonstrations, arrests, living
on the run, communal houses, music, drugs and sexual liberation
were all part of the rollercoaster of rebellion.
The young radicals wanted to make the world a better place and
they weren’t about to be deterred. This is one of the
first stories of that era reported through the eyes of someone
right in the thick of it, someone who lived every moment of
the Sixties, someone who was there and who remembers.
Michael Hyde outmatches our expectations for the
memoirs of a student revolutionary. He does not tell us what
the Sixties meant, but shows us what they were like through
explorations of the drifts between friendship and comradeship,
and the giddy mix of sexual politics as ideology and intimacy.
Throughout he recreates what it felt like at the time –
to be batoned into unconsciousness; to burn one’s draft
card; to hear now legendary lyrics for the first time. Holding
these strands together is Schopenhauer’s rule for fine
writing: have something to say.
Humphrey McQueen
Michael
Hyde has been writing and teaching writing for
30 years. He has published more than thirty books of fiction
and non-fiction. His Young Adult novels in particular have been
critically acclaimed and widely studied in Australian schools.
After
25 years of secondary teaching he now lectures in writing and
literature at Victoria University in Melbourne. He is a regular
guest at Literature Festivals and conducts writing workshops
for teachers and students across Australia.
He lives in Melbourne with Gabrielle and Zachariah, the youngest
of his four children. Michael loves rivers and the sea and is
a passionate Collingwood supporter.
Reviewed
in the Courier Mail SAT 18 DEC 2010
LATE in the 1960s, while our troops fought major battles in
Vietnam, left-wing extremists conducted mini-battles in our
city streets.
The Vietnam War was both the cause and the catalyst for radical
dissenters, whose ultimate aim was to overthrow the "imperialist
US" and establish an egalitarian society through - they
believed - Maoist Communism. Monash University in Melbourne
was a major hotbed of student protest, and Hyde was among the
leaders. He visited Communist China and, coincidentally, flew
over South Vietnam on the first day of the Tet Offensive en
route to Phnom Penh. The ardent ringleaders, using violence
and propaganda and burning draft cards, gradually aroused public
consciousness. By 1970, anti-war rallies were attracting 100,000
people.
Radical activists such as Hyde required raw courage to defend
their beliefs and their bodies against the vilification of press,
politicians and police. The stress took its toll, sometimes
irrevocably. Hyde's intimate account explains why. As if the
21-year-old Hyde were speaking, he writes easily and vividly,
as you'd expect from this veteran author.
Without recrimination, soul-searching or hubris, he revives
the 1960s angst and rites of passage. When he traces the escalation
of events culminating in open rebellion on campus, All
Along the Watchtower becomes a quasi manifesto
on power and crowd behaviour.
Already the 60s wear the faint penumbra of history, but Hyde
delights in the legacy he helped achieve. Here he gives future
Australians an understanding of the way we were, conservative
or radical.
Barbara Baker
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