Seventies

In 1970 homosexuality was illegal, God Save the Queen was our national anthem and women pretended to be married to access the pill. By the end of the decade conscription was scrapped, tertiary education was free, access to abortion had improved, the White Australia policy was abolished and a woman read the news on the ABC for the first time.

The Seventies was the decade that shaped modern Australia. It was the decade of ‘It’s Time’, stagflation and the Dismissal, a tumultuous period of economic and political upheaval. But the Seventies was also the era when the personal became political, when we had a Royal Commission into Human Relationships and when social movements tore down the boundary between public and private life. Women wanted childcare, equal pay, protection from violence and agency to shape their own lives. In the process, the reforms they sought – and achieved, at least in part - reshaped Australia’s culture and rewrote our expectations of government.

In a lively and engaging style, Michelle Arrow has written a new history of this transformative decade; one that is more urgent, and more resonant, than ever.

Sales Points

• This book is the first to explore the impact of the 1970s on Australiansociety since Frank Crowley’s Tough Times: Australia in the seventies,published over 30 years ago
• Michelle Arrow was the joint winner of the 2014 NSW Premier’sHistory Awards Multimedia History Prize
• She was the first historian to read the archives of the Royal Commissionon Human Relationships, an extraordinary social inquiry that hadbeen almost entirely forgotten until now. Has led to an award-winning radio documentary and to this book
• Many accounts of the 1970s focus only on economic and politicalissues where this emphasises changing relationships, more openness to sex and sexuality, looking at gay and lesbian activists
• One of the first books to address place of conservative anti-feminist activists at the time, such as Women Who Want To Be Women and the Festival of Light