Salient 58 Years On: Student Activism from the Year 1968

Salient has been a driving force on campus since 1938, and has become a fixture of student life. From infamously helping collect VUWSA funds for both the Viet Cong and South Vietnam in 1972, to setting up the somehow more controversial “Lundy 500” in 2009 where teams of vehicles travelled from Petone to Palmerston North in an attempt to recreate Mark Lundy’s alleged timeline of the infamous Lundy murders, Salient has had its fair share of tumultuous history.

Throughout that time, we’ve always had an editor at the helm. Take our lovely Phoebe Robertson, for example, in her third year as editor of Salient. As noted in our ‘Choose your Fighter” Instagram post, she pretty much has a Bachelors in Salient.

But long before Phoebe, editors were already cementing Salient’s reputation for boldness and controversy. One standout figure is Bill Logan, the 1968 editor, who took charge of the then-newspaper during a period of global unrest and student activism. 

I came to Logan’s apartment on a Tuesday. He let me into a house filled with a life lived. Portraits of him and his partner lined the walls alongside shelves of books and an array of paintings and photographs—most notably a hand-painted Soviet Union flag and a photograph from Logan’s unsuccessful run for VUWSA in 1970. 

Logan is a Wellingtonian, born and raised. He attended VUW in 1966, originally enrolling in the Faculty of Law. Logan described himself as “a Liberal National Party type” before swapping into political science and beginning what he calls his “recruitment into Communism and Trotskyism" by prominent Trotskyist and Dispute magazine editor Owen Gager.

In simple terms, Trotskyism is a branch of Marxist-Leninist ideology developed by Leon Trotsky, and remains one of the largest sects of communism to this day.

Logan first graced Salient's pages at the end of 1966, when he uncovered the Boshier-Laurenson Affair, in which senior National Party official R. J. Laurenson attempted to use the Security Service to obtain information on young activist Roger Boshier. Logan became the whistleblower, and the incident sparked debate in Parliament. Prime Minister Keith Holyoake defended the officials involved, but Laurenson’s actions were widely seen as inappropriate, highlighting the risk of political misuse of intelligence services. This led Logan to become disillusioned with the National Party, of which he was then a youth member.

The year Bill Logan became editor of Salient was a big one globally. In 1968 came the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, The Prague Spring, and the May ‘68 movement in France. The latter was of particular note to Logan, who told me that “even in New Zealand, the radicalism reached a peak.” 

He said the trade union activism sparked by the Nil Wage Order—a landmark New Zealand Court decision that ordered no increase in general wage levels despite high inflation, triggering widespread union protests—coincided with the student anti-Vietnam War protests of the time. “It was a really good and interesting year to be editor of Salient.”

Early on Logan’s year as editor Salient became enthralled in activism, beginning with an editorial call for student power—or, as Logan tells me, “really just a call for a slightly more democratic constitution of the University as well as student reps on departmental committees and the professorial board.” Things we take for granted today. The morning the piece went out, Logan received a call from then-acting vice-chancellor Ian Campbell, who invited him to morning tea.

The conversation became Logan’s first real insight into how student publications could affect real-world issues. Campbell told him, “I think if we play it right, we’ll get a committee set up that will make recommendations on the university constitution.” Logan later reflected that, from a liberal perspective, the committee was highly successful, achieving almost all of its original demands. However, he also admitted that the increased student representation made little difference to actual university life and mainly served to “placate student radicalism” within bureaucracy. Still, that did not stop Salient from having an effect on Wellington.

Photograph by Sophie Spencer

Salient has long been known for its provocative articles and writing, and that isn’t new. Logan tells me that he “ran a Salient which was deliberately provocative. We made sure that we had right-wingers writing columns, and left-wingers.” 

After quickly skimming Salient’s 1968 publications I found a range of articles, including “The Cultural Revolution in China” written by the aforementioned leftist Owen Gager which promoted the perceived benefits of Mao Zedong’s infamous Cultural Revolution. Another article titled “Black & White Views on Rhodesia” compared and contrasted views on colonial Rhodesia, present-day Zimbabwe.

Logan finished with Salient in 1968, but continued on campus. He ran for the VUWSA executive on what  was known as “RAT” or the Radical Activist ticket. The ticket failed to produce a VUWSA exec team, and Logan finished his degree in 1970. He spent most of that time within the Progressive Youth Movement, a far-left radical grouping that Logan describes as “a group without terribly well thought-out politics but still committed to action.” 

From then, Logan joined the New Zealand Spartacist League, a Trotskyist group connected to the Spartacist League of the United States. For a while, he built up the New Zealand  communist group before continuing activities in Australia and Great Britain where he helped to build the Australian Spartacist League. The group still exists and has only recently joined the Revolutionary Communist Organisation (RCO). 

However, Logan was expelled from the Spartacist League in 1979 on the grounds of  “gross moral turpitude.” The accusations remain controversial and ambiguous, and they continue to be passionately debated today. Logan chalks them up to “a certain layer of homophobia,” but says the far-left group couldn't be outwardly homophobic. He admits the main motive was that the “tight leadership in America felt under threat by [his] success in Britain.” He told me that it was “a danger to the regime of this petty organization in New York.” 

Upon his ousting of the group, Logan returned to New Zealand. He “had spent [his] 20s being a revolutionary, and [he] was a revolutionary without a revolutionary organization.” Aimlessly, he returned to Wellington, enrolled in an MA, and became a junior lecturer in Political Science for a while. Eventually, Logan began a bookshop called Capital Books and began to work with the Wellington Gay Switchboard, a helpline for those questioning their sexuality at a time where homosexuality was illegal. He continued to do that for 25 years. Capital Books eventually became “a bit of a center for gay people.” 

After an approach from Wellington Central MP Fran Wilde, Logan found himself once more in politics, now as a part of the Gay Task Force. Logan says that for the next 16 or 17 months he found himself working on Homosexual Law Reform.  

Logan ended up debating Cardinal Thomas Williams, a strong anti-homosexual law reform advocate at the time, and came out live on television. He said in an interview for PrideNZ, “I think that's the way all my family and friends learnt that I was gay, was on television.” 

After the Homesexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986, Logan continued to work within the LGBTQIA+ space and helped to set up the AIDS foundation. However, throughout all his publicized ordeals, he told me he became “rather unemployable.” He began doing a lot of funerals for gay men who had died of AIDS. “It was a pretty terrible time,” he tells me. “And non-religious celebrants weren’t a thing. Funeral directors would say, ‘Hey, could you do this funeral for us?’”

Logan began to make a living doing funerals. He told me that, at one stage, he was doing four or five a week. In fact, Logan ended up doing the funeral for Ian Campbell—the acting Vice-chancellor with whom Logan’s student politics had first begun. 

Funerals became emotionally draining for Logan, and by 1990 he had trained as a counsellor and gone into private practice. Today, he works as a counsellor, funeral celebrant, and wedding celebrant.

Nowadays, Logan lives a quieter life. He remains very active in the International Bolshevik Tendency, and you may see him and his comrades at the Hunter Lounge on a Friday, jostling over politics and all sorts of life. When asked how his personal views have changed throughout his life, Logan told me, “values all remain very similar, we all start out wanting to be a decent person and to make a different world; it's how we go about it that changes.” 

He warns that people are often pulled into their own private worlds, where the need to make a living can overpower a sense of community. Logan argues that “we do not start out corrupted, but are often corrupted by the world. And if you are lucky, you find a way to avoid that.” He adds that he does not believe he himself has been corrupted, before reflecting, “Ah! But how many people believe they have been corrupted?”

He looks back on his time at Salient fondly. “The idea that conflict between ideas is really important” was taught to him in the offices, he tells me, and has stayed with him throughout his life. He stressed the importance of all small publications—not just Salient. “They play an extremely valuable part of the political culture.” 

As I left Logan’s that day, I came away with the sense that student radicalism never really dies. It just finds new editors.