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It\u2019s difficult to imagine now, but there was a time when a howling crowd of university students in Melbourne managed to trap a prime minister in a tiny underground room; his so-called protectors, having lost control, desperately trying to plan an escape.<\/p>\n
It was August 1976, and Malcolm Fraser had been prime minister for only eight months. The catalyst for the roiling protest at Monash University, however, occurred exactly 48 years ago today, on November 11, 1975.<\/p>\n
That was the day the then governor-general, John Kerr, dismissed the elected government of Gough Whitlam.<\/p>\n
Leftist university students \u2013 particularly those in Melbourne, a hotbed of radicalism since the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s \u2013 suddenly had a hot new cause.<\/p>\n
Fraser became a hated symbol of everything the students considered wrong with Australian democracy.<\/p>\n
Conspiracy theories that the dismissal was driven by the unseen hand of the CIA flourished, and placards routinely featured a swastika replacing the \u201cs\u201d in Fraser\u2019s name.<\/p>\n
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Malcolm Fraser and his bodyguards are surrounded by protestors at Monash University in August 1976.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>The Age<\/cite><\/p>\n When students learned Fraser was to appear at Monash to deliver a speech and open a new education centre for disabled children, the ingredients for one of the most intense protests in Australian political history came together.<\/p>\n Now a film has been made about those events, which are little known among recent generations.<\/p>\n How to Capture a Prime Minister<\/em> will premiere at The Capitol in Melbourne\u2019s Swanston Street on Saturday, November 11, to coincide with the anniversary of the Dismissal.<\/p>\n Director and producer Gary Newman sank so much of his income into the project from his work as a journalist and communications consultant over the past decade that he says it is the reason he doesn\u2019t own a house at the age of 46.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been a harrowing experience, but worth it because it\u2019s a great story and an important part of our national history,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \u201cI assumed at the start that people would know about the Dismissal and events around it, but I discovered that a lot of people don\u2019t know about it all.<\/p>\n \u201cI wanted to tell a story that would re-engage people with politics.\u201d<\/p>\n Newman\u2019s film is more than a documentary about a protest, though the historical TV footage captured during the wild hours of the demonstration is spellbinding.<\/p>\n Doors are pounded and the eyes of Fraser and his small body of protection officers are wide with something approaching fear as they are surrounded.<\/p>\n Fraser, about to speak from the stage of Monash\u2019s Alexander Theatre, is handed a note from his press secretary saying his security can\u2019t be guaranteed.<\/p>\n The film reveals security arrangements were a fiasco.<\/p>\n ASIO, having infiltrated the protest movement, downplayed the potential for violence, reporting to the Commonwealth Police that students were on vacation. Only a small group could be expected to turn up.<\/p>\n But Melbourne\u2019s radicals cared nothing for vacations.<\/p>\n Maoists hired buses and barrelled in from La Trobe University to join Monash\u2019s anarchists, revolutionaries of varied allegiances and assorted other activists. Lindsay Tanner, later a federal Labor MP who served as finance minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments, was among the contingent who travelled across town from Melbourne University, where he was studying law and editing the student magazine Farrago<\/em>.<\/p>\n Student activisits lay siege to Malcolm Fraser at Monash University.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>The Age <\/cite><\/p>\n Meanwhile, Victorian police sat in their cars beyond the campus, moving to try to escort Fraser through the melee only after events were beyond controlling.<\/p>\n The prime minister, unable to get out of the hall, disappeared.<\/p>\n Students thought they had him bailed up in the toilets. In fact, he was locked in a building engineers\u2019 office in the basement.<\/p>\n Eventually, the prime minister was hauled by a police officer through a window almost too small for his large frame and rushed to an unmarked getaway car.<\/p>\n Newman peppers his film with the recollections of a number of participants in the demonstration, all of whom have since become prominent in society, one way or another.<\/p>\n Among them are Red Bingham, later noted for assaulting fellow student Peter Costello at Monash; Jeannie Rea, who became an educator and served as president of the National Tertiary Education Union; philosopher Carleton \u201cBruin\u201d Christensen; Dick Gross, a lawyer, author and former mayor of Port Phillip; Bruce Hearn, who became a senior lecturer at Deakin University and lead singer of the ska band Strange Tenants; Brian Boyd, who became secretary of the Victorian Trades Hall Council; and economist and senior public servant Bill Mountford, who served as CEO of WorkCover for a period.<\/p>\n Though most of these characters have mellowed with age and experience, few expressed regret in the film for their roles in the Fraser siege at Monash.<\/p>\n But a fascinating moment in the film comes when they meet Fraser, who definitely mellowed before he died in 2015, including quitting the Liberal Party.<\/p>\n Fraser invites the old radicals into his office, and afterwards, they agree they found him engaging and not at all the character they imagined when they imprisoned him at Monash.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n