Re: Re: Old Discussion

[Peter Boyle <peterb@xxxxxxxxxx>]

[ jpeg snipped ]

That's me in the foreground with my youngest daughter at a march for
refugee rights in Sydney last Sunday. We go to interesting places
together: about this time last year this spunky child (then 4 years old)
was detained with other overseas comrades by Indonesian police who
raided a conference on neo-liberal globalisation in Jakarta. I migrated
to Australia from Malaysia as a 17-year-old "front-door boatperson" in
1971 partly because Australian immigration officials gave my family
"points" under the White Australia Policy for the bit of European
ancestry that gave us our Irish name. The shock of how relatively easy
things were in the "Lucky Country" compared to Asia and a taste of
racism, got me thinking. Then some anti-Vietnam war demonstrators came
to my college and I joined my first political protest march. I was a
left activist without party affiliation until late 1973 (because the
organised left had wasn't present in the city I lived in then) when I
joined the Socialist Youth Alliance (the predecessor to Resistance)
during a brief visit to Melbourne. In 1976 I joined the Socialist
Workers Party (now DSP). I work in the national office, write for Green
Left Weekly and have nationally coordinated numerous campaigns
(including the DSP's intervention into the 20,000-strong 3-day blockade
of the World Economic Forum in Melbourne in September 2000) as well as
doing my share of the "boring" paper selling, fundraising, etc. I was
the first managing editor of Links magazine and one of the initial
national convenors of the Socialist Alliance.


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