on of university education to social groups that had never previously had access to it. In this wonderful period of the expansion of tertiary education to new layers, there were a number of significant secondary features. For instance, in 1967 the extra school year was introduced in New South Wales. p> As a result, the only freshers in universities were a large cohort of mature-age students who were encouraged to take advantage of the gap year to start university education. (This was the year when the Vietnam antiear protests, incidentally, really began to gather momentum, and it is my very distinct memory that many of these mature-age students, who by then knew a bit about the world, were in the forefront of this development.)
A little later, throughout the 1970s the very notable phenomenon took place of mature-age women students taking advantage of scholarships and the Whitlam free education to get degrees, and many of these women became rather belligerent feminists, having previous been deprived of tertiary education by social circumstances.
In short, the combination of all these factors produced a massive change in the moral, cultural and political climate of the times, and this had a very big and happily enduring impact on the generations who acquired their education in the 1960s and 1970s . It was a time of great inquiry, criticism and change. p> It may have had its aberrations and eccentricities, but it was a great time to be alive. In this period, as I observed and experienced it, a number of previously latent currents in Australian society came to a certain flowering, such as the basically healthy ethical training in relation to matters like race and migration in Catholic schools. p> This was the period when the products of the Catholic education system formed a disproportionate part of the undergraduate population, having been well instructed by the brothers and nuns to take full advantage of all the Whitlam period educational opportunities available to them, which pitched them headlong into the political and cultural radicalisation of the period.
The substantial swing among students and graduates in this period against racism, did owe a lot to the educational revolution of the period, but it also owed a lot to the new moral climate that emerged in these conditions, which actually corresponds more adequately to basic civilised human instincts than the bigoted backwardness that the Katharine Betts of this world believe is normal in human beings.
Happily, these more civilised attitudes have persisted among people who acquired their education over this period. It's their normal state of being in relation to all these matters. There may be a certain amount of group identification in it as well, but that's no bad thing either! It's better to be a proud member of the generation of 1968 or 1972, in my view, than to be a dopey bigot. p> Over the last few years I have time and time again had the experience of graduates of the classes of 1968 or 1972 bringing their children into my bookshop, reminiscing about the past and attempting to introduce their sometimes rather bored kids to the delights of Furry Freak Brothers comics and the serious literature of the period.
It is my impression that the decisive sea change on cultural matters, censorship, politics, race and migration made in the 1960s and 1970s, by many people who were educated then, tends to persist into the next generation. Even if the children of the class of 1968 or 1972 are sometimes a bit bored by them, they tend to retain the basic values ​​acquired by their parents during the great sea change. br/>
How Betts, Birrell and company worry about Sydney. Bob Gould live from Gomorrah
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A rather bizarre aspect of the 25-year Betts-Birrell crusade against migration and multiculturalism is the particular attention these Anglo-Victorians always give to the perceived problems of life in Sydney. Over the period they have made constant dire predictions of social, environmental and economic disaster in Sydney, and later events have mostly proved them wrong.
Over this period Sydney has constantly evolved. There are real problems in Sydney, many of which stem from the successful economic development of Sydney and NSW. A very serious and worthwhile Sydney economist, Phil Raskell, has made his recent life work the careful documentation of, for instance, such things as the widening economic inequality in Sydney.
For this useful project, he has worked extensively on the public statistical records of who pays tax and at what level. But Phil Raskell never overloads his useful and thoroughly commendable work on income inequality, with the vehement anti-migration and anti-development rhetoric that the Monash group does. They tend to grab hold of Phil's economic work, whenever it is published, and then they put their own unplea...
