From the Archives, 1982: Thousands march for peace in Melbourne

First published in The Age on April 5, 1982

Thousands march for peace

Anti-nuclear protesters gather in 1982.Credit:Geoff Ampt

Many thousands of people marched through the city yesterday in a rally for nuclear disarmament. Police estimated the crowd at about 20,000. Rally organisers said more than 40,000 attended.

The rally stretched for seven city blocks as demonstrators walked slowly behind a drum corps, which beat a funeral march.

Nuclear disarmament rally in Melbourne in 1982.Credit:Geoff Ampt

Police said the crowd was the biggest seen at a city rally since the Vietnam moratorium marches.

Below the forest of banners, flags and signs were mingled Franciscan monks, Spartacists, ALP and ACTU representatives, trade unionists, International Socialists, conservationists and church and student groups.

Nuclear war “victims” drew a cart bearing a figure of death and a large blackened globe of the world, as jazz bands behind played swing to the steps of hundreds of demonstrators packed around them.

The rally was to support the United Nations resolution calling for disarmament. Similar rallies in Sydney, Wollongong, Hobart, Adelaide and Perth have been held in the past three days.

The Melbourne rally began about 1.30 pm at the Treasury Gardens. A spokesman for People for Nuclear Disarmament, Dr Jos Camilleri, told the crowd they were there because they wanted to “reassert our common humanity”.

After a fiery Professor Manning Clark urged them to “say no firmly to death and destruction; say yes firmly to life and to love”, the protestors began the march through the city to the Flagstaff Gardens.

There a retired West German general, Gert Bastian, told the crowd that the major powers had failed to grasp the dangers of the weapons they were stockpiling.

General Bastian, who resigned in protest against his country’s deployment of United States nuclear missiles, said the world now stood at the crossroads between death and a future free of nuclear weapons. A further arms build-up would make a nuclear catastrophe inevitable. He said the major powers sought a security based on mass murder and fear of an imaginary enemy. “To threaten mass murder is not a morally justifiable way of ensuring peace,” he said.

A lighter note was struck by the Anglican Bishop of Bendigo, the Right Reverend Oliver Heyward, who inadvertently referred to the “United Snakes”. The crowd liked that.

In Sydney, the author Patrick White told a rally that nuclear war was the most serious issue that had ever faced the global family. Addressing a crowd estimated by police at 20,000 to 30,000, and by organisers at more than 40,000, Mr White said: “By now, Australia has become an important nuclear target, and nowhere have the people been consulted. French nuclear tests will bring nuclear war closer to those who feel their island is inviolable.”

Mr White attacked what he called the lack of respect shown by uranium miners for Aboriginal land rights, and people whom he called the “Frankenstein consortium of American millionaires who have launched on the world their monster, Ronald Reagan; a figure out of his own B-grade movies”.

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