Seizures of Youth : The Sixties and Australia

Author: Robin Gerster, Jan Bassett

Condition: Good

Hardcover

216 pages

The 1960s - a modern Golden Age of freedom and cultural adventurism - has been merchandised like no era before or since.

In Australia as elsewhere in the Western world, the decade's reputation for unparalleled social turbulence hinges on how it disturbed the calm, conformist surface of post-war life, on how the baby boomers led a 'revolution' in manners and morals that 'changed the world'. Passionate and confrontationist, the burgeoning youth culture attempted to seize the political initiative away from their 'complacent' and 'conservative' elders. But was the revolution, in the end, mere adolescent disobedience? And was the passion of the anti-war demonstration essentially different from the hysteria of the pop concert?

In this history book, Gerster and Bassett use newspapers, fiction, drama and film in order to define the Australian sixties. They also read historical events for their cultural significance - the 'imperial' visits to Australia of the Beatles and President Johnson; the Vietnam moratoriums; the political passing of 'The Patriarch' Sir Robert Menzies and the premature demise of his successor Harold Holt; the murder of young Graeme Thorne and the disappearance of the Beaumont children; and, as a tragicomic coda to a decade of raised hopes and aborted expectations, the rise and fall of the Whitlam Labour Government. They discover a time when Australia both confidently asserted its place in the world and withdrew even more into insularity and dependence, a time of contradiction and paradox, the confusions of which are presented in striking photographs.

This history book analyses what the decade means in historical terms, its impact and its legacy. 

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