The Illawarra has a long and proud history of peace activism, including this gathering for peace celebrations in Dapto in 1919. Photo: Wollongong City Libraries and the Illawarra Historical Society – P13982.
A very timely exhibition at Wollongong City Library tracing the long history of the peace movement in the Illawarra has brought back some strong memories for me.
Dr Alexander Brown has helped curate the Peace Movement Illawarra exhibition, which is currently on display and runs until 30 August. Conveniently, some of its elements are also available online, including lots of wonderful photos.
My memories are especially of Doreen Borrow’s largely unheralded work with the Illawarra Branch of the Australian Peace Committee, as well as the more celebrated lives of the Illawarra anti-war draft resisters, Louis Christofides, ballet teacher Edna Gudgeon, and her film director son, Mac Gudgeon.
The exhibition also features extensive online interviews with other long-term Illawarra peace activists, some of whom I have also encountered over the years, including Sharon Callaghan, Nick Southall and Dr Margaret Perrot. Dr Brown himself has also been interviewed.
My interest in their activism has stemmed from my schoolboy failure to understand that it was possible, after both the armistice was declared on 11 November 1918 and the experience of so many in the horrors of the so-called ‘war to end all wars’, that peace didn’t forever descend across the planet and help make sure that no Australian (let alone anyone from Illawarra) ever got the chance to water the cold ground of foreign countries with their blood.
World War I had made it impossible for my mother to ever meet two of her uncles, who foolishly enlisted way too young and were senselessly slaughtered along with so many Australians on the Western Front. My own father later became an “economic volunteer” and was desperate enough to enlist on the first day of World War II in 1939.
He did so for the simple reason he’d been unemployed and homeless since leaving school. And so the Australian military generously taught him to be a gunner and be willing to kill people while serving on DEMS (Defensively Equipped Merchant Ships).
These were merchant vessels armed with guns and manned by military personnel to try to defend against attack during World War II.
My father claimed that, whether by good luck or design, despite continuing to serve well after the war’s end in 1945, he never once needed to fire an angry shot.
Nonetheless, having almost continuously sailed the seven seas for years on end and thereby serving in so many potential war zones, he was awarded an array of medals. For whatever reason, he forever abhorred war and refused to join the RSL.
With that sort of parental background, it is little wonder that my favourite poem by the great English writer Thomas Hardy was written at Christmas in the midst of the horrors of World War I.
“Peace on Earth,” we said. We sing it,
And pay a million priests to bring it.
And after two thousand years of mass
We’ve got as far as poison-gas.
Whether or not Thomas Hardy then knew that poison gas had been the subject of a long series of experiments undertaken by Professor Brereton Baker and his colleagues at the British Imperial College of Science is unclear.
Those scientists were asked first to combat German poison gas and then to produce a gas even more deadly.
Thanks to them, a “better” gas was discovered through patient laboratory work, and a new and terrible British gas shell was finally sent to Europe in overwhelming quantities.
From this, many Illawarra residents would feel its devastating impact. Some would either die or be permanently injured by the shell’s throat-burning “friendly fire”, through either carelessness or the provision of dodgy gas masks.
But back in Wollongong, as late as 1923, even the editor of the Illawarra Mercury allowed the following words by some anonymous person to be re-published: “Could war be abolished if the scientists of the world resolved to have no connection with inventions which had for their object the destruction of man in warfare – poison gas, huge explosive shells, etc. – is a question which one would like to hear the scientists discuss? At present, it is a matter of conjecture only.”
And the tragedy is that it has long remained a cruel matter of supposed conjecture ever since.
Fortunately, in days gone by (and still in 2025), passionate Illawarra residents have argued that the conjecture should have long stopped and they thus still actively campaign against those scientists and industrialists who either design or build weapons of mass destruction.
August 6 – the date of annual commemoration of the horrors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 – is a day that always makes me shake my head that not only could it happen but that any government anywhere could be so tone-deaf as to either want or allow the pilot of the plane that dropped the merciless weapon to name his aeroplane the Enola Gay, after his mother.
So, with the horrendous slaughter currently taking place in Gaza, it’s salutary that in the Illawarra there is an exhibition at Wollongong Library remembering those locals willing to say “NO” to Australia’s involvement – whether directly or complicitly – in the horrors of imperialist wars.
Dr Alexander Brown will also give a talk associated with the Wollongong Library exhibition on Monday, 28 July, at 5 pm.
