Taking It from the Streets

The Politics of Collecting, Writing and Exhibiting History from Below

Abstract

Writing in Griffith Review 13 about ‘being political now’, Mark Bahnisch described the Museum of Brisbane's Taking to the Streets exhibition as a ‘monument to the symbolism of the '60s’. On display, he wrote, were causes and experiences that ‘symbolise a generation’. It's an interesting observation, especially in an essay concerned with debunking generational stereotypes. For it seems Bahnisch himself may have fallen for, well, a generational stereotype. Aside from apparently missing the 75 per cent of the exhibition that didn't deal with the 1960s, he also seems to have failed to notice that the people represented in the interviews, the written accounts, the grainy images, the shaky film footage and the lists of arrests were not all of one generation. Ranging from punks to pensioners, students to seafarers, communists to Christians, they were in fact an amazingly motley bunch of citizens who shared a history only because they shared a desire for a better society and a belief that protest was a legitimate and worthwhile political activity. And, despite the mythology, the issues they mobilised around — war, racism, the nuclear industry, sexism, workers' rights, civil liberties — had been around as causes well before 1965. Even that icon of late 1960s radicalism — the peace symbol — came from earlier times, as Ted D'Urso so carefully explained in his exhibition interview.