Sydney Push

Well known associates of the Push include Richard Appleton, Jim Baker, Lex Banning, Eva Cox, Robyn Davidson,[1] Margaret Fink, John Flaus, Germaine Greer, Lynne Segal, George Molnar, Robert Hughes, Harry Hooton, Clive James, Barry Humphries,[2] Sasha Soldatow,[3] David Makinson, Jill "Blue" Neville,[4] Paddy McGuinness, Frank Moorhouse, David Perry, Lillian Roxon and Darcy Waters.

[7] Other active people included psychologists Terry McMullen, John Maze and Geoff Whiteman, educationist David Ferraro, June Wilson, Les Hiatt, Ian Bedford, Ken Maddock and Alan Olding, among many others listed in the article.

[8][9] There are also interesting critical articles in the Arts Society's annual journal Arna by Baker[10] and Molnar[11] whose essay on Zamyatin's We concluded: ... Orwell spins out to its last conclusion the illusion that the fate of freedom depends mainly on the colour of the ruling party.

It looked like a cartoon on which Hogarth, Daumier and George Grosz had all worked simultaneously, fighting for supremacy.Since the mid-1950s, before extended pub hours replaced 6 o'clock closing, Push night-life 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 held most nights of the week at private residences.

Sydney Libertarianism adopted an attitude of permanent protest recognisable in the sociological theories of Max Nomad, Vilfredo Pareto and Robert Michels, which predicted the inevitability of elites and the futility of revolutions.

An early Marx quotation, used by Wilhelm Reich as the motto for his The Sexual Revolution, was adopted as a motto, viz: 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.Nevertheless, Push associates regularly assisted in organising and turning out for street demonstrations, e.g., against South African apartheid and in support of victims of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre; against the initial refusal of immigration minister Alexander Downer, Sr. to grant political asylum to three Portuguese merchant seamen who jumped ship in Darwin; and against Australia's participation in the Vietnam War.

At the election after prime minister Harold Holt failed to return from a swim, artist and film-maker David Perry produced a highly acclaimed poster featuring "a continuum of pigs (inspired by Orwell's Animal Farm)" with the slogan "Whoever you vote for, a politician always gets in.

This was later revealed to be a collection of body parts, the property of a doctor, found and used in a macabre practical joke by a notorious confidence trickster, the late Julian Ashleigh Sellors (known in the Push as 'Flash Ash').

Meanwhile, Push hangers-on and 'tourists', now numbering hundreds, patronised pubs like the Four-in-Hand (Paddington) and the Forth and Clyde at Balmain, but these were venues of social entertainment, lacking the intellectual camaraderie, the informal folksong and the bohemian flavour of the 'George'.

Push personalities who emigrated to the United Kingdom included Clive James,[23] Paddy McGuinness, Chester (Philip Graham) and Ian Parker (pictured above) who returned to Sydney in the late 1970s and was knocked down and killed while drunk, in Dixon Street.[24]: p.

Folksinger John Earls went to Bolivia and former Tribune (Communist Party of Australia newspaper) cartoonist Harry Reade went to join Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba (and returned in 1971 at the same time as Paddy McGuinness).

The Royal George Hotel in April 2004. It has been renamed the Slip Inn. The Sydney Push met in the "back room", a little above ground floor, at left.
The Lincoln Coffee Lounge, located on Rowe Street , is said to be the birthplace of the "Sydney Push" movement in its early days, just after the war. A popular meeting place for artists & writers, it comprised a mixture of university students, lecturers, bohemians and libertarians.
Sydney Push associates Ian Parker (left) and Bob Gould in a 1960s pavement demonstration outside the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney. Parker died in the late 1970s; Gould, a notable bookseller, [ 18 ] died in 2011.
A group of Push associates at a reunion in 2012