Australia's only successful revolution began in 1966, at the height of the Vietnam war, when the American President Lyndon Baines Johnson visited his Coca-colony, the Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt promised to ‘go all the way with LBJ’ and went on to a huge electoral victory, and the young took to the streets in protest at the conduct of their elders. When they blocked the way of the New South Wales Premier in his car of state, he instructed his driver to ‘run over the bastards’. While the Viet Cong dug their tunnels and the President of South Vietnam gaoled his opponents, students around the world inaugurated the counter-culture with its slogan of personal and political liberation, ‘Make love, not war.’ They got stoned on pot instead of pissed on beer, rocked to the Beatles and the Monkees and the Rolling Stones instead of waltzing to Nelson Riddle and his orchestra, demanded alternative courses and established free universities, and lived a public culture of protest that culminated in the moratoriums and, in Australia, the outraged demonstrations against the South African rugby tour. Politics was never going to be the same.

In 1972 Gough Whitlam addressed crowds of enthusiasm with the opening words of the new age, ‘Men and women of Australia …’ It was time, and he went on to win a famous victory.