“Postage will prove a big expense”: Hand-made newsletters and education reform campaigners in 1970s-1980s Australia

Conference Abstract: International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) 2022, Milan

Helen Proctor

This paper is grounded in a set of historical phenomena occurring in the settler colony of Australia in the 1970s and 1980s that, being explicitly and very obviously political, are sometimes written about as if they can be understood purely in terms of interactions between people, ideologies and the state. In this paper we are still very interested in people, politics and policy but propose that fresh understandings can be found by centring our focus on material objects—rather treating them as adjunct or contextual to the humans who made them, worked with them and moved them from place to place (e.g. see Goodman 2017). Taking up the theme of the panel, we attend to the artefacts we examine not just as exemplary, unitary forms (although we find that kind of analysis to have its uses too) but relationally. 

The artefacts at the centre of our analysis are two runs of newsletters produced by, respectively, an ultra-conservative Christian group, the ‘Society to Outlaw Pornography’ (STOP) founded in 1972 and an anti-capitalist collective, ‘Radical Education Group’ (RED G) founded in 1976. Both groups were fundamentally hostile to the contemporary bureaucratic liberal democratic state –albeit with very different rationales – and both saw public pedagogy – or consciousness raising – as core business, which they prosecuted through their volunteer-produced newsletters, STOP PRESS and the Radical Education Dossier (RED) (e.g. see Gerrard & Proctor 2021; Harris 2005).  

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