Cold War Kid is an activist’s account of the period 1945-1972. Rowan Cahill tells the story of how a would-be poet and beachcomber solo-sailor was conscripted during the first call-up in 1965 and morphed to become prominent in opposing Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War and conscription.

The action begins in the back roads of Sydney’s North Shore amongst remnant orchards, dairies, and bushland, and ends in a rural bolt hole, the author criminalised, the threat of imprisonment constant, and experimenting with writing history from below. We visit Sydney University as a site of radicalism and the Sydney waterfront, where the author worked with the militant Seamen’s Union of Australia.

Activists will find hope and encouragement in this book describing agency and the development of resistance against overwhelming odds that helped end Australia’s involvement in an illegal war, ended conscription, and brought an end to twenty-three years of conservative government.

ROWAN CAHILL is a graduate of the universities of Sydney, New England, and Wollongong. Conscripted for military service in 1965, he became a Conscientious Objector and prominent in the anti-war and New Left movements of the 1960s and 70s. He has variously worked as a farmhand; as a teacher in technical education, schools, the prison system, universities; as a freelance writer; and for the trade union movement as a publicist, historian, and rank and file activist. He has published widely in mainstream, trade union, social movement, and academic publications. His recent books, co-authored with Terry Irving, are Radical Sydney: Places, Portraits and Unruly Episodes (UNSW Press, 2010) and The Barber Who Read History: Essays in Radical History (Bull Ant Press, 2021).

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