As a participant, I can confirm that, during those heady days of collective art, everything seemed possible. Our intention was no less than the transformation of art and society. There had to be alternative world views to the ones which accepted claustrophobic conservatism, censorship, conscription, war-based economies, patriarchy, sexism, racism, a morally bankrupt western culture dislocated from the natural environment and devoid of meaningful values. With considerable energy, we dedicated our youth to demolishing these rigid constraints and creating new arts. This was a time which demanded a radical avant garde. We knocked down the barriers between art forms and questioned the validity of all known perimeters. The work had to be relevant, questioning, experimental, democratic, participatory, satirical, irreverent, sometimes confronting, hopefully empowering.

When we back thirty years later, it becomes clear that there have been two related periods of intense radical activity in the arts this century. During the 1920s and the 1930s, the work and ideas of Dadaists, Surrealists, and the Futurists reacting to the rising tide of fascism were followed by the activism of the 1960s. While sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll were fine as a backdrop, it was certainly not all that period was about. Nor did happenings just happen.

At that time, a confluence of ideas and experience influenced a generation of artists worldwide, all aware that we were taking part in a cultural movement, a collective body of ideas and ideals in common. The international underground created a context in which works produced here could be shown in UK, USA, and Europe, and vice versa. Ubu’s vigorous exhibition of experimental films nationally and internationally is well documented in this publication.

‘What’s a Canadian Indian doing writing a book about Underground Art in Sydney during the 1960s?’ asked Peter Mudie, film-maker, academic and author of Ubu Films, at the book’s launch. In fact after three years extensive research, Peter Mudie has put together a masterly document. This book is composed from an impressive array of primary sources, chronologically ordered and clearly annotated, with an eloquent preface and overview. Mudie creates an accurate context in which the full history of Ubu Films and its associates, and some seminal events from the underground culture of the 60s, can be revisited. Mudie writes:

This book chronicles the activities of the Ubu film group throughout the 1965–1970 period. Ubu Films was Australia’s first group devoted to making experimental films, and the first organisation to establish an extensive network for the exhibition and distribution of independent films. Ubu produced Australia’s first light shows and published this country’s first underground newspaper Ubunews.

Formed in 1965 by Albie Thoms, David Perry, Aggy Reid and John Clark, its early associates included Bruce Beresford, David Striven, Garry Shead, Mick Glasheen, Nigel Buesst, Paul Cox, Bruce Petty, Jim Sharman, Peter Weir, Dusan Marek, Yoram Gross, Paul Winkler and a schoolboy named Phillip Noyce, the theatre group, The Human Body, and musicians, the Id, Tamam Shud, Tully. This book examines a free-flowing creative community, of which Ubu was very much a part. The book has a filmic structure. Time has been accepted as the ordering structure for the primary material and commentary which form the body of the text. Each year of the chronology is preceded by a page that outlines the notable incidents in Australia and the rest of the world during that particular year. These pages allow ‘pauses’ – moments of reflection by which the reader will gauge the labyrinth of events that follow. With clear, well-designed layout, the texts are accompanied by a vast array of exciting visual material, finely reproduced: film frames, photographs, hilarious cartoons, underground posters, programmes, manifestos, notes from The Film-makers Co-op. Ubu’s extensive exhibition of underground movies from UK and USA with attendant censorship battles are both hilarious and salutary. Pages from underground publications are juxtaposed together with reviews from the mainstream media, often with interesting repercussions.

In 1967 Newsweek declared ‘the avant garde filmmakers are people with lenses in their heads, film in their viscera and splicers in their fingers. They are monitoring, processing and manhandling the rising tide of events and images into works of art’ (up from the underground). Exactly, I thought … read on. Two weeks later, the Sydney Ubu showing of twenty-six experimental films at Anzac auditorium, including premieres of new films by Garry Shead, David Perry, Albie Thoms, Bruce Beresford and John Bale’s AFI winner, was greeted with the following review by Ray Castle in the Daily Telegraph:

By what stretch of whose imagination did the organisers (Ubu) of last night’s show of amateur movies at Anzac House consider they qualified for the label ‘underground film’? I didn’t attend last night’s screening but ...

Ignorant, malicious, laughable? Decide for yourself, it’s all there.

The movement also had its supporters in the mainstream press, notably Sandra Hall, Johnny Allen, Don Anderson, Daniel Thomas, Craig McGregor, Sylvia Lawson, Ken Quinell and Wim Wenders. As well as encouraging the creation of independent films, Ubu tirelessly lobbied government for the establishment of an Experimental Film Fund and film schools, as well as changes to the absurd censorship laws for films exported and imported, for art house cinemas. All these battles are there in full documentation.

There are, as Mudie declares in the preface, inevitably a few omissions. The highly inventive pioneering film work of Mick Glasheen, Jack Jacobson, and Peter Kingston with The World Design Science Decade and the extensive experimental film work of Arthur and Corinne Cantrill and their publication Filmnotes merit broader coverage. The focus here is Ubu.

In this handsome account of the underground culture, there is a cornucopia of primary material and commentary wisely collated. It is humorous, revealing and instructive, with wide appeal for the general reader. No cultural historian, art or film student should be without it.