Dispersal After 1964
The year 1964 saw the gradual demise of the Royal George Hotel as the prime focal venue of the Sydney Push which dispersed its bustling social life to other traditional venues like the Newcastle, Orient and Port Jackson hotels in The Rocks near Circular Quay and the Rose, Crown and Thistle at Paddington, but also to alternative central-city pubs including the United States and Edinburgh Castle. By the early 1970s, the Criterion Hotel on the corner of Liverpool and Sussex Streets had become the watering hole of the last of the Push diehards. Meanwhile, Push hangers-on and 'tourists', now numbering hundreds, patronised pubs like the Four-in-Hand (Paddington) and the Forth and Clyde at Balmain, but these were venues of social entertainment, lacking the intellectual camaraderie, the informal folksong and the bohemian flavour of the 'George'.
The retired education professor Alan Barcan has published a personal account of his view of activism at Sydney University during the 1960s. Though he was not an eyewitness of Push life, he provides some relevant insights into how student life became infected by Push doctrines of freedom and rebellion, to a point at which the social movement was superseded and its leading personalities were dispersed or replaced with a new breed of social critics. As described by Barcan, this period saw the emergence of mainstream talents like poets Les Murray and Geoffrey Lehmann, journalists David Solomon, Mungo MacCallum (Jnr) and Laurie Oakes, Oz magazine satirists Richard Neville, Richard Walsh and Martin Sharp, and maverick writer Bob Ellis. These were people who did not actively embrace the Push life but were strongly influenced by it.
Push personalities who emigrated to the United Kingdom included Clive James, Paddy McGuinness, Chester (Philip Graham) and Ian Parker (pictured above) who returned to Sydney in the late 1970s and was knocked down and killed while drunk, in Dixon Street. For some reason, a false account was promulgated that he died in a London street. Paddy McGuinness returned to Australia in 1971, working as a film critic, Labor ministerial staffer, right-wing newspaper columnist and journal editor until his death in 2007. Folksinger John Earls went to Bolivia and former Tribune (Communist Party of Australia newspaper) cartoonist Harry Reade went to join Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba (and returned in 1971 at the same time as Paddy McGuinness). The disabled poet Lex Banning travelled to England and Greece from 1962 until 1964 but returned and died in Sydney in 1965. The accomplished folksinger Don Ayrton departed to settle at Kuranda in Queensland where he committed suicide in 1982. A tragedy occurred as Paddy McGuinness was departing for Italy by ship in May 1963. The farewelling crowd included a young Push lady, Janne (or Jan) Millar, who fell to the concrete dock floor from a height and suffered fatal head injuries. A number of other tragic deaths occurred in this decade, including some from substance abuse which was becoming a regular part of Sydney culture at the time.
Many young Push associates simply moved on to careers in the professions and academia. A reunion organised by André Frankovits at the Royal George/Slip Inn in 2000 attracted over 100. Another, at the Harold Park Hotel in February 2012, drew several dozen, including some who had travelled from North Queensland and Perth to attend.
On the demise of the Push, Anne Coombs has stated: " in 1964, the year the Beatles came and brought into the open that new phenomenon: 'youth culture'." Citing this, Alan Barcan added "In advocating free love and opposition to authority, the Push and the Libertarians anticipated the new post-1968 morality. But the adoption of many of their ideas by society undermined their raison d'être".
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