One of the first moves of the newly elected Whitlam Labour government in December 1972 was to free seven men imprisoned for their beliefs. Their crime had been refusal to comply with the National Service Act, a so-called “lottery of death” that sent some 15,300 young Australians to fight in Vietnam. Two hundred of them never came home.
The issue of national service – often dubbed “the draft” following American vernacular – was perhaps the most powerful in the anti-war movement’s arsenal. “Draft resisters” mobilised public sentiment with their heroic stands, respectable mothers campaigned to “Save our Sons” and, as I explore in a newly published book chapter, the Australian wing of Amnesty International classed these men as “prisoners of conscience”.
