Sydney Push

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This article is about the intellectual sub-culture, for the criminal gang see Rocks Push

The Sydney Push was a predominantly left-wing intellectual sub-culture in Sydney from the late 1940s to the early '70s. Famous associates of The Push include Wendy Bacon, Eva Cox, Liz Fell, Germaine Greer, Clive James, John Flaus, Harry Hooton, Robert Hughes, Frank Moorhouse, Lillian Roxon, Sasha Soldatow, Margaret Fink and Jim Staples. In 1961-2, poet Les Murray resided in Brian Jenkins's Push household at Glen Street, Milsons Point, which became a mecca for associates visiting Sydney from Melbourne and other cities.

The Push operated in a pub culture and comprised a broad range of manual workers, musicians, lawyers, criminals, journalists and public servants as well as staff and students of, initially, Sydney University - predominantly though not exclusively in the Faculty of Arts. Rejection of conventional morality and authoritarianism formed their main common bond. From the mid-1960s, New South Wales University of Technology (later renamed the University of New South Wales) also became involved.

Some of the key intellectual figures in Push debates included David.J. Ivison, George Molnar, Roelof Smilde, Darcy Waters and A.J. (Jim) Baker, according to the article, Sydney Libertarians and the Push, published in Broadsheet in 1975. Other active people included June Wilson, Les Hiatt, Ian Bedford, Terry McMullen, Ken Maddock and Alan Olding, among many others listed in the article. A representative collection of essays was published by L. R. Hiatt in The Sydney Line, printed in 1963 by the Hellenic Herald, whose proprietor Nestor Grivas was a prominent non-academic Push personality and champion of sexual freedom.

John Anderson, a Scottish born professor of Philosophy at Sydney University from 1927 until his retirement in 1958, was seminal in the formation of Sydney Libertarianism, of which he vigorously disapproved. In 1951, a group of his disciples, led by Jim Baker, had formed a proactive faction which split Anderson's Freethought Society. They asserted that it was natural and desirable for critical thought to engender commensurate action, the principle on which the Libertarian Society was launched. The intellectual life of the Libertarians was mainly pursued in and around the university, though it overflowed into the much larger social milieu known as the Push, which flourished at a succession of pubs and other places of refreshment including the Tudor, Lincoln, Lorenzini's Wine Bar, Repin's Coffee Shop and, of greatest notoriety, the Royal George Hotel in Sussex Street.

Since these were the days of 6 o'clock closing for pubs, nightlife commonly consisted of a meal at an inexpensive restaurant such as the Athenian or Hellenic Club ("the Greeks") or La Veneziana ("the Italians") followed by parties which were held most nights of the week at private residences. These were very lively occasions with singing of folksongs and bawdy ditties such as 'Professor John Glaister' and many others.^[1] Accompaniments were provided by accomplished guitarists and lutenists (Ian McDougall, John Earls, Terry Driscoll, Don Ayrton, Brian Mooney, Don Lee.) The late Declan Affley and Martin Wyndham-Read are but two well known artists who learned much in the Push.

Sydney Libertarianism adopted an attitude of permanent protest based on the sociological theories of Max Nomad, Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels, which predicted the inevitability of elites and the futility of revolutions. They used phrases such as "anarchism without ends," "non-utopian anarchism," and "permanent protest" to describe their activities and theories. Others labeled them as the 'Futilitarians'. An early Marx quotation, used by Wilhelm Reich as the motto for his The Sexual Revolution, was adopted as a motto vis:

"Since it is not for us to create a plan for the future that will hold for all time, all the more surely what we contemporaries have to do is the uncompromising critical evaluation of all that exists, uncompromising in the sense that our criticism fears neither its own results nor the conflict with the powers that be."