VALE Wallace McKitrick: cultural fighter (1950-2025)

Written by: Nick G. on 1 April 2025

 

Wallace McKitrick, perhaps still known by some by his birth name, Peter Hicks, was an advocate for, and creative artist of, progressive Australian culture.

Wallace worked for most of his life in community-based artistic and cultural activities.

He began writing poetry while at high school, enrolled for a short time at Flinders University. He then worked at odd jobs while helping to develop a street theatre collective with Margot Nash. Wallace wrote many of its scripts and performed them alongside Margot and others, not just at rallies against conscription and at Moratoriums, but also outside car plants, other large factories and schools.

Wallace was arrested in 1968 during an anti-conscription sit-in at the Department of Labour and National Service offices in Adelaide, and created an uproar in July 1969 when he announced his intention to burn a dog to show people who were not awakened to the horror of the US use of napalm against Vietnamese civilians just what was involved. “Student to burn dog as protest” was splashed across the newspaper front page, and although it was just a media stunt and never intended to do harm to the dog, Plato, it resulted in death threats for the Flinders student.

Wallace chose not to apply for conscientious objector status, and refused to register for the conscription ballot. When police summonsed him to appear on charges related to the offence, he went to New Zealand for a year and subsequently to the Spanish Canary Islands, returning to Australia when his mother sent him news of Whitlam’s election and the end of conscription.

He worked at various labouring jobs and then re-enrolled at Flinders, having heard of the Politics and Arts course offered by the Philosophy Department as part of the Marxist-Leninist course offered by Prof. Brian Medlin and Greg O’Hair. Wallace had known Medlin since the Moratorium days when Medlin was its leader.

At that time 1973, Wallace was working at the Botanic Gardens, mowing lawns, for almost a year and then was awarded a six-month Commonwealth Literary Fellowship on the basis of his record as a poet. That was the first issue of Commonwealth literary grants in Australia by the new Whitlam Government.

Then in 1975, he was appointed as the inaugural Arts Officer with the Trades and Labour Council of South Australia. That involved organising lunchtime shows in factories and building sites – musical shows or very short dramas, theatrical shows or exhibitions or films. This time he collaborated with singer Robin Archer who wrote songs about working class immigration, and sang them to workers in Greek and Italian.

Three years had elapsed between the street theatre and his forced departure from Australia.

It was following his return to Australia that Wallace joined the Worker-Student Alliance and the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist). Asked in a 2022 oral history interview whether he had joined the Party, Wallace, who always strictly observed our “iceberg” organisational principle, laughed and said “If I had joined the Marxist-Leninist Party, I couldn't tell you.”

He now turned his attention to setting up the Progressive Art Movement (PAM) with Annie Newmarch and Pam Harris. It was intended to bring together working class issues and the movement for Australian independence across a multimedia collaboration which focussed largely on screenprints created by Annie and others.

In 2024, Wakefield Press published “If you don’t fight…you lose: Politics, Posters and PAM” as an illustrated retrospective on the Progressive Art Movement. In their chapter on the history of PAM, Catherine Speck and Jude Adams write: “PAM, like the Worker-Student Alliance, was a front organisation for the Communist Party of Australia (CPA M-L) which had several agendas operating. One was a campaign against foreign bases in Australia, another was against a car industry run by American companies, yet another was supporting (and joining) the Australian Independence Movement. Within this political mix, cultural workers became involved in rank-and-file operations and in the class struggle at the two major car manufacturing plants, GMH ad Chrysler.”

Another area of involvement for Wallace was the leading of the Creative Writing Workshops in Yatala Prison, which he initiated with friend and fellow poet John Healey, in 1974. It kept going for four years, initially fortnightly, and for a period of time weekly. It meant a great deal to Wallace to work with the inmates who, despite a policy of “rehabilitation”, felt they were regarded as society’s “rubbish”, but who blossomed as creative writers and artists when they felt they were treated as humans for the first time.

Wallace was also involved with the Assemblers folk group which included some of the Rank and File organisation at Chryslers. He wrote various songs and some pieces for The Independent Australian magazine. He wrote a song called 'Ballad of a Bloody Worker,' about Chrysler worker Wil Heidt's arrest and imprisonment. 

When the folk-rock group Redgum was formed by students of Medlin’s course, inspired by Mao Zedong’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, Wallace contributed the song Red Raggin’ to their first album. The song declared the wearing of the anti-Communist “red raggers” badge to be an act of defiant pride. The album cover, by George Aldridge, depicted a gigantic Aussie worker about to put an axe through the US spy base at Pine Gap. The back cover featured photos by Anne Newmarch. Its title was the militant union call, “If you don’t fight, you lose”.

Wallace was a founding member of the Community Arts Network of South Australia in 1979 or ‘80. In 1980 he became employed by the Arts Council of South Australia, which was a regionally-based organisation. He conducted workshops and supported community artists and writers across Eyre Peninsula at Ceduna, Port Lincoln, Tumby Bay, Port Neill and Whyalla. He also did a lot of the same work in SA’s South-East. 

In 1988, with the struggle between Patricks and the Maritime Union in full swing, he had his poem “The Slimy Patrick’s Scab” printed in Overland magazine.

Wallace was a great supporter of Indigenous cultural work and was a reference committee member (Klynton Wanganeen, Wallace McKitrick, Bill Wilson, Crystal Murray) for iDreamingTV (originally called Yaitya Makkitura), created in 1998 by the SA Aboriginal community interested in establishing an Indigenous screen and multi-media organisation. 

Wallace spent ten years representing a federal funding agency concerned with cultural initiatives in Indigenous communities.  He was Senior Policy and Program Officer, Indigenous Culture Branch, Ministry for the Arts, Australian Government 2004-14; Senior Policy Adviser, ATSIC; recipient of 1987 Ros Bower Award (then under his name as Peter Hicks).

Wallace worked with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) from 2001, where he was increasingly aware of the political importance of the Aboriginal self-determination movement. He was in Port Augusta with ATSIC for two years, and had been in Port Augusta already for almost two years before that, with a community development programme based in local government. And then he came to work for the State Policy Centre of ATSIC in Adelaide in 2003.

In 2012-13, Wallace was Senior Policy Officer for the Indigenous Languages Support scheme and its Australia-wide Master-Apprentice Language and Learning Workshop (MALLP) providing support for the revival and teaching of Indigenous languages. 

In 2012 at a Spirit of Eureka commemoration for Eureka Day on the SA Parliament House steps, Wallace heard a talk by Italian-Australian Don Longo on Eureka participant and historian Rafaello Carboni.  He mentioned it again in 2022 when interviewed by Don and Lyn Longo for the Days of Wrath oral history project. He was particularly impressed by Don’s emphasis on the multicultural nature of the 1854 Eureka Rebellion.

Following the death of his friend and comrade Brian Medlin, Wallace contributed to a book published in 2021 titled “The Level-Headed Revolutionary”, a collection of writings by and about Medlin.

Then, when his friend and collaborator from the Progressive Art Movement, Anne Newmarch, died in 2022, he wrote a moving testament to her political commitment titled “Remembering Ann Newmarch – vital contributor to an independent Australian culture”, published on the Spirit of Eureka website.

When Australia was embroiled in controversy over the referendum on Constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, Wallace wrote a three-part series on Aboriginal sovereignty for Spirit of Eureka under the heading “Indigenous Sovereignty movement is indestructible”.

In August 2024, despite illness, he wrote a review of the film Ḻuku Ngärra: the Law of the Land. The film was made by the Yolŋu people of the NT and focuses on the life of law custodian the Reverend Doctor D. Gondarra. Wallace said of Dr Gondarra’s analysis that it “deftly connects historical British imperialism, Australian settler-colonialism, and modern imperialism’s intensified exploitative practices, while sketching some essential ingredients of a people’s liberation movement.” The review is also on the Spirit of Eureka website.

When Wallace died on the morning of March 14, he had on his desk a copy of Carboni’s book on Eureka, placed on top of his copy of Don Longo’s Eureka Day speech. 

He had said during his interview with Don and Lyn Longo “Reading your 2012 Eureka Day speech, in fact brought back home to me, the absolute critical importance of that dimension. And that's what has to be brought forward. The multi-cultural fact, the diversity of backgrounds and political persuasions in other respects, all with revolutionary intent. This is a microcosm of what's possible.”

Wallace had told family members he intended to write a three-part cycle on Eureka, and kept his unfinished dream of using Eureka to show what is possible in terms of revolutionary intent beside him as he passed away.

Wallace’s passing is a sad loss for wife Sarah and his children and grandchildren.  We extend our sincere condolences to them.

But we rejoice in this comrade’s unblemished record of whole-of-life contributions to Australian anti-imperialist, democratic and socialist cultural work. 

 

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