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Community Carnival or Cold War Strategy? The 1952 Youth Carnival for Peace and Friendship

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conference contribution
posted on 2024-11-18, 09:11 authored by Phillip Deery
In March 1952, four youthful and possibly maverick members of the NSW Police Force contacted Audrey Blake, the national secretary of the Eureka Youth League [EYL]. As a team, they said, they wished to enter several sporting events in the forthcoming Youth Carnival for Peace and Friendship. The national executive of the EYL, which helped organise the carnival, reported that, at first, it 'regarded this request with considerable suspicion, but after discussion with the policemen, found they had a genuine interest in the purpose of the Carnival, namely Youth activity and Peace'. I This request, and its response, exemplify two themes of this paper. First, the extent to which the Carnival, one of the longest, largest and most logistically complex carnivals ever held in Australia, embraced broad community interests, extending even to the police services. Second, the degree to which the vigilance and suspicion of the carnival organisers was due to potential participants being policemen, to whom the Labor movement was traditionally hostile or to concerns about the level of infiltration and surveiIIance by security services. This raises a third issue: how far community involvement in this carnival was limited by the role of the state, in which the role of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation [ASIO] was only one dimension.

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