Post by Wayne Hall on Mar 9, 2021 2:53:10 GMT -5
Hall Greenland
Hall Greenland was a few years ahead of me at school (Fort Street Boys' High School). When I went to university in 1966 while still sixteen years of age he was the editor of the university newspaper Honi Soit and had been president of the Labor Club. I was a spectator of their often amusing activity, from a distance.
In my second year at university I formed an attachment with an attractive young woman from my German class whose father had been a Luftwaffe pilot and had brought his family to Australia after the Second World War. This new element in my life meant that in the year 1967 politics and student activism were not exactly first in my priorities. But the following year was 1968 and after May there were stirs of excitement even in faraway Australia. At a Sydney University front lawn meeting Hall Greenland was addressing a big crowd of students. He was just back from Paris, and was very excited.
In that year a "Free University" started up in a terrace house not far from the Sydney University campus. It was the initiative of a group of students around Bob (today Raewyn) Connell. Plunging with enthusiasm into the activities of the Free University, I was not accompanied by most of my friends, (almost all old school friends), or indeed by my sweetheart. But the time was coming, in any case when I, at least, would be going out into the workforce, and into the world, leaving university and leaving Sydney.
Years passed after that, in various places and various situations, and it was not until 1975 that Hall Greenland's ideology, Trotskyism, caught up with me in practice. Not in the same tendency, as is habitual with Trotskyists, because Hall Greenland was a disciple of the arch "revisionist" Pablo, whereas I had been captured by the tendency of the Belgian Ernest Mandel and its leading representative in Australia, the Brisbane medical doctor John McCarthy. Hall Greenland had been elected to the municipal council of my home suburb, Leichhardt, on the ticket of Australia's only Trotskyist mayor (then and at any time), Nick Origlass
Hall wrote a biography of Nick Origlass. It is a spirited and meticulously documented work and obviously set him thinking of more ambitious projects, namely writing a biography of Pablo. And although I had never been a friend of his, or even really known him, it was this project that brought Hall Greenland to Athens, and the Trotskyist network that threw him together with me. We spent an evening at the Ama Lahi taverna in Athens, run in those days by a Trotskyist, discussing the project with a Trotskyist crowd, and the dimensions of the impossible project then became clear. To write a biography of Pablo one would need at minimum to know French and Greek, well. From this viewpoint I could have done what Hall Greenland at that time wanted to do. But I lacked his other qualifications: belief, contacts, motivation, time, talent as a writer, perhaps. All of which Hall Greenland possessed in abundance. But not the languages.
Idly surfing the internet following a link to my old suburb, I see that Hall Greenland has now played a central role in saving Callan Park from commercial ruination, to the extent this can be done without support from the New South Wales state government. Hall Greenland has been an activist all his life and this tribute from 2013 is perhaps the most fitting way to conclude the present article.
Hall Greenland was a few years ahead of me at school (Fort Street Boys' High School). When I went to university in 1966 while still sixteen years of age he was the editor of the university newspaper Honi Soit and had been president of the Labor Club. I was a spectator of their often amusing activity, from a distance.
In my second year at university I formed an attachment with an attractive young woman from my German class whose father had been a Luftwaffe pilot and had brought his family to Australia after the Second World War. This new element in my life meant that in the year 1967 politics and student activism were not exactly first in my priorities. But the following year was 1968 and after May there were stirs of excitement even in faraway Australia. At a Sydney University front lawn meeting Hall Greenland was addressing a big crowd of students. He was just back from Paris, and was very excited.
In that year a "Free University" started up in a terrace house not far from the Sydney University campus. It was the initiative of a group of students around Bob (today Raewyn) Connell. Plunging with enthusiasm into the activities of the Free University, I was not accompanied by most of my friends, (almost all old school friends), or indeed by my sweetheart. But the time was coming, in any case when I, at least, would be going out into the workforce, and into the world, leaving university and leaving Sydney.
Years passed after that, in various places and various situations, and it was not until 1975 that Hall Greenland's ideology, Trotskyism, caught up with me in practice. Not in the same tendency, as is habitual with Trotskyists, because Hall Greenland was a disciple of the arch "revisionist" Pablo, whereas I had been captured by the tendency of the Belgian Ernest Mandel and its leading representative in Australia, the Brisbane medical doctor John McCarthy. Hall Greenland had been elected to the municipal council of my home suburb, Leichhardt, on the ticket of Australia's only Trotskyist mayor (then and at any time), Nick Origlass
Hall wrote a biography of Nick Origlass. It is a spirited and meticulously documented work and obviously set him thinking of more ambitious projects, namely writing a biography of Pablo. And although I had never been a friend of his, or even really known him, it was this project that brought Hall Greenland to Athens, and the Trotskyist network that threw him together with me. We spent an evening at the Ama Lahi taverna in Athens, run in those days by a Trotskyist, discussing the project with a Trotskyist crowd, and the dimensions of the impossible project then became clear. To write a biography of Pablo one would need at minimum to know French and Greek, well. From this viewpoint I could have done what Hall Greenland at that time wanted to do. But I lacked his other qualifications: belief, contacts, motivation, time, talent as a writer, perhaps. All of which Hall Greenland possessed in abundance. But not the languages.
Idly surfing the internet following a link to my old suburb, I see that Hall Greenland has now played a central role in saving Callan Park from commercial ruination, to the extent this can be done without support from the New South Wales state government. Hall Greenland has been an activist all his life and this tribute from 2013 is perhaps the most fitting way to conclude the present article.