AUSTRALIA ADMINISTERS THE GREATER PART OF THE NUMEROUS mountainous, volcanic, jungle-clad tropical islands to its north, collectively called New Guinea. Indonesia administers the lesser part west of the 141st meridian. There are about two and a quarter million people in the ‘Australian’ part, of whom only 35,000 are not indigenous Papuans or Melanesians. One-third of the population live in Papua, the more southerly section, which has been an Australian Territory since 1906; two-thirds in ‘New Guinea’, administered by Australia as a mandate since 1921, and a Trust Territory since 1946, when unified control of the two Territories under a single Administrator was confirmed by the Trusteeship agreement. The Australian administration has engaged in an active programme of economic and political development only since the end of the war with Japan (a good part of which was waged in the Territory).

IT WOULD SEEM CURIOUS TO AN OUTSIDE OBSERVER THAT THE DISSOLUTION of the Nihon-Anakisuto-Renmei (Japanese Anarchist Federation) should be formally announced in January 1969, at a time when militant students were determined to defend their ‘fortress’, the Yasuda auditorium of Tokyo University, which they had occupied for several months, against an attack by the riot police. The anarchists themselves called the dissolution ‘a deployment in the face of the enemy’. Yet they had to admit at the same time that they had reached a deadlock in their attempts within the Federation to formulate new theories of anarchism and to hit upon new forms of organization for the new era of direct action which they believed had begun. Indeed, they remained very weak numerically, and they had only a limited direct influence among the student movements which appeared in their eyes to have ushered in this era.

NOTHING FAILS LIKE FAILURE; THE LESS ANARCHISTS ARE READ, THE less they write, and the less they are written about. The anarchist movement has risen and fallen in turn for more than a century, and in the trough just before the current wave there was probably less new literature concerning anarchism than ever before. My object here is to examine the situation in this country at that time, roughly between 1941 and 1960, and then to see how it has changed during the last ten years. (I have excluded articles in periodicals in order to avoid over-complication,)

LIKE THE HISTORICAL ANARCHIST MOVEMENT THE NEW LEFT TODAY is an international phenomenon, and it is recognized as such both by the revolutionaries themselves and by the authorities, just as the revolutionary movement was a century ago. In June 1871, a few weeks after the suppression of the Paris commune, Jules Favre, the Foreign Minister in the provisional government, said ‘Europe is faced by a work of destruction which is directed against all nations and directed against the principles upon which civilization rests.’ And on 14 November 1968, a few months after the attempts at revolution in Paris in the spring, M. Raymond Marcellin, Minister of the Interior in the French government, said ‘a study of the movement launched in the German Federal Republic in November 1967, in Britain from 1968, and the attempts observed in Holland at the same time disclosed the disturbing simultaneousness, a complete identity of methods of action and of intervention between communist and activist groups. We observe in the convergence of the phenomenon between Europe and the United States in the last few years the action of determined and militant minorities cultivating close contacts with each other across frontiers and living in a state of permanent conspiracy against society.’