Australia: Pressure Groups Material

Leaflets, letters, newsletters, journals, posters, badges, stickers and pamphlets at federal and state level issued by the Australian Democrats Student Organisation, the Australian Heritage Society, the Australian Independence Movement, the Australian League of Rights, the Aboriginal Mining Information Centre, the Australian Peace Committee, the Australian Union of Students, the Council for Civil Liberties, Citizens for Democracy, Combined Unions Against Government Cutbacks, the Federation of Adelaide Metropolitan Residents' Association, the Higher Education Round Table, the Immigration Control Association, the Libertarian Socialist Association, the Movement Against Uranium Mining, the New South Wales Labor Day Committee, the No Ties With Apartheid Campaign, the National Workers Control Conference, People for Nuclear Disarmament, the Proportional Representation Society of Australia, Resistance, the Southern Africa Liberation Centre, the Socialist Labour League, the Sydney Working Women's Group of Women's Liberation, the Transnational Co-operative, Tax Payers United, the Union of Australian Women, the Women's Action Alliance, the Women's Electoral Lobby, Words for Women, and the Wilderness Society.

The late 1960s and early 1970s in Australia saw the burgeoning of new movements which sought to influence the political process, often on single issues and from outside the established parties which were the conventional channels of political expression. The most popular of these included the anti-war movement, the anti-uranium movement, the land rights movement, the women's movement and the conservation movement, although as the list above indicates there was no shortage of other issues prompting the formation of new pressure groups. Some of these movements coalesced into mainstream political organisations, in the case of the Green Party with significant electoral success, whilst others remain on the margins or have been co-opted by the very forces and institutions they set out to challenge - an example of this being the deradicalizing of the agendas of many feminist groups. The materials held here reflect first-hand both the concerns and the struggles of these movements.

Alphabetically by group, and then in rough chronological order.

Open to all for research purposes; access is free for anyone in higher education.

Institute of Commonwealth Studies

Records at item level on library catalogue (SASCAT)

Description compiled by Daniel Millum, Political Archives Project Officer at the Institutes of Commonwealth and Latin American Studies.

Copies can usually be obtained - apply to library staff.

The Commonwealth Pressure Group Materials collection was built up alongside that of the Political Parties, which was begun in 1960-61, and likewise concentrated on the collection of primary material. The main method of gathering material has been to appeal directly to pressure groups throughout the Commonwealth, though contributions from Institute members and staff following visits to relevant countries have been significant. More recently Australian material has been collected by means of downloading documents from the websites of significant groups and movements.

Further accruals are expected, some in electronic form.

See also Australia: Trades Unions Material (TU.AT) and Australia: Political Party Material (PP.AT), as well as Political Party, Trades Unions and Pressure Group Materials for other Commonwealth countries, and related material in the library's main classified sequence, all held at ICS.