Barry York was a leading student radical at La Trobe University at the height of the movement against the Vietnam War. In 1972, along with two other student activists, Barry was arrested and held in Pentridge Prison for his anti-war activity. He recently self-published a memoir of his time in Pentridge as a political prisoner which will soon be available at Red Flag books.
The La Trobe struggle was part of the wider student movement opposing the Vietnam War, conscription and apartheid in the late 1960s and early 1970s. On campus, we challenged the university’s ties to political and economic power, including Chancellor Sir Archibald Glenn’s association with ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries, renamed Orica Limited in 1998), which had contracts with the government linked to the Vietnam War. ICI’s parent company also had links to the munitions and chemicals industries in apartheid South Africa. We opposed La Trobe’s rule barring students suspended elsewhere from enrolling, and questioned its possible cooperation with the Joint Intelligence Organisation. At the heart of these campaigns was a basic question: whose interests should a university serve?
At a mass student meeting in April 1971, attended by about 1,000 people, students endorsed demands for action on these issues. It must be noted that, at that time, La Trobe was a small campus and probably only had about 1,500 students on campus at any time. The campaign involved meetings, leafleting, debate, occupations and demonstrations. In July, students blockaded the university governing body, the Council, inside its chambers. The action had been endorsed at a student meeting, but it prompted a heavy police response and intensified the conflict between student activists and university authorities. Several activists were suspended and a larger number were fined. However, we won two key demands—the Chancellor’s resignation was announced in December, and the exclusion rule was rescinded.
This did not end the dispute though. The university authorities sought to stop the Student Representative Council from using its funds to pay the fines imposed on radical students who had been suspended. The fines totalled $3,000: a substantial amount, equivalent to about $40,000 today. Early the following year, the university sought a Supreme Court injunction barring four student activists from entering the campus. When we defied it, Fergus Robinson, Brian Pola and I were imprisoned for contempt of court. Rod Taylor evaded capture.
We were held indefinitely at Pentridge prison, a notorious high-security prison, without a criminal trial, the right to bail or appeal, or the opportunity to cross-examine witnesses. No fixed sentence was imposed. We would remain in prison until the university authorities asked the court to release us. The case raises lasting questions about freedom of expression, judicial power and the use of imprisonment to suppress political dissent.
That struggle forms the background to my memoir. Pentridge Prison closed in 1997, but the reality of life inside its bluestone walls should not be forgotten. The prison has been transformed into apartments, landscaped gardens, shops and fashionable cafés. Much of its brutality has been softened, repackaged or concealed by the redevelopment.
I wanted to recover that history by describing what it was like to be held at Pentridge as a political prisoner, first in D Division and then in A Division. Through observation and conversations with other prisoners, I also came to understand conditions in B and C Divisions and the notorious H Division, known as “Hell”.
The imprisonment of the “La Trobe Three” as we were called shows how fragile our freedoms can be. In writing the memoir, I also wanted to challenge the familiar, softened account of the youth rebellion of that era. The movement was about much more than sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and counterculture. Opposition to conscription, the Vietnam War and apartheid were central concerns. Many young people took their politics seriously; some sought revolutionary change as well as reform and were prepared to make personal sacrifices. Conventional accounts often leave that commitment in the background.
My political engagement with Pentridge continued after my release. From 1973 to 1976, I played a leading role in the Victorian Prisoners’ Action Committee. We campaigned against brutality and degrading conditions and brought prisoners’ experiences into public debate. We organised demonstrations and spoke at schools and public meetings. In one audacious action, we set up loudspeakers outside Pentridge and broadcast messages of solidarity over its walls, symbolically “unsealing” the prison. My memoir offers a history of the committee. I wanted its work, and the prisoners whose lives it touched, to have a place in the historical record.
There was a deeply personal reason for writing, too. I needed to come to terms with the young man I had been and with the Brunswick in which I grew up for 30 years from 1954: a tough, low-income working-class suburb dotted with factories, textile mills, quarries and boxing gyms. That environment shaped my class loyalties.
Prison brought my political and emotional lives together in ways I could not avoid. An affair of the heart made my incarceration much harder. The pain and uncertainty of that relationship accompanied me into cell 108 in A Division and became part of the story I needed to tell.
The memoir is therefore more than a record of prison conditions and political repression. It is an attempt to understand how family, class, politics, public rebellion and private vulnerability became intertwined—and how Pentridge led me into years of political activism and continued to shape my life long after I walked out through its gates.
Barry York blogs at C21st Left.
