The oddest feature of these times was that much would be forgotten if it wasn't for the activities of our enemies, the coppers, who spent many millions of dollars spying on us. I have exercised my legal rights to get my ASIO file under the 30 year rule, up to the end of 1973, and I have also acquired my NSW Special Branch file as a result of the decision of the NSW Labor government to release the files a couple of years ago. I have about 6000 pages of police records of my activities, or about 8000 discrete items.

One feature of this meticulous secret police bureaucracy, which relied very largely on phone taps, was that if you were mentioned in someone's phone conversation, the whole of the transcript of that phone conversation was painstakingly added to your own personal file. As I was at the centre of many agitations, my file is full of the phone conversations of members of rival factions, which makes for a fascinating kind of social history of that moment of youth radicalisation.

There are a number of conversations in my file between Humphrey and his Maoist associates, in which I'm mentioned, and these transcripts give a sense of the real problems of organisation and agitation that were common to all groups. One of the things that emerges in Humphrey's conversations is the tension that rapidly developed in his own life, between political agitation, and serious intellectual activity, and in his case, the serious intellectual activity more or less won out over the agitational work very early on. In my view that was a good thing, because his intellectual activity and output became prolific and wide-ranging.

All the radical, broadly based and rather multi-tendency and heterogenous student and youth movements eventually disintegrated in ways that were often unique to the particular ideological current. The Maoist movement evolved in a particular way. The powerhouse of the Maoist youth movement was the Bakery premises in Prahran. The form of organisation became the Worker Student Alliance, and the WSA became quite a powerful force in the youth movement in both Melbourne and Adelaide. The connections between the Worker Student Alliance and the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), which had been set up by Ted Hill and the Maoist union officials who had broken away from the old Communist Party of Australia in 1963, were rather tenuous. The Maoist theory of the party concentrated mainly on the conspiratorial and underground side of political activity, and in practice this made the CPA(ML) a very shadowy kind of organisation. Several of the Maoist student leaders commented later that they had been on the CPA-ML Central Committee without even being informed of it! In the late 1980s, Barry York and John Herouvim wrote a fairly detailed account of the political atmosphere and political style of the Maoist youth movement published in Arena and other places, and this material is of considerable interest.

In practice, the political party aspects of the WSA weren't terribly important to the functioning of the organisation. The WSA was a movement that revolved around charismatic individuals, the first rank of whom were Albert Langer, Darce Cassidy and Michael Hyde. The second rank were people like Dave Nadel (who later broke away to become a founder of the International Socialists) Kerry Russell (Langer's then wife), Barry York, Fergus Robinson, Brian Boyd (now industrial officer with the Victorian Trades Hall Council) and Jim Bacon, later Labor premier of Tasmania (recently retired because of lung cancer). Initially Humphrey McQueen was kind of in the first rank, but his agitational role was soon modified because he rapidly moved mainly into his own theoretical and historical work. The Maoist student movement flourished for a period, based primarily on constant mobilisation against the Vietnam War, mainly at Monash, Latrobe and Flinders universities.