Burgmann went on to a distinguished career in politics and public life in New South Wales. Wheatley is an award-winning biographer, historian, novelist, memoirist, and writer of children’s books. What they had in common in their young days, apart from English literature and Women’s College, is the fact that they were both arrested more than once for their part in protest demonstrations, and in 1968 were arrested together for obstruction as they sat down in front of a paddy wagon containing a pair of draft resisters.

Now in their early seventies, and friends since their late-night meeting over the metaphysical poets and the leftover toast, Burgmann and Wheatley have collaborated on a collection of twenty portraits or profiles of Australian contemporaries who, like them, came of age in the late 1960s and took part in activities and demonstrations against whatever they found most oppressive. Much of this oppression was personified, directly or indirectly, in the figure of Robert Menzies, whose second stint as prime minister of Australia ran from 1949 to 1966. Burgmann and Wheatley make this point in their Introduction: ‘For a twenty-year-old Australian today, who has lived through seven Prime Ministers, it would be impossible to imagine how stultifying it was to grow up under a single one – and a patriarchal, conservative one at that.’

Each of the participants was interviewed by the authors and the result written up by either Burgmann or Wheatley in a form similar to a magazine profile. They are colourful, personal portraits of various notable Australians, most of whom would say with the authors that ‘our lives had been transformed over a short period’ in the late 1960s. The Sydney-centric nature of the cast is acknowledged, but other kinds of difference are pointed out. There is a gender balance of eight women to twelve men, which is pretty good considering the fact that in the protests of the 1960s, men inevitably got far more than their fair share of the megaphones, the media attention, and the subsequent status as public figures. There are three Aboriginal participants; three people whose parents were European refugees; several gay or lesbian participants; and ‘a plethora of feminists’. There are politicians, lawyers, artists, and people who have become prominent and influential figures across the media.

The word ‘radical’ is used fairly loosely. The main focus of 1960s Australian radicalism was the war in Vietnam, but there were plenty of other things to kick against, and the focus shifts from profile to profile. What ties all twenty profiles together is the question that the authors asked all of them: how were they radicalised? Did they have an ‘aha’ moment, and if so, what was it? The answers to these questions are the most consistently intriguing aspect of the book. Aboriginal academic and activist Gary Foley recalls being told by his high-school headmaster not to return after fifth form, for no better reason than ‘We don’t want your kind here.’ Actor John Derum recalls joining the crowd of people outside Pentridge Prison on the morning in 1967 that Ronald Ryan, the last person to be judicially executed in Australia, was hanged. Former Senator Margaret Reynolds describes the year she spent teaching disabled children in a Tasmanian hospital. David Marr recalls the sacking of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam by the governor-general on 11 November 1975: ‘That was when I discovered that Australian Tories are willing to bet the house on power … And that, at their worst, they are not constrained by law. And that they are willing to do almost anything for power, and to prevent change.’ International human rights lawyer and writer Geoffrey Robertson’s tale of school days concerns the issues of censorship and social justice and shows how they can be connected. In his final year at Epping Boys High, he noticed that the private schoolboys on the bus had copies of The Tempest that seemed fatter than his own:

After a bit of digging, he discovered that the state school kids had been issued with an expurgated edition of the text, with some of the sexual narrative deleted … ‘That’s when I saw the counter-productive aspects of censorship and it made me angry because it was affecting our careers. Yes. We would get lower marks, because we wouldn’t understand the play, because every state school was issued a bowdlerised copy of the play.’

A number of the participants identify music as an early influence. Singer Margret RoadKnight says that the closest she came to an ‘aha’ moment was the first time she heard Joan Baez singing ‘What Have They Done to the Rain?’ Other participants who mention the influence of music include politician Peter Batchelor (Pete Seeger, and, surprisingly, The Beatles), John Derum (Pete Seeger again), and editor and radio producer Robbie Swan (Jimi Hendrix). Arthur Dent, formerly known as the revolutionary intellectual and activist Albert Langer, had recognised the radicalising power of folk music as young as fourteen, when he organised a folk concert in aid of the anti-apartheid movement.

Burgmann and Wheatley seem to have agreed on a chatty, almost gossipy style that will make the book accessible to a wide range of readers, but what’s sacrificed is depth in the discussion of the ideas and theories behind the ‘radical’ positions taken, or recalled, by the participants. The most ideologically interesting, original, and self-aware thinker here is Queenslander Brian Laver, a cousin of tennis legend Rod Laver and a gifted tennis player himself, who has been described as ‘the world’s only Anarchist International Tennis Coach’.

It would have been good to see the participants, or the authors, step back more often to examine the principles behind their actions and beliefs of fifty years ago. One of the reasons why Robertson’s story about the bowdlerisation of The Tempest stands out is that it provides such a good example of what’s meant by ‘systemic’ in discussions of injustice and inequality.

While I was reading this book, I asked a small group of friends what their own ‘aha’ moments had been. Each of us was surprised by the others’ answers, especially by how young we had all been when some light globe or other had suddenly come on over our heads, and the conversation then went deeper and wider into the reasons behind each of those teenage epiphanies. While this book is a valuable if informal and partial bit of social history, perhaps it’s more valuable for the way it can prompt each reader’s own reflections and, perhaps, reappraisals.