What Did You Do in the Cold War, Daddy? Personal Stories from a Troubled Time

The Cold War was a turbulent time to grow up in: family ties were tested, friendships were torn apart, and new beliefs forged out of the ruins of old loyalties. In this book, through 12 evocative stories of childhood and early adulthood in Australia during the Cold War years, writers from vastly different backgrounds explore how global political events affected the intimate space of home, family life, and friendships. Some writers were barely in their teens when they felt the first touches of their parents’ political lives, both on the Left and the Right. Others grew up in households well attuned to activism across the spectrum, including anticommunism, workers’ rights, anti-Vietnam War, antiapartheid, and women’s rights. Sifting through the key political and social developments in Australia from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, including the referendum to ban the Communist Party of Australia, the rise of “the Movement” and the Labor split, and postwar migration, this book is a powerful and poignant telling of the ways in which the political is personal.

Ann Curthoys is an honorary professor at the University of Sydney, and was previously Manning Clark Professor of History at Australia National University. She is author of Freedom Ride: A Freedomrider Remembers and the coauthor of How to Write History That People Want to Read and Is History Fiction?Joy Damousi is a professor of history at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Colonial Voices: A Cultural History of English in Australia 1840–1940; Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia; Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-war Australia; and Women Come Rally: Communism, socialism and gender 1890–1955. She is also a coeditor of Diversity in Leadership: Australian Women, Past and Present.