McLaren, John (2003) Comrades and Apostles. Chapter one : Melbourne University. In: Free radicals of the left in postwar Melbourne. Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne. (Unpublished)

Abstract

Contains an overview of the post-war political era influencing the functioning of the Melbourne University, which as an institution was on the brink of change experiencing post-war expansion and overcrowding. The wartime generation of students who came to the University of Melbourne in 1945 and 1946 differed from any who had gone before them. They were the first generation who had to face life without either a god or a mother country. All had memories of the Great Depression that had threatened to overthrow the western world order, and had in fact precipitated a terrible war in which they had all been involved. Those who had been in the services had had their lives interrupted, and were now trying to pick up their education in a world that had changed as much as they had. Those who had come straight from school had finished their school years with the shadow of war hanging over them, and now became students alongside adults whose experience gave them a mythic status and distance. All had known an Australian nation faced for the first time with a real threat of foreign invasion and occupation. The emergence of the United Nations as a tangible expression of hopes of peace was clouded by the divisions between the great powers and the smaller nations over whether the new organisation would be a true world authority or, like the League of Nations, a mere forum for debate.

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